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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
Dark Souls
So, I've been playing Dark Souls and I thought I'd write a bit about it. If you're already a fan this might be a bit of a boring article, but I was, if you would, in the dark about this game until recently, and I'm having a blast playing it. Dark Souls is a mostly singleplayer Action RPG with some of the best combat mechanics and game design I've ever encountered. I've been playing it for the PC, but with a madcatz gamepad plugged in, since you basically need 2 analog sticks to play the game.
The battle system in this game is just viscerally fun. Imagine a system like in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with health and stamina, but your stamina regenerates much more quickly, and any combat action like blocking or even weak attacks uses some amount of it. Now imagine you're playing on Master difficulty and can't use sneaking or magic, and there's a parrying move kind of like in Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker but of course if you fuck it up you are vulnerable to getting your ass kicked.
Every battle is intense and any enemy can kill you, but if you are skilled you won't even take any damage from bosses. Enemies have visible health bars and non-visible stamina bars. One method of fighting is to quickly dodge their attacks and hit them when their guard is down. You could also try to strafe behind them or around to their sword side and hit them where they can't block. If you build right, you could just keep on hitting them until they don't have enough stamina to block any more and basically bash through them.
You level up using souls (which are basically like exp) but you also use them to buy, upgrade, and repair your equipment, and to get more ammo if you're an archery guy. If you die, it's like D2-- your corpse has all your shit. Well, it has all your souls, but not your equipment. You have to fight your way to the corpse to get your souls back. If you've already spent them on gear or levelling up you don't lose them though.
There's a lot of other little mechanics, but the big thing is that every battle in this game feels fun and intense. You need good reflexes and tactical thinking, and sometimes you need to just retreat to better terrain or just straight-up run. In a lot of ways, this game feels reminiscent of the roguelike Dungeon Crawl. It's easy to make mistakes and die, and dying has consequences. In another way, it feels like a classic platformer like Megaman. If you do die, you just restart at the beginning of the level-- and things are fucking hard. The way the battles feel with z-targeting and the stamina bar is just so much fun.
I guess I just like games where you feel like you're learning. I mean, obviously I'm not doing differential equations here, but sort of like Sc2, Dark Souls requires skill to play, and as you develop your skills it's rewarding and fun. Not only do you get better and fighting as your character gets more stamina and health, you personally have to become skilled. Some of it is reflexes, some of it is learning how enemies attack, and some of it is tactics. I might be a simple-minded guy, but I kind of like the feeling of learning something new in a game.
I don't think this game is for everyone, by the way. Prepare to feel frustrated at having to play through the same zone several times (again: sort of like Megaman) and fight the same retarded enemies several times. It's a hard game, and in a lot of ways I think it's the kind of game that was more popular 10 years ago and less common now.
There are little things to help you in this game, though, which makes all the difference. You can write on the ground in soapstone and it will appear in other players' games in the same level. If you see writing, it is a good idea to read it-- people leave warnings about traps and ambushes ahead, or tips on how to defeat certain enemies. You can upvote and downvote them as well. You can also call in friends to help you out, but I haven't explored this option yet. There's also something called "invasion" which sounds like a neat game mode as well.
I'll see if I can throw up some gameplay VoDs or something if I can get my goddamned xsplit to work this evening.
  
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I liked the game, then I beat it... once. Then it becomes ridiculously, face-meltingly easy and therefore boring. And I'm talking about on new game plus.
I still like the game, for what the developers (a smaller company) were trying to accomplish, but the difficulty is 80% artificial. What really pisses me off is when I see people say "look at Dark Souls, that is how you make a difficult game right." No, it really, really isn't. If you want to play a game with correctly scaling/skill based difficulty, go play Ninja Gaiden 1 on xbox, and try to play through to master ninja. Try any of the DMC series, particularly DMC 3 or 4 and try to beat it on Dante Must Die. THAT is how you make a game truly difficult and skill based.
The difficulty from Dark Souls comes from basically two major ways. First, it has this really awkward/bizarre timing for the parrying and dodging. I basically dubbed it "dark souls" timing, because it isn't about being particularly fast, it is just this weird timing that is unique to that game (and different enemies have slightly different timing). Once you learn this for the game, and some of the specific enemies, most of the difficulty is gone. The second kind of difficulty is the "hey we put this trap thing there and you couldn't know about it, now you're dead." It's interesting for what it is, but obviously that goes out the window after the first play through.
The multiplayer has interesting ideas, but to be blunt, is poorly executed. I could go on about this, but it sounds like I hated the game, which I didn't. I do think it is overrated/overappreciated as a "difficult" game, when it really isn't a true skill game imo. That said, the first play through will wreck you, probably even if you are using a walk through.
My 2c on the game (I played it about a year ago on xbox 360 for w/e that's worth).
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I think there is no other game where I'm playing on such low speed, I just get annoyed by some things (mostly randomly dieing t.t) after 2-3 hours and let it rest for a day. However, I'm also totally in love. Haven't had this much fun and satisfaction from a game in that genre since a long time.
<3
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United States1654 Posts
If you love Dark Souls you should give Demon's Souls a try if you have a PS3.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
Ok so I was talking to a couple of friends who also have this game and it seems a lot of what I thought about this game is not totally accurate. The overall picture is correct but I'll clarify a bit here. Here are the main points you should know that might change your gameplay experience.
1) There are several classes. As is usual when I play a new RPG, I picked the biggest, baddest-looking class (Bandit, the buff guy with the axe) during character selection, named him Richard Nixon, and called it a day. Evidently, there are like 12 classes including other kinds of warriors, mages, priests, rogues, and archers. They use a lot of different game mechanics and some of them focus on ranged combat (which always uses ammo, even if you're a mage) or a different kind of melee combat, using quicker strikes than Richard Nixon does..
2) The classes play very differently. So it turns out that Bandit is like the one class that gets 100% block when it guards an attack. I thought that this game was all about just blocking and managing your stamina bar-- but it turns out this is totally not the case. The other classes start with crappy shields that only mitigate 50-70% of damage when an attack is blocked. A lot of how you play is evidently using things like "parrying" and "dodging" to avoid blows, even from non-boss enemies, which strikes me as pretty lame. But yeah apparently this game is super super hard for non-Bandits since they can't actually block reliably to mitigate damage until they reach the first blacksmith about 6 hours of game time in. Sucks to be them I guess.
3) Multiplayer co-op is kind of a shitfest. Well, basically there's no way to get someone specific in your game with you. Just like you only see a random subset of the messages scrawled on the ground to help you, coordinating co-op play is difficult. You can enter Human form and summon allies, but their marker has to be in your location in their game, they have to be the right level, etc. Dark Souls gives you the idea of wandering alone in the blackness and occasionally running into a kindred spirit. It's nice, but not good if you have friends.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that your mileage may vary, unless you too pick Bandit and decide to be an axe-wielding badass.
I'm sure the other classes are fun in their own way but I'm supremely glad I picked the one with 100% block at game start.
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On September 06 2012 01:10 Blazinghand wrote:
Ok so I was talking to a couple of friends who also have this game and it seems a lot of what I thought about this game is not totally accurate. The overall picture is correct but I'll clarify a bit here. Here are the main points you should know that might change your gameplay experience.
1) There are several classes. As is usual when I play a new RPG, I picked the biggest, baddest-looking class (Bandit, the buff guy with the axe) during character selection, named him Richard Nixon, and called it a day. Evidently, there are like 12 classes including other kinds of warriors, mages, priests, rogues, and archers. They use a lot of different game mechanics and some of them focus on ranged combat (which always uses ammo, even if you're a mage) or a different kind of melee combat, using quicker strikes than Richard Nixon does..
2) The classes play very differently. So it turns out that Bandit is like the one class that gets 100% block when it guards an attack. I thought that this game was all about just blocking and managing your stamina bar-- but it turns out this is totally not the case. The other classes start with crappy shields that only mitigate 50-70% of damage when an attack is blocked. A lot of how you play is evidently using things like "parrying" and "dodging" to avoid blows, even from non-boss enemies, which strikes me as pretty lame. But yeah apparently this game is super super hard for non-Bandits since they can't actually block reliably to mitigate damage until they reach the first blacksmith about 6 hours of game time in. Sucks to be them I guess.
3) Multiplayer co-op is kind of a shitfest. Well, basically there's no way to get someone specific in your game with you. Just like you only see a random subset of the messages scrawled on the ground to help you, coordinating co-op play is difficult. You can enter Human form and summon allies, but their marker has to be in your location in their game, they have to be the right level, etc. Dark Souls gives you the idea of wandering alone in the blackness and occasionally running into a kindred spirit. It's nice, but not good if you have friends.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that your mileage may vary, unless you too pick Bandit and decide to be an axe-wielding badass.
I'm sure the other classes are fun in their own way but I'm supremely glad I picked the one with 100% block at game start.
There are not 12 classes, there's 10. Also, classes don't really matter all that much. The only thing it changes is starting level/stats and starting gear. You can start as any class and be anything else before the forth boss, more or less.
Sure, Bandits might start with a shield with 100% physical block, but I'm pretty sure knights and soldiers also do that.. and even if you don't, you find a 100% physical block shield more or less immediately.
Picking a starting class is all about stuff like... do I want to use pyromancy before I beat capra demon? Do I want to use magic before I get to the lower undead burg? Do I want to be able to wield weapon X without leveling up 5 levels? It doesn't really matter for your playstyle because you can start as a knight and be a pure mage within 3 hours of playtime.
As for coop, the reason why it was made "hard" to coop with your friends is because it takes away from the atmosphere and difficulty of the game.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
Yeah I mean I guess most of this stuff is "how do your first 6 hours of gameplay look like" since you level up and get new gear pretty quickly. Still, the idea of playing without 100% block sounds super terrifying to me. As you get out of like the basic undead burg area though you'll be able to do what you want-- the classes aren't fundamentally different from each other, each class just determines what gear and aptitudes you start with. It's not like D3 where your class choice dictates your whole game.
And yeah Also just as an FYI for people on your first playthrough, try to do it without summoning allies. Summoning allies makes a lot of the fights super super easy, and part of the fun of this game is learning how to deal with fights that at first seem preposterously difficult (ie gargoyle fight in undead parish)
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Im surprised you didnt talk about what a terrible port it is.
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Blazinghand
United States25550 Posts
On September 06 2012 06:47 Ushio wrote:
Im surprised you didnt talk about what a terrible port it is.
I never played it on the original system. I will say using the XBox Live for Windows system is completely inscrutable and took half an hour to set up, though. Once I got it working I haven't had to deal with it but it is really poorly designed, and is required for online play. The best thing I can say for XBox Windows Live is that once you've set it up you never need to deal with it again.
In terms of issues with the port, there are two:
1) Resolution. The game automatically renders itself into some ass-bad resolution, like 1260x1080 or something terrible. You have to DL a mod that changes the rendering of the game. It takes like 5ish minutes to set up.
2) Controls. This game was meant to be played with a gamepad. If you don't have one you will quickly learn to hate life. You could probably play this with a joystick in one hand and a mouse in the other if it was a good joystick with a lot of buttons. But basically you need two analog-stick type inputs.
Both of these would be experience-ruiningly bad if I didn't mitigate them. Not too much trouble, but still.
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I really need to find this game. I got it last year in like January and never put it back in
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EPT
