That was on Forbes, but yeah, it was a ridiculous article.

Locking away leveling was a questionable decision.

Guess what? World Tendency is (sort of) back. Mild spoilers:
.
.
.
.
.
.

My pattern is always the same for my first character in a Souls game: start as a magic-user and transition into mostly melee with magic as a backup. Royal in Demon's Souls, Pyromancer in Dark Souls, Sorcerer in Dark Souls II. In every case, magic was an early crutch for me and then just a nice fallback later.

It says a lot for how powerful the Moonlight Greatsword is that even with pure magic damage, it cleaves things in half right good even in Shulva. That said, after that I switched over to a Raw Watcher Greatsword, which is something I hugely recommend. (Its magic scaling is crap no matter how you infuse it, so you…

I can understand edge cases, like getting clipped by the flame or something, but this is a couple in-game "feet" larger than the sword itself. If there'd just been, like, a shockwave effect around it or something, I'd have no problem with it. It would change from "what the hell hit me?" to "damn, got nicked by the…

Oh god, yes. Agility is the uber-stat. The sweet spot seems to be around 105 Agility, which is either 32 Adaptability (I think) or 50 Attunement + 17 Adaptability (for the mages out there). After that I don't think you get another i-frame until 115 Agility and that's a really heavy investment to get there.

Yeah, I can agree with that. There were some wild theories at the game's launch that Soul Memory stopped mattering in NG+ and it was all about SL at that point, and I wish that was true—I actually think that would've been a good way to handle it.

Yeah, the other DLCs are worth it.

If you liked Dark Souls II, absolutely get the DLC. It's better than the main game in almost every way, from the bosses to the level design to the unique equipment they offer.

The only hitbox that I thought was actually bullshit was Fume Knight's post-buff thrust. That thing can hit you when you're behind him even though there's no flame back there, no sword back there, and you're a couple feet away from his blade. If there had been some visible shockwave, or a flare-up of the flames around…

Unfortunately, I don't think that would fix it unless you seriously increased the amount of souls required to improve equipment (or somehow weighted souls spent on equipment more heavily than souls spent on stats). Soul Memory's purpose is to prevent low-level twink invasions—if you have a low SL but endgame,…

The worst areas in each DLC are entirely optional to completing the DLCs, thankfully. They're apparently tuned around assuming you're summoning other players, but even then they're just stupid, frustrating, and not particularly fun.

I'm the same way. Honestly, I'm not particularly good at video games, but I've beaten all the Souls games multiple times on multiple New Game+ cycles. These are games with their own rules that encourage you to play cautiously until you really know your stuff. If you're patient enough to learn the rules, they're really…

I've found the Strikes to have a lot more variety than the story missions.

I find it helps to tune out whenever a game developer, publisher, or marketer says the word "innovative." If you ignore any sentence that claims innovation, you can actually get a pretty clear picture of what the game would be.

That's not really a good comparison. The normal jump is pretty solid, but every class had a special jump ability. Warlocks are "floaty" for sure, because their ability lets them glide. Titans get the equivalent of a jetpack. Hunters get a straight-up double-jump that isn't floaty at all.

As an RPG player playing Destiny… he honestly isn't far off. The story's incredibly sparse, and not in the good, inspires-players-to-fill-in-the-blanks way that the Souls games' stories are. There's nothing even resembling a plot. The story missions feel like they're snapshots of a setting, just letting you see what…

The high school bits can get pretty cutesy, yeah, but both Persona 3 and 4 have extremely compelling storylines that aren't afraid to get surprisingly dark. I prefer Persona 4, myself—it's a murder mystery with a wider variety of scenarios and a pretty excellent payoff.

Eh, I dunno if I'd say Mad Men features "corporate sociopaths"—or, at least, that's not what the vast majority of the main characters (Don Draper included) are. Whether that's what Joe turns out to be remains to be seen, of course.