Dark Souls 2 Video (Patreon)

How Dark Souls 2 Was Saved From Disaster

Dark Souls 2 had a troubled development period. If it weren't for some aggressive restructuring and a complete overhaul of the game, the second Dark Souls title (and the first Souls title to be directed by anyone other than Hidetaka Miyazaki) would have never seen the light of day. Or else, Dark Souls 2 would have been so unpolished and broken that it could have destroyed developer From Software entirely. Usually with Video Game Story Time, we tackle games that prove to be tremendous successes in some way. This week, we're looking at a different kind of success: the success of simply finishing a project to a "good enough" standard. There's nothing particularly wrong with Dark Souls 2, but it is one of the weaker games in the series. There's plenty of good reasons for this, and considering its development woes, it's incredible that the game is as good as it is! It's nice to be able to take some positives from the development of this game considering that many hardcore Souls fans heavily criticize the finished product. From Software deserves respect for being open and honest about everything that went wrong with this game. Even before Dark Souls 2 was released, Yui Tanimura was speaking publicly about how the development had been troubled and how everything had been restructured late into development. We appreciate that honesty, not only because it makes it easier to create this kind of retrospective! Be sure to check out the sources below if you want to know more about what was going on behind the scenes. Making something that's "good enough" can be difficult. We here struggle with perfectionism. BretonStripes will often record the same voice line over and over and over in an effort to get it perfect, while Kotor will spend hours agonizing over his drawings. Sometimes, this desire for perfectionism even leads to mistakes, such as our video last week, which featured two of BretonStripes' takes for the same voice line. So, sometimes, we have to accept that "good enough" really is good enough. If Yui Tanimura, the director of Dark Souls 2, can make a game that's solid if not the greatest game in the series, then maybe sometimes, we can accept that our videos will have flaws. Also, we apologize if Dark Souls 2 is your favourite in the series. There are plenty of people who love this game, and we hope our video doesn't seem too negative. We hope you're having a great week. We're all really sick at the moment, but hopefully we'll feel better soon. Lots of love, BretonStripes (http://twitter.com/bretonstriped) and Kotor (http://twitter.com/kotorcomics) Title music by Tee Lopes (http://twitter.com/teelopesmusic) Incedental music: Wisps of Whorls by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Sources: http://peterbarnard1984.tumblr.com/post/113163062955/dark-souls-2-design-works-translation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB4Ke5F78QQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuOhUwTkKOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4vCpzx_bKI https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/235674/The_trouble_we_expected_Dark_Souls_IIs_producer_on_leveling_up_the_game.php https://kotaku.com/5970754/dark-souls-ii-runs-on-a-brand-new-engine/ https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-03-19-from-software-explains-changes-to-dark-souls-2-graphics