Teasing to death
So I was in the Dark Souls II beta this month, which is probably the most interesting thing to happen this month, except maybe finding an 18th-century baby skeleton with a bead necklace, but... there's not much to talk about that, really, so Dark Souls II beta it is!
Playing a Souls game has shades of being in an abusive relationship. I don't really participate a lot in events like this, so I don't know how they usually go, but I haven't often heard of beta tests more strictly teasing than the Dark Souls II beta. Specifically, the beta was only playable when the servers were on, which was the case for a total of three hours on a Sunday morning, and, well, that's as much as you get! This kind of strategy makes a strange amount of sense considering how much Dark Souls is built on word-of-mouth - the more they restrict access to cool stuff, the more people are going to want it, and the more they're going to spread rumours about it. There wouldn't be nearly as much to talk about if everyone could see the what there is for themselves, yes? As it is, I heard that nobody in the Americas was able to participate at all because of server issues, which is a truly epic snub and must have done wonders to fuel the anticipation.
I will say it was a very intriguing event, even though most of the multiplayer elements supposedly being tested didn't do much of anything. Specifically, the format itself sets up a striking contrast. Dark Souls, in many ways, is a game about slow, meticulous and patient progress, about weighing your greed against caution. When you play that sort of thing in a scenario where you have a limited amount of time - three hours, as it were - to get as much "content" out of the game as possible, and actually you're competing with everyone else to see who can get digest the biggest chunk out of the game in the alloted time. That really adds to the stakes, as though there were actual risks involved! Time limits are something you don't see in games a lot these days, which makes sense since normally they're frustrating as all Hell, but there's something to be said for the tension it brings in situations like this.
Well, what could you do in three hours? Not all that much. It's enough to see that the game's still good, of course - some of the cheesy abilities of the first game were toned down, enemies are more aggressive and less suspectible to cheesy tactics, the animation is substantially improved. Beyond that, I managed to test two character classes and successfully discovered one boss and killed it before time ran out. I'm guessing that they made reaching the bosses especially hard in the beta, considering how there was a ridiculously overpowered NPC black phantom guarding the boss area entrance that was, strictly speaking, much harder to kill than the actual boss. As small a slice of the game as the beta was, there was still a lot of stuff I've only heard rumours about, including a whole another boss somewhere, so I suppose that takes care of the "leave them wanting for more" bit.
Oh well, so it goes! Abusive or not, if nothing else, I guess playing games in which one skulks carefully around dark, decrepit ruins full of dead people is a nice change of pace... or not. Another excavation commences next week. One might predict it to be spectacularly cold.
Playing a Souls game has shades of being in an abusive relationship. I don't really participate a lot in events like this, so I don't know how they usually go, but I haven't often heard of beta tests more strictly teasing than the Dark Souls II beta. Specifically, the beta was only playable when the servers were on, which was the case for a total of three hours on a Sunday morning, and, well, that's as much as you get! This kind of strategy makes a strange amount of sense considering how much Dark Souls is built on word-of-mouth - the more they restrict access to cool stuff, the more people are going to want it, and the more they're going to spread rumours about it. There wouldn't be nearly as much to talk about if everyone could see the what there is for themselves, yes? As it is, I heard that nobody in the Americas was able to participate at all because of server issues, which is a truly epic snub and must have done wonders to fuel the anticipation.
I will say it was a very intriguing event, even though most of the multiplayer elements supposedly being tested didn't do much of anything. Specifically, the format itself sets up a striking contrast. Dark Souls, in many ways, is a game about slow, meticulous and patient progress, about weighing your greed against caution. When you play that sort of thing in a scenario where you have a limited amount of time - three hours, as it were - to get as much "content" out of the game as possible, and actually you're competing with everyone else to see who can get digest the biggest chunk out of the game in the alloted time. That really adds to the stakes, as though there were actual risks involved! Time limits are something you don't see in games a lot these days, which makes sense since normally they're frustrating as all Hell, but there's something to be said for the tension it brings in situations like this.
Well, what could you do in three hours? Not all that much. It's enough to see that the game's still good, of course - some of the cheesy abilities of the first game were toned down, enemies are more aggressive and less suspectible to cheesy tactics, the animation is substantially improved. Beyond that, I managed to test two character classes and successfully discovered one boss and killed it before time ran out. I'm guessing that they made reaching the bosses especially hard in the beta, considering how there was a ridiculously overpowered NPC black phantom guarding the boss area entrance that was, strictly speaking, much harder to kill than the actual boss. As small a slice of the game as the beta was, there was still a lot of stuff I've only heard rumours about, including a whole another boss somewhere, so I suppose that takes care of the "leave them wanting for more" bit.
Oh well, so it goes! Abusive or not, if nothing else, I guess playing games in which one skulks carefully around dark, decrepit ruins full of dead people is a nice change of pace... or not. Another excavation commences next week. One might predict it to be spectacularly cold.