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Dark Souls 2. Bearer of the curse, seek capes.
Hermano
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Dark Souls!
Jolly cooperation!
Gavlan wheel? Gavlan deal!
PSN- AHermano
Hermano on
+1
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getting a pickaxe is the most amazingly stupid thing
PSN- AHermano
I love this, I wonder if there's anything else hidden away people haven't found yet
PSN- AHermano
The way that the levels connect and the ending are much worse
However, the actual game is mostly better. I'm also basically going to play it for the PVP. Get my gear, get in NG+, invade dudes, bell dudes, blue dudes, rat dudes and blood dudes all day.
As someone who hates PVP and didn't know/care much about the story
It sounds like the core pve mechanics are as good or better
Everything but level design and ending are better
There's no need to grind here and as a result I finished the game.
PSN- AHermano
Also the boss fights are way way better. There were some shit boss fights in DS1.
But I am a pyromancer, and I have no fears of such things.
This I found. The living shrubbery which had posed me so much pain before fell in a stroke to the axe empowered by the Golem's soul, and I plucked the moss that grew between their limbs. I was resistant to poison, but not so much that I could ignore the benefits that a curative offered. It was almost boring.
The Stone Knights fared little better against me; their armor was thick and resilient, but the Golem's soul smashed through them at a blow, and they were toppled. I was given pause by this, and it made me nervous. Lordran has taught me that death is the natural state of things here, and that when I become an easy doler it is not to be trusted. Hubris is more dangerous than anything else, and I knew this, and I whispered it to myself as I slew Stone Knights and the bad ents that stood guard over a corpse.
When they were dead - it did not take long, which made me stare long into the trees and listen, because who could be sure in this place? - I took the armor from it, and returned to the gate. I rested at the bonfire next to it, re-allotted my spells, and went deeper into the woods. To Artorias, I thought, whoever he was.
What I found in that place was a deeper darkness, and stronger bad ents. They could survive a blow from my axe, but not by much, and thereafter they toppled or they burned. No fear here, though they came from everywhere, and to be struck from behind would still wound deeply, and so I walked with caution, shield up, waiting for the sound of leaves brushing against each other, often tricked by my own footsteps.
A small stone outpost split the only traversable path through the gardens, and when I walked through it I was expecting to be attacked by some thing grown strong in the dark and the wet and the warm. My eyes were on level with my head, because they always are.
I heard a growl above me and swore and leaped backward, shield up, and looked to where the sound came from.
An enormous, rotund cat stared down at me, its eyes too far apart and its mouth splitting the shape of its face like a frog's. We stared at each other for what must have been a long time before I decided it was not hostile, and I approached, and we spoke to each other.
The cat assured me that Artorias's grave was a myth, and that to seek it was the realm of the foolish. It insisted that I agree; I saw no reason to lie to the creature, so I told it that this did not seem to be so. It insulted me, and told me to go, and I went, expecting it to leap upon my back with every step. It did not.
I descended a stone stair into a new area of the garden, and I had only gone a few steps when I saw movement in the trees - not a body but movement, if you can see an action without a thing to ascribe it to.
A phantom barreled out of the wood at me, a knight carrying a greatsword in two hands, and I threw up my shield as he struck - and it landed with such force that it nearly broke my guard, and I felt the thrill rush through me. This was the fight I had been looking for, then. It did not occur to me to be disturbed by my lust for battle; in Lordran, you learn to accept such things or you become Hollow. I did not, at that moment, notice how transparent he was, how much less solid he was compared to phantoms I had been invaded by or the Hollow creatures I had fought before, or how much more solid than the holders of the Ring of Fog I would fight further in.
As we did battle I heard sorcery cut through the air behind me, and I turned and looked and dove beneath a soul arrow cast by a mage in the trees. I ran, enough to put a tree between the sorcerer and myself, and the knight struck and wounded me. I dispatched him, and drank from my Estus Flask, and charged after the mage.
I did not know, though I should have guessed, that more waited in the woods. What followed was a pitched battle, with a great deal of running and fighting and a few instances of managing a riposte against strong opponents. Another knight found me, and a hunter, and a barbarian and a cleric, on and on. We ran and we fought and I burned my estus flasks one after the other, but I noticed things about them: some were solid, and some so transparent it could only have been sorcery, while a small few had the lean and timber of the phantoms that occasionally flitted in and out of my vision, echoes from another world. These were no echoes, their steel real enough to cut and their bodies real enough to shiver and fall, but I was given pause as I fought them. What was happening? Were all of these people hollow? No - no, their purpose was too united, their actions too concerted, to be hollow. This was too much.
I slew them, after a time, and continued on. I crossed a stone bridge, and came to another part of the wood. I wondered how far I could possibly go, how deep the woods would lead me. No answer was apparent.
Tiny mushrooms with arms and legs walked in regular patterns through the woods, unmindful of my presence. They came up to about my thigh, and I admit I found them cute, so stubby and eyeless and clearly used to a life where they did not mind the presence of strangers. They were like fae things out of an old story; I distrusted them immediately, but let them be.
The larger specimens were not so kind, and were so strong as to be preposterous, but they burned. It took a great deal of fire, but they burned. As they fell, charred and smelling of rot, the smaller ones walked purposefully around their bodies, paying no mind to the corpses of their fellows. Strange creatures.
And so it went, on and on, for a long time.
I came at last to the end of the garden, or what I thought was the end: the path terminated in a stone bridge, covered in warnings against pains and sorrows, and the bridge ended in a door cracked open. Light poured from the crack, bright enough to be painful in the dark of this place. The grave of Artorias lay beyond it, I was sure, and I pushed the heavy door open and stepped through.
Artorias's grave was there, a monolithic tombstone at the center of a massive clearing in the wood, but it was not all that was there. As I drew closer, I saw that it was surrounded by smaller headstones, each adorned with weapons - as Artorias's was - and once more I was given pause.
Artorias, from what I have been able to gather from a ring I had found, was one of the servants of Gwyn - likely that he had many followers. These graves could well have been the graves of his men, placed here after some catastrophic battle. Was that the source of the phantoms - not the solid men and women, or those cloaking themselves in invisibility - who attacked me in the woods? Were they trying to keep me from reaching this place? Was the cat aware of them, and had she been testing me? The undead who had attacked me alongside the phantoms, were they the troops who served under Artorias, guarding their commander's resting place?
These thoughts gnawed at me as I approached the sword that lay in front of Artorias's grave; a massive thing, too big for human hands, but I had no doubt it was some weapon with meaning to Artorias. Perhaps his sword, if I accepted that he might have been as large as Smough. I reached out for it, to touch it, wondering-
And then I met the guardian of that place.
It began with a sound, thunder echoing from deep within a cave, and I looked up and saw a great grey wolf standing atop the grave marker. I backed away from it, and it leaped down, and I saw that it was of a size where it could hunt and probably bring down elephants - it weighed a tonne if it weighed a pound, and was light on its feet and quick like no wolf of normal size could ever be. I was prepared for it to leap forward with fangs bared, to drive my axe or my hand into its massive eye, or to die and be devoured, but the wolf had other plans.
It grabbed the hilt of the sword in its teeth and leaped away, landing some twenty paces distant, holding the sword parallel to the ground in its jaw, the blade pointing out to the wolf's right. I was impressed: someone, perhaps Artorias, had taught this creature to carry a sword.
Then it paused, and tossed the sword, catching it so that the blade faced in the opposite direction, and it settled into a stance that made my hand tighten on the hilt of my axe. No, no one had taught it to carry a sword. Someone had taught this wolf how to fight with one.
That is how it began.
Imagine, if you will, a four-legged creature that stands ten feet tall at the shoulder wielding a sword that must weigh half a thousand pounds in its mouth. The grace of the thing defied easy description, but one motion in particular captured it well: When I struck at it, the wolf would occasionally retreat. And when it retreated, it would sometimes do this by striking and leaping at the same time, swinging its massive head in the moment it leaped backward so that the sword bit into the ground where it had been standing a moment before. In one movement it removed itself from danger and used its superior reach to strike out even in retreat, and even to my untrained eye this seemed a grand and awful thing.
It leaped about the massive clearing like a dog might run around a pen, retreating and charging in turn, pushing my shield arm to its limit with every pass. I could not fight it within range of that blade, so I fought every instinct I had for dealing with wolves and got inside of its reach, diving under a sweeping blow and coming up under its body, standing between legs as thick and powerful as young trees. There I struck blow after blow, and it leaped away, but I could see that I had wounded it.
How long did we fight there? I do not know. Minutes, perhaps. No longer. The creature was a cautious fighter, but more than cautious it was tenacious, wholly devoted to the cause of driving me from this place. That lack of fear is what allowed me to approach it, to get inside of its guard over and over, to drive my axe and my fire into its body. It roared and howled and snapped and swung and struck me, so that I had to drink from my flask as it retreated, and we clashed again and again and again.
In the pitch of battle it was possible to divorce myself from everything except for the fight. We were two creatures, one living and one undead, each seeking the other's destruction. This remained true until I struck what would be the second-to-last blow and it howled in pain and leaped away from me.
It landed far away, and made as if to charge - but it could not. It came on, implacable, but it favored its right side and would not place its right forefoot on the ground. It looked at the ground, minding its footing, only glancing at me often enough to be sure I was still there. I walked away from it, keeping my shield up, and even limping it caught up and swung - but the swing was slow, and it could not catch its weight on its right side, and the force of its attack flipped the wolf onto its side and then onto its back as it yelped in pain, thrashing its legs in the air.
It was in that moment I realized I was not doing battle, here, at least not battle as I had understood that word up to now. Seeing it flail upon Artorias's grave, I realized that this wolf - Sif, its name was Sif - was not trying to kill me, it was defending its master from an intruder. Artorias was one of the knights of Gwyn, as Ornstein had been. How long, then, had Sif guarded this place? Had it stood sentinel for a thousand years, eternally faithful, keeping watch over a master who would never stroke its head again? Did it pick up the sword with love in its thoughts, and was it with love that it fought against me?
Sif rose, and I wondered at what I was doing here.
Then it faced me, its eyes blazing, its growl coming from deep within its cavernous diaphragm. Perhaps it did act out of love, but that did not change the reality of what I was seeing. For Sif, and for myself, there would be only two outcomes: it, or myself.
We clashed, and I took the blow, and I buried my axe in its heart. Sif whimpered, a long sigh of a living thing letting go of life, and fell.
I retrieved a ring of a third knight of Gwyn from a corpse behind the gravestone. Perhaps he had sought out Artorias, and fallen afoul of the guardian of this place. I took another ring from the front of the grave, the Covenant of Artorias the Abysswalker, and I took the soul of Sif, the lifestuff of a creature who had proven itself noble, and brave.
I left that place, the silence weighing heavily upon me. I would not return.
The new way healing items work makes them super scarce at the beginning of the game and nigh-impossible to run out of by the halfway point. I think they should have just stuck with the system in DS1.
A lot of the boss fights early on are pretty dull. Dragonrider, Old Dragonslayer, Flexile Sentry, the Ruin Sentinels all feel like you're just fighting a normal enemy with more HP. Ruin Sentinels in particular are super dull if you can summon people to fight them one-on-one.
Shards are really scarce early on, and it kind of punishes you for experimenting with different weapons, especially since upgrading armor is way more useful in this game. On my one character, I have access to unlimited large shards and have a ton of chunks, but I can't upgrade my armor without going out and grinding for shards.
But the combat is more responsive and varied, the way the upgrade system works is a lot better, boss weapons are much better and easier to get and experiment with, spells are more varied and fun.
It's like, made for a person to navigate and find things
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Upgrading armor in DS1 is incroyable
I have the Elite Knight set almost uniformly to +7 and it is worlds better than it was at the start. At +10 it might protect as well as Havel's armor, even.
Does anyone else think Havel's armor looks like crap
I wish the heaviest armor looked a little cooler
PSN- AHermano
https://www.paypal.me/hobnailtaylor
They're just accessories - the main hype comes from the fact that there's actual fabric tech now, unlike pieces with capes in DS1 in which the cape is basically a rigid animation
You can fight Pinwheel right away in DS1 for 20 estus, which might as well be infinite. The 4 estus charges available before Iron Giant isn't so bad, and by the time you're at sentinels you're up to 6 + however many lifegems you've accumulated.
Shards aren't so scarce if you consider that weapons only go to 10. I have literally never upgraded a piece of armour except the pre-nerf antiquated skirt though, so I can see how it could be an issue. Twinkling Titanite used to only be available in finite quantities til they patched that in DS1, so perhaps further down the line.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I'm still suffering from this. I couldn't decide between club, scimitar, falchion, long sword or short bow, so each one of those things is about +3, and all of them are sort of OK.
I'm still sort of stuck at Lost Sinner, what's her face snake woman, or somewhere else. I don't remember the third road block, as I have been engaging in much jolly cooperation to earn sunbro medals to unlock yet another sword.
I did find another fragrant branch in Harvest Valley last night, so I un-petrified the poor woman blocking the Shaded Woods, but I didn't venture in there.
Does this soul memory mechanic count souls earned, or souls spent? I lose a lot of souls, way more than I spend. I was having quite a bit of trouble finding phantoms or getting summoned, but I think that was the name-engraved ring. I don't think anyone wears that thing, so the pool for each god is probably very tiny.
I'm starting to wonder about the plot of the game
It's kind of coming together but there are still gaps in my understanding, like what the fuck happened in New Londo. Like, it was flooded to seal the darkwraiths, I get that, but who the fuck are the four kings? Why are they - and their minions - various degrees of Nazgul? Why do they eat humanity when they grab you???
Why are there ghosts
Gotta figure out what's up
I've seen several ghosts or whatever you call the fleeting translucent images of other players around bonfires doing just this
Overall, I think it's a better game than Dark Souls and Demon Souls. There is less BS, in general.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
the two handed attack did less damage than the one-handed demon hammer lunge so i didn't really see the point to it
http://www.audioentropy.com/