So far, exploring doesn't take very long at all before I, for example, get so involved with trying to roll around a skeleton (stay DOWN damn you!) that I forget that there's a cliff right there.
You haven't died, until you press B one to many times to exit a menu and then step back off a cliff and die.
Thanks to Astromarine I'm now playing this as well. So far, at least for me, it's been kind of a frustrating game to just play. The go anywhere nature of the game, the general unwillingness of it to engage in any hand holding and the additional layer of confusion introduced from the translation and port (I've hooked up a controller but it's a PS3 one so not all of the button prompts line up - still miles better than my initial struggling with the keyboard and mouse) often results in me making no discernible progress for long stretches, bashing my head against various walls because I've not discovered either some button combination that unlocks a vital part of the game or don't know some arcane part of the game lore that is left unexplained. For example, I only just discovered that free crosshair aiming was possible by watching a youtube video, I'd hunted for it before but after fiddling around with the controller for ages I'd figured it didn't exist. Of course the reason I didn't discover it is because it's kind of obscure, I believe it's only possible with a bow that of course you have to decide to purchase yourself (along with the necessary hundreds of arrows), make sure you don't stumble into the cross-bow trap, AND you have to specifically switch to a two handed stance before you can aim even though your character always uses two hands on the bow anyway when you shoot with the other method. I guess this laborious process is mostly to make the get in and out of aiming process slower, but it is certainly not very intuitive to the newcomer who just sits down to play without a manual or wiki. The other one that got me for a long time was how to increase your effective 'range' from a bonfire by increasing the number of healing potions you can get with the whole slightly arcane 'kindle' process. Struggling around with five potions and only weak general melee skills trying to tackle a series of bosses wasn't much fun I can tell you. So yeah, there are a lot of good points here. From what I can tell this is a game with almost no filler. At least nothing beyond what is absolutely necessary to complete the other impressive design achievement - the continuous believable linkage of the various level areas. For the parts I've played so far you go from hand-crafted, fresh encounter to boss and back again. I like the novelty of it playing more like a turn-based puzzle game than an action game. I like how the atmosphere and merciless way the game will kill you just for going the wrong way reminds me of the old kids TV show Knightmare. But I'm a bit less enamoured with repeating long sections of zombie killing I've already 'solved' over and over so I'm curious how other people approached that first play through, did you learn through repeatedly dying and repeating chunks or did you learn via alt-tabbing out to watch videos/read walkthroughs of someone else playing each time you encountered something unfamiliar? For example, right now I've discovered, in various directions, a litany of giant murderous beasts; a red dragon, three separate instances of big, murderous, and heavily armoured knights and one giant seemingly impregnably armoured bull. I'm unsure whether I should be engaging or continually avoiding any of these beasts. Trying to learn if they are potentially defeat-able from playing leads to repeating a lot of zombie killing which I'm not in much hurry to do forever. Sometimes, it seems you are required to kill a giant monster to proceed and other times you aren't. So how did you approach discovering a new one of these seemingly impregnable foes when you were playing, did you just immediately look it up on the internet to learn what you were 'supposed' to do as a newbie player or does that ruin some special part of the game? So far I've gone to the internet to learn how to kill the Taurus Demon (a very silly looking fight in the end the way I did it) and to discover that you can shoot arrows at the dragons tail for ten minutes to unlock a fancy sword but I'm not sure if this is the way to engage with rest of the game or not. .
Those are good questions Dan Lawrence I've been wondering about that too. I've been spending some time glancing over guides and over various threads here, biggest problem is that most of it is gobbledygook to me anyway. On one hand I don't want to spoil too much for myself, but on the other hand I could do with a little bit of hand-holding and direction, at least until I find my feet.
I would NOT hesitate to look things up online. Letting other people get killed for you is part of the Dark Souls experience. Also, I would commend the tactic of actually thinking about whether you want to fight something or not. (The Bridge Wyvern - don't.) My favorite page - let me show it to you. A guide to all the places in Dark Souls. I find this hands out just the right amount of info on any given area - what's there and what you want to do while you're there.
This is a step by step walkthrough. I wouldn't follow it the whole way, but it might help while getting started: http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/667257-dark-souls-prepare-to-die-edition/faqs/63351
I would seriously recommend avoiding both of those. Playing Dark Souls with a walkthrough defeats half the purpose of playing the game, which is to explore and find things on your own. You're much better of just asking people here for hints and tips when you get stuck or have a question about the mechanics, so you get just the specific piece of information you need rather that a step-by-step guide to never exploring Dark Souls at all.
I hadn't read too much of that guide to avoid spoilers, just the Asylum bit because I got stuck at one point (I never saw the hole in the wall from the ball). I'm playing through the Asylum with the different classes to get a feel for different weapons and style of combat. How much of a problem is the limit on spells? The sorcerer only gets 30 spells which I'm assuming you burn through pretty fast, and resting respawns everything you've just killed ofcourse. I also find I use my shield all the time to block, I prefer it over trying to dodge/jump back since I can't always pull that off reliably. Is that play style viable later on? The cleric spell seemed useless to me because it takes too long to cast to use in combat, and I wasn't too keen on the bow. I'm going to mess a bit with the Knight next, see how moving slower effects the game.
The way it works is that you have a certain number of "slots," which is determined by your attunement stat. You basically equip spells in those slots (this is the "attune magic" option at the bonfire), and the number of casts you get is specific to each spell. So Soul Arrow (the one you start with) gets 30 casts, which is actually a lot, and generally you get fewer casts as spells get more powerful, which you make up for by raising your attunment and getting more slots. Sure. The healing spells aren't that great. They're basically useful in between fights to let you not go through your estus (the healing potions) as fast. Nowhere near as good as offensive spells.
Dan Lawrence: the phase you are in right now is probably the hardest hump to overcome in the game. Other parts are, strictly speaking, more challenging in a technical sense, but the difference between approaching the game with a narrow toolkit and a broader one is huge. 1. Dealing with the armored boar is important: the game rewards you for it with a good shot at a decent piece of armor dropping as well as with the fact that boars are dead forever in that playthrough once you kill them. These mid-boss creatures, like the knights, are almost always avoidable but generally worth planning a couple of engagements to kill them. The boar gives you an upstairs area to spend dozens of arrows shooting at him, or you can lure him to the fire by the stairs and retreat back as he comes at you, and if you're really quick you can just drop off the top into that hole that's next to him and move on to the next section. It's a fine art to luring him to the fire without taking damage or dying, but what you mainly want to develop is a routine for clearing the Undead Parishioners efficiently. 2. So the superficial main objective leads to this primary thing, which is that undead parish basic enemies are too difficult right now. There are two main things you can do to get around this: one, learn to kick/backstab. Kick is forward and r1 at the same time (if you do a flip backwards that's a function of some curved weapons and we can talk about that alt attack). It's tricky to master at first but it does wonders for dropping shields and giving you a stagger window to attack through. There is a guide to backstabbing in the OP of the main Dark Souls thread: I strongly recommend looking at that as it gives you an idea of how right now you can basically one-shot most enemies, which is essential to the process of efficiently clearing them. Second, you can upgrade your gear. Raising your stats helps, but you are just short of the first really handy blacksmith because he both sells the basic upgrade material and upgrades your gear. Getting your melee weapon and shield upgraded is first priority, but you'll see that getting your armor pieces to +3 also delivers tremendous returns in terms of broadening your margin of error. 3. What I'm getting at is that if the zombie killing feels "solved" but is a pain in your ass, then it's not solved. The difference between how I solved this problem at 5 hours in, 100 hours in, and a 1000 hours in is substantial, and not linear progress, either. The main thing is that now it involves almost no waiting for enemies to react or relying on careful wearing down or anything like that: at this point regardless of the character I have ways of controlling the tempo of combat with low-level enemies from start to finish and getting through them is no different from walking down a hallway. 4. Finally, when it comes to shooting arrows at dragon tails and the like, the answer is "are you willing to do the <safe thing in question> or do you not care to"? I have only ever gotten the sword in question once or twice, and mainly for the all weapons achievement because while it is powerful it's not my style and I find that process tedious. Lot of different ways to get a boost in damage and I prefer almost all of the others. In contrast I am religious about using the master key to get the dragon crest shield out of the valley of the drakes as early as I can, because I really value a light, decent stability shield that I can upgrade on a different track from the rest of my starting gear. But it's better if you say what you want to be able to do with your character and odds are good we can toss you some ideas about how others have done things like that.
When I started playing Dark Souls, I learned early on that the game wasn't going to provide me with sufficient feedback to easily answer your questions, Dan. Specifically, after I finished the intro dungeon and first arrived at Firelink Shrine, I wandered into the cemetery and started to fight the skeletons there. They broke apart & reformed over & over & over without any indication of whether they were immortal or if I was chipping away at their health. So... yeah. I pretty much looked everything up as I went along. It's possible to plow through the game without guides of any sort, but it takes way more patience than I have... and you'll end up dying repeatedly to things that are, effectively, unbeatable. (Well... they're not "unbeatable", per se. But you're supposed to go around them... or use a special kind of weapon, or.. something.)
While I'd never ever want to discourage anyone to discuss Dark Souls, I'd just like to explain that I completely agree that you shouldn't follow a walkthrough for Dark Souls - what you definitely CAN do is check up on an area that you think you've cleared and get an insight into the mindboggling vastness of the world of Dark Souls. Also the Dark Souls experience is a rather stressful experience in the beginning, I can absolutely claim that my ability to absorb the info provided in text form in the game was minimal - especially since I couldn't even understand how to access half of that info. So while I agree with the principle of your advice, I still believe that new players are more likely to be frustrated by the opaqueness of the game than they are by being "spoiled" of how to find the second Bonfire in the Catacombs after 20 deaths. So yes, don't follow walkthroughs, but don't hesitate to go online and check stuff out either.
Dodging in Dark Souls is surprisingly tricky. When enemies appear to be doing the same attack moves that you can do, (e.g. a sword thrust) it's natural for you to assume that they follow the same rules that you do. (e.g. your sword thrusts can't change direction mid-thrust; once you start thrusting, that's the direction you're going until your thrust ends.) However, that's often not the case. Enemy attacks are able to track you to a certain extent. So the hollow soldier's sword thrusts will magically swerve towards you if you dodge to the side. If you time the dodge correctly, he'll miss anyways, but it's kind of a pain in the ass to learn just how much each enemy can track you. Some track you like bloodhounds, and they're damn near impossible to dodge. Others don't track at all. Because of that, I *still* use my shield as my preferred damage-avoidance mechanism. There's nothing wrong with relying on your shield; it always works, whereas dodging is often iffy. Surprisingly enough, parrying is also a reliable method of avoiding damage once you get the hang of it. The problem is that it's pretty difficult to get the hang of it, and every time you fail a parry you're pretty much guaranteed to be hit. The bow is almost exclusively a sniper weapon in this game. You pretty much never use it once battle is engaged. But it comes in handy many many times when you want to pull just one enemy in a group of three, or if you want to take out an enemy before they're aware of you, and other situations like that.
I would suggest NOT looking up walkthroughs of specific areas, or how to get specific items, or any of that stuff. Rely on orange messages for clues on what's coming up and approaches to tackle them. And leave some of your own for others. Watching videos on some of the more obscure moves you can do is a good thing, though, I think. I appreciated the videos on backstabs and ripostes that I watched soon after starting, and hearing about roll-attacks and backstep-attacks and sprint-attacks. But I regretted it every time I looked something up on a wiki, and accidentally learned something I wished I hadn't.
Took the plunge about an hour ago. Started out so well—crushed the Asylum Demon with a bit of the ol' roll 'n' axe maneuver. Then I got airlifted out of the tutorial, ran down a stairway and got torn apart by like six skeletons. Went back there a few times to grab some of the loot I could see amongst the graves (Caduceus Round Shield the only useful thing), then hightailed it back up one of the other paths. Kicked some guys off a cliff, killed some weird pig thing, and found myself in the Undead Burg. Tooled around there a bit until a dragon scared the bejeesus out of me and then I got ripped up by a sniper and had to call it a day so I can finish wrapping gifts and then get to the airport. Didn't see a bonfire in the Burg yet, which is mildly annoying, as I keep having to kick those guys off cliffs. Enjoying it so far, even if I don't have much of a clue about what's going on.
When you get to that sniper's position you should be able to see a bonfire within spitting distance. Just take your time, lure the opponents out of sniping line of sight, and you'll get there in no time.
The easiest and quickest way to take out the boar is to use the alluring skulls conveniently located on the bridge just above the boar. Just throw them into the fire by the bridge (i.e. right below where you found the skulls) and the boar will kill himself trying to attack them.
Well, I think I'm going in a fruitful direction. Up some stairs from Firelink Shrine seems to take me to a small citadel or a town or something. The stuff in there is killable, though I still take a fair bit of damage.
No. It is frozen where you left it, apart from status effects (both beneficial and negative) and things related to unique enemy drops that aren't really important right now. Just know that if you meant to kill something in-game and needed to pick up their drop, re-load in place and it will be nearby.
Gotcha, thanks. I did manage to find a shield upgrade. I also tried a suicide run into the graveyard and got a Zweihander, though my strength is far too low to use it. So far I'm really enjoying the game; while it's definitely tough so far it's tough in a fair way; when I die I can point at something I did wrong (usually being a bit reckless with my pulls).
I kept getting kicked out of the game last night because my FPS wasn't good enough for online play, even though I was hollow :( I've disabled/lowered all the settings that I could is DSfix, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I'll be getting some upgrades for my PC next month so I shouldn't have any problems any more, but for now is there any way to make the game start in offline mode?
if you don't log in in GFWL it should be offline, savegames are not compatible between modes i believe.
Thanks, I'll try that. The game does seem to save before kicking me out, so not that much is lost luckily. So I'm playing around with a Cleric at the moment. I've raised my Intelligence to 10 and My Attunement to 12, then bought the Soul Arrow spell and a staff from the blacksmith down the stairs from the elevator. I also bought some chain armor from the merchant in Undead Burg, although I'm not too sure about it since it makes me slower. So far I'm enjoying this character a lot, between melee and ranged spells I have plenty of options to dispose of the easier enemies, I have heals for in between battles if I do get injured, my shield takes plenty of damage and unless I do something stupid I'm surviving pretty well. I'm not really sure how to raise my stats next, I suppose it will depend on whether I go for a faith or an intelligence build. For now I'm just sticking with some endurance and some vitality for survivability.
Those sound like good choices. You really can't go wrong with just paying attention to the gear you want to use and the spells you want to cast and then filling in end and vit in between, for a first playthrough. You can always start another more optimized character and get it quickly to your current level of progress if you decide you want to specialize at a lower soul level, but it's my generalist characters that went deep into NG+s.
There's not really anything wrong with just taking from all the columns. If you like using heal spells and also sorceries, you can certainly use both if you want... and there are even some special weapons in the game that you can only use with moderately high strength, dex, int, and faith, so that's certainly an intended option. One thing I'd mention though if you want to specialize in one or the other of those is that there are offensive miracles but there aren't any healing sorceries. I tend to lean away from miracles myself, but if you want to supplement your melee combat with some ranged spells the offensive miracles are certainly good for that.
Well, I got a few upgrades. I'm not sure if I'm making the appropriate tradeoffs or not; but we'll see. Currently I'm wearing a Hollow Soldier helm that dropped as loot, and some chainmail armor I purchased. I also have a battle axe that I got as a drop; I was using the Winged Spear but this seems to be better (though not as much range on the attack). I kind of have the early part of the Undead Burg down, but the Taurus Demon is giving me trouble. I think it's because I don't have his timing down; I tend to get panicky and start rolling randomly every time he twitches!
Remember the plunge attack you used to kill the demon in the tutorial area? There's a way to use it on this demon too!
Yeah, I caught that. It takes a nice chunk out of him, but I haven't been able to get him far enough away from the ladder for another plunge; he always knocks me off of it. Which brings me to another point: I almost feel as if my stamina is too low. Is there a way to raise that? Or maybe my current equipment is too heavy?
END(urance) will increase your stamina. What you're wearing will affect your regeneration rate, too, though at this point I don't think that would be an issue. Why you do want to pay attention to is your encumbrance. If it is >50% (that is equipment weight / total carry weight) then you're in for trouble. You pretty much want that below 50% not matter what. If you get it below 25% you will get better rolling action, faster stamina regen and faster run. Try them both!
Basically at the point you're at, you can usually trade some marginal improvement in damage resistance for much improved mobility by cutting a piece or two until you get to 25%. Boosting END as CP suggested helps a great deal in opening your tactical options, or Master Keying down to Havel (this is where summoning someone for the Taurus demon makes more sense) at the base of the Taurus tower for his +50% equip weight boost ring becomes invaluable. It's actually better to realize this now as killing Havel is rather challenging early on without a summon, and you can't summon in that area once you kill the Taurus demon.
Woo I killed the Taurus Demon! It wasn't even all that difficult once I got the hang of his timing. He also dropped the Demon's Great Axe, which I gather is pretty rare. Should I try statting myself out to equip it?
Awesome! Mine dropped nothing when I killed him. I had an easier time with him then you did since I killed him from a range with magic. I did have to drop from the tower twice to get my initial attack off, since the first time I missed him with my dive attack and fell flat on my face next to him. Not exactly elegant...
