[Bennett]

Thank goodness they bumped The Last Guardian.

Don't worry, at least half of the October/November games will slip to 2012.

[Bennett]

If your game receives the financial support of a major software publisher it is bound by the International Covenant on QTE Inclusion in Games 2010 (ICQTEIG). Products found to be in violation of the ICQTEIG are subject to being dumped by their publisher and distributed by a niche hobbyist distributor such as Atlus.

[Bennett]

I've preordered this and LA Noire. Before that, I hadn't preordered a game in five years.

Poll: Have I become a sucker?

Poll 2: Is this actually a pretty good year for games?

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

Wait, is the player character in Dark Souls an undead person?

[Bennett]

I watched that video, but I didn't come away knowing what the 'Gravelord ability' is.

[Bennett]

I'm replaying Demon's Souls now in anticipation of this game, and I guess I don't see the memorization as a very big flaw in it. The main reason is this: this time, I'm doing a no-armour + spears build, which is different from what I did before, and I can say that very few of the solutions to the various predicaments in the game remain constant between different builds. Nearly all the tricks I had memorized don't work.

(Clearly this isn't quite as true when it comes to the bosses though)

[Bennett]

So, [url=http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=161226863950366#!/photo.php?fbid=161227043950348&pid=369266&id=119869331419453]the longer you take to retrieve your humanity, the more your body rots[/url]. Neat idea.

/third edit - I give up on making URL formatting work

[Bennett]

Yeah, it seems like hiding is a thing, since apart from the barrels there was also a shot of a player hiding in a coffin. I think one area they could easily improve on Demon's Souls is in the stealth game, actually. In Demon's Souls, like Oblivion, I think the problem is that the monsters' ability to detect you is too limited, so you wind up finding ways to game their line of sight. The worst moments in both those games are where you wind up firing an arrow at a distant monster, then hiding, waiting for it to lose track of you, and then repeating.

One of the nicest thing about the MGS games is that they avoid this. They make the monsters very good at seeing and hearing you; they give you lots of options for making yourself completely invisible to them, but these options force you to sacrifice mobility or offense. That's how I saw MGS2 and 4 anyway. That iconic MGS cardboard box, although goofy, is actually really nice from a game design standpoint when you compare to games like Demon's Souls or Oblivion.

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

Looks like an ad for Everquest II.

/edit

[Bennett]

Serious question: is there any other game that even challenges this one for Best Game of All Time?

[Bennett]

I don't think it's perfect. You could even start by listing all the technical flaws, before getting on to the design flaws and the aesthetic flaws.

I feel like Dark Souls made me aware of how much daylight there is between current games and perfection though. If a game can be so amazing despite sucking in a bunch of tangible ways, it makes many of my previous favourites look like well-polished turds.

[Bennett]

I think the aesthetics (broadly construed) are one of the main areas where the Souls games exceed all other fantasy games. But even so, there are some localized failures.

- The offputting and silly cat/dog monsters in the forest
- The crouching lava bugs in Blight town
- The floating, exploding skulls
- Lost Izalith, first half, has a Turok/N64 feel for me. The moving statues don't really work either (aesthetically speaking)

Still I think one of the real strengths of the two games is that they present environments and opponents that are actually *fresh*, which is vanishingly rare in the high fantasy genre. Instead of the usual fire/ice/forest/desert tropes there are genuinely unexpected things like the tar pit in Sen's fortress, or the amazing Ash Lake at the bottom of the world. I get a sense of adventure which is now absent for me in Elder Scrolls games, Castlevania games, and Zelda games, to take three well-known examples. But it doesn't tread too far into the absurd, causing me to lose my suspension of disbelief, as Final Fantasy games so often do.

Also, based on his interviews, I think Miyazaki actually thinks deeply about the emotional dynamics of the predicaments in his game, which is so unusual in all AAA games right now, not just the fantasy ones. To me, the main emotional device in dark souls - heading deeper and deeper into the earth past the point of no return - is an amazingly perfect match for the mechanics of the game.

I'm sure some of you shared my visceral dread when we first entered the catacombs, or when we descended the cistern into Blight Town. I don't find myself responding to games like Nethack, or Diablo, or God of War, on that kind of level.

[Bennett]

Also, I know many of you are Kings Field fans, but did anyone other than me play Blade of Darkness (aka Severance: Blade of Darkness)? For me that is the most Dark Soulsy game I ever played prior to Demon's Souls.

[Bennett]

The monk fight in Demon's is essentially an arena mode. I think it can be done well, in a non-obvious, thematically consistent way.

[Bennett]

I think you could add a non-anonymous coop mode to a Dark Souls sequel, but it would require a slightly different approach to world design. I would spawn both players at opposite ends of the world. They would have to fight really hard just to meet up, and then the game would force them to choose between progressing their own aims or staying with their friend.

You could do some awesome forced-separation scenes too... for example, the floor gives way and your friend falls down into a pit. Or a cave-in occurs cutting you off from your friend. This kind of stuff would really help a game like Diablo, too, but Blizzard would never do something so hostile to player convenience.

[Bennett]

Last I read it had moved to 'Winter 2012'.

[Bennett]

Guys, you can cheat in videogames. Who knew?

[Bennett]

You guys made me re-buy this game. I don't really get what the big deal is about the resolution - my menu lets me choose resolution and refresh rate. In any case I sit 15 feet back from the TV so I don't really want it any sharper than 720p.

And I finally saw a vagrant!

[Bennett]

Does anyone know if they fixed the Gravelord covenant?

[Bennett]

Q: if I've killed Ornstein & Smough, Gwyndolin and the princess, howcome I can summon sunbros outside the Ornstein & Smough room? Is there another boss?

[Bennett]

I was wondering if I had been kicked off the servers, since after reaching SL60 or so I couldn't summon or be summoned in a bunch of places anymore. But then I went to some different areas and there are still phantoms around. I suspect the PC server populations might fluctuate more over the day than in the PS3 version.

Used up my last eye of death in the DLC areas. Going to stand still for an hour or two, maybe I'll spread some good misery.

/update got revenge-invaded by a katana guy, who kicked my butt. I think gravelording is really for expert PvE players who are happy to stay in human form all the time because they never die.

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

"skeletons of Olympic fencers" sounds like it would be a pretty cool game. Hmm.

[Bennett]

I think to be honest it's a bit too soon for there to be a lot of players on NG+. It takes a long time to get through DS the first time.

[Bennett]

Finding it quite enjoyable cheesing invaders with the Wrath of God miracle

[Bennett]

What about the Manus catalyst?

Gravelording is actually working for me now. I'm nowhere near good enough at PvP to get any eyes, but still!

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

A less dramatic change would be if they put the enemy health bars in the GUI space rather than in the world space, so that they didn't break the suspension of disbelief so much. That's what they did in Final Fight, and I guess it has its pluses and minuses since it's less readable than in-world health bars.

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

Got bored of my faith character, restarted. I'm going to see if I can do a no-boss run.

(by this I mean I'm going to see how much gravelord grief I can cause without beating any bosses)

/edit: best thing ever: invading people with my real name as my gamertag

[Bennett]

I finally am yielding a net profit in eyes of death! All it takes is to gank spirits of vengeance as soon as they materialize.

Then my lvl 5 wanderer got invaded by a guy in full darkwraith gear. I know it's technically possible to get that gear at level 1, but this guy sucked so much at fighting I found it... pretty hard to believe. (I still lost)

[Bennett]

I loved Severance! It had very good use of light and atmosphere for its day, and really nice dismemberment mechanics. It evokes that same lonely sense of solo adventuring that you get in the Souls games.

Clearly much more primitive than Dark Souls in terms of both level design and controls, but a pretty amazing game for its vintage, and a lot better than its contemporaries in the genre (for example, Die By the Sword)

[Bennett]

The trailer looked good to me. The Edge article is cause for worry but the Elder Scrolls comparison is just editorializing by the journalist, and that tells you that it's probably also a journalist who felt that the first game was too hard, and was seeking what he/she considered to be a positive angle for this piece.

Anyway my default position with Demon's Souls sequels (and this included Dark Souls) is that eventually the series will get watered down and dumbed down. Sequels are always like that, even if the original director stays in charge, so Dark Souls was a pleasant surprise to me. I guess the best outcome will be a game that isn't as emotionally huge as Dark Souls but has fixed a bunch of the little flaws in the first two games.

The new director is from Monster Hunter so that's not a terrible sign, especially if you like the capcommy parts of Dark Souls.

[Bennett]

I was gravelording in the burg today, and got invaded by a cheater with infinite health. Luckily for me, I was griefing invaders with an acid surge right as they appeared, and after that his backstabs weren't able to do more than a few pixels of damage to me. Eventually I succeeded in kicking him off the rooftops to his doom.

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

[Bennett]

But doesn't the game try to collect similar-leveled players into your floating pool of IP addresses? (I was about to delete this and write it as a piece of in-world lore, but maybe it's just easier if you pretend I did that)