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Looks like Steam has the preorder listed as April 25. I guess I'd call that "shortly after."
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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Yeah I guess Amazon is hedging.
I watched some of ENB's earrrrrrly Dark Souls playthrough/commentary vids, as in the Japanese version of the game before it was even out in the US or elsewhere. What a trip. It seems ages ago that the game was so new to everyone. It's also funny to see how much the various patches changed things. For instance, he tried kicking those spear hollows in the Burg and it had almost no effect.
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OOPS I just preordered it. Free shield!
I'm a consumer whore.
It's true, before the 1.05 patch it was a different game, and far more punishing. I still have nightmares about the stacking curses.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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I got this thing to play that thing the kids are all talking about. Souls of Darkness I think it was.
I'm not sure, I just feel so greasy.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
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It glows with Soul Magic!
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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OK, so what's the point of all this? Just to wander around and find stuff? How in the world do I remember where I've already been? I guess the last few years of straight line shooters has wrecked my mind.
Learning to use a controller like this is a pretty simple task. You simply start the process of play, and the brain's essential plasticity comes to my aid, in recruiting layabout neurons to the new task. I'm sure there are some clumps attached to the old differential equation centers that are just sitting around sopping up pancake syrup that are going to sping to actions. I haz alrady fingered out hows a persons gets up a new shild! An I cans looks ups y downsy all on my owwn.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
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My eyes! The burn, it hurtsss us!
Silly man, the point is simple: to die! A lot! And then brag about how cool it is! Now get to work, you!
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Ahh, the age-old question - what's the point of all this.
If uz alrdy fingered out howsa gets up a nu shild, you're halfway there already!
Or as the lady says at the beginning of Dark Souls 2: "You are going to die. Again. And again. And again." But as the trailer says, this is not about death. This is about what you learn from death.
What you learn from death: death hurts.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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So, pardon the new question, but when you die, do you lose your restored humanity and get hollow again? Some things you read make it seem like you are either hollow or human, while others seem to imply levels, as in restoring bits of humanity. Are there levels or shades of humanity? Camping in the Undead Burg, levelled to 17 so far. Will try the plunging attack on the bridge again tomorrow.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
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It's hollow or human, with no gradations in between, which is kind of at odds with the lore (they changed this in Dark Souls 2, for the better I would say). When you die, you lose what some people call soft humanity (along with all your souls) as distinct from the humanity you keep in your inventory. It's the number in the upper left-hand corner of the display. Having soft humanity confers a few benefits that you must weight against the risk of losing it upon death. It raises your curse resist as well as your item discovery. It also increases the damage of a certain type of weapon upgrade. There may be more benefits I'm forgetting.
EDIT: If you're human, the humanity counter will be bright white. If hollow, it will be gray. Of course you can always just look at your character model to tell: normal means human, raisin-headed crack baby means hollow.
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"raisin-headed crack baby." Botch, you make me happy.
Helmut - I believe the amount of soft humanity you're carrying increases item drops as well. You'll earn humanity for defeating enemies in a region, so if you run the Undead Burg a few times chances are you'll collect some points in it. The "Hard" stuff in your inventory is safer to carry around, and you just crack it when you need some to reverse your Hollowing or Kindle a bonfire. Certain optional game events will only happen when you are human, and some characters may treat you differently. You can only summon help or be invaded when alive as well, though you can make yourself available to be summoned (once you get the appropriate item) whenever you want.
Players who are killed while holding a large-ish amount of soft humanity have a chance to spawn a Vagrant, a demon that randomly invades another player's world and carries nice loot if you can kill it.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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Wow, can't believe I forgot the most important difference between human and hollow: multi-player. May I humbly suggest that, while the temptation to stay hollow in order to avoid invasions may be strong, you resist it. Besides the benefits of certain encounters only available while human (as SP mentioned), there's no thrill quite like that when you hear the sound of someone invading your world. It's a fundamental part of the Souls experience.
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I can underscore what Botch said strongly enough. In fact, though I did a lot of multiplayer in my DkS playthrough, I didn't actually do it enough and it'd be fair to say I didn't take advantage of the multiplayer, meaning that (in a way) I missed out.
1) Far and away the best method of accumulating souls and humanity is to help other players with bosses. In subsequent playthroughs I was a particular fan of using the Bell Gargoyles fight for this, as there's a huge range of levels to work with.
2) It is a fantastic way to scout an area that makes you nervous. Since there are no penalties for getting killed while serving another player as a White Phantom, you can explore and take risks without fear.
3) There are "good" and "bad" multiplayer people, and you'll soon learn to recognize them. As a White Phantom, your job is to die for your summoner. And your summoner's job is to keep you alive. You can't use Estus in Phantom form - instead, you heal when the world master uses their Estus (healing spells and objects still work), so a "good" summoner is going to keep an eye on the health of their summons and hang back, healing them when appropriate.
4) Before the 1.05 patch the language was a little different, and to this day I insist there is nothing more terrifying in all of gaming than seeing this prompt appear onscreen:
YOUR WORLD HAS BEEN INVADED BY A BLACK PHANTOM (now it says "DARK SPIRIT <WHATEVER> HAS INVADED" which isn't quite as holy-shit but FromSoft has been trying to be sensitive about use of the words "white" and "black" with positive and negative connotations)
Similarly, seeing YOU ARE BEING SUMMONED is a great feeling.
Spend as much time unhollow as you can. You'll experience more of the richness of the game, and be more invested in the threats.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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Steerpike said
I can underscore what Botch said strongly enough. In fact, though I did a lot of multiplayer in my DkS playthrough, I didn't actually do it enough and it'd be fair to say I didn't take advantage of the multiplayer, meaning that (in a way) I missed out.1) Far and away the best method of accumulating souls and humanity is to help other players with bosses. In subsequent playthroughs I was a particular fan of using the Bell Gargoyles fight for this, as there's a huge range of levels to work with.
2) It is a fantastic way to scout an area that makes you nervous. Since there are no penalties for getting killed while serving another player as a White Phantom, you can explore and take risks without fear.
3) There are "good" and "bad" multiplayer people, and you'll soon learn to recognize them. As a White Phantom, your job is to die for your summoner. And your summoner's job is to keep you alive. You can't use Estus in Phantom form - instead, you heal when the world master uses their Estus (healing spells and objects still work), so a "good" summoner is going to keep an eye on the health of their summons and hang back, healing them when appropriate.
4) Before the 1.05 patch the language was a little different, and to this day I insist there is nothing more terrifying in all of gaming than seeing this prompt appear onscreen:
YOUR WORLD HAS BEEN INVADED BY A BLACK PHANTOM (now it says "DARK SPIRIT <WHATEVER> HAS INVADED" which isn't quite as holy-shit but FromSoft has been trying to be sensitive about use of the words "white" and "black" with positive and negative connotations)
Similarly, seeing YOU ARE BEING SUMMONED is a great feeling.
Spend as much time unhollow as you can. You'll experience more of the richness of the game, and be more invested in the threats.
See, that was a whole dimension I missed because a) my connection was so slow back when I was playing Dark Souls that online things didn't happen or didn't work at all and b) I spent most of my time hollow because I didn't see any obvious advantages to being human. If I return to Dark Souls it'll be on PC I think with my bitchin' connection, and to hell with the cleric I was before with her useless miracles. I won't touch Dark II until I've completed Dark, just like I did with Demon's.
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Can't emphasize the tactical utility of #2 strongly enough.
Gregg, may I also humbly suggest not abandoning the cleric. While there are some very good offensive miracles available, as well as some of the best weapon buffs, unless you know what you're doing they're difficult to come by early. Look at the cleric as primarily a melee fighter with healing and some crowd-control support. Easily my favorite character to roleplay is the cleric. Just don't let Patches know your true nature.
EDIT: that's not to say that there aren't myriad ways of playing a Faith-based character, just that weapon damage, of whatever kind, will usually get you farther, with miracle-based damage being a complement.
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Something that worries me - and this is getting off topic so I'll circle us back in a second - something that worries me about the Souls games in general is longevity. I mean long gevity. People are still playing Demon's Souls now, but what about in three or four years? Speaking as someone who can and has loaded up STALKER or Thief or System Shock 2 or other favorites, sometimes more than a decade after their release, I wonder what will happen in 2020 when I want to play Dark Souls and there's no one but me. No bloodstains, no messages, no summons. I can see exactly why Gregg couldn't get into Dark Souls. If you play alone you miss... it's hard to describe what you miss, but it's tremendous. This is a long-term danger of multiplayer in general. I could see university-level courses on game design taught using just Dark Souls, but how exactly is the class expected to experience it properly?
On miracle characters: when I played Demon's Souls I was a Temple Knight, and I think I might go that route again when I play. I feel like I didn't get it right the first time. Miracles seem to have more limited utility but there's a challenge to them I find intriguing, almost like part of the difficulty is creating clever ways to apply them. I have little (no) experience with faith-based characters in Dark Souls but I can see the early frustration. You're not as strong a fighter as the offensive classes and your magic doesn't have the utility of the magical classes, especially at the beginning. You've got God on your side, but God is all laissez-faire and stuff. No offense to God but I think I'd prefer to have a vicious rottweiler on my side, or a Kalashnikov, or one of those grizzly suits that strange people wear to associate with bears.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
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Patches? Hahaha, I killed him in Demon's Souls, the backstabbing jerk. Granted, I lost the only heavy arrows vendor in the game but he was an asshole.
I just don't remember any miracle other than heal being any good, or at least most of them seemed very situational, so much so that I forgot I had them most of the time.
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I loved Dark Souls at first but not being able to do half of the cool online stuff meant when I got into some tough spots there weren't really that many options for me. I couldn't be a white phantom, it never worked, and summoning others never worked either. I say 'never', I did hook up with Max a couple of times and that was a real highlight for me, especially down in The Depths. We were also invaded down and around there a couple of times. And I remember summoning a dude for the Bell Gargoyles, but those things never really worked again after that unfortunately. I'm pretty sure they'd work perfectly now though, it's just a case of finding the time to get back into it again. So many other fresh experiences out there!
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Remember when the Demon's Souls servers were originally slated to go dark? That was 2012 I think. They're still on. That's not to say they won't eventually turn out the lights but the staying power, in multi-player terms, has been quite the thing.
I'm curious about firing up either version of Dark Souls I own right now and seeing how busy it is, what with Dark Souls 2 out now. There's a part of me that's afraid I won't go back to Dark Souls 2...
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Ok, thanks y'all. Things are going amazingly well (in my limited opinion). I managed to level up heavily in the burg, snagged the Black Knight's longsword, and managed to get stuck on the Taurus Demon's head and dispatched him second go. When you see someone's white mark on the ground indicating something about a summons, is that someone else asking you to go be present in their world? And what are those floating white circles above the ground that look like a winterfresh Lifesaver?
Missed a lot of these things with not having played Demon's Souls I suppose. I leaned pretty heavily on the wiki at first, but am trying to go with less. The game is pretty sparse with even the most elemental game play explanations but I'm more content to see what I get. Some of the descriptions of the things available to purchase seem no longer to be available, and I can only assume they've been patched out.
Slowly coming onside. Very fun combat, and I like the feeling of cautiously extending limits as I risk exploration. Dying far off the home fire is only a concern if I'm so far out that I die trying to recover my last lost bundle. I honestly didn't like the look of things the first few hours. There just seems a tremendous amount I can't fathom, and wont ever figure them out.
My Dark Souls single player sensibilities are protected by a +10 GfWL Firewall of Ineptitude
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