>>738853515
it's one of the best

>>738854281
i heard it's not very balanced or difficult and it's easy to fall into cheesing everything with your kick and instant enviro-death.

also i heard it's super buggy and crashes a lot. is there a community patch or something?

Get both

>>738853515
completely different than exanima. what kinda retarded comparison is this even

>>738855324
i like the way you think anon

>>738855437
i just want systemic, physics based combat

>>738854485
It's hard to say it's "cheesing" with the physics when the game teaches you how to kick before it even teaches you how to swing your weapon. It's practically encouraging you wherever you go to take advantage of the fact you have a way to stagger or outright knockdown enemies for that would otherwise deal huge chunks of damage to your health. If anything, not using the physics engine retards your overall experience.

>>738853515
its fighting system still mogs every damn RPG game after all these years

>>738854485
>i heard it's super buggy
I remember that in the german version when you hit water with a fire sword the game crashes. This a bug created by the censorship because german games arent allowed to have any gore.
When you install a blood patch the crash goes away and you can chop peoples heads off.

>>738854485
>kick
it only works if there's something dangerous behind the enemy, if there's nothing he won't fly away

there's also magic and archery, so you don't even have to play as a kicking machine

>>738855567
He's right though, I think the problem is that it's not varied enough. Skilled enemies should be able to catch your kick and punish you for it, and there should be a lower cut-off where kicking is basically useless. Dark Messiah suffers from being an imsim, they all have the same problem: the design philosophy creates a super low skill ceiling that detracts from the game overall. You have to work quite hard to earn the ability to do a no armor, no shield, club only Dark Souls run where you're just fucking around and stunting on the game. It's a lot more engaging and fun to do so, despite the game being much less "interesting" in theory than a game like Dark Messiah or Dishonored. The commitment to total freedom in problem solving is admirable, but overall there's a real lack of a certain X factor that imsims leave on the table as a result.

OP it's still good and you should play it.

>>738856504
I don't see how the imsim freedom creates a low ceiling. They may not prioritize depth in order to facilitate more flexibility, sure. But you apply equal arbitrary restrictions to them (no upgrade run, melee only run, etc) per your example

>>738853515
Exanima is abandonware scam, avoid it like the plague.

>>738853515
It's great

it's a complete meme game

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>>738853515
It's great and Xana is sexo.
Also despite being unfinished, the demon form is actually kinda useful since run attacks oneshot nearly anything.

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>>738858482
It emerges from degrees of freedom and a design philosophy which is entirely based around maximizing that freedom at all times. The point I'm making with Dark Souls is that you're not really going to be engaging with the game like that and doing stupid shit right off the bat, there's a long learning period and a journey to mastery you have to go through in order to be able to do those challenge runs. Miyazaki's games aren't the only example, Nethack is a pretty good one too.
Immersive sims, by their own design philosophy, run counter to the exact thing which creates that journey to mastery. In order to maximize those degrees of freedom, essentially the game's balance needs to constantly avoid stepping on the toes of the systems themselves. Otherwise, you're not really an immersive sim are you? Effectively there's a whole dimension of balance, where the margin of error in utilizing these interacting systems and how much they gate the progression of the player has to be extremely slack, cannot exist without destroying the immersive sim qualities of the game.
In the case of Dark Souls, in order to do that ridiculous challenge run, and what makes it interesting, is that you are purposefully stepping outside of the safety zone which the game was balanced around. Immersive sims don't really have the same kind of distinction, they can't afford to do it and it runs counter to the overall design philosophy. The gap between playing Dishonored with no abilities and manamaxxing for example, isn't really that big of a difference. By virtue of its maximizing the viability of any arbitrary use of its own systems, it basically collapses the gap and makes mastery of the game all the easier.

There's more to it than this, but I hope that this aspect makes some sense?

>>738854485
>i heard it's not very balanced or difficult and it's easy to fall into cheesing everything with your kick and instant enviro-death.
Yeah, this is one of the games I wouldn't suggest playing on higher difficulties. On highest difficulty later on you have extremely tanky enemies that can two-shot you out of max upgraded HP and come in groups, so you end up having to cheese everything with instakill kicks. On regular difficulties it's not as bad and taking down enemies normally isn't an exercises in tedium. However kicking is fun.

>>738854485
"cheesing" is sorta the name of the game in dark messiah, it's balanced for you going for environmental kills. enemies kill you in like two hits on hard and you can burn through mana quick. very resource management-based like a lot of immersive sim-adjacent games but i think it handles difficulty better than a lot of games like it.
play a magic knight or you're playing the game wrong

it's not really about "raw" man to man melee combat like that as fun as it is to golf swing a goblin off a tall bridge. If you build hard into Might from the start so you can get the orc cleaver early you can get solid results with a sword but using the environment is really the name of the game and you're not going to be parrying attacks or anything, just trying to keep out of range and swinging

>>738863089
also, have fun with it. always look for fun opportunities. stuff like hurling a fireball (which is basically a grenade) at a bunch of enemies on a breakable floor. this is just the kind of game where you will have more fun playing for style points where you can.

one last thing OP: even in melee combat they want you to pay attention to the environment. power attacks work like kicks in that if there's something they can be launched into, a directional attack will ragdoll them into it. that goes for pits, fire, breakable objects, spikes, etc. it's context sensitive.
>>738860353
the way you generally get around the lack of tension at least in an imsim is by having lots of necessary resource management. DM does this on hard to an extent, Bioshock does in comparison to something like Dishonored. Ctrl+Alt+Ego is all about tying almost every significant action you can take to a shared resource.

>>738853515
it's fun.

>>738854485
>it's not very balanced or difficult
Its actually pretty hard. You'll need to get all the 'cheesy' enviro-death you can later on.

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Play on normal and give yourself extra skillpoints every time they are rewarded with cheats. It's very stingy and playing the last 40 minutes with maybe one and a half full tree is lame. It's much more fun to have spells and skills to experiment with early on. Of course it kinda fucks the balance but I've always enjoyed it more as a experimental thing than doing everything legit with timed strikes, blocks, parries and combos.

Do not play on hard or if it has very hard. "Executing" downed basic grunts only for them to get up three times is extremely unsatisfying. Cheesing is fun but not for an entire campaign just to avoid dying to three hits.

>tfw you'll never be able to save Duncan

>>738864009
Dark Messiah, effectively has one enemy, a melee guy who runs at you that you can instakill (Bandit, Vampire, Orc, Zombie)
all the other types of enemies are gimmicks/non threats
If you ported some enemies from Sekiro/Souls to Dark Messiah through mods (now that the game is open source) then maybe it might get hard (I think some modders are looking into this) but as is, its really easy.

>>738864114
I saved Duncan. the only thing to do is spam telekinesis 24/7

>>738864115
I disagree. Try and fight one of those Vampire knights using just sword and board. It can be pretty difficult they have high health and very high damage output. Try and fight three at once, and you can find yourself dead in seconds.
You kind of need the cheese

>>738864114
>>738864226
Same. Bro is just wandering around the small plaza after that.

The online mode was extremely fun. A completely bullshit balanced piece of shit but hilarious nonetheless.
>Play Wizard
>Get 5 or 6 level ups
>You can on the fly change your spells to:
>Melee tier sticky fire you flick at people, everyone dies from a single hit unless stoneskinned or warrior maxed spell resist
>Instant kill guided fireball (just aim over spell shields and hit their ass lol)
>Instant kill hitscan lightning
>AoE fireball killing everyone with DoT unless healed
>Lightning orb auto instant killing anyone getting near its path flying forward

Basically a Wizard had an answer to everything and countered everyone. They weren't weak enough to be one-shot in melee that easily either.
Not to mention the campaign maps being heavily slanted for the undead faction.
>Living faction gets a castle undead has to push a siege tower to and some standard bottlenecks at the end
>Undead has a giant bridge they can collapse at will at any time and just team wipe the other side with impunity
Such bizarre design choices.

>>738860353
I agree in theory though thinking about it in practice, it's hard not seeing imsims so called freedoms converging into very simplistic and analogous camps. Like sure, skipping a boss because you hacked a system to bypass him - purely a skill check via player finding the keypad and having the literal stats to use it. It's a very binary accomplishment and offers little depth. Could the same be said about any sort of routing and finding keys/items in a souls game?
And for enemy encounters, especially bosses, I get saying DS boss was designed with specific moveset in mind you learn to master whereas an Imsim is fully expecting anything and everything and isn't too concerned about punishing one particular method.
But in the end, both genres don't really care how you beat them and both only do so much to disrupt certain play styles - use a block/bleed/fire build, pause time to put out 500 traps, if it's not something the boss counters or disrupts, you can use it on Boss A or Boss B without question.
Still feel like your right, I don't think I ever approached an imsim with a mastery beyond 'memorizing level layouts', but thinking about from a reductionist standpoint has clearly reduced it too much for my pea brain

>>738864580
>>I disagree. Try and fight one of those Vampire knights using just sword and board.
I did, as long as you know that the sword and board combat is designed around comboing power attacks rather than normal attacks, which actually seem to scale their damage with your characters speed (including falling speed) they are easy. Without those features ofc the melee combat sucks too much to bother, but with it it can be fun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo9PnGx7g2w

I once played this online and got to friendly fire backstab Tim "Loss" Buckley.
Pretty sure it was before his meme debute. At the height of gamer guys in a couch online comics.

>>738864831
>combat is designed around comboing power attacks rather than normal attacks
Certainly true yeah. But you're talking from the perspective of someone who's mastered the game. Most games become easy once you've learnt them.

Is that your mod? What does it do and is it out yet?

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>>738865184
no not my mod (I only mod skyrim and wc3 xd), thats a polish guy who has been obsessing over dark messiah for 20 years now
essentially, to master dark messiahs combat you need to learn to mix power attacks and cancels + sprint and jump
recently ubisoft gave the source code of Dark Messiah to an autist to create modding tools for it like
https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-trials-of-kha-baleth
https://www.nexusmods.com/darkmessiahofmightandmagic/mods/102

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>>738853515
It's good and so is exanima. Pirate both.

>>738858753
Exanima is a really fun abandonware scam. I would never pay a single cent for it but it's the gameplay and atmosphere are amazing.

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this game absolutely ruined every fantasy ARPG I played afterwards because being a pragmatic magic knight who uses magic in tricky ways that augment a martial playstyle rather than "i cast lightning and disintegrate you" is an addictive fantasy that almost no game manages to meet

I did a playthrough of Avowed where I tried to do a Magic Knight and towards the end of the game I decided to try to respec to pretty much pure warrior and instantly had more fun. why are RPG systems like this

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>>738865495
>recently ubisoft gave the source code of Dark Messiah to an autist to create modding tools for it like
I really hope something comes of this, but I fear it's too late and the community is mostly dead at this point.

It's incredible. I'm reinstalling it right now, actually.

>>738868604
use this too
https://www.moddb.com/mods/dark-messiah-restoration-mod

>>738853515
It's very good, but you need to actually like video games.