Evangelier wrote on Mar 25
th, 2014 at 12:16am:
Did the higher difficulty stem directly from the combat encounters (terrain + enemy placement, stats, and behavior), or from the peripheral changes to the game (Estus, hollowification, invasions, etc.)?
A little of both. They kinda throw you to the wolfs, that is to say while it is open like the first, the 4 starting areas can really be taken in any order. One has a boss that will fly down on a giant hawk halfway through the area. If you die to him he will move to his real boss area. The mobs are easy to see and control if you know what to look for and have played a souls game before.
The estus change kinda sucks. At the start you have only one and when I finished I had 10 @ +4. The thing is you have others items to heal with. The hollowing is not that big a deal since they throw the new humanity to you like candy. I was only invaded by a real person once for the fact that there are only cracked red orbs now.
The areas all look great. Each is very different amd look amazing! The spooky pirates cove was really cool but on the other hand blight town 2.0 was a fucking nerve racking experince since you have to use a torch and give up your shield.
All in all it is a great game that IMO is better then DS1. Except taking bleed off my katanas, fuck that.