Dark Souls... is a dungeon crawler, that requires a cautious approach and thinking through even the most trivial fight, because even the lowest zombies could easily kill an overconfident player.

It's an action game, but one with a slow, deliberate pace. You can hack away blindly with your weapon... and if you do, you will die. You'll miss, you'll stagger, you'll run out of stamina, and your opponents will punish you. You've got to learn your weapon. When to strike. How to strike. When to hide. When to dodge. When to roll.

It's an unforgiving game. It will never kill you unfairly, but it will encourage you to make stupid risks and kill yourself. And if you do, it will leave all your rewards, all your souls, which combine your experience and your currency, will drop where you did. Get them back, great. Die on the way, and you've lost them for good.

Don't do that.

It's a game that will throw huge bosses at you. And you'll go into them first time, and you will die. But each time, you'll learn something, and that's the true advancement; there's no point grinding for XP, because that won't get you very much. Having a better character won't help you. Being a better player, will. And when you kill that boss... sure, you'll obtain some souls as a reward. But the biggest reward, is that you won. You'll feel that as a player.

Dark Souls is a game that rewards players who are willing to learn. It's unrepentantly harsh on players who refuse to learn. It's a game and a play style that I think a lot of posters here would really enjoy.

You'll need either quite a lot of PC, or a Microsoft or Sony consolebox. And you'll need time, because you have to learn this game, as a player. But it's bloody well worth it.

DS uses frustration and monotony as game mechanics. Consequently I thought it stank.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;579179DS uses frustration and monotony as game mechanics. Consequently I thought it stank.

Dark Souls requires learning from your mistakes, and you will make a lot of mistakes. Overconfidence kills. It's not a twitch game, and it will punish you for trying to play it as one.

Just killed a boss right now. After 4 or 5 attempts, I took off all my armor and protection and went to fight him naked and with my light Stoc sword.

And I won. Because he couldnt match my speed and grace.

It was sublime.

(then I died just after that and lost all my souls :eek: )

Quote from: silva;579263Just killed a boss right now. After 4 or 5 attempts, I took off all my armor and protection and went to fight him naked and with my light Stoc sword.

And I won. Because he couldnt match my speed and grace.

It was sublime.

(then I died just after that and lost all my souls :eek: )

Last boss I fought was

Spoiler

the Gaping Dragon, in the Depths. There is an NPC summon point outside the fight, but honestly, he didn't help much. The actual fight isn't too difficult, as long as you back off in time, before the dragon moves - those legs are wider than they look.

I play mostly melee, with a War Pick +9 and chain mail currently (And enough endurance to get fastest running speed), but I've also got a Pyromancer's Flame so I've got a ranged attack available. I've tried spears, but there's something about them I just don't like.

Quote from: Ladybird;579248Dark Souls requires learning from your mistakes, and you will make a lot of mistakes. Overconfidence kills. It's not a twitch game, and it will punish you for trying to play it as one.

I never said it was a twitch game.

I'm well aware how it plays. I have no problem with the mechanics of combat. I do have a problem with the total lack of setting context or story plus the fact that the game uses frustration as a tool. This is a ridiculous way to design a video game. The hobby needs to stop looking at Japanese design as if it were the holy grail. It isn't; it's a set of arbitrary and tedious mechanics that defy evolution change or progress. That isn't heroic or clever, it's just sad.

In order to learn, one has to know how. When one dies at the hand of a giant monster, one is sent back to the previous bonfire and has to make his way back through the exact same palcement of non-boss mobs again. It's like groundhog day for the desperate. IMO, that is simply not fun.

I couldn’t agree less with you.

See, Im totally sick of todays games taking me by hand through point A and B and C like I were some retardo. I want games that respect my intelligence. Dark Souls is like a dream coming true: Bushido Blade-like gritty fighting, Shadow of the Colossus-like dreamlike setting, Fallout-like “open-world” exploration, and a hardcoreness that throws away all the industry “streamlining/retardo evolution” of last decade and that keep you tense on your chair, cold sweating, preying for the next bonfire, for the next relief from all that twisted violence, at all times. Its sublime.

Quote from: silva;579685I couldn't agree less with you.

See, Im totally sick of todays games taking me by hand through point A and B and C like I were some retardo. I want games that respect my intelligence. Dark Souls is like a dream coming true: Bushido Blade-like gritty fighting, Shadow of the Colossus-like dreamlike setting, Fallout-like "open-world" exploration, and a hardcoreness that throws away all the industry "streamlining/retardo evolution" of last decade and that keep you tense on your chair, cold sweating, preying for the next bonfire, for the next relief from all that twisted violence, at all times. Its sublime.

I didn't say anything about hand holding. This is the msitake people keep making; that anyone critical of this nonsense is somehow feeble and inept. There's a reason games have evolved as they have quite why the idiots in japan continue to overlook solid design conventions I will never know. There is nothing liberating about having to constantly repeat yourself over and over.

Some history may be of interest here.

The earliest console games were Nintendo Hard not because that was what home console buyers wanted, but because the earliest games were usually straight ports of the arcade ROMs, and those arcade versions were designed to suck away your money.  There was absolutely no reason for home console games to do that, but since it was easier to port straight across than redesign the gameplay, that's what home console buyers got.

Several generations of consoles followed on not because it was technically necessary or because that was what home console buyers wanted, but because the expectation had been set.  It wasn't until the beginning of the consoles-killed-the-arcade-star era that console game manufacturers woke up and realized that they already had your money, and that making games more accessible was only a good thing.  This has culminated in the BigFish/Zynga explosion, which has doubled the size of the video game market by selling things that are not even, strictly speaking, games.

There's room for Viva Pinata and Ninja Gaiden Black in the market, and most games that still bother to have some kind of single player component allow you to ramp up the difficulty to as masochistic as you like.  Frankly, I don't see the complaint.

Aside to Ghost Whistler: it's not an accident that the JRPG genre is dead outside of the Japanese PS3 locale and ports for the DS.  OTOH, I'm not sure that a million Modern Gears of Battlefield 3 clones is any better.

I dont undesrstand the citation of JRPGs in this thread, since Dark Souls is not a JRPG in the first place. If we were talking about JRPGs (Final Fantasy, Chrono-X, etc) then yes, I would be agreeing with Whistler, since I think their focus in telling "stories" instead of actually playing games is killing that model. But that's clearly not the case here, since Dark Souls is a hybrid that combines elements from different genres (Action, Adventure, RPG, etc) with a focus on playing the game, not telling a "story".

Quote from: silva;579724...since I think their focus in telling "stories" instead of actually playing games is killing that model.

The core game design of JRPGs is grinding turn-based encounters to optimize your characters.  The stories are just pasted on.  There's more difference between the gameplay mechanics of Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 than there is between any two JRPGs.

sounds neat, would love to try it, but:

1.  mac user (yes i know that limits my game options)
2.  no current console (the ps2 still gets plenty of usage, with occasional wii or n64 side journeys*)

would be cool it they go browser-based; seems to be a strong trend out there.


*atari 2600 and sega genesis came out of storage, too--all it took was a $5 part from radio shack

QuoteThe core game design of JRPGs is grinding turn-based encounters to optimize your characters

... and also of most western rpgs, from Ultima to Baldurs Gate to Fallout to KOTOR series.

That's not what differentiates these schools. What really differentiates them is how you explore and interact with the game world. While in JRPGs, its mostly a linear path full of combats interspaced by cutscenes with almost zero world interaction besides combat, in western rpgs it tends to be much more open-ended and interactive, with the story serving gaming purposes instead of the contrary. So, in a way, JRPGs tells you a story, while Western RPGs give you a world.

P.S: one nice consequence of the second approach that I specially like is the choice-consequence principle seen in games like Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum, Vampire: Bloodlines, etc. where acts or choices you make in-character have tangible effects in the world around, like a drop falling on a lake and producing ripples around.

Quote from: silva;579724I dont undesrstand the citation of JRPGs in this thread, since Dark Souls is not a JRPG in the first place. If we were talking about JRPGs (Final Fantasy, Chrono-X, etc) then yes, I would be agreeing with Whistler, since I think their focus in telling "stories" instead of actually playing games is killing that model. But that's clearly not the case here, since Dark Souls is a hybrid that combines elements from different genres (Action, Adventure, RPG, etc) with a focus on playing the game, not telling a "story".

It's not a JRPG in the FF sense. But it is an rpg made by the Japanese. COnsequently it has their ludicrous checkpoint save system, made even worse by the intentional frustration intrinsic to this game.

When the gameplay experience is dominated by that frustration, and the commensruate forced tedious and specific repetition (mobs respawning exactly as they were) I'm inclined to bin the game. There's way more to life than this sort of nonsense.

Whether or not a market saturated by yearly fps clones is a good thing is somewhat immaterial. The only problem that CoD has is that it's success forces Activision to laziness and they have never bothered to fix the game's core problems: broken gameplay and latency online. Beyond that they are good games, if you like fps games.

Quote from: silva;579770... So, in a way, JRPGs tells you a story, while Western RPGs give you a world.

FF13 has you follow an emotionally retarded kid follow around an emotionally stunted woman for ten hours in an experience that is the emotional equivalent of watching someone with severe constipation try and have a shit. Waterboarding would be preferrable.

The sad thing is the combat is quite good, as it is in DS. It's everything else that sucks a big dog's cock.