The Dark Souls Discussion Thread

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Probably already mentioned, but From Software is trying to turn Dark Souls 2 into popamole.

"We've always been about making games for the core gamer, and they weren't necessarily games that did well financially, which is too bad. The success of both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, which have each sold over a million [units] per title worldwide, has made us shift our thinking internally to not just core gamers, but to globalize our products, that they can be successful on a worldwide scale. That's now one of the key pillars we consider when we develop games in the future."

In other words, dumbing down?

You should really play Demon's Souls. Compared to the youtube videos I've seen on Dark, Demon's feels more charming and focused. Dark unfortunately looks a bit too grindy to me. Also, open world does not do anything good to that game concept. I think you're gonna love Demon's with it's Tier-structured levels and the Nexus more.

... Maybe they're talking about translating it to more languages?

M-, maybe they meant...
...ah, who are we kidding.

Wait what. Dark Souls did well so we're going to dumb down our games? How does that make sense?

Allow me to explain...
/

More animu this time around.

Pure greed. We're successful with a type of product, lets dumb it down so we can mass market it and cash out. I'm disappointed.

Demon's Souls has a lot more grind. Dark Souls gives you at least one slab of each type, and farming chunks is easy, so you can max out whatever weapons you want. Demon's Souls makes you grind like fucking crazy for half the upgrade trees. Everyone knows about the pure bladestone, since finding one of them typically takes days of farming, but getting enough chunks to max most of the upgrades is horrible as well. Most of the weapons get significantly better at maximum, too, so you can't even stick with +4 and be nearly as good like you can in Dark. The game's grindy as hell.

Dude. Both games look like a fucking grindfest to me.

I'm not even sure I'm prepared to waste another 100 hours of my life with Dark Souls. But it's really really hard to resist.

wtf? I have never ever grinded in Demon's and finished it.
There is no need to max out weapons.

I have not spend a single minute in Dark Souls grinding. I don't know why you'd want to. Maybe for building PVP characters? Since that didn't matter to me I just played the game "normally" and never felt like I have to grind for souls or shards, ever.

And it still must have taken me 120 hours or so. I often restarted to try out different characters and weapons before I finally manned up, put on my heavy armor and finished the game with my stupidly bad Demon's Great Hammer. Most time of the game was spent learning how to dodge roll properly and mastering my weapon of choice and trying out different equipment and, perhaps the biggest time-eater, exploring the cool, cool environment very, very slowly, dreading death.

I loved the final boss fight, too. I really felt like it was one of the best fights you can come up with. You versus just a dude, but one who never gives you respite. Sure you can do that parry thing, but learning to dodge and attack him was pure bliss to me. I love the way he doesn't give you time to do anything if you hesitate too long.

for PvE there's definitely no need to max and especially not grind, but the option is there if you're a bad player like morgoth and need to make up for it by overleveling yourself and your gear.

and jesus fuck, people. how can you extrapolate that when a japanese company whose main userbase (and thus revenue) is japanese (and by a pretty large margin) wants to "globalize" and "reach a worldwide audience" that they want to "dumb down their games" when they have never really done so in the past? man, codex is getting dumber every day...

We're just jaded, man. You should be too.

The good thing about the Souls games was that they were developed by a rather small team with rather humble sale goals. A niche product. Now that Dark has sold over 1,5 million units, it's publisher Namco wants to go big. You know, the usual story. The story of decline. Bigger team, bigger marketing money, bigger target audience = bigger pile of shit game.

Look at Bethesda, they're the experts in this regard.

MOAR MONIES

At the the expense of the (reasonably) intelligent fans that made them.

System Requirements added to the Steam page

• • OS: Windows XP , Windows Vista, Windows 7, or newer
  • Processor: 2.6 GHz Dual-Core
  • Memory: 1 GB (XP), 2GB (Vista/7)
  • Hard Disk Space: 4 GB
  • Video Card: 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon 4850 or higher, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or higher
  • DirectX®: 9.0c
  • Sound: Direct Sound Compatible
  • Additional: Multiplayer requires microphone headset support

4Gb HD space? LoL. Either they use compression (which is unnecessary) or they're wrong.

Or, you know, shit textures.

But the console versions are about twice as large. Something doesn't add up here.

I just saw two images for PS3 that were ~4 GB each. Just because the discs are ~7.5 GB or 25 GB it doesn't mean they have to fill it and they must compress some files. Games in general seemed to have stopped getting bigger since the ps3/360 due to ports I guess. Also the system requirements are probably not finalized since wasn't it struggling to run on a GTX 6xx a few days ago?

Nope. People were paniced when they said they wanted to make it so more people could play Dark Souls. Turns out them saying "more people can play" meant "on the Xbox".

Given that and From games having a history of no western release (even the overly American ones), I don't doubt they mean "get it released in more places".

PvP requires a fair amount of grinding if you don't abuse some item duping glitches etc. PvE does have some grinding when you're starting out and don't know what you're doing, i.e. you might spend 30 minutes or so farming in the Burg and getting the Drake Sword, but it's only because at that point you suck at the game. With decent mastery of the game's controls and/or some planning you never have to worry about grinding; it's perfectly viable to just run past as many enemies as you can and manage only on boss souls / bigger bounties.

Makes sense, especially since being new to the game you'd have no idea you could get the Drake Sword.

As a new player you might be tempted to grind the Burg to get the Bottomless Box, Residence key, weapon/armor repair boxes, etc. Their combined cost can't be above 20k souls, of which 15k you can get easily enough from killing the gargoyles and the rest more than easily enough from just killing stuff on the way / Taurus Demon.

Truth is, there's no need to grind unless you want to / feel the bosses are too tough for you. Even then, co-op is a great way to advance in the game and learn new tricks.

It's like you excavate my post for that one inconsequential detail you could nitpick about.

Most new players would know of the Drake Sword because they heard about it from their friends or on the net. It's one of the most shared exploits in the game, not some obscure secret passed down from one Master Ḥashshāshīn to the next over the generations.