Dark Souls II Review
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Speaking of online functionalities, it's worth exploring the way Dark Souls II integrates single-player with mutliplayer options: while playing online, players are capable of leaving each other messages, usually to either offer tips or mislead (more often than not, a message inviting you to make a jump is a prank). These messages can be ranked up, momentarily healing the player who originally wrote them if online, and are especially useful to discover secrets like illusory walls, or prepare for an upcoming ambush. Players can also leave a Summon Sign to be summoned into a Human form character's world and help them go through an area or beat a boss, invade another player's world to kill them and earn some souls for the effort, and even participate in specific online activities tied to special groups called Covenants, which can be joined during the game. There are Covenants set up to protect weaker players from invasions and punish invaders, Covenants that make it easier and more fruitful to play co-op, and even Covenants that let you lure other players into your world to kill them in trap-filled dungeons.
Dark Souls II's online play feels greatly improved when compared to its predecessor: it's now impossible to accidentally lock yourself off a Covenant, and connecting to other worlds is much easier. The game is also now set up to encourage players to play in Human form, so there's a bigger pool to draw from for pretty much every activity, and a much wider variety of playstyles are showcased as a result. Finally, quite a few exploits, like the infamous "toggle escape" (a way to cheat yourself out of stunlocking by taking advantage of some engine quirks) have been fixed. Unfortunately the net code is still wobbly, and From Software's attempt to fix low-level ganking, Soul Memory, is a complete failure. The system tracks the amount of souls you've earned during your playthrough and matches you with players in the same "bracket", without taking Soul Level and equipment in account. This effectively eliminates any incentive to stop leveling for PvP, and considering the widespread availability of hacked save games, doesn't save low-level players the displeasure of being invaded by much stronger enemies. Dark Souls II is the product of a largely insulated development environment that seems to largely ignore current gaming development trends, and while it often works in its favor, in this case I'd say that perhaps taking a look at how other online-focused game handled similar problems would have helped.
Character Progression
Speaking of improvements over the original title, the stats breakdown in Dark Souls II feels overall more sensible than it was in Dark Souls, though not without a fair amount of weird quirks and puzzling choices, an unfortunate tradition for the Souls series. At every level up you are given one single point to spend on one of the game's main nine stats: Vigor (which determines HP), Endurance (which determines your total Stamina), Vitality (which determines your maximum equipment load), Attunement (which determines the number of your Attunement Slots and your Cast Speed), Strength (which improves damage on Strength-scaling weapons), Dexterity (which improves damage on Dexterity-scaling weapons), Adaptability (which improves your Agility, a derived attribute which improves the speed of some of your actions and adds invincibility frames to your dodge roll, and many of your resistances), Intelligence (which boosts your Magic Defense and Bonus and the power of all spells save Miracles) and Faith (which improves Lightning Defense and Bonus and the power of all spells save Sorceries).
In truth the relationship between main stats and derived attributes (mysteriously called "Performance" by the game) is slightly more complicated: pretty much all stats affect HP and at least one or two resistances in a minor way, some attack bonuses get determined by the average between two stats (Fire, for example) or the lowest (Dark), and quite a few other attributes are influenced by more than one stat. It's a better breakdown than the original's, if only because there's not one single useless stat like Resistance, but still far from perfect: Adaptability feels extremely useful for most builds until up to 20, when its contribution to your performance starts rapidly diminishing, while Vigor and Endurance have a fairly low impact this time around, and really aren't worth spending a lot of points on, especially since they rapidly start giving diminishing returns.
It's not mentioned as often as it should be, but stats are an important component of the Souls series, and Dark Souls II makes no exception: most weapons and spells have requirements and scale in damage and effect based on your stats, armors now scale in effectiveness based on your Physical Defense (a derived attribute), and you can get even locked out of a few merchants if your stats are too low for them to deem you worthy of their presence. Even better, Dark Souls II improves on the original by making more playstyles viable and adding options where necessary while also trimming what didn't quite work previously: elemental damage and even status effects now scale with stats; Divine damage was eliminated for being redundant (Lightning takes its place as the Faith-scaling damage type); a new type of spells, Hexes, scales based on your Dark bonus and uses Sorcery and Miracles catalysts depending on the spell, offering even more options to magic-themed characters; dual-wielding has been given a mechanical overhaul, as it's now possible to power-stance two weapons of a compatible type if you have 1.5x their requirements, unlocking a whole new moveset; and there's even a weapon upgrade path that scales based on your lowest stat, Mundane, that rewards jack-of-all-trades types.
Speaking of weapon upgrading, the Dark Souls II's team overhauled the system that was present in the two original titles by separating it into two systems, upgrading (which is now a single, linear progression path) and imbuing, which changes the properties of weapons, catalyst and shields. There are 9 upgrade paths, most of which are interesting to try out this time around, but they're still rather imbalanced. A few examples: this time Raw feels more useful (though it usually ends up being worse than Mundane for high-level builds on most weapons), but Enchanted, an upgrade path that adds physical damage based on your Intelligence, feels downright useless, and Bleed and Poison tend to feel subpar. Dwelling too much on the balance problems would feel unfair, given most playstyles feel fun and viable in PvE, but I can't afford glossing over them, so I'll cite a few others: Dexterity weapons definitely got the short end of the stick when compared to Strength ones (especially Clubs and Greatsword class weapons), ranged weapons can still be used to cheese a fair amount of otherwise challenging areas, and casters have an almost unfairly easier time with some bosses. Just to be clear, I don't advocate for every playstyle to get the same experience out of the game, but I don't think some situations should be quite as easy as they are for certain playstyles without a trade-off in another area. If nothing else, it's now possible to respec your character by using a rare item called "Soul Vessel", and while that arguably reduces the impact and importance of your level-up choices, it helps making sure you won't have to re-roll just because you found out halfway through the game that your build didn't lead to the fulfilling gameplay you expected.
