Welcome to the first episode of Dark Souls 2 Dissected! This episode takes a close look at how the matchmaking mechanics evolved into Soul Memory, and how these mechanics were figured out.
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00:00 – Intro
1:22 – The History of Invasion Balancing
5:09 – What Is Soul Memory?
7:22 – The Flaws of Soul Memory
11:52 – How Hackers Caused a Mechanic to Get Patched
13:38 – How Soul Memory Was Solved
27:43 – Inside Help
30:28 – Testing Holdouts & Loose Ends
34:57 – The PvP Arenas
37:22 – Modified Save Files
38:50 – Closing Words & Credits
26 Comments
Hey everyone! If you enjoy these videos and the game research I do, please consider supporting the Patreon I just launched!
https://www.patreon.com/illusorywall
Any amount of contribution would go a long way into supporting what I do.
I use to love doing pvp before ceasless discharge. Its a perfect little arena.
Soul memory was truly a design choice of all time.
I was wondering where the really nice souls1 wiki went then you said it became fextralife and now i am disappointed
Dark Souls 2 and a feature that was disliked by the community? No way
Soul memory is almost good… however, it would be better to just compute the amount of souls expended in acquiring attributes plus the amount of souls represented by the worn equipment.
can I just say thank god the password system was added in DS3 (I think it was, I played the souls games starting with elden ring sorry if I'm wrong)
Why is it called twinking??
This brings back memories. I remember I used to beeline for that Agape Ring so I could keep doing co op on my fav bosses. It sucked when you would just suddenly not get summoned any more.
Thank you for your service.
Ds2 is such a great game don't know why people hate it.
26:38
that name is a joke in spanish, basically when you read the name you are saying "the tasty dick" as it translates from "la rica pija"
26:35 "Larry Capija" translates to "The Tasty C**k". This is gold naming lololol.
Dark Souls 2 also has a pseudo password matchmaking system through the name-engraved ring. 😂
I do duo playthroughs with a good friend of mine. And since the host gets more souls from a boss then the phantom one of us would kill a boss in our world and be put into a different soul memory bracket. Especially in the early game this happens a lot and the brackets are plain frustrating
These games are very dear to my heart, but sometimes the choices made in designing the multiplayer just absolutely confound me beyond belief.
26:10 the name 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I love all of your dissected videos !
funny hearing someone else reject the SL matchmaking thing re BoB arena, how something this blatantly wrong has been unquestioned for like 8+ years now beats me
there are literally people in BoB arena who make SL 838 chars dedicated to BCing out repeatedly in an effort to prevent 838s from playing. I find it hard to believe people this deep into ds2 pvp aren't using BA (which tells you the opponents SL), so I wonder what they think the reason is for instantly matching with a 150 over and over again lol
26:32 ese es argentino!!!
I wish they just had proper scaling that takes all context into account, dks1 remaster was also a mess when it came to this. I was thinking… can you pick up stone armor and invade burg? HAH! Try maxed giants, ridiculous. Id rather just have it go in raw like the original at that point
Do cracked red eye orbs in DS1 pop a confirmation box when using them? If so, you could easily re-use them with confirmation box delaying.
Can you please like, give us that hacked save file…
5:29 I played DS2 SotFS recently, I can tell you exactly what was my Soul Memory
4177267
… On a first playthrough
Without even touching NG+
And only grinding for levels at the start of the game to have 60 INT
All other grinding was for titanite
honestly? all they had to do was make the agape ring available from the beginning of the game, and make it so you still obtain souls from pvp regardless
I think a better way for the agape ring to work to improve co-op would have been to make it not increase your soul memory by souls gained as a white/gold phantom