Dark Souls 3.... unfinished?

So I'm beginning to notice several features that seem just plain unfinished or they are glitched in my individual game. Am I crazy or did From release an unfinished game?

From rarely release a fully functioning game... They're just so damn fun and addictive.

What are you talking about?

Poise and repair to start

poise is fucked, no question about that. it's quite literally useless, it does nothing right now except add hyperarmor for certain attacks. there is code in the game to make it function like dark souls 1 but it's turned off for some reason

content-wise? nah. first dark souls game where it feels like a finished, complete product with nothing cut or scrapped at the last minute.

DLC not even arriving until 2017.

I heard about poise not mattering, but I just stuck with the knight armor I started game with. Was light enough, did enough protection. All bothered to level up was dark sword.

Wait explain this to me

poise in dark souls 1 was a stat that prevented your character from being stunned. everytime you are hit by an attack in dark souls 1, your poise is drained, and when your poise reaches zero, you are stunned/staggered. every enemy had a baseline amount of poise. poise was most directly raised by armor, and the heaviest armors had the greatest amount of poise. havel's set had the greatest total poise in the game at 121 points; the wolf's ring added an additional 40 poise without any weight. different attacks had different poise reductions, and these are dependent on weapons and enemies. for example, say you are hit by the 1h R1 of a longsword: each hit will drain 20 poise. if you have no armor or wolf ring equipped you will be staggered with one attack. someone in havel's set and a wolf ring will have to be hit nine times to be stunned. this mechanic made heavy armor inherently useful as it truly enabled the player to "tank" hits (and physical damage reduction was far more beneficial than physical damage absorption in dark souls 3, but that's another matter)

in dark souls 3, everything is fucked. poise is still a stat that exists on armor, rings, and a greatshield but it doesn't work at all like it should. you are always stunned by every attack regardless of what armor you wear. i actually redact my earlier statement: there is no situation in which poise seems to have any effect whatsoever. what this means for dark souls 3 is that heavy armor is quite literally useless, especially since damage absorption is pretty much the same mechanic as it was in bloodborne--meaning the heaviest armors with the highest damage absorption will provide only tiny gains in damage mitigation compared to their lighter, lower-damage absorption counterparts.

the really fucky thing about poise though is that enemies still have poise: this is most evident with the cathedral knights, as those bastards can take a hit from a goddamn ultra greatsword and not even flinch. but you know how enemies like rats, thralls with axes, and basically any enemy with a straight sword can chain-combo you to death? this is the result of poise having zero effect in dark souls 3.

as i mentioned, hackers have found a way to enable poise to make it work exactly like it did in dark souls 1, and it essentially involved just flipping a switch. why from decided to disable the stat is pure speculation, but we know for sure that it was intended to work similarly to dark souls 1: item descriptions and stat descriptions state that poise increases your ability to withstand hits (paraphrasing). everyone really hopes they fix this shit soon, because the current pvp meta is people just using weapons that have the best damage and fastest attacks (i.e. straight swords and the estoc) so they can chainstun people.

Ya'll should be happy poise if fucked. It would be impossible to win against gankers if this game had DkS1 poise. I don't agree about this game being unfinished at all. Tons of quality content is not something you see very often nowdays.

Every 'Souls game is unfinished.

Demons Souls was missing an entire level,

DkS1 had incomplete bosses and enemies, some of which were reused in DkS2.

DkS2 had incomplete features such as the torch mechanic, you could tell it was a collection of unused ideas and content from DkS1.

Not played enough DkS3 to comment on that yet, but most games are the same, nothing is ever finished because of deadlines.

@ten_pints: I never noticed Dark Souls 1 incomplete. I remember online mode was pretty much broken though. I also played the Prepare to die edition, so maybe thats why.

Who doesn't? Even Nintendo nowadays release unfinished games. Sucks, but this is how gaming is now.

The catacombs are generic as fukc. Every wall is the same repeating texture. Every column is exactly the same. Every arch is the same. The Catacombs seems like a weekend project.

Which game would that be?

Are you by any chance playing with BESTOC?

You might not have noticed it, but there is quite a bit of left over unused assets. It's still a complete game just like Demon's Souls. Blight town I think was a little rushed.

@ten_pints: Im not sure what was wrong with Blighttown, but yeah, that area had something going on since frames would suffer inside.

of course not. katanas, estoc, farron gs, dark sword are for peeps that are new to the series and need help at being able to kill shit in pvp. I main the Spiked Mace and Murakuma *for now*.

I use the great sword with the stomp and the spin. Too bad poise does absolutely nothing, they added a move to boost poise that doesn't boost poise. Awesome job.

All of the souls games are unfinished though.

I wouldn't say unfinished, but my god they can't seem to make a game with a consistent frame rate on consoles. If we're talking about game-play mechanics its def poise being useless.

There's no point in making a heavy armor build at this point since a fucking rat can stun a Havel user in full gear. Its insane on top of it since there are plenty of enemies in the game that DO have poise even from the biggest weapons.

Are you positive it has no effect whatsoever? I met a guy on Roads of Sacrifice with a Phantom who wore a set of heavy armor and a hammer and I was unable to stun him. It took multiple hits for me to stagger him. The other guy had light armor and I could easily stop him dead in his attacks.

Yeah, but that comes off as just good ol fashioned poor design, where as say the demon ruins and lost izalith are so blatantly rushed and unfinished looking.

I just wish poise worked. What's the point of having a special attack that increases poise....that does nothing?

you know what poise does? renders quick/medium damage weapons useless. You think you want poise, but you really don't. BB did this perfectly. No poise but every single weapon was good and slow weapons were stunning you long enough for two hits. Best thing of the soulsborne series.

Lol yeah, everything felt so disjointed and out of place compared to the rest of the game. 10 Taurus Demons standing in military formation just waiting. The Bounding Demons being poorly placed and in plain sight. They should have just cut them from the game. They actually make it worse. Lost Izalith more so than Demon Ruins.

@silversix_: you see it doesn't make medium weapons useless. That's stupid. It makes them less overpowered because you actually have to dodge and use well timed defense as opposed to spamming bullshit R1 that can stun a great sword using heavy armor wearing special skill high poise stomp.

It's a completely broken game mechanic that takes away an entire element of PvP. Maybe you'd actually have to be smart instead of cheesing with a single overpowered tactic.

Not really, you can still rack up damage fairly quickly with medium/fast weapons even with poise. They just don't break form. Now all the noobs and their moms use Estoc and fast weapons.

Haven't played much but weapon durability also seems to be useless. Been using that katana you get almost at the start and I've hardly seen it go past a quarter of it's durability when purely exploring areas and clearing all mobs. Poise seems strange, sometimes enemies seem to be staggered by my attacks but then again sometimes it's as if the same enemy just doesn't care. Hard to know so far the other way around since I started as deprived and only wear what I find as loot, haven't bought anything from merchants, so almost everything seems to stagger me. I was really enjoying the game until I started to get crashes from my video driver hopefully it can be fixed soon with some update from either From or AMD.

people use straight swords but you're gonna tell me that ultras are bad? They're great in this compared to DkS1, DkS2. all poke weapons are fucking stupid ever since dark souls 2... all have stupid ass phantom range from 3km and deal way too much damage for something this easy to land. hitbox is broken on poke animations.

looks unfinished. looks like they forgot to add textures to most of the game. looks good for an early 360 game though

here we go, this is how mems is supposed to respond in a Souls thread.

@silversix_: only speaking truths. Still waiting for the current gen version

In line with other Souls games then.

yes yes keep it flowing it feels good

@silversix_: word, the truth always feels good.

you know, i bitched about the souls games looking like trash for sooooooooo long but since BB, its not as not abysmal as it once was. up close, textures are still 'Dynasty Warriors quality' but at least the environment is detailed. They need to start using some advanced engine that wasn't made in a basement by three peeps but they won't/can't because *probably, maybe not* their engine is tied to the animations and it'll f*ckup everything if they were to use UE4 etc

yeah that's why I play Fashion Souls in this game because Armor don't matter.

I've spent the game naked, mostly because the increase in your roll distance i find more useful than damage reduction.

Damage reduction ain't helpfull if you don't get hit.

You should always wear something in each slot. DS3 defenses stack a flat percentage based on having an item in each slot, so if you run naked you'll take 50% more damage than if you wore a full set of 0 defense armor.

Unless you're planning to literally never get hit even once, you should always equip gear.

Almost all builds now are made around getting as close to the 70% equip limit for fatty rolls without going over, because naked play and super heavy armor play are both shit.

@Vaasman: Yeah when I get hit I take a ton of damage, however I like playing naked it's funny.

I even take on invaders with no weapon, it actually hard to deal with someone punching you over and over rarther than a sword/spear/mace/halberd.

When i get invaded I put my sword away, bow for respect and try to beat them to death. I loose my fair share but I find it funny when I win.

Having good fun, up to the area just after the pontiff boss without using armour.

armor is quite poop anyway as the dr hits quite early and it's harsh

@silversix_: I've done some coding and motion capture. Transferring animations is starting from scratch, for dozens of weapons and move sets.

It's Fashion Souls 3. Poise has never been something I invested myself in. I care about how badass I look.

Undead legion armor is where it's at now. It looks so good especially when kindled

we're stuck with shit visuals forever then :<

@silversix_: probably not. They'll probably go away from Dark Souls for a long time then come back with a new engine in a few years. There's still potential for the type of gameplay but as you pointed out the engine is limiting. If they went with Crytek or even just Unity they'd be able have much more dynamic animations and way better hitboxes.

The whole game is predicated around precision and timing but the engine itself is rather poor at it. Enemy weapons clipping through objects, bad hit detection online, bad framerate drops... all issues with an inherently bad engine. There's so much potential for good multiplayer gameplay but the engine is just awful at it.

People eat it up and say get good but it's adapting to engine issues similar to the rubberbanding in battlefield 4 that made it so you could prefire around corners and kill enemies. Imagine if there was poise and no insane phantom hits in every fight, I'm not sure what it is but it's crazy just how bad the hitboxes are. In a game like NHL 16 where there are 10 players colliding with physics calculation the hitboxes maintain relative fluidity and players don't teleport and glitch around.

besides the fact you are lowering your defense rating immensely by not equipping each armor slot with something, you should know this: all rolls give the same iframes (with the exception of fat roll of course). fastroll no longer has an iframe advantage; it only increases roll length. and in fact the iframes come out earlier in the roll animation, so fast roll actually leaves you more vulnerable towards the end of the animation. of course it's personal preference, if you still like the longer roll length then it's up to you

This has been the case with practically every Souls game at this point. Especially if you're playing on PC.

@princeofshapeir: yeah its the length of the roll I like, its easier to get the **** out with a lengthy fast roll.