Yeah I had that problem with the maps when I first played the game, but now I know them well enough that I usually enough don't have a problem getting someplace specific, even if I have to occasionally Google a specific item whenever I replay it.Eva Yojimbo wrote:Well, yesterday made me feel pretty dumb. Wasted some time going back to Demon Ruins to farm the Demon's Greataxe and Demon's Machete only to find I already had the former in my inventory. Luckily, I didn't waste too much time as I'm always carrying 10 souls around and put on the Helm of Avarice to (between both) quadruple item discovery, so I only had to take down like 3 Taurus Demons. Then I realized that I hadn't picked up the Giant Ember in New Londo Ruins, so I had to go back there and get that, and, frankly, all online maps suck if you're trying to find a specific item at a specific location. I'm sure it's hard given the convoluted nature of the level designs, but it still took a while to get my bearings and find it. So finally got the DGA upgraded to +15 and with my now 50 strength I'm doing like 650 damage one-handed and with Havel's shield in the other hand I was even able to successfully block Kalameet's attacks. Speaking of...
Yeah I've had the same issue with the Embers lol.
He's a really cool fight. I really struggled again him on my Level 1 run, even with several White Phantoms helping me. What a tough son of a bitch.Kalameet may be my favorite boss in the game so far. Took me even more tries to beat that Artorias, but what an awesome fight with a badass boss. Not being able to dodge anything, managing stamina was even trickier than with Artorias and that breath attack was just devastating. After a couple of tries I eventually had to forego the hope of beating him with the ring that gives you extra souls and went with the Corianthy(sp?) ring that speeds up stamina regen. Still took me several tries after that. Funnily enough, on the time I beat him it I was going there mostly just to retrieve my souls/humanity and then book it back closer to the ladder so I didn't have to run so far every time just to retrieve them, but he kept knocking me down before I could get back to the ladder so I ended up fighting him anyway and got lucky to end up on his side a few times when he did that sweeping breath thing and I 2-handed the shit out of him.
I mean, I like the melancholic atmosphere itself a lot, but I dunno. Lore/world-building on its own doesn't mean much to me if I'm not already invested in the basic narrative.Eva Yojimbo wrote:I don't think there's really much of any "storytelling" per se in DS. It's more what I'd call "lore" or world-building. Maybe it's my getting into D&D that's made me appreciate this aspect more (thinking about poor DMs having to invent an entirely new place with multiple locations and histories and politics and people etc.). I also think there's something about the perpetually melancholic and oppressive atmosphere that really hammers home the idea that something bad has happened to this place, and the "myst-ery" aspect of being dropped in a place and not really given much of anything explicit about its history or present. I may go into this more whenever I finish and write my review.
Like people have written a lot about the backstories of Ornstein and Smough for example, but man they're still just some dudes that I have to kill to me.
The problem with Pyromancy is that your own stats doesn't effect the amount of damage it does at all. That can be good for a Level 1 character on a fresh New Game file, but as you do New Game+ runs there's huge diminishing returns on it since there's no way to make it stronger past a certain point.Pretty awesome. Kinda makes me wish I'd invested in Pyromancy more! LOL.
Like if you invest in Sorcery you're always able to increase your INT at least a little bit. The flat damage rates of Pyromancy eventually just fall off in terms of usefulness.
Yeah its very Metroidvania-ish. Bizarely enough though, Dark Souls 1 is the only game in the "Soulsborne" series that really does that. Demon's Souls has fairly linear levels you just teleport to, Dark Souls II merely has "spokes" in its world design that effectively function like the Demon's Souls levels, and Bloodborne comes the closest to Dark Souls 1 level design (Though not remotely as interconnected as Dark Souls 1) but there are a lot of choices they make that actively undermine that kind of exploration.I've played the game over too long a period to remember, but I can't recall many sections that are only unlockable once you've done one thing or another. IIRC, it's mostly Demon's Ruins/Izalith and of course the DLC stuff. Is it just me, or is the game almost Metroidvania-esque in its level design? Metroidvanias are a little more "do X to unlock Y section," but the basic notion of having one giant, interconnected map/world is pretty similar.
Like, all three of those have this fairly bizarre thing where you can't just level up at bonfires or their own in-game equivalent to bonfires (I forget what it is in Demon's Souls but in Bloodborne its "Lampposts"), you instead have to teleport to a central location and talk to an NPC Waifu in order to level up. It just completely breaks the flow of exploring despite being a "problem" that Dark Souls 1 had avoided completely. Like imagine if anytime in Dark Souls 1 you wanted to level up you had to teleport to Firelink Shrine.
Bloodborne also does away with any kind of Estus system and goes back to the Demon's Souls system of consumable resoratives for health which is just maddening.
The other games have their own good aspects of course and its not like Dark Souls itself is flawless, but its so weird that so many of its really good ideas are just ignored by later games which instead look back to Demon's Souls for inspiration. So you just end up with this really weird series where it feels like FromSoft just never perfected the formula they worked in for so many years the way that say, Capcom did with the original run of Resident Evil from 1996 to 2003 or so where most would agree that REmake is clearly the best game in that style. There's no Souls equivalent to REmake that really expresses the ideas they're going for nearly perfectly.
I should also again emphasize that I haven't played Dark Souls 3 myself yet but the general reception to it seems to indicate that it has plenty of problems of its own.
Yeah there was no way in hell I was going to bother figuring that cart nonsense on my own lol. I probably could have gotten the rest of tree world on my own though had I banged my head against it for another hour or so.I also played Myst as a kid. I picked it up from a used game shop on a whim for PS. I'd only vaguely heard about its reputation but didn't know anything about. This was also pre-internet (for me) and I didn't know of any game guides for it (though I'm sure they probably existed). So I basically played that game guideless. I did finish it, but, man, looking back I don't know how I solved some of those puzzles. The one you mentioned certainly, but I also recall getting completely lost in the tree world and that underground cart thing. Eventually I remember in those sections I had to literally get out a piece of paper and pencil and draw the different possible paths I'd tried to work out which ones didn't work and how they connected to each other.
Honestly I was surprised how much of Myst's story did end up in Lost. Like the two brothers in Myst might as well be Jacob and Man in Black. But yeah its a really bold game- whatever quibbles I do have with it, I still really respect it.But I have no doubt of Myst's influence. It was absolutely the first of its kind, perhaps really the only of its kind. It was unprecedented to just drop people in a world with really no information and just expect them to start solving puzzles that aren't even (at first) obviously puzzles. The sense of discovery was so much of what that game was about. Hence my little "myst-ery" allusion when talking about Dark Souls. I can see it in Lost as well, but of course Lost is much more overtly story/character driven while Myst is, well, not.
Yeah, though I will say I think in its day Myst was probably more popular and well known than Dark Souls is now. Like John Goodman isn't signing on to do a Dark Souls parody game lol.As for how it became such a cultural phenomenon, I also think there's something similar to Dark Souls there too where it probably became a communal effort to figure everything out because the game just doesn't hold your hand at all. I think there's something about games that demand you DIY, and that feel deeply rewarding when you do, that can easily create that kind of gaming or even socio-cultural phenomenon. I mean, I almost regret using guides as much as I have for Dark Souls because I'm sure it would've been a much more rewarding experience trying to do it all alone and blind, but these days there's just so many games to play that it's hard to justify wasting all that extra time just figuring out where to go and what to do, and I also think that element was probably way more important to Myst than to DS (DS still has all the other gamey stuff that's challenging without that exploration aspect).
I would play Dark Souls: John Goodman Must Prepare to Die Edition though, that sounds badass.