Like, don't get me started on how some weapons have poise multipliers attached to them, and the multiplier changes, based on what attack you use! Gah. This is part of the reason nobody figured out poise for so long. 'You can only see the effect if you are in the right situation. 'The whole bloody calculation is invisible,' he said.

Now, any attack, even when poise isn't flipped on, can impact your invisible 'poise health.' None of this was made visible by the game, of course it was all silently happening in the background.Īs Norwood discovered through extensive testing, though, FromSoftware made poise far more complicated in Dark Souls 3. In Dark Souls 2, FromSoftware introduced a wrinkle that fans dubbed 'hyper poise.' For certain weapon types-usually heavy ones like greataxes-poise would temporarily increase while attacking, but you had to time your attacks to make sure poise kicked on at the right moment. Though this wasn't surfaced in the game's interface, you could intuit how it worked. If your poise meter expired, your animation was interrupted. When attacked, your poise meter would go down. In Dark Souls 1 and 2, think of poise like an invisible meter. Buckle up.įromSoftware has changed how poise works across all three games, to varying degrees. That's an invisible numbers conspiracy.'Īnd here's where we're going to get super technical about how Dark Souls works. And that stat doesn't even work the same way it used to work. The only thing they get told is there is a stat, poise, which does something during attacks. No way to tell if there even are situations in the first place. No way to tell what situation they are in. No way to see if their weapon even has poise. 'They have no way to see in real time this variable changing. 'A normal player cannot do this,' he said. With this tool in front of him, Norwood was able to start getting answers. Norwood, who spent his college years studying psychology, knew how to set up an experiment and check evidence.

'I turned the invisible numbers war into a visible numbers war.'

'I could put the game in windowed mode, stick the table next to the game window, and visibly see how the values changed,' he said. He wasn't able to start coming up with answers until he stumbled on a cheating tool for the game that accidentally surfaced the poise number changing in real-time. You'll notice one important detail is lacking in that apology: an explanation.

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