[thestage]

[analogos]

i didn't get that ring because it sounded dull and cheesy. clear room, stand around for five minutes to get full hp, clear next room, etc.

[DJ]

Just (finally) took out the Belltower Gargoyles. Got 'em on my first try! I beat the E3 Demo to death so this isn't saying much.

Went and rescued the dude in the lower burg, and that's where I'm headed next.

Was kind of debating trying to take out the Hydra.
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[CubaLibre]

Turns out the Hydra is really, really easy. If you have a shield. Also the black knight down near him is the easiest one yet... if you have a shield. Shields are important in Dark Souls. It made me remember how important they were in Demon's Souls, too, until I got so good at the game that I didn't need them any more.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[TXTSWORD]

The black knight near the hydra rolled off a cliff :( I was really hoping for his glaive. Currently using ninja gear and a black knight sword.

[Mr. Apol]

[thestage]

progress is slow going

right now my choice is between some giant thing with magic and a pitchfork surrounded by a hundred hollow, or a giant boss that shoots lightning and swings a huge glaive whom I hit for 18 points of damage.

I like that "shortcut" gate in the undead parish that doesn't actually stay open if you die or use a bonfire.

[glossolalia]

finally made some progress and i think i owe it all to killing lautrec and using his ring. beat the gargoyles, moonlight butterfly, and the rhino. got to the first boss of the lower burg and made my first trips into the catacombs and ruins, which are both pretty terrifying. lower burg seems real ugly compared to the rest of the game.

[glossolalia]

is there even any sense in going to the ruins or catacombs before ringing the second bell? are they connected to blighttown somehow?

oh yeah, i was standing next to the giant crow and i heard snoring or something for half a minute. it even had subtitles, like "mhmmh mhgmm." can't figure out where the hell it could be coming from though.

[CubaLibre]

[klj5j6li]

[thestage]

but I always kill all the skeletons and that gate has never stayed open :(

oh well, doesn't really matter any more. it has outlived its usefulness anyway

[remote]

Spent some time in Darkroot Garden, which is pretty cool... The butterfly boss there was super easy, but still a pretty neat fight, at least visually. Still don't know how to open the door with the glowing gem in the center right by the bonfire, though, so I decided to go back to the Catacombs. Finally took down the first two bosses there with a companion, and then when I took the ladder up next to the second boss's altar I apparently entered the Tomb of the Giants (?) and quickly fell to my death after trying to follow tiny lights in pitch darkness. I guess I might need a lantern or something...? Not sure where else to go at the moment. Maybe Blighttown.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[Flylighter]

[remote]

[remote]

Nevermind, that was way easier than expected. Next area seems pretty tough, but I managed to grab the Eastern Armor set! Very nice. Actually, the chest is the only piece I'm using. I've got a weird mix of leather gloves and boots along with that, plus the Helm of the Wise. One odd-looking warrior, I guess. I like it anyway.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[dmauro]

So I picked this up and put a few hours in tonight. Not sure if I'm going to keep going. There's just nothing really selling me. I mean, the graphics and ambience are nice, but the gameplay is mediocre, and the RPG stat boosting/tweaking type stuff has not even surfaced yet so who knows if that will be any good. The load time upon death is pretty painful. I'm assuming that's there on purpose because the load times otherwise are seamless, but it was a really bad idea. When you die is when you really need to NOT have a load time because you want to get back on the boat.

The humanity thing seems like it could be cool, but none of it has any apparent effect anyways, so :/

I suppose this is one of those games that people will shoot back with "oh it doesn't get good until 20 hours in," but I just don't have 20 hours to pump into an unfun game in the hopes of it getting better.

Oh, one more thing: X is the attack button, not right bumper. Have these guys never played another third person hack and slash action game?!
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[dmauro]

Oh and I had a bunch of notes from people earlier on in the night, and then they all disappeared. I was still connected to XBL, what gives? I might have enjoyed it more with some tips from other players.
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[DJ]

Man this thread is playing out exactly how I hoped it was going to. Excellent.
The surface has barely been scratched.
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[TXTSWORD]

Man, this game feels so massive compared to Demon's and I keep thinking back on the world and I'm like "fuck Dark Souls is so much better". I feel like the mysteries of this shit will never end and like I could play it for years without feeling like I've done everything I want to do. I'm getting to where I can see tangible goals for subsequent playthroughs, and I can tell I've only just started on this one despite pouring a fair amount of hours into it. This is everything I could have wanted and so much more. I can't wait to not fuck a million things up when I start fresh! Oh yeah, I actually got to have a bit of multiplayer fun tonight and farmed some souls helping people clear out the blighttown area boss. Also, I now look like a Ring Wraith... :| This does not please me. I really prefer light armor though, and this has good stats and low weight. I'd rather dodge around and get 1-2 shot killed if I fuck up than clang around in heavy armor and a shield. I wish I could find some good miracles or weapons that get faith bonus. I feel like all of my faith points from rolling cleric are seriously going to waste. Probably be way better off if I had rolled bandit. But I dunno hopefully that changes in the long run. Starting on Sen's, but maybe I should take a trip over to that butterfly boss hmmmmm...

[DJ]

King's Field: Final Cut
Perfecting This Shit Since 1994™
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[TXTSWORD]

This game is seriously unreal. I'm so high on it right now. I want to ignore any sins it may commit and call it The Best Ever Videogame but I think I should probably wait on making that declaration.

[remote]

Not sure what just happened. After the Hydra I noticed a message saying "Imminent Pyromancy" or something, so I walk around the bend into a cove where a big golem awaits. When I kill it, a woman emerges, as I have evidently just freed her. She says she wishes to entrust me with the magic of her home (uh, Oo-something) before she fades into the ether and mentions something about her signature, but then she just vanishes. Was she supposed to give me a spell or something? As far as I can tell, I got nothing.

After that, I tried going up the nearby ladder again and found myself beset by a gang of spirits or something that I couldn't lock on to. They kicked my ass.

Yeah. I think it's back to Blighttown with me for now. Er, tomorrow, that is.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[DJ]

You just got passive-aggressively invaded! :D
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[remote]

Eh? Is... that a thing people can do?
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[remote]

Oh, man, I just googled this. Um. Wow.

Actually, I still don't completely understand. When I was running through that area earlier, when I first grabbed the Eastern Armor, I saw a few humans I assumed were hostile NPCs of some sort. I was being chased by a horde of tree people at the time, so I just got the fuck out of there. They weren't translucent at the time, nor were they red like black phantoms. So are you telling me that players can "passively invade" by waiting for someone to arrive and appearing as, for all anyone can tell, NPCs? And on top of that, when I came back to see what those supposed NPCs were, they had all equipped this ring that makes them translucent and immune to lock-on? That's some fucking overpowered bullshit. Fuck.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[DJ]

That...Isn't my understanding of it, but:

Folks who go the Gravelord route are able to place a sort of reverse summoning sigil on the map. This will infect other people's worlds with added NPC enemies who glow dark red, like an invading player would.

So, just like how you can elicit NPC co-op aid, so too can you be invaded by NPC phantoms.

If you die while your map is infected, the infector gains half the souls you'd have dropped upon death (the "lose half your souls" mechanic becomes common in these scenarios, just in different ways for all the alignments, basically).

Your means of fighting back is thus: That invasion sigil appears on your map same place as it does on your infector's map. You and two other people. If any of you touch it, you get to invade their world. If any of you kill them, the curse is lifted and you get your souls back plus half of theirs.

So: Benefits to Gravelord-ism: Might get free souls!
Downside: You can 3 very pissed and higher-level-than-you people invade your world simultaneously.
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[Moogs]

Man.

As if this game wasn't terrifying enough...

[Teflon]

So does the PS3 version have the same shaky framerate? It's not quite at SotC/Perfect Dark levels but I'm definitely getting AC4A Arms Fort vibes every now and then. Oddly enough it doesn't really seem to correspond to particularly impressive vistas, like the worst I've seen it get is when you look directly at the round churchy window in the tutorial. Reminds me of Bethesda's thing where they carelessly model random rock #27 with 40.000 polygons and people end up having this incomprehensible hit of slowdown whenever they chance upon a couple of them in an otherwise empty field.

I'm playing a lady pyromancer who I awkwardly named Gwynne (after For Answer's Wynne D Fanchon whose name I mangled), because the ALL INT ALL THE TIME mage/crescent falchion build suited me to a tee in Demon's and well something called a pyromancer holding a big fucking axe sounded closer to what I wanted to do than the poncy looking mage starter. It's.. not entirely working out yet because the starting fireball is nowhere near as useful as Soul Arrow was (let alone the old fireball) and the axe is no curved sword but a couple levels and some nicer spells/weapons should sort things out rather nicely.


Also yes, fuck that bridge near the first bonfire in the Undead Burg.

Also also I took a picture

[Youpi]

NOT READING NOT READING NOT READING
I'm trying to beat it without any outside information whatsoever, except from what I might observe playing multiplayer.

Dark Souls really makes me feel dumb. Not because of the difficulty (I do not die often actually, I play slow and paranoid, most of my deaths are being one-shot'd by enemies I'm not supposed to be able to kill yet), but because of how it fixes so many problems with Demon's Souls I did not even realize existed before seeing them fixed in Dark Souls.
For example, as I understand its working for now, the humanity system is a damn elegant fix for the "suicide in the nexus" mechanic that always bothered me aesthetically.

Too bad they didn't fix the most obvious problem, multiplayer being still location-based. I hope there won't be some areas that will devolve in no-MP ghettos.
What I really hoped for was for a "let's play co-op or vs anywhere you want, but RIGHT NOW" option.
Well, maybe there's actually one I will only find later.

I've played for four hours today and made almost zero progress, besides killing the twin gargoyles with some help, and upgrading my winged gear—and that's despite playing as chickenly as possible. (Currenly a lvl 23 spearman.)

Hard to believe this game is exceeding my colossal expectations.

NOT READING NOT READING NOT READING
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Twitter: @youpi

[Wilkes]

[dmauro]

I died plenty. That's not such a problem as death doesn't seem to set me back at all, it just hasn't opened up at all and I played for like 6 hours.
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[CubaLibre]

[remote]

[Teflon]

[remote]

Oh, on the positive side of things, the black knight down by the Hydra dropped his halberd for me.

I can't equip it just yet, but it is/will be by far the most powerful weapon I've found so far.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[glossolalia]

the halberd is great, two-hand it whenever possible. it's perfect for taking out minor enemies in narrow areas, even works pretty well for the knights on stairwells.

i'll try not spoilering it this time: is there much of a point to the catacombs and ruins before ringing the second bell?

[remote]

I've gone down there quite a bit, though I don't think I'll be going much further without some kind of light-emitting spell or whatever.

Still have no idea where the second bell is...
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[DJ]

[remote]

I guess I really have to figure out how this Covenant thing works.

Isn't the area with the creaky wooden platforms the New Londo Ruins? If the bell is down there... fuck.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[TXTSWORD]