Dark Souls - 75% Off On Steam

[Couchpotato]

You can buy Dark Souls: Prepare To Die for 75% off on Steam. This is a good opportunity for anyone that hasn't played the game yet.

Save 75% on Dark Souls™: Prepare To Die™ Edition during this week's Midweek Madness*!

Dark Souls is the new action role-playing game from the developers who brought you Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware. Dark Souls will have many familiar features: A dark fantasy universe, tense dungeon crawling, fearsome enemy encounters and unique online interactions. Dark Souls is a spiritual successor to Demon’s, not a sequel. Prepare for a new, despair-inducing world, with a vast, fully-explorable horizon and vertically-oriented landforms. Prepare for a new, mysterious story, centered around the the world of Lodran, but most of all, prepare to die.

More information.

 

[bjon045]

Unless you have good timing and reasonable reflexes I don't recommend getting this. Personally I cannot play games where when you see a certain animation you have to press a certain button within a certain amount of time - my brain just doesn't work that way. I loved the Gothic1/2 combat system but this was on a whole different level.

I might give it another shot in the future but I don't have high hopes for it.

 

[SpoonFULL]

Unless you have good timing and reasonable reflexes I don't recommend getting this. Personally I cannot play games where when you see a certain animation you have to press a certain button within a certain amount of time - my brain just doesn't work that way. I loved the Gothic1/2 combat system but this was on a whole different level.

I might give it another shot in the future but I don't have high hopes for it.

With the excellent and clever design of Dark Souls, you don't have to have good timing (it would help though). You can farm souls and increase your strenght and play as a tank to just hack and slash your way through. You can also 'snatch and run' loot and armour to build yourself since levels are open (except for boss fights).

 

[bjon045]

Fair enough. All I remember was after beating the first big demon (took about 15 tries for me to down him) I stumbled around a bit until I found a graveyard with a couple of skeletons who repeatedly ripped me a new one until I got so frustrated I uninstalled it I also remember the port was one of the worse I have ever seen - zero effort was made to make the configration and keyboard mappings etc even remotely useable. Not only that but the ingame help referred to xbox buttons...

I'll give it another shot though, it deserves a fair chance when I am in a better mood.

 

[Ihaterpg]

With the excellent and clever design of Dark Souls...You can farm souls....

Contradictory, I can't imagine worth and more boring gameplay than farming/grinding.

 

[Pongo]

I gave up on Dark Souls first time around at about the same point you did - I couldn't believe that there wasn't a bonfire after the first taurus demon, and then the game threw a dragon and a giant, vicious pig thing at me and I died very quickly a couple of times and turned it off. I didn't think I'd turn it on again.

I was really bored a couple of weeks back though and did try again, and I'm so glad that I did. I've got my head around it much better this time, approaching it all more cautiously and properly investigating all the areas. There's so much to find, and it has some of the best creature design I've seen in years - the weird dragon thing in the Depths is simply awesome. Its also not as hard as I expected, once I got into the swing of it. I still die a lot, but it feels less frustrating now because I usually learn something in the process and do it differently on the next run-through, and its so satisfying when it finally all comes together.

I haven't found the need to do much farming - I did a little bit early on when I was really low level, and a little bit more when I wanted to use a specific armour set and had to increase my endurance by a couple of points, but generally I've just been running around and killing stuff for the sake of having fun.

I would definitely recommend reading the online wiki that explained the rules before playing. I didn't find the rules intuitive, and it made a big difference second time around when I'd done a bit of reading on how stats / magic / weapons and had a rough idea of how they worked.

Having said that, I'm only up to the Painted World of Ariamis so far, so maybe it gets properly difficult from here in!

 

[SpoonFULL]

Contradictory, I can't imagine worth and more boring gameplay than farming/grinding.

As I indicated, you don't have to farm, but you can if you want to. That is why dying sometimes is a bliss.

 

[SpoonFULL]

I'll give it another shot though, it deserves a fair chance when I am in a better mood.

Mouse and camera controls are terrible, so only play the game with the mouse and resolution fixes:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/211420/discussions/0/846940249121202471/

 

[gumbomasta]

This is the kind of game that is either for you or it's not. For those who its for (myself included), it's simply one of the best games ever. EVER. For those who it is not for, it is comically one of the worst. It's so cheap right now that I guess there's no risk in finding out for yourself one way or another. Still, before you play the way it's meant to be played, you need two things:

a controller
an easy-to-install patch that fixes the graphics and other port-based glitches

Get those, open your mind, and give it an honest shot.

-g

 

[JDR13]

One of the rare instances where I actually prefer a console version (PS3) to the PC version.

 

[ChaosTheory]

I guess I don't mind a game being difficult— even frustrating difficult, as long as it isn't "cheap" difficult. I'm also not much of a button-masher.

But the reason I haven't tried DS is that I just can't see myself playing an undead zombie hero. It's just too dark, depressing, etc. It's like someone made a game out of Dante's Inferno… Maddening.

 

[cptbarkey]

very nice, picked it up.

 

[Carnifex]

I played this on the PS 3 and enjoyed it a while back, but a friend of mine that got it for the PC really didn't care for it. Probably best to play on a console if that's an option.



-Carn

 

[killias2]

I own it on both PS3 and PC. I actually preferred the PC version, although that was largely due to my strong preference for it as a platform. I'm still using a PS3 controller, as this was definitely designed for playing with a controller. However, the PC version, IMO, doesn't have the same problems with slowdown that the PS3 version has occasionally. If you really need to push the graphics, definitely get the resolution fix. If you can play with a controller and use the resolution fix, the only real problem with the PC port is the nonsense Games for Windows Live integration, but that really only impacted multiplayer and, even then, just occasionally.

I spent 90 hours with the PC version, so I feel qualified to say that the port ain't perfect but it's really not bad either. The game itself is brilliant, although you should be aware that it's definitely an "action RPG" where your ability to understand the combat system will matter greatly. I don't think the game is nearly as hard as people make it out to be, but that's still a noteworthy consideration.

Edit: If anyone is looking for a place to grind, in the early-ish game, I highly suggest fighting the four NPCs (mage, thief, priest, warrior) on the other side of that Crest in the woods. The Crest is expensive, but, once you can take them, those four easily represent the best grinding opportunity in the earlyish game. Later on, once you can enter as well as leave Painted World, get some decent AoE spells, and grind on that whole group of guys with the shields. With Wrath of the Gods or late-game Pyromancy AoE, you can take the whole group almost instantly, restart the Paint World, and then do it again. You can pretty much get as many souls as you'll ever need. Grinding too much sort of ruins the difficulty curve of the game, but the DLC content (included in the PC version) will probably still be pretty challenging. Manus is hard, but that calamity dragon (Kalameet) is pretty much insane.

 

[Cacheperl]

As I indicated, you don't have to farm, but you can if you want to. That is why dying sometimes is a bliss.

Yeah, but if you like neither farming/grinding nor the otherwise high difficulty level, you are still fucked, right?

 

[HellRazor]

Unless you absolutely hate it, its really hard to go wrong at under 8 bucks though...!

 

[Ryder]

I stumbled around a bit until I found a graveyard with a couple of skeletons who repeatedly ripped me a new one until I got so frustrated I uninstalled it

The Catacombs is the last area you should be heading towards. The fact that it's so close to the starting point of the game makes you think it should be easy. They obviously designed it like that to toy with our emotions.

 

[Ryder]

I guess I don't mind a game being difficult— even frustrating difficult, as long as it isn't "cheap" difficult. I'm also not much of a button-masher.

The best thing about Demon/Dark Souls is that if you button mash, you die. Simple as that. You get rewarded for patience.

 

[Shagnak]

Damn, got sick of holding out and bought the PS3 version only a few days ago. Would have preferred the PC version, as then I don't have to wait until the kids are away from the console.

@killias2: nice tips, thanks!

 

[fadedc]

Yeah, but if you like neither farming/grinding nor the otherwise high difficulty level, you are still fucked, right?

Not necessarily. Often the difficulty is more about figuring out where to go next, than anything else. For example, bjon045 complained about getting killed in the graveyard. That's because he did things in the wrong order, and should never have been in there in the first place. If he had explored more, or read a walkthrough suggesting where to go, he would have had a much easier time.

While grinding can be helpful, and twitch skills can be helpful, neither are anywhere nearly as important as exploring and finding the right place to go next. Sometimes important areas or items are hidden a little too well.