My steam id: http://steamcommunity.com/id/fantasyheaven/

The game that I would like to request is DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin, which is currently 72% off on GamersGate.

Dark Souls is one of my most played games on Steam at 103 hours.

I enjoyed both the plot and the gameplay of the game. While the core of the plot is fairly generic, the minimalist method of story telling made it interesting for me. Only the bare minimum of the lore is told to the player so that they can understand and advance the plot, while the rest of the world-building information is scattered throughout the game as item descriptions. It made discovering new items a pleasure, as each new thing obtained provides something of value - either in utility as an item or a source of lore.

That said, what kept me playing the game for so long was the combat system. It had an authentic feel to it in the attack animations of both the player and enemies - there is a sense of realism in the speed and weight of the attacks. This appeal to attacks having weight is enhanced by the poise system, which determines one's ability to withstand hits without flinching. When combined with the stamina gauge, the battles feel believable - neither player or enemies can withstand powerful blows as if they were raindrops, nor could they attack endlessly as if exhaustion is a foreign concept.

As someone that believes that polearms are more effective weapons than swords, the fact that the game had spears and halberds as usable weapons is also a plus for me. There really should be more games where the protagonist uses a spear as their primary weapon instead of swords.

Another crucial thing about the game: the level of difficulty was challenging but fair. While character stats and equipment do help, what matters the most in determining the outcome of a battle is player skill. The consequence of this is that mook enemies can easily kill you if you become complacent. Players have the ability to roll (which have invincibility frames) and enemy attack's are telegraphed, so being hit can only be attributed as a failing of the player to pay attention to the fight. Learning and adapting a fighting style to win against a new enemy made me feel like I am improving with each victory without dying.

As such, I would like to play the sequel. I understand that there were several quality-of-life improvements to the gameplay mechanics such as better PvP, 8-directional rolls and proper dual-wielding, but there are also several criticisms by those that enjoyed playing the first game. While they are not that important in the grand scheme of things, some of the criticized changes that are noteworthy to me are:

• Enemies stop respawning. I enjoyed refining my fighting style against enemies, so this change is troubling. That said, the different enemy placement in NG may offset this.

• A lower variety of weapon movesets. Of course, this might only be an incorrect perception caused by the moveset to weapon ratio being lower (than that of the first game) because there were more weapon additions than weapon animations.

• Estus flask recovery speed. Drinking it is no longer instant, but a slow recovery over time. While I understand the reasoning behind it, it feels to me that all this change really does is make fights longer than necessary.

• Change in rolling mechanics. The first game had three different rolling animations each with their own amount of invincibility frames, depending on how encumbered your character is. Dark Souls 2 has only two different rolling animations and the invincibility frames are dependent on character stats, making so that rolling is hardly useful for dodging at the start of the game and too good near the end.

• Tail cuts yielding unique weapons. Not only did it produce a secondary objective against fighting certain enemies, the idea of using a giant lizard's tail as a weapon was really amusing to me. I am a bit disappointed that they removed it.

• Level design is disjointed and relies on "travel cutscenes" to access different levels. The first game had a world-building design philosophy that I found imaginative - almost all the levels in the game are geographically connected to each other and can be traversed on foot. This approach really helped with making the exploration of Lodran fun for me. Unlocking shortcuts and mentally seeing how each section of Lodran are connected together was quite delightful. Finding out about the Dark Souls Map Explorer blew my mind away.