First sin locked down the game a lot. There are a shitload of statues everywhere and you are lead through the “natural” progression. DS2 was great on the “open world” aspect. You could go heide, you could go forest, you could go sewer with a tiny investment in health and a ring, you could unfreeze the only statue in ds2 to go to the misty forrest location
In SOTFS they basically force you to go to the forest of fallen giants.
Also they added pointless enemies that shouldn’t be there
No they don’t, Sotfs is debatably more open because you have more ways to get the first branch. Most of the statue shit is optional areas, and they give you more branches to compensate. For instance, they added a statue for Ruin Sentinels, but there’s also a branch near the bonfire coming from the forest, so it only matters if you come from the port. (Which I think may have a new branch of its own) Why CAN’T you go to the sewer and Heide in Sotfs? The Heide knights don’t fight until you beat the area.
I thought the enemy placement was the main complaint for Sotfs.
Edit: I just fact checked, and in the original you actually don’t get a branch until Lost Sinner, The Black Gulch or Harvest Valley. Sotfs lets you buy a branch in the forest and go to Shaded Woods far earlier, or allows you to get Straid without backtracking if you clear both the forest and the wharf (or just the wharf, as Ruin Sentinels are optional) or just one if you don’t want to go to Shaded Woods, via the buyable and Bastille branches, and you don’t even need to skip Sentinels. There’s a lot more routing you can do, I’d say.
Yeah so step 1 “know where all the branches are and the game is as open as the original”. Which doesn’t really work for 90% of players. I encountered statues in first sin, got pissed. Hence my opinion of the game.
Did you play the original first? If you didn’t and you’re a first-time player, I can think of all the ways you could progress through the game, and the only player I can think of who’d be bothered is the type who immediately backtracks and uses it on every statue he saw, even after seeing important paths being blocked.
You don’t need to know where the branches are. These games expect you to explore the areas thoroughly, and there’s STILL multiple unmissable branches.
If you did play DS2, you already knew what the branches were, how they were limited early, and past Things Betwixt I can’t see you getting cockblocked unless you use the first branch you get on the tutorial. Which, already knowing they block major pathways too, is stupid.
There was nothing there besides an ogre (or were there two already?) and thus ladle in the original anyways, and now you at least get an Estus shard and Twinkling Titatnie. Usually when these games give you a reason to reexplore the tutorial it’s good, why is this instance bad?
