More thoughts (disappointments) on Dark Souls 3
Let me first say, that even if I think ds3 is the weakest souls game, it's still a souls game. Which means that it's still a great game, just that I think it handles some things poorly that its predecessors did better. I really do not like that one of the fewer things ds3 cribbed from 2 is the way it handles rings. Ds1 only allowed for 2 ring slots and the rings were incredibly important for defining your build. Some were too good (havels, favor and protection) but the thing was that just having 2 ring slots forced you to agonize about what was important for your build. Doubling the equipped ring count in 2 and 3 severely undermined this. Now you can have a ring that boosts equip load, health, grants extra exp, and boosts stamina recovery. The result of this is also that individual rings are less impactful than they were in ds1, and therefore less important. But as much as I dislike that, what I really hate is the +1 and +2 versions of the rings. I hated these in dks2 and I hate them in dks3. Partly I dislike them because they're the laziest kind of ng+ content, but mostly I hate them because they are one of the few times the game invalidates a piece of equipment by offering an objectively better alternative. Yes, as a result of balance issues or in the case of joke items (ladle, broken sword) there are other examples of this but those are either not intentional or clearly jokes. +1 rings are neither of these, they make previous versions of these rings worthless. And dks3 is even worse about this than 2 because it will offer you upgraded versions of rings that are normally not available as covenant rewards! Tl;dr: dark souls equipment system is great because it should offer you loads of choices that are not better or worse, but different. Unfortunately upgraded rings undermine this system (and so does the lack of poise in heavy armor, but I already covered that.)











