Dark Souls ll

Dark Souls II (ダークソウルII Dāku Sōru Tsū^?) is an action role-playing video game. The third game in its series, Dark Souls II was developed for Microsoft Windows,PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 by From Software, which also published the game in Japan, while Bandai Namco Games published the game in other regions.

Dark Souls II was announced at the Spike Video Game Awards on December 7, 2012.^[5][6] Hidetaka Miyazaki, who served as director on the two earlier games in the series, Demon's Souls and Dark Souls,^[7] acted as a supervisor, while the game was directed by Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura.^[7] Although set in the same world, there is no direct story connection between Dark Souls and Dark Souls II.^[8] The game uses dedicated multiplayer servers.^[8] Taking place in the world of Drangleic, the game features both player versus environment (PvE) and player versus player (PvP) play, in addition to having some co-op components. As in the earlier games in the series, it once again features challenging gameplay, but with a more powerful graphics engine and more advanced AI system.

After some initial delays, the game had its official launch in North America on March 11, 2014, with the PC release launching on April 24, 2014.^[4][9] An updated version of the game, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, was released in April 2015. The title is a compilation of the original game and its downloadable content and patches, and also encompasses a remastered port of the game for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC with upgraded graphics, expanded online multiplayer capacity, and changes to the game's layout.

Dark Souls 2, in the mold of Dark Souls, is a game of considerable difficulty. Each time the player dies their maximum health is reduced by 5% until they use a human effigy or assist another player in clearing a level. There are no auto refilling health bars, healing items are in limited supply, and even the game's most basic enemies are capable of dispatching the player in a few hits. Writing in Extra Credits, James Portnow states that every other game utilizes some kind of out of game menu to adjust the difficulty. He writes that game research has shown that most players will quit the game altogether rather than adjust the difficulty. Even worse, he writes that some games ask the player to set the difficulty of the game before they have any knowledge of game mechanics.^[10]

However, unlike every other AAA game, Dark Souls 2 allows the game's difficulty to be adjusted by mechanics built into the game. The game designers deliberately placed powerful items early in the game allowing newer players higher basic damage and defense than they should have at that point. For more experienced players, the designers placed higher skill cap items early that do more damage if executed correctly.^[10] Other penalties, such as the health reduction on death, can be significantly reduced with certain items. This set up allows the player to set the game's difficulty based on their experiences with the game, rather than a clunky menu option.^[10]