DARK SOULS WARCRAFT III EDITION REVIEW

https://web.archive.org/web/20160303121643/http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/maps-564/dark-souls-warcraft-iii-edition-v1-3-a-271881/index2.html

So I just got done playing this map for 6 hours with some losers, really wanted to quit at the beginning but we soldiered through to the end so that we could finally say we finished this map. All three of us played the original dark souls and were pretty interested to see how it was translated into wc3. Also excuse the wall of text I have nothing better to do other than review this map at 5 in the morning

First of all I have to say I really like the UI and the mostly-faithful recreation of the game's terrain, items, etc. While the terrain isn't amazing it gets the job done, I recognized most of the places from the original game and some areas, such as Blighttown, actually have functioning terrain effects like poison water. That was a pretty nice touch. There's some truncated content, but for the most part it was secondary. The only "main route" area that wasn't in the game as far as I could tell was upper Blighttown (also a lot of Anor Londo was missing). I can forgive those, though, since they have a lot of elevated terrain and implementing them into wc3 would be very challenging.

At the same time I have a lot of problems with this map. Firstly, the combat system is questionable considering the source of the game... Dark Souls was challenging, yeah, but you could clear all the content without getting hit once, if you understood it well enough. This? You're going to get autoattacked to death over and over as you throw yourself like fucking lemmings at the content. There's no mechanics in place to avoid attacks, especially if you're in single player where there's no one else to take hits. Nothing grants I-frames, no rolls, and for the most part you're just going to have your shield up the entire game because that's your only defense against the right clicking. It's pretty goddamn one dimensional and, frankly, got me and my friends bored after about an hour.

Also the fucking LORDVESSEL DOESN'T GRANT BONFIRE TELEPORTATION AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The combat system in place also forced some really weird decisions for weapons. All the weapons are defined by "Damage" and "Weight". I think some had some extra mechanics, like bleeding (I think it was just poison in function?) and crits (never actually put in weapon tooltips but I noticed I crit with the demon's spear, this may not have been weapon related but I'm not sure). That's it. Now, when you have weapons from the original that had merit based on their moveset alone translated into a two-dimensional wc3 version of themselves, there were a lot of goddamn useless weapons. Zweihander? Nah, my Demon's Spear does the same damage and doesn't have the retarded str cost or weight. Actually, Demon's Spear seemed like probably the best weapon overall if you didn't have a strength build going. It was only like 3-4 in weight and had a whopping 130 damage, which was way more than most weapons. The only weapons I recall having more damage required huge amounts of strength, something like 30-40, being the Demon Greataxe and Dragon Tooth. I kept the Demon's Spear from Blighttown to Gwyn since all the other weapons either had lower damage or MUCH higher weight for a negligible change in damage. And on the topic of weapons, there was some REALLY weird shit like the Uchigatana requiring 28 strength to wield?????? Yeah, roughly 90% of the weapons could have been cut out and the game would be the same. Even weapons like the parry dagger didn't have their associated function, they were just autoattack weapons strictly inferior to everything else, kind of made us wonder why they were in the game at all, if not just to "be there". There's not much for me to say here; it's probably just a consequence of using the default wc3 combat in a game that relied on some pretty complex weapon mechanics and movesets.

Same shit applies to armor. None of us bothered to equip high-weight armor because of the questionable armor system in the game, which had us start at 89% physical damage reduction and ended with 91% damage reduction. Getting heavy armor was almost completely pointless, because the massive weight would slow you down to such a slow goddamn pace that kiting bosses or enemies, or even running past them was not an option anymore. And, in return, you'd get a 1% or 2% increase in damage reduction. In this case some simple triggering would probably have gone a long way to making the armor system actually (not really) interesting (but useful). Maybe have a 37 defense armor cut off 37 damage from attacks, or something. If something like that was the case, using heavy armor could actually be justified since it would cut damage taken in half compared to some of the lighter armors, as opposed to a measly 10 damage or less reduction which amounts to a fucking fart when bosses do like 500 damage autoattacks. You can ignore this paragraph if there's actually a system like this, but perhaps if that's the case make it more noticeable?

The bosses pretty much all had the exact same abilities. Any given boss probably did one or more of the following things:
1. Auto-attacked you
2. Used an AoE slam attack every X seconds. Some bosses had terrible telegraphs for these slams which amounted to them twitching slightly before shitting all over your health.
3. Summoned mobs, even in boss fights that didn't even have mobs before. Gaping Dragon summoned basilisks, Bed of Chaos summoned treants, fucking Centipede Demon summoned little Centipede Demons. Gwyn just fucking continuously vomited Black Knights until he died.
4. Had some modified Phoenix Fire passive that would shoot at someone every now and then. This wasn't even restricted to bosses; a lot of invaders had the exact same mechanic, which I think was supposed to represent spells or something.

That's... about it. Some bosses had some extra mechanics, like Sif had some attack speed increase thing (which basically meant everyone died because autoattacks are unavoidable), and O&S had the old "kill one, other becomes stronger" thing. Oh, and the four kings thing. I really hated the four kings thing. Really? You took a DPS race boss, and made DPSing a LIABILITY? Yeah, every certain amount of health you took off the first king, he would summon another king. Before we realized what the fuck was going on, we had 3 kings smacking us. After frustratingly trying to get through New Fucking Londo's ghosts around 20 times, we just gave up and went to TotG instead. New Londo on a whole is really a mess in this map. It has the same amount of enemies as any other area, but no bonfire. Really, it really, really, REALLY needs a bonfire. Having to go from Firelink, fight through 30 ghosts just to deal 10 damage to 4Kids before getting smacked to death was not fun at all. Maybe you intended New Londo to be harder than the other areas, but I'm not really sure. I imagine without a certain spell (which I'll get into later), we'd probably still have trouble with it at level 30+. But, that's tangential to my original point. Warcraft 3 has a lot of goddamn default spells. With some extremely basic triggering, you could have made a lot of bosses more interesting, even given the limitations of auto-attack combat. Maybe some bosses could have cleave, or maybe Firesage Demon could use Flamestrike? I don't know, I'm just throwing some ideas out there. But I really think you should take a look at your bosses and try to make them a little more interesting. In a game with so many bosses, doing that could really boost the quality of your map.

And finally I have some other minor grievances with the map, mainly to do with magic. I only ran pyromancy since spells in this game are extremely expensive (level 2 of any given magic school is 70k souls, jesus DICK), but even with only one magic school at my disposal I noticed a lot of weird stuff. First, having such high mana requirements on your spells is odd. I get it, you want to put the spells behind a time gate of sorts so you can get the most powerful spells later and have some sense of progression, but by the end of the game I didn't even have my final spell, Chaos Storm. It cost 145 mana, and I was level 33 or 34 with only 140 mana and I had spent all my levels in int (other than one point I spent early on in strength). This was after we killed Gwyn. To have seen that Chaos Storm, I would have had to play through the entire game and then some, probably having to grind like it was some Korean MMO to level 35 or 36. In terms of balance the high mana costs weren't really necessary either because a lot of the particularly good spells had decent cooldowns attached to them. Anyway looking at the mana costs in retrospect I think they were overtuned a bit.

One of my friends had level 2 sorceries and miracles and had access to a particular spell that probably saved the game for us: Black Fog. Jesus christ man that spell does like 1/3rd of everything's HP in its duration. Remember when I said we had trouble with 4Kings? The first time we fought them with Black Fog, we killed three of them straight up (at this point there were four out since one of my friends had accidentally spawned the fourth one earlier). We also shit over everything else in the game, including Gwyn. There's some really wonky balancing when it comes to magic. For instance, in the pyromancy school, my fifth or sixth spell was Fire Tempest, which did 80 damage a second in a fairly big AoE around me, nice spell. The spell after that, the one that costs MORE, did like 30 damage per second in a smaller radius??????????????????????????????????????????? Yeah, most of the AoE spells didn't seem to do a lot of damage. The only ones I noticed that did were Black Fog and Fire Tempest.

There was also some weird balancing in the targeted spells, as well. The first two spells in Pyromancy basically did the same thing, but one did like 20 more damage than the other. They were also supposed to stun but they "stunned" for something like 0.5th of a second which is never useful considering that they take like 2 seconds to cast. Oh, and their cast range seemed pretty small; Most (all?) of the boss AoE attacks hit you even if you're casting at maximum range, something that never happened in the original game minus maybe Nito's AoE. That made spellcasting pretty underwhelming because you did damage comparable to a single autoattack, you spent 2 seconds casting it, and you had to cast it while shoving your face into the boss's ass. After a while I didn't bother to use any of my spells other than Combustion and Fire Tempest, and my friend didn't use much other than the buffs, chain heal and Black Fog. Also, there are a lot of tooltip discrepancies in the game (tooltip says spell does X damage, actually does Y damage) and I think some more triggering could help some of the spells, like Pursuers (which is just feral spirits with a kamikaze ability from what my friend described to me, he also said that there was a fully functioning triggered version of Pursuers on the Hive so looking into that would be good). EDIT: also apparently whenever the pursuers spawn it displays some message that it shouldn't, forgot which

I probably sound really critical but I have to say I really respect the amount of work you put into this map. I really like the Souls series so seeing maps taking inspiration from it is always great. I just think that perhaps using the combat system you did isn't quite as good as some other ones, like what that other poster said. I think a Blades n Gore type combat system would be much better for a game like this. Again, Dark Souls wasn't about constantly dying because you had no other choice, it was about learning from your deaths and doing something differently so that you'd stop dying. The auto-attack system kind of fails to grasp this concept and I think it's one of the most important concepts in Dark Souls, or any video game for that matter. That said, I think a system like this could be fun to play if some more love was put into the boss fights and combat in general, like more unique spells and mechanics that make you do something other than "attack until low on HP, back up, let someone else tank for a bit, resume attacking after healing." And that kind of mechanic is certainly possible with a wc3 combat system. I think this map can only get better with more work and I look forward to playing a more revised version of it in the future, if file size problems don't get in the way, of course.

TL;DR pros/cons

Pros:
-Faithful to the original game
-UI is great
-Sounds are great
-Terrain is solid
-Lots of content and playtime

Cons:
-Subpar combat
-Questionable design decisions like no Lordvessel teleporting (and no bonfire in New Londo)
-Some zones truncated from the game (though this is understandable given the file size, you could probably remove a few sound files here and there to free up some space, like character laughing and all that, maybe)
-Not many accessory items like rings or weapon buffs
-Balance issues involving most weapons being useless and magic trees having strange balancing
-Tooltip errors