Dark Souls 2

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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus »

I bought Dark Souls 2 forever ago and finally got around to starting it. The game's alright (I think DkS1 had better aesthetics, my thoughts on the gameplay changes are mixed - parry windups? Go fuck yourself), but of course I'm going to talk about the M+KB controls because DkS1 was a spectacular failure on that front.

For DkS2, they implemented actual mouse integration instead of hooking up the mouse inputs to a joystick emulator. You can control the camera with a mouse! Amazing! Technology has come so far! Unfortunately, every single other thing about the M+KB support is worse in a tiny way that will quickly compound to drive you into a frothing rage.

DkS2 will let you bind actions to double clicks. Your initial thought may be "this is neat, it gives my mouse double the functionality; I can duplicate the function of both controller shoulders with just two mouse buttons." It is not neat. It is a feature whose mere existence makes the game worse until you realize you need to turn it off. In order to distinguish a single click from a double click, the game must wait to give the player a chance to double click. But if the player was only single clicking, then that wait for the second click which will never come is just straight up input lag. Horrifically noticeable input lag, in this case.

But good news! They eventually patched in the option to disable the double-clicking feature entirely. You can't bind things to double clicks any more, but the game doesn't delay your action to see if you will provide additional inputs. Spoiler: I'm reasonably sure they failed at this too. It looks like the game is still registering double clicks as a distinct kind of action and discards them (because they are turned off). What I mean by this is if you click twice in rapid succession, your first attack will come out immediately (as it should), but the second attack will not queue because it's being detected as the second part of a double click and double clicks aren't bound to anything. The only reason I think this is what happening instead of the game just having tight attack queueing is that when I bind my attacks to keyboard keys and use autohotkey to have my mouse fake those keyboard keys, I have less difficulty queueing attacks than when I use the DkS2 native mouse binds. Something weird is going on there, and it's in the way DkS2 handles the mouse.

Rolling is also mildly fucked. It took me a long ass time to notice it, because I haven't been rolling that much. I started as deprived, noticed rolling sucked (because no agility), noticed basic parrying sucked (because parries have startups now), and didn't know where to find a 100% phys shield. I gave up on all three of the game's defensive mechanics almost immediately and just footsied and baited my way through everything until I found the rapier, which I used to parry-murder the Pursuer, which got me Drangleic's shield, which has carried me the rest of the way. Anyway, point is I'm fighting Elana from the DLC at the moment and she's got a bunch of slow-moving magic attacks that make the shield kind of worthless and I would like to roll through those magic attacks and stab her in the face. And there are a bunch of times where I tap the button at the last second to roll through them and my guy eats it like an idiot. Because it obviously can't be my timing or hitbox shenanigans and has to be some kind of technical flaw over which I can justifiably rage, I test something; I push the roll button down and hold it, and nothing happens.

No, the point isn't that I have lead fingers that won't properly let go of the key and that's been fucking me over. The point is that the action is tied to the release of the key instead of its downpress, which is fucking weird and stupid because it will consistently be slower that way. At first I thought it was because I had roll bound to shift and the game uses shift as a modifier key and weird game logic was at play (as it was with the mouse), but no - it happens even when you rebind it to an ordinary key. Then I wondered if the whole game works like that, and the answer is no - as far as I can tell rolling is the only action that triggers on release instead of on downpress. The rolling input registration is uniquely fucked in a tiny annoying way. The good news is Autohotkey should be able to minimize this delay to about a single frame (if you try to send a downstroke followed immediately by an upstroke to a game, pretty much any game, sometimes they will arrive at basically the same time and the game will not think you pushed the button at all. To get an upstroke to register, there has to be some delay), though I haven't taken it for a proper test run yet to see how it feels.

EDIT: Having thought about it a bit longer, it's obvious why rolling is delayed; because they are waiting to see if you're going to hold it to sprint. Now I'm just wondering why I never noticed it in Dark Souls 1. Is it because the window was tighter in DkS1, or because the game as a whole was a fuckton jankier and it just blended in with all the other bullshit you had to deal with to play that game on M+KB? Who knows. Anyway, I thought DkS2 gave the option of giving separate bindings for sprint and roll, but it does not, so I can't actually fix it. I guess I could abuse auto-sprint as a dedicated sprint button, but fuck it. More work than it's worth at this point.

tl;dr console ports. Buy a controller or get real goddamn comfortable with autohotkey, because they're always shit. No exceptions.
Last edited by DSMatticus on Sat Aug 05, 2017 11:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Archmage Joda
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Post by Archmage Joda »

I recently got ahold of dark souls 2 myself, after having gotten so much playtime and enjoyment out of ds3, and should probably get around to playing it sometime soon. How would I be advised to get started? I was thinking of going for a hexer or sorcerer build, because I'm me and I like magic (my first run in 3 was as a pyromancer, for gwyn's sake), which would be better for a first playthrough, and how would I get started as a sorcerer?
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