Dark Souls

[Malius]

Successor to Demon Souls if you ever played it.

If you think games now days are too esay give this a whirl.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhwAH4jtrU0

[OxyNitro]

Graphics are awesome, spiritual successor is so natural to be viewed.

[Ether]

I may have to buy this.. I already platinumed Demons Souls.


Dark Souls Murders Early Players
Sep 21, 2011 - From Software has sent max-level enemies to punish anyone playing the game before its release.


The Dark Souls Review Diary: Part 1
Read how we're getting on with Dark Souls in the run-up to review.

This is Part One of our Dark Souls review diary, where we tell you how we're getting on with the game in the run-up to review. SPOILER WARNING: minor spoilers about the early stages of the game ahead!

I already know that reviewing Dark Souls is an experience I'm never, ever going to forget. Putting in 10+ hour daily shifts on huge games isn't an alien concept to most people in my profession – but a game that's this dark, this punishing, this emotionally demanding? And – of course – a game this fist-eatingly, heart-achingly, soul-crushingly difficult? This is a whole other thing. Having spent 12 hours of the last 24 immersing myself in its world, Dark Souls is actually starting to affect my mental health.

I'd love to say that things get off to a gentle start, but they really don't. Dark Souls' first proper boss is still the hardest of any I've faced so far – partly because you are, by necessity, so underpowered when you meet him. He's called the Taurus Demon, and he's utterly hateful. You stride out onto a bridge, and he drops down from nowhere, a bull-headed, winged, aggressive satyr ten times your size, sporting a club that can end you in two hits if you get unlucky. Run away from him, he chases you. Attack him, he crushes you. Get behind him, he steps back and spikes you with metal protrusions on his legs. He is proper hard, and he lives at the top of a tower that you have to climb every time you want to face him. He is, all told, a woefully obstinate introduction to the game – and one that seems to set the tone for the rest of this mammoth, psychotic endeavour.

I can't quite explain that special gamer's psychological process that enables you to fail at something over and over and over again and still maintain the will to go on. I think you have to be a certain type of thrill-seeking masochist to even entertain the notion of a game like Dark Souls. Every death at Taurus' hands brought me closer to sheer mental exhaustion. Time after time I'd get him to within a few hits of death, then feel my hands turn to jelly as the nerves ruined my reflexes and he caught me in a one-two attack loop, dispassionately ending my life over and over again on the end of that massive club.

I slayed Taurus – after more than three hours of continuous failure – with a final, desperate swipe, a death throe, milliseconds before he crushed me beneath his club for what felt like the 600th time. As "YOU ARE DEAD" flashed up on the screen, I was ready to give up games journalism and go become a lawyer like my school careers advisor always said I should – but then, in the background, just before the screen faded to black, I saw that bull-headed bastard fall to his knees, felt the head-spinning rush of triumphant adrenaline that only games have ever given me, and I knew that Dark Souls now owned me completely. Just like Demon's Souls did before it.

Things are so difficult in Dark Souls that, after the first fifteen hours, the question I keep asking myself is "have they gone too far?" Truth is, for Demon's Souls devotees, there's *almost* no such thing as too far. The bigger the challenge, the bigger the reward, and the more thrilling the final victory. For anyone who hasn't played through Demon's Souls before it, though, I'm not sure that Dark Souls does enough to tease you with that thrill before dropping you straight into the deep end. You have to fight tooth and claw here right from the off.

It's also huge. In the Chain of Pain – the little email support group that a collective of Dark Souls reviewers is currently relying upon for tips and moral support, in the absence of the online community that will grow up around the game when it actually launches – one of my fellows reckons he's about a quarter of the way through the game after 60 hours. This is something that people will spend months playing.

This a very different game from Demon's Souls, with a different rhythm and structure. The bonfires change the way you play entirely, removing the option to run back to a safe haven and regroup before heading back out into the fray. And without wanting to give too much away, its tone is different too; it's darker, more distressing, and more claustrophobic despite its open-world structure. It encroaches subtly on your mental well-being.

I'll be writing more about that in the next instalment of this review diary. For now, though, we can answer at least one question: is Dark Souls harder than Demon's Souls? Well, yes – much harder – but for some reason I've not quite put my finger on yet, it's not more dispiriting.


ign

[Ether]

The Dark Souls Review Diary: Part 2
Read how we're getting on with Dark Souls in the run-up to review.



There are so many moments that define the Dark Souls experience. Moments of improbable triumph, of lucky escape, of superhuman skill; the times where you find a game-changing sword at the bottom of a chasm after running away from pustulous chimerae, or where you fell a boss with a dying blow, or where the enormous fossilized skeleton you've been skirting around suddenly comes to life and murders you.

Then there are the times you spend an hour and a half hiding behind a rock shooting arrows at a dragon.

Today, after twelve hours of very solid progress yesterday, I hit one of the brick walls that inevitably crop up when you're caught between bosses, unsure of where to go or how to progress. Bored of my well-worn stomping grounds in the Undead Parish, I decided to venture further afield into Dark Souls' open world, only to find that I'd become so comfortable in my old habits that the mere sight of new enemies was enough to throw me right off my game and get me killed within ten seconds. For hours. In all my joyful reminiscences on Demon's Souls, I had forgotten exactly how much of the game was spent achieving exactly nothing.


It's one these games' great strengths that even when you're making no tangible progress at all, you're passively acquiring the combat and survival skills that will eventually lead you further and further on. Dark Souls rarely feels like grinding; it feels like learning. Because this is an open-world game now, you can easily venture back to areas you've already conquered, and surprise and delight yourself with the ease and flair with which you're suddenly navigating sections that took you forever to conquer first time around.

That's what I ended up spending most of my day doing: retreading old ground to build up my confidence (and my soul level). It was at the entrance to the Undead Parish, standing at the other end of a bridge guarded by an eff-off enormous great dragon, that I had a sudden thought born more out of boredom than any wiser impulse. I thought: I bet this guy's not so hard. I reckon I could pick him off with a couple of hundred arrows.

Standing just out of range of his fiery exhalations, I fired arrow after arrow at his face, doing miniscule damage with each one. After about five minutes of this, he got pissed off with me and, to my horror, jumped down onto the actual bridge and stomped over to say hello. Terrified, I scampered back to an alcove further down, hiding from his thrashing attacks. I was trapped. All I could do was dart out and fire the odd arrow at him whenever there was a break in his raging.

About one hour and 300 arrows later, with the dragon about halfway towards death, I accidentally pressed the wrong button and stepped backwards off the bridge. So it goes.


People read this review diary, and they ask me "how in the hell is this game supposed to be fun?" Truth is, Dark Souls isn't fun, 95% of the time. It's the other 5% that you play for. Things are so incredibly difficult that even the tiniest victories bring you close to tears of joy and relief. Tonight, at the bottom of a fungal, lurid cavern filled with lots and lots of dangerous things that I'd managed to creep past, I found an incredibly useful new poison-resistant shield on the body of a less fortunate adventurer and could barely contain my excitement. If I could, I would have kissed it.

I'm going deeper underground, and I sense things are about to get serious. It might be a few days before the next instalment of this review diary, but I feel like I'm starting to hit my stride.

[Ether]

[Ether]

The Dark Souls Review Diary: Part 3
Read how we're getting on with Dark Souls in the run-up to review.

After Part 1 and Part 2, Keza's time with Dark Souls before the review is coming to and end. SPOILER WARNING: Very minor spoilers ahead.

What's striking me about Dark Souls, after five days in its company, is how open-ended it is compared to Demon's Souls. Every single time I talk to someone about this game, I learn something new – where to find an ashen lake hidden down below a swampy mire, what that bird in Fire link Shrine does, which characters are hidden in the game's dungeons, or which rare items can be found by chance, through valiant deeds or as the result of careful exploration.

There's no fixed route through the game. There's a chain of progression, but most things can be done in any order. It means there's always something else to attempt, some new corner to peek around. It also means that there are entire areas of the game that you might never see, unless someone casually alerts you to their existence.

The Dark Souls Reviewers' Support Group (or the Chain of Pain, as I called it back in Part One) has been an invaluable source of information and emotional comfort during this week. This feeds into something that's essential to Dark Souls: it not only encourages, but actively necessitates communication and co-operation. It's difficult to overstate how crucial the online component is to Dark Souls. Without it, you're a wanderer lost alone in a vicious and cruel world, almost unable to survive. With the help, soapstone messages and strategic advice of other travelers, though, you can prevail.

Dark Souls' online elements are similar to Demon's Souls', but it's more nuanced and developed. You can still offer your services to other players as a Blue Phantom (in all but name), helping them take down a boss to gain yourself souls, humanity and a sense of achievement and well-being. Souls are what you use to level yourself up and boost your abilities, giving you slightly more chance of survival. Humanity is what you use to kindle bonfires, giving yourself more Estus Flasks to boost your health. It also lets you revive yourself from your Hollow undead form to a flesh-and-blood Human, which in turn lets you summon other players into your world.

It's a clever system, this. It was clever in Demon's Souls too, but given Dark Souls' increased difficulty and the way that it's more tightly designed around community, it's absolutely integral now. When you reach a dead-end in your own game, you can pop into someone else's and help them out for a while. Similarly, when you're butting your head up against a brick wall of a boss, a helpful stranger can make things approximately 500% easier. It's this that stops Dark Souls from being straightforwardly impossible, even at its worst, most punishing moments. There is always someone around to help you out with their knowledge, experience or discoveries.

Over the weekend, I've taken a break from my own game to go online with a retail version, starting again from scratch. Around bonfires, you see the ghostly forms of other travelers crouched and resting, preparing themselves for their next challenge. Messages already litter the game world, making you feel less alone. You catch the ghostly echoes of other players' deaths and triumphs; walking around Undead Burg, you sometimes hear the tolling of the bell at the top of the gargoyle tower, letting you know that some other soul has just had a monumental victory. It spurs you on to try harder yourself, or makes you smile at the memory of your own conquest if you're already further on.

It's as a result of this sense of camaraderie and community that your experience with Dark Souls will almost certainly be easier and, probably, more enjoyable than mine. The online experience casts Dark Souls' difficulty in a different light. In any of my Demon's Souls play throughs, nothing gave me as much trouble as I've been having with some of Dark Souls' worst confrontations. I now realize that it's because Dark Souls is designed more tightly around online than Demon's Souls was; certain sections of the game push you towards co-operation, offering you rich rewards for helping others.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty much on my own out here, and it's getting to my head. Yesterday was largely wasted trying to fight two bosses simultaneously, on my own, having long since run out of arrows for my bow or Humanity with which to kindle my bonfire. If I had been playing the retail version, I'd have been able to call upon some help – or offer help myself, guiding another player through an earlier confrontation that's giving them as much trouble as this one is giving me.

The game does offer non-player characters that you can summon for fights like these, if you're stuck offline and on your own like I am. But if you run out of humanity, that's it – you can't summon anymore. It's not impossible. It's never impossible. It's just almost impossible. With another day, some careful grinding and some repeated attempts, these bosses will fall just as all the others did before them. But I know – and this is a problem that reviewers of online-enabled games often face – that this time around, I'm not getting the Dark Souls experience that was intended for me.

The upshot of all of this? I can't wait to start again once the game's actually out. Until then, Dark Souls is incomplete; a tantalizing teaser of the breathtaking communal effort that it will eventually become. I've had a taste of that now, and my final impressions of this exceptional game are starting to crystallize in my mind.

[Ether]

[Ether]

IGN gives it a 9.0

There are some things that only videogames can do. For me, Dark Souls' predecessor Demon's Souls was emblematic of all of them. Where most games do their best to be something else – to tell a story like a novel, to impress with cinematic techniques like a film – Demon's Souls is pure game, a complete and darkly fascinating vision that makes no concessions to the modern conception of how games should be. Instead, it was an exploration of how games could be; how bleak, how twisted, how focused and – most famously – how challenging. Most developers take pains to protect you from failure. FROM Software turns it into an artform.

[Flabulous]

IGN gives it a 9.0

There are some things that only videogames can do. For me, Dark Souls' predecessor Demon's Souls was emblematic of all of them. Where most games do their best to be something else – to tell a story like a novel, to impress with cinematic techniques like a film – Demon's Souls is pure game, a complete and darkly fascinating vision that makes no concessions to the modern conception of how games should be. Instead, it was an exploration of how games could be; how bleak, how twisted, how focused and – most famously – how challenging. Most developers take pains to protect you from failure. FROM Software turns it into an artform.

Just pre-ordered it for the 7th! £36.91.

[Ether]

Bought this, am I and flab the only ones sick enough in the head to buy this on the forum?

come on..