#ds2crown

[lordranandbeyond]

Sir Alonne stands upon a burning Iron Kingdom in this month’s reward wallpaper for $10+ Patreon supporters, drawn by @anadapta!

[lordranandbeyond]

New Patreon reward sketch of Raime, the Fume Knight, by @ragtiming!

[lordranandbeyond]

New Patreon reward sketch of the Burnt Ivory King, drawn by @blazemalefica!

[lordranandbeyond]

Another new Patreon reward sketch by @baruyon, this time of the Burnt Ivory King!

[lordranandbeyond]

Sir Alonne graces the newest L&B Patron reward wallpaper for November! Anadapta handled the impeccable line work, while Baru added her splendid coloring! This is available as a wallpaper and hi-res download to all the $10+ supporters of the Lordran and Beyond Patreon, and the lines are available as a translucent .png too, so you can add your own colored backdrop or texture! Newcomers can visit the official website to check out the on-going Dark Souls comic!

[lordranandbeyond]

 New Patron reward sketch by @artsywindow for the L&B Patreon!

[lordranandbeyond]

Here’s a boss death animation that I had no idea existed. 

(+author’s Reddit thread)

[lordranandbeyond]

Hey, i have been following you a long time and i wanted to know if you think that from and the souls series will lose the love of the players if keeps doing things like in dark souls 2, which is version for consoles, later the version for pc, a bunch of dlcs(even if they are good), a complete edition(scholar of the first sin),i feel like all of this distant releases and extra paid content could make them really unpopular in the long term. Thanks for reading :)

I personally don’t think so, since at the moment the stuff From has done so far isn’t too egregious if you ask me.

The Dark Souls II example you cited was already somewhat the case for the first game, just rearranged; console release, PC release w/ DLC, console DLC released later, and then a “complete” edition was even released in certain territories. And honestly, I think staggering the release of the Artorias of the Abyss DLC two months later for console players was probably a meaner thing to do to the fan base than how the DLC and re-releases for Dark Souls II were handled. The slightly delayed PC release of Dark Souls II wasn’t much of an issue for me; I’m more of a PC gamer than anything else, so naturally I’d prefer it to be day-and-date with consoles, but From being up front about when the PC version was releasing was still a good move, and it was a great port so I didn’t at all mind double dipping.

The Scholar of the First Sin is a mix of some good, some bad, and some ugly. A lot of the lore stuff, including the extra ending and boss fight, were patched in for free for all players, which is good! I think sort of retroactively altering core elements of the game like that is an iffy thing to do, but delivering that for free was at least the right way to go about it. Packaging everything into a “complete edition” just makes sense. I personally have zero problems with late adopters having a chance to snag this stuff at a good value. 

The gameplay oriented bits like the remixed enemies and items were exclusive to current gen versions of the game, which is quite a bit stranger. That said, I don’t necessarily consider the SotFS changes on XB1/PS4/PC to be better or worse exactly, just different. Not $60 worth of differences, but it’s stuff that’s mostly harmless (though that does depend on who you ask).

To more literally answer your question, I don’t think the fans love for the series is really at stake since I wouldn’t say From mistreats their fans. Even though Dark Souls II gets a lot of hate (which I’ll never understand), it’s hard to argue the DLC for that game was really good stuff. The long and short of it is that From delivers Souls content worth paying for on a very consistent basis.

It’s actually the rather rapid releases of the new games that kind of worries me; Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and (presumably) Dark Souls III will all be separated by only a year between releases. I’m not one to complain about more Souls, but giving the franchise a breather for an extra year or two after Dark Souls III before announcing the next Souls-ish title would be a smart move (especially since we’re no doubt going to have DLC for Bloodborne and DS3 to tide us over). Giving time for people to get anxious about when a new game is coming out can be a good thing; you can bet there wouldn’t be half as much buzz about Fallout 4 right now if Fallout: [insert subtitle here] was only a year or two old.