Dark Souls

Past level 100 is a mite late to start leveling Faith.

Don't reckon Nito is going to take me too long, anyway.

Grabbing the Divine Ember and using it on even just a basic mace should be more than enough, really.

You don't even need to do that, just have Andre undo the Occult upgrade on the Occult Club from Anor Londo and it becomes a Divine+5 Club.

edited 10th Dec '16 6:30:40 PM by shigmiya64

So, turns out regular Divine weapons don't have a Faith requirement, they just scale with it.

*suicide runs for big white ember, makes +9 Div Dem Gret Mac*

*runs at Nito again, engages skeletons this time, gets three Rapeswords up the ass for his trouble*

Dammit.
Also ran at the Kings with +10 Fire Great Mac

FUCK THEM

"Great Mac?"

Was it a Holy Macarony?

Macaroni. Not y.

Demon Great Machete. Game shortened it in the menus, so I had a bit of fun with it.

edited 12th Dec '16 11:24:14 AM by Knowlessman

I was somehow able to deal with Nito and all the skeletons with only a +5 Divine Reinforced Club and a +5 Fire BSS. Don't ask me how; I'm honestly still surprised I managed to bring down everything before taking on Nito. Praise be to the almighty BSS, I suppose.

I'm on New Game +. :|

In my previous experience (in regular old New Game), the Furysword just makes him trivial, and he keeps his mooks down for me. My Great Mac does far more damage than it does, but maybe I just can't hit him fast enough.

I do kinda hate wasting so much Humanity trying to power up the Furysword, though.

edited 12th Dec '16 11:50:48 AM by Knowlessman

Finally finished that essay I talked about earlier! I'll post it tomorrow in this thread, if people are still interested. (Also, I found out that someone wrote an official rebuttal to that second article I mentioned. Huh.)

Also, last night, I was bored and didn't have my co-op buddies around to help, so after some giant clam farming, I decided to put my summon sign down at Ornstein and Smough's boss gate and reran the second half of Anor Londo while I waited, still in my farming getup. I ended up looting myself a Silver Knight Straight Sword! I'd heard good things about it in passing while looking up info on the Great Lord Greatsword (which I have on NG+0 because some random invader tossed me a Soul of Gwyn, Lord of Cinders on my first day of playing Dark Souls ever), so I equipped it to see how well its moveset measured up compared to the Balder Side-Sword. Results: I have a new favorite sword. I immediately boosted it to +5 with some of the Twinkling Titanite I'd farmed up, then tested it out on a spear-wielding knight, and promptly got a Silver Knight Spear as a drop... which ALSO turned out to have a really fun moveset. Blew even more Twinkling Titanite on that, but it won't be too hard to farm back up if I ever want to.

Speaking of Silver Knights, their armour is the fanciest thing to wear in the entire game.

Right after Chester's Coat.

I prefer Ornstein's, Hunter, Elite Knight or (female) Thief, myself.

And Dusk's is FABULOUS, while Quelana's is great if you're using a scythe.

edited 15th Dec '16 12:48:09 PM by IFwanderer

Right, so, Dark Souls essay. Prepare for text.

As a refresher- this is the article I was writing my essay as a rebuttal to.

It’s clear from the get-go that the author, Michael Thomsen, has an odd sort of expectations from this game. In the first paragraph, he rattles off a list of actions he presumably thinks would be a better use of time than playing Dark Souls (I say “presumably” because he doesn’t explicitly state as much, but to me the implication is clearly there), and one of the first items on that list is reading Tolstoy’s ‘’War and Peace’’, an item that he continually refers to throughout the article.

“Tolstoy covers the range of human existence,” he writes, “love, premature death, villainy, class[…] Dark Souls leaves you with the intimate knowledge of when to roll out of the way of an ogre’s club swing.” Thomsen’s article is filled with this sort of sentiment, and from it I derive what I believe to be his expectation of video games: they must be art. They must teach you, must contain some deep philosophical meaning or allegory. Simply playing and enjoying a game is evidently not enough.

Indeed, Thomsen seems to outright dismiss enjoyment from the equation when it comes to a game’s quality. He cites the affective fallacy, “…wherein the value of a work is tied to the emotions it dredges up from its audience.” My response is thus: isn’t that the point of a game? To have fun? When you play a Mario game, do you go in expecting a fantasy epic on the scale of Tolkien’s ‘’The Lord of the Rings’’? Are you disappointed if you come out of Dead Space 2 having not experienced a masterpiece on the level of Citizen Kane? Not every game can be Metal Gear Solid 2, painstakingly crafted from the ground up to subvert your expectations and toy with your mind, dispersing random kernels of preaching among the way- and, in my opinion, that’s a good thing. Metal Gear Solid 2 is a hell of an experience, but at the same time, it’s designed to suck you dry. Games are meant to be played. Joy should never be dismissed. If you stop enjoying a game, it stops being a game and becomes a chore.

And here is where we start to get to the heart of the matter.

Thomsen makes his comparisons to ‘’War and Peace’’. He makes meaningless arguments such as citing the game’s “nonlogic” by speaking of how an early boss is weak to lightning despite being perched “…on the medieval equivalent on a lightning rod” (one might as well complain about why a move called “Flash Cannon” belongs to the Steel element in Pokemon or why one cannot step on marked squares in hopscotch). He directly insults players by calling the game “…a self-esteem kit for people who can take marching orders from giant talking snakes called Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe without withering a little inside.” He discusses the content of hundred-hour games, says “There is something in these efforts that shouldn't be dismissed”, then immediately proceeds to detail why they should be dismissed.

And, more than anything other than the insistence that Dark Souls isn’t enough “art” for him, he cites its difficulty, and the rewards for making his way through it.

He speaks of opaque instructions and controls. He speaks of constant deaths and the monotony of throwing yourself at the same wall until it gives way instead of your skull. He speaks of elitist gaming culture, of being constantly punished for trial and error when you have no other recourse, of time sinks with nothing to show for it but numbers on a screen and flavor text.

This, I think, is the core of Thomsen’s article, buried under layers of pretension and nonsense: it was too difficult for progress to feel rewarding. An enormous world, filled with amazing things- but every step is locked behind a thousand deaths, and that is too high a price.

And that, I have to admit, is an extremely valid complaint.

I am on my first playthrough of Dark Souls. I’ve just beaten Seath, and I’m farming the clams in the Crystal Caves for Twinkling Titanite and Purging Stones to prepare for the eventual hell I know traversing New Londo will be. I have travelled Lordran, and marveled at its wonders.

Dark Souls, to me, is many things. For starters, it’s ‘’brilliant.’’ It’s filled with marvels, rich in lore, carrying a unique flavor that I’ve never felt before and can’t get enough of. It’s a great game, it truly is.

It is ‘’not’’, however, fair- not by any stretch of the imagination.

The Capra Demon. Poison swamps. Toxic darts. Greatbow snipers. ‘’The entirety of Sen’s Fortress.’’ No guardrails. ‘’Never guardrails.’’ The Stray Demon, Titanite Demons, throwing yourself at a Black Knight over and over again until you learn to bitch-slap his sword out of the way with enough ease to not get cut down in two strokes with no chance to heal.

There are times when Dark Souls is legitimately difficult, when I can look at the words “YOU DIED” blooming on my screen and think, “That was my fault; I could have done better.” But there are other times, far too often for my liking, where those same words appear for me and I can’t help but sputter impotently at the injustice and curse Miyazaki’s name and cruelty. Had I been playing alone as Thomsen likely did, without foreknowledge and performance mods, I likely never would have made it past even the second boss, much less made it anywhere close to the hundreds of hours that he managed.

What got me as far as I am now- what got me into playing the game at all, in fact- is the fact that at almost any given time, I had no less than two friends at my side.

The truth of Dark Souls, the truth that Thomsen likely never had an opportunity to experience, is this: Dark Souls is a multiplayer game.

The world is dotted with messages left by other players and bloodstains containing visions where your fellow undead met horrible ends. Ghostly silhouettes spring into being in dungeon hallways, offering glimpses of fellow gamers fighting for their lives on the very ground you currently tread. Anyone that stops at a bonfire you are sitting at manifests an image in full; these images cannot be interacted with, but remind you that no matter where you are, in Dark Souls, you are never alone. Small orbs pop up wherever someone in another world casts enough miracles to leave an echo. If you are human, you can find inscriptions in the ground through which one can call other players into your own world and engage in, as the meme goes, JOLLY COOPERATION! Or, if you’re unlucky, you find yourself invaded by a red or blue spirit that made a pact with an NPC leader to travel to other players’ homes and claim their souls and humanity.

Communication is limited to emotes and messages with predetermined phrases, but this does nothing to hinder human interaction. Messages will often arrange normally innocuous words and phrases into full-fledged jokes. Friendly phantoms express their joy upon arrival in a host’s world by leaping into the air or Praising the Sun, point out easily-missed items and pathways with well-aimed pointing, and leave gifts from much later segments of the game by tossing them at their companions’ feet. Even when it comes to invasions, there is an unspoken code, supported not by game mechanics, but by the honor of the combatants; always announce your presence, bow to your opponent, give your enemy time to prepare, never heal yourself or call on an ally.

And then there’s the offline community! Stories of misadventures and stunning kills and plays, thousands upon thousands of videos of builds and lore dissections and mad antics, multiple meticulously groomed information repositories that give you all the information you need to turn an insurmountable challenge into a fair fight (provided you’re not too concerned about spoilers). The playerbase of the Dark Souls series is nothing if not passionate, and while it does have its share of elitist snobs, more often than not, the phrase “git gud” is uttered with little seriousness; ask for help, and it will be granted.

Indeed, Dark Souls co-op, in my experience, is the best part of the game; I have many fond memories of planting my summon sign outside one of the most notorious bosses (or pairs of bosses, in this case) in the game, greeting newbies and veterans alike with a joyful wave, and following them into Ornstein and Smough’s arena to either cut the two golden titans down to size or be smashed to bits in turn. Every victory leaves me with the satisfaction that I’ve made a difficult game that much easier for someone else; every failure makes me more motivated to avenge myself and my comrades in my next fight.

Perhaps my favorite experience in the game so far is of being summoned three times by the same player, obviously a first-timer, in the wee hours of the morning; we started as an uncertain newcomer and his lone companion, but ended as a trio of champions. I cheered with every successful dodge, swore whenever Ornstein leapt into the air and covered half the field in lightning, shouted “No!” whenever a teammate found him- or herself on the wrong end of a spear and thrown through a pillar; when the fight ended, my only regret was that I didn’t have time to bow before I despawned.

Dark Souls, in the end, is not a series you enjoy by walking in with nothing but your own skills and stats to depend on, falling off ledges and being gored in the heart until reflex pushes you forward. It’s a game where the most valuable possessions you can acquire are an eye for detail, good information, and a good friend to stand by your side.

This sort of atmosphere, a game that relies on shared knowledge and forces you to follow in the footsteps of those who came before, is imperfect; sometimes, you simply can’t find a friend to watch your back, to say nothing of those first few players who went into the game with no way of knowing what to expect, no veterans or encyclopedias to solicit much-needed help from. There’s also personal preference to consider; just as Dark Souls’ incredibly steep difficulty curve can be too painful and thankless to be worth some players’ time, so too can interaction between players be seen as undesirable, and such reasons for disliking the game are, for me, perfectly valid. But at the same time, I don’t believe this makes the game ‘’bad’’- and certainly not, as Thomsen’s second article states, “the worst game ever”.

The fact that Thomsen calls Demon's Souls one of his most favorite games while calling Dark Souls 2 the worst game ever is just... what?

Dark Souls in my opinion is a game that is a lot more than the sum of its parts.

When you sit down and think about it critically there are a number of unfair or dickish parts, and there are various other miscellaneous flaws to it that might ruin a normal game.

However the experience that Dark Souls provides through its atmosphere, art direction, high points of the game's level design and combat, lore, etc is so relentlessly compelling that many players can forgive or at least overlook those flaws or just not outright not notice them the first time around.

It's a game that's rough around the edges in many ways but it has a real originality and vision to it that make it triumph above its flaws. It's a living testament to the idea that a heavily flawed but interesting game can be a more worthwhile experience than a more polished but significantly less interesting game.

Incidentally that's more or less my main problem with Dark Souls 2; the experience doesn't come together anywhere near as seamlessly, so the game is JUST the sum of its parts instead of being more than them and it has plenty of flaws to drag things down.

edited 16th Dec '16 6:09:40 AM by Draghinazzo

Plus 2 doesn't really follow the plot of the main series. The other two are "stop the Fire from fading, or let it go out." 2 is more like a somewhat generic high fantasy game running on pre-established lore and lexicon.

yeah its in Sunshine's DLC

Well that's just unbelievably snobbish.

It's a view of video games that I feel doesn't mesh well with what video games actually are. Games are about the journey, not the lesson at the end.

Well, I finally got the RNG to play nice with me and drop the weapons I needed for Knight's honor (Stone Greatsword & Greatshield, and the fucking trident). One more NG cycle to clean up the weapons I'm missing (Moonlight Butterfly Horn, non-cursed Greatsword of Artorias, Golem Axe, Smough's Hammer, Darkmoon Bow and Gravelord Sword) I should have 100% achievements.

Trident?

Channeler's Trident? The one that does the silly dance.

Oh that fucker.

Blah blah rehash of fuck Ornstein and Smough

At least I got past it again. What's almost as frustrating are those two Silver Knight Dragon Bow assholes who stalk that portion of Anor Londo.

I really want the art book pls go cheaper than 25 amazon

I think the silver knights were even worse than the Super Londo Bros. At least Ornstein and Smough give you room to move and don't one-shot you even if you block them. I can handle those two.

Just like

run up the thing and shank/humpty dumpty the one dude and ignore the other one

Londo Bros are way worse than those guys; those guys're just cheap, you're dead in two seconds or you're good

Pork n' Beans can take you on for five or ten minutes before ganking you or facesitting you to death