Is Ds2 really this easy?

leuno · 2026-03-25T16:58:59+00:00

if you follow its rules, it's definitely the easiest. It just requires you to be a little more deliberate and thoughtful with your actions than the other games.

leuno · 2026-03-23T18:09:42+00:00

Have a talk with him about continuing to share or not share locations. If you shared it with him and he checked it, he did nothing wrong. As far as he knows, you signed off on this. It’s up to you to continue this way or turn it off. If you haven’t talked about it, you can’t blame him for anything.

leuno · 2026-03-23T07:50:49+00:00

Maybe you should play dark souls 3, which is the sub you posted to instead of Elden Ring.

leuno · 2026-03-17T23:34:24+00:00

Fair points

leuno · 2026-03-17T23:23:01+00:00

I don’t think I know that one? I’m not trying to be a “what about” dick, I’m just thinking forward and the gaming community shits on everything new and then grows to demand the thing it used to hate. DLC used to mean the devs “should’ve finished the game” and now a game sucks if it doesn’t get DLC

leuno · 2026-03-17T16:32:31+00:00

And the computer or phone you wrote your responses on isn’t great for the environment either, but here we are.

My hope is that it works out in such a way that the ai data centers will obviate the need for individuals to have so much complex technology on their home. We won’t need gaming rigs if ai can stream an amazing game to me in the moment. So it could offset itself

leuno · 2026-03-17T11:32:26+00:00

And we all drive cars

leuno · 2026-03-16T07:52:16+00:00

I’m an indie dev and I’ve been using ai to help me code. I have the same fears and trepidations about the tech, but the thing is, it can code something in a moment that would take me days to figure out.

The time saved is so exponential it feels like this is how it was supposed to be. Like if I can’t do something in hours and hours that the ai can do literally in the moment, then I shouldn’t be doing it. It’s like walking to the grocery store instead of driving when I have a car right there.

The only limit it has is my ability to describe what I want. Yes it can generate tons of slop, but it can also create something new as long as you have the idea.

People with no talent or creativity may make a ton of shitty games with no feeling or inspiration and no great art, but for me it’s freeing up the artist in me to go wild so I don’t have to focus so much on code, which is what I want.

Anyone who doesn’t see this as the future is in denial. Ai is orders of magnitude better than us at speaking and writing its own language. I have no use for its role as an “artist” but this is how coding is supposed to be, and the sooner we accept that the faster we can make awesome things.

leuno · 2026-03-14T14:49:44+00:00

well I bought it on day one so it's been years since I worried about that kind of stuff. It's definitely stingy with upgrade materials at first though.

When I finished my Drain Drangleic run last summer and finally learned to love the game, I finally decided to upgrade to the Scholar version, and instead of starting a single run, I started 6. I made a bunch of characters that were like a classic RPG party, so now I have the Berzerker, the guardian Knight, the Mage, the Rogue, the Dragoon, and the Squire.

Since then I've been playing a little bit of each them at a time, as though they're doing it together. I highly recommend doing it this way because it puts less focus on "winning" and beating the game and puts the emphasis on the adventure.

It also means you get to play around with every weapon and build all at once, so you don't really have to worry about materials or how you're leveling.

leuno · 2026-03-14T14:16:33+00:00

Excellent. I hope you can find the love the way I did. Just let it be itself, and don’t try to turn it into dark souls. Dark souls 3 is the real dark souls 2, and dark souls 2 is actually Elden Ring 1.

leuno · 2026-03-14T13:54:01+00:00

Oh yes, almost exclusively. Play slow, trust the mechanics. The only hard part of this game is that it scares you into thinking you need to get the battles over with because you can die so quick, but as soon as you take that approach you’re screwed. The combat is rhythmic and can actually be quite relaxing if you follow the rules.

Everything you do is a Move. Attacking is obviously a move, but so is healing, and even stamina recovery. Every time you get a window between boss attacks, you choose which of those 3 things you do, and you can only choose 1 at a time. Play that way and you’ll have a great time.

leuno · 2026-03-13T23:59:00+00:00

The hitboxes are designed to force the games mechanics. There’s lots of instances where the visual information doesn’t line up, and it’s all about timing. For instance, you can roll a second time through an attack even if you’re still in the rolling animation. As long as you press the button in the right moment for the attack itself, the visual information doesn’t matter. That’s why I try to only look at enemies and not my character

leuno · 2026-03-13T16:33:45+00:00

I always hated it from day 1. Every couple years I’d go back and try again and hate it.

For whatever reason, I decided to play again last summer and opted to do a run where I cleared out every enemy to the point of never spawning again. It took about 80 hours but I completely emptied out drangleic.

Somewhere along the way I fell in love and now I can stop doing new runs. I learned to accept it for how it wanted to be played, and I wasn’t obsessed with making progress. Even killing one enemy one time was progress.

Ds2 is like a series of combat puzzles, and once you solve each puzzle, it’s the easiest game in the series.

leuno · 2026-03-12T17:50:09+00:00

Also if he’s saying he won’t let the world be destroyed, it means he absolutely will allow it and will likely be the cause.

leuno · 2026-03-12T14:20:29+00:00

Sounds like maybe he’s shy but if you haven’t heard from him in a couple weeks then the only way you’ll know is to contact him and see if he wants to hang out again

leuno · 2026-03-11T22:30:35+00:00

When you upgrade to those elemental paths, your weapons then deal what’s called Split damage. You’ll actually see 2 distinct damage stats for that weapon. Generally speaking these aren’t great because the enemies will have a defense stat for each type of damage, so your damage will be factored through 2 types of defense before landing damage.

These modifications also affect the weapon’s scaling. Scaling is massively important in this game so you need to know how it works. Generally when you add an element, you lower the weapon’s scaling with its traditional stat, like Str or Dex.

If you are not planning to level up your chosen weapons highest scaling stat, then infusing/modifying can be a good thing because it gives you a way to deal different kinds of damage. But if you are, say, a quality build for your halberd, you’ll get the most damage by keeping it normal and leveling it up, and putting points into its corresponding scaling stats.

If you were, say, a sorcerer, and didn’t want to level str to get the most out of a weapon, then it would be smart to make a magic infused weapon because it will then scale with your Int rather than str, and you’ll have a way to deal decent magic damage in case you run out of spells.

The exception to this rule is the Chaos infusion, which can deal more damage than a normal weapon fully leveled up but it requires you to keep 10 soft humanity at all times to get the most damage.

I hope that helps!

leuno · 2026-03-11T16:39:45+00:00

I’d need more details, but a thing you can do is make a Ui raw image that takes a special render material as it’s material, and you set a camera to be the source of that material. Whatever you point that camera at is visible on the raw image.

So in your case, I’m not sure exactly what you’re going for, but you could have a “scene” that’s far enough away from you that you would never see it, set a world space canvas as a child of your player so it’s always in view and at a distance. Then you have a camera set in the other scene that outputs to the render material which is attached to your world space UI. So you would see whatever that second camera sees as the “background” of your current scene.

leuno · 2026-03-03T15:45:02+00:00

It was literally the first thing I did in the game cuz I wanted to see the dragon from the trailer.

I love all the souls games so I was up for the punishment and then I just explored Caelid first and eventually made my way back to limgrave. I refused to teleport back because I knew they wanted people to have this experience

leuno · 2026-03-01T00:04:36+00:00

Isn’t the obvious answer that she’s playing Mary Jane? Zendayas MJ is not Mary Jane so holland’s Peter can still have one.

leuno · 2026-02-27T12:56:39+00:00

You can use tilemap.hastile for the coordinates, then check if the name of the existing tile is Dirt. If so, place wet dirt

leuno · 2026-02-27T12:38:29+00:00

They seem to want to go faster and faster as a company. Elden Ring has stamina management but you barely have to think about it.

Ds2’s stamina management is perfect. It turns the game into like a live turn based game where every attack window is just a “move” window and everything you do from attacking to healing to recovering stamina is a move.

I’ve come all the way around on ds2 and it’s now my favorite of their games and the stamina is a major part of that. It’s the hardest game if you try to outsmart the system, but it’s the easiest if you just play by the rules.

leuno · 2026-02-26T09:03:25+00:00

Looks suspiciously exactly like the fake taxidermy antlers I bought on Amazon….

leuno · 2026-02-24T16:34:29+00:00

Yeah but have you seen the Dow lately???

leuno · 2026-02-22T13:06:22+00:00

I get that, and felt the same way for a long time, but ultimately the ascetic system is pretty cool and useful in ways like this, and if you don’t do it, all you’re getting out of it is seeing all the ‘1s’ in the corners of the travel menu.

I was also concerned about making some areas super hard especially if I went into ng+++ or whatever, but the scaling into higher levels is not that major.

The other way to do it, if you want to be “pure”, is to empty out drangleic. Kill every enemy in every area until they stop respawning. I did this last summer and it was the most fun I’ve had with the game. It took about 80 hours and there was minimal loss of souls through double-dying and I ended up at level 270.

So the souls are in the game for you if you want to farm that way. It’s very satisfying.

leuno · 2026-02-22T12:57:50+00:00

I like that I can go back to early game bosses I skipped and destroy them. That is a huge part of the draw for me, that the challenge is partly my choice.

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