You seem to associate "checkpoints" and "frustration"(enemy respawning ?) with japanese design. Its not. CoDs are american/western and work on the exact same principle – checkpoints interspaced with lots of mobs/enemies that respawn (if you die without reaching the next checkpoint). The difference is that CoD treats you like a retardo. While Dark Souls treat you like a sado-masoquist. XD

And no, CoDs are not good games at all. They don't flex the medium boundaries in any meaningful way. In fact, they are nothing more than shooting galleries – you could use a pistol accessory and just shoot at everything that moves on screen with some coolz cutscenes and explosions in-between and the final experience would be the same.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;579801It'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.

Nope, no checkpoints. You can save anywhere; it's the same save mechanic as roguelikes tend towards ("You can suspend your progress anywhere, but can only reload once"). You can only level at bonfires, though, and they serve as respawn points.

You can save scum. But only morally deficient people do that.

QuoteWhen 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.

Dark Souls is only frustrating if you refuse to learn from your mistakes. There is a right way for every character to fight every encounter. If you die... either you were doing it wrong, or you weren't doing it right enough. And you'll be able to tell. Souls doesn't just kill you dead with no warning.

If you're charging into unknown territory with your shield down... prepare to die.

So, the bonfires. Yes, everything respawns if you rest. If it didn't, you would run out of souls. You wouldn't be able to replace items used on failed boss runs. You wouldn't have enough souls to advance. It would also let you do a fight, bonfire, do the next fight, bonfire... essentially taking every fight at maximum health, with no resources spent on your behalf.

That would suck.

The incidental fights in Souls are sometimes more fun than the bosses, because the enemies are about your level of ability, and the situations vary more. It's also really rewarding to discover that perfect route through an area, and do that perfect, no-damage run.

If you're frustrated, fine. Dark Souls isn't for you. But it's you bringing that emotion to the game.

QuoteWhether 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.

I dunno. I liked CoD4, but by the end of it, I just felt like... I'd shot a lot of brown men. It was good, I really enjoyed it, but that was my fill of that sort of game for another four years. I prefer arena or corridor FPS, or System Shock.

ah.. System Shock... thats a great game indeed... and one that really flexed the medium boundaries. (specially if you consider it went out in the same year as Doom 1).

Back to Dark Souls, I have a question: is this region the game occurs, Lordran, the land of the Ancient Lords (Gods ?), is representative for the rest of the world ? I mean, all the world is infested with undead like that (in fact I have the impression normal/human people dont even exist!) , or just this region in specific ? Im really curious about this..

Ok, to be clear: in DS the game has no active save function and you will only ever save and spawn at the last bonfire you lit.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;579961Ok, to be clear: in DS the game has no active save function and you will only ever save and spawn at the last bonfire you lit.

No, you are wrong.

DS autosaves your character every so often. It's pretty regular; I think it's after every kill or character-affecting choice. Position, items, souls, currently defeated mobs, etc; it's all there. If you quit and reload, you'll be, at most, a few metres away from where you left. There's no do-something / don't-like-the-results / reload-and-rewrite-history loop in the game. There are things you can do to correct some stupid mistakes - for example, if you attack one of the non-hostile NPC's - but you'll have to put in some effort to do so. The first time something goes badly after attacking a non-hostile NPC, you should probably learn that casually attacking everything in the game world is a bad idea... you can pay to make people non-hostile again, but you can't pay to bring them back from the dead.

The bonfires let you spend souls to advance, repair gear, and restore your healing flask. Using one makes most of the enemies respawn, and that's okay - if they didn't, there would only be a finite amount of souls in the world. And if you use a bonfire, it autosaves.

If you die, you'll respawn at the last bonfire you used, and the game will autosave. You'll have everything you had when you died, except any souls and humanity points. They'll drop somewhere near where you died, and if you can make it back there and grab them, you'll get them back, and if not, you won't.

But here's the thing: if you play smart, you won't actually lose much, if anything. Souls are relatively easy to earn, and you probably shouldn't be walking around with large quantities on you at any time. If you're still exploring an area, you can always pull back, spend souls, and try again; better to do that than die, because if you die you're going to have to fight most things again anyway just to get back to where you were. Humanity is harder to earn, but you might not need it! If you're playing entirely offline, investing it in bonfires is a great idea.

You will overstretch yourself, and lose a few thousand souls. And you'll learn from the experience, and not carry too many unspent souls on you again. Or you won't, in which case, it's your own fault.

Yep, the game saves automatically when you quit. So you can quit anywhere, and when you come back to play it your character is at the exact same point you were, with the enemies will killed already dead. The difference is that the game don't have a "load" option for you to reload at will when something bad happens – If you die in this game, you always lose something. Its always "for real".

___

Now, please, someone answer my questions:

Whats really happening with this world ? Is this a doomed era or something? The "Age of Fire" that the intro shows is really some golden age in the far past when gods and mortals inhabit the world together? Is that "Fire" extinguishing? That's why a lot of undead are showing up ?

Also, whats with this city Lordran ? Is it where the old gods dwelled ? And is this attracting such a huge number of undeads because of that "prophecy" the knight in the Undead Asylum told you ?

And to finish: is everybody in this region undead or not ? I have the impression that guy sitted at Firelink Shrine is a normal/mortal human, as is that fatty one from the first covenant. Am I right ?

I sometimes wonder if people's preferences in video games aren't related to their day job.  I know many of the people I know in the software industry do the equivalent of this:

QuoteDark Souls is only frustrating if you refuse to learn from your mistakes. There is a right way for every character to fight every encounter. If you die... either you were doing it wrong, or you weren't doing it right enough. And you'll be able to tell. Souls doesn't just kill you dead with no warning. If you're charging into unknown territory with your shield down... prepare to die.

...every day for real money and real stakes.  If I were to suggest a game like this to them for entertainment, I'd get beaten roundly about the head and shoulders.

I can see how people whose daily experience is not challenging and largely consequence-less would prefer this kind of game as a way of getting that kind of stimulation.

Hmmm... I see some problems with your logic.

First, can we really measure objectively how stressful is a job? I mean, I think each person have its own personal threshold and parameters for what constitutes a stressful job or not. So the same "job" could be seen as light and enjoyful for one person and heavy and stressful for another. As an example, a friend of mine is a commercial manager who must travel all the time to make business deals, even on weekends. I would find this kind of job stressful, since it wouldn't allow me enough free time to be with my 2 small kids (2 and 4 years respectively) that I love to play with. On the other hand, he is single, don't have kids, and love to be "on the move", so he finds his work great and enjoyful.

Another point is : we will find cases where a person with a stressful job likes to engage in engrossing/challenging/masochist entertainment out of it, while at the same time we will find people that find his job light and unstressful and still like very casual/light/retardo entertainment.

Also, this last point raises the question: is there really someone who find his day job light and unstressful ? XD

It has nothing to do with stress.

It has nothing to do with day jobs.

Edit:

Ok, found out this wiki about DS, that helped me to understand the world better. Just take care of the spoilers. I recommend dont reading too much, since part of the fun of the game is discovering the story by yourself and taking your own conclusions.

Quote from: silva;580023Yep, the game saves automatically when you quit. So you can quit anywhere, and when you come back to play it your character is at the exact same point you were, with the enemies will killed already dead. The difference is that the game don't have a "load" option for you to reload at will when something bad happens – If you die in this game, you always lose something. Its always "for real".

___

Now, please, someone answer my questions:

Whats really happening with this world ? Is this a doomed era or something? The "Age of Fire" that the intro shows is really some golden age in the far past when gods and mortals inhabit the world together? Is that "Fire" extinguishing? That's why a lot of undead are showing up ?

Also, whats with this city Lordran ? Is it where the old gods dwelled ? And is this attracting such a huge number of undeads because of that "prophecy" the knight in the Undead Asylum told you ?

And to finish: is everybody in this region undead or not ? I have the impression that guy sitted at Firelink Shrine is a normal/mortal human, as is that fatty one from the first covenant. Am I right ?

The fact that the game doesn't answer any of this (certainly before I gave up) is one of the reasons I got bored of it. The lack of context, setting or anything other than a drab castle just did me in.

It all sounds promising: the blurb and the ideas sound like they might make for a fun game. But in practice it wasn't to be.

Yeah Ghost, at first I thought this too. But I noticed there is a story/context, and a interesting one indeed. The "problem" is that the game dont give this out easily like most games do. The player  must go out and find it by himself, "assembling the puzzle" by careful observation (and sometimes, personal interpretation). After I noticed  this, it  actually made me more excited to keep playing the game.

Now, one thing is still not clear to me: as I understand it, all fire in this land is sacred*, right ? So the bonfires are not like "normal" bonfires, but have some kind of godly/divine (?) property or something like that. Also, whats causing the people to turn to undead all around the world is the "extinguishing" of the worlds "fire". Like if the "souls" that give humans teir mortality were extinguishing like fire ? And the expression "going hollow" is when a being is completely devoid of any fire/soul and then it goes nuts, mindless attcking everything around (just like the hundreads of enemies in the game) ?

Does it make sense ?

* another hint at the sacred property of fire in this world is the existence of "pyromancers", that look just like shamanistic/animist practitioners, only worshipping the Fire instead of spirits.