[Animelover#1]

Originally Posted by Kafriel

Nearly 100 hours in, as well as what I believe to be 60% of the game!

Spoiler for Impressions!:

- The combat is seriously advanced, the tutorial boss is actually a great teacher for things NOT to do (panic rolling, overblocking, overreaching, not minding your surroundings, etc). Late game area battles really feel like PvP matches.
- Magic, especially INT, is VERY promoted. Tons of spells, ashes of war and gear, as well as reasons to get your INT up to 60+. FTH gets a smaller arsenal, and it spells are harder to obtain, but boy do they hit hard. Classic support is still here.
- Arcane, the new stat of the game, serves a dual purpose: one, to scale with bleeding weapons, and two, to cast and scale with dragon magic (arguably the most powerful school of magic in the game). Bleeding and blood magic, weapons and skills are also heavily promoted.
- The game is enormous. This post cannot convey the sheer enormousness of the Lands between, and not just in distance measured, but content too. The dungeons start out small, but end up as big as a full DLC from the older games (and I ain't talking about Shulva or Ariandel length!)
- It's easily the most immersive title yet, the music really helps with that. It's also the most transparent one with regards to the story; it's still a bit broken up, but NPCs exposit for real this time.
- Some areas feel unfair, to the point of breaking your controller, but the game provides solutions to everything, as long as you're willing to search for them. Summons and craftable items can become VERY powerful.
- On the negative side of things, there's a lot of recycling. Like, DS2 lot.
- I've had two cases of staggering frame drops, one excused by the sheer number of opponents, and one caused by what I think was water physics. Still pretty good for nearly 100h of gameplay.
- Some spells are stupid. There are two elemental sword buffs that last EIGHT SECONDS. Some other spells need balancing (high FP cost for same dmg, slower casts too).
- Overleveling can become an issue. It's honestly too easy to level up, I'm already nearing RL120 with at least 3 big bosses to go.

That's all I can think of for now, surprised this thread hasn't been active, so many people talk about this game. From my experience, it's worth the ratings it got.

I'm about 80 hours in, and while this game does so many things right, I've not played it in several weeks now, mostly because of the state of online play. I've always loved pvp in the souls games and it's just... Not fun...

So many op 1 shot and meta builds and gank. It's like all the worst parts of each souls pvp merged into one game. That aside, the actual gameplay is a blast, and as long as you don't care much about pvp this game is definitely worth a play.