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e: The gently caress, this is not the Dark Souls 3 thread. Ignore please.
Paul Zuvella fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Apr 21, 2016 |
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Apr 21, 2016 15:48
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Crazy Achmed posted:
Hah, just the opposite, seeing that LP sold that game to me and a bunch of my friends through me, watching the wonder unfold before me sold me on a game that the sort of "this game is for REAL GAMERS ONLY NERD!!" reputation would have otherwise put me off of, and me and every one of my friends I sold it on considers it a greatest-of-all-time. So yeah, thanks for sharing with us Vicas 
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Apr 21, 2016 17:47
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Speedball posted:You find exactly zero hollows in Anor Londo, so I guess the Iron Golem and all the traps were meant to separate the wheat from the chaff; only a very strong Undead with their wits about them can make it through. Still doesn't exactly explain where the snake guys came from... Andre outright tells you that Sen's is an "old proving ground built by the ancient gods." An interesting question is just how old it is. Andre mentions gods in plural. Does he mean the original Lords, or the inhabitants of Anor Londo? If he means the original lords, you seemingly only have two out of four included in Sen's. Seath's snakemen are the guards, and they use lightning like Gwyn (even though its mechanically magic damage). If you want to argue that Gravelord Nito is a giant, that would account for the giants. Where's the Witch of Izalith? There's only firebombs in Sen's. In the DLC, the item description of the purple coward's crystal you get when entering the battle of stoicism says that victory in the arena once led to Anor Londo. Oolacile is described as a gentle, sorcery-focused place, so it's odd that they would have a huge coliseum. Presumably the gods/lords always had a penchant for martial might, and the Oolacile arena functioned as a Sen's of its time: if you were powerful enough, you could ascend to the city of the gods. Perhaps back then it featured competitions between regular humans, not cursed undead. Sen's might have been built after the events of the DLC, and after the Witch of Izalith tried to duplicate the first flame with bad results, and ended up in her current state. The curse of undeath might have become known, so the fortress is filled with traps and intentionally built as a gauntlet. There are cages for "hapless adventurers" who are undead but not quite powerful enough to overcome the fortress, so that they can be sent up presumably to become Seath's experiments. Others might just give up/become hollow facing it. As for the sealed gateway behind the Iron Golem, it probably was the physical entrance to the city that was closed to create the new challenge. I've no idea how do the batwing demons tie into everything, aside from being a Demon's Souls callback.
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Apr 21, 2016 19:42
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The timeline stuff is kinda murky, but the word "god" almost exclusively refers to Gwyn and his family/species in this game. The owners of the Great Souls are Lords, and while their powers are god-like, they don't tend to get the title, rather getting things like Witch of Izalith and First of the Dead We're getting ahead of ourselves again but it's worth noting that Seath and the Four Kings are not Lords. They just have pieces of Gwyn's soul
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Apr 21, 2016 19:46
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Vicas posted:The timeline stuff is kinda murky, but the word "god" almost exclusively refers to Gwyn and his family/species in this game. Other gods (aside from Gwyn's family) mentioned are Velka, Flann, Fina, Old Man McLoyf, and the nameless blacksmith deity responsible for titanite slabs/demons.
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Apr 22, 2016 17:59
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Paracelsus posted:Other gods (aside from Gwyn's family) mentioned are Velka, Flann, Fina, Old Man McLoyf, and the nameless blacksmith deity responsible for titanite slabs/demons. I'm counting them as being within Gwyn's species, which is largely an assumption, but the point here being that City of the Gods and other "Gods" related terms specifically do not refer to Nito or the Witch of Izalith
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Apr 22, 2016 18:31
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Being a God or a Lord always seemed like a colloquial title to me. I don't think, when you really get down to it, there's as much difference between Gwyn's descendants and humanity as he would like to believe.
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Apr 23, 2016 06:39
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ManlyGrunting posted:Hah, just the opposite, seeing that LP sold that game to me and a bunch of my friends through me, watching the wonder unfold before me sold me on a game that the sort of "this game is for REAL GAMERS ONLY NERD!!" reputation would have otherwise put me off of, and me and every one of my friends I sold it on considers it a greatest-of-all-time. I've played the other Souls games (except DS3) since then, but none of them has pulled me in like Dark Souls 1 did. Bloodborne seems to be making a decent attempt at it, though.
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Apr 23, 2016 07:15
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I wonder if the huge tree in the Great Hollow is a remnant of the pre-Fire era where it was nothing but a bunch of fog, trees and stone dragons.
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Apr 23, 2016 08:12
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Now that we've found Big Hat Logan, it got me thinking to post about Magic users in the Souls games, but I'm not sure if Vicas plans to make or talk about one so I don't want to take away from that. I do think it's really interesting how the souls games have developed from one to another mechanically (note I have no idea about how things have changed with dark 3 because I'm pretending it doesn't exist until I can, some day, play it, so ty thread for not talking about it). The sword/shield combo has seen some refinement, like the codifying of poise and stability, but (I think?) has stayed fairly consistent from game to game, with small revisions to enhance the experience, and seems to be the way most people play the games. However, a lot of the side mechanics have changed quite a bit - from parry windows, dual wielding, etc, but I think some of the most significant changes have been seen with magic. Watching Geop's LP got me thinking to play Dark Souls myself, but I chose to make a character type I hadn't seen any of in his LP - a sorcerer. As a result, my first character in Dark 1 & Dark 2 were sorcerers, and it really coloured my experience with the games. In a way, I think, in any other game, these character types could seem a bit shallow or unfinished - most of the time I think people only play them as distractions or for additional gimmick playthroughs of a game they like, and I think they fit that role well - someone who is willing to play again, knows where to find the people to help them, isn't expecting a fully fleshed out, refined experience and is simply looking for a new challenge or some alternative dialogue & events, can have quite a good time. After all, there aren't any NPCs that won't talk to you if you don't have at least 15 strength. I have a lot of thoughts about it, but I'd also like to hear what other people have to say about magic et al in this game, although based on some posts earlier, I suspect that it can degenerate pretty quickly.
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Apr 24, 2016 15:50
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Feel free. I'll be buying most of the sorceries to read them and get logan to move on, but not really much otherwise. I have a lot of thoughts about how magic denotes socioeconomic class in Dark Souls but that isn't quite the same
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Apr 24, 2016 15:58
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Playing a sorcerer was my first successful ds1 run, it was a drawn out chore compared to the rest, in part due to it being the first time through most of the areas though and not just that magic is severely limited. In a way I kinda like that you're forced to make strategic choices about when and who to shoot but often this meant me saving all my spells for the bosses and plinking my way through mobs with whatever lovely weapons I could use with my awful stats and taking forever to get anywhere. It does make some boss fights a hell of a lot easier when you don't need to get that close to them though. But given the breadth and variety of weapons available even in the early game, the magic system does seem pretty lame in comparison.
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Apr 24, 2016 16:54
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Playing a full sorcerer is a high road to a bad time - playing a sorcerer hybrid that later on focuses more strongly once you gain access to homing soulmass/crystal soulmass is quite good though and crystal soul spear can absolutely trivialise some of the lategame bosses if you also have high int.
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Apr 24, 2016 17:44
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The magic system in ds1 is ridiculously overpowered... if you know where to get the items and spells that make it so. There are four sources of multiplicative scaling buffs for magic, compared to two for weapon damage. This lets you chump most bosses with ease, and lets you kill most trash mobs with one cast of greater soul arrow.
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Apr 24, 2016 17:50
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pun pundit posted:The magic system in ds1 is ridiculously overpowered... if you know where to get the items and spells that make it so. Would you say it's arcane knowledge? 
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Apr 24, 2016 17:59
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Yeah, I kinda agree. I didn't go into 1 completely blind, though for 2 I did, but, having never seen anyone actually use sorcery, it took me a while to get the hang of how to play. Being completely blind changes the way you operate as an offensive magic user quite a lot compared to a sword and shield character. I distinctly remember having pretty much the same experience - where I was expecting the bosses to be the main roadblocks, it was really more the number of basic opponents sapping away at my spell uses, especially due to the aiming mechanics & their dodging out of the way. In terms of expanding your power as you level, well, firstly, you absolutely depend on NPCs - you rarely (if at all) find primary spells out in the wild, and are instead taught them by trainers, so, finding those NPCs is pretty important. In Dark, those NPCs are kinda out of the way, even if you find where they are; Griggs needs a key from a merchant you can completely miss, and Logan needs you to do some boulder related exploration, as well as finding a key in a place you have to perform that kinda sketchy jump to get to - in a vacuum, it'd actually be kinda hard to both find and then unlock these guys, and without them, well, it would be bad. Clerics by comparison, tend to have fewer offensive options wrt faith spells until later in the game, and start with the stats to spend a decent amount of time as melee fighters, with healing magic as a backup - they don't have the same dichotomy of which stat to choose. Plus, your first trainer is in fact just standing around in Firelink. However, as we've seen, Petrus may not be 100% on the level, so, much like the Sorcerer trainers, you need to pay attention to that whole story line to continue to train, so it is arguably as difficult a situation to navigate. Noting that I am deliberately unaware of anything they've done in Dark 3 - as the series has progressed, we've seen magic options of one game being refined, expanded and parted out into mechanically separate schools in the subsequent game, and given stats to support them. Demon's Souls had its fire magic mixed in with blue sorcerous magic - they were tied to a Magic stat for power, as well as Intelligence for both slots to store them, and a restorable blue energy pool with which to cast them - miracles had separate dedicated slots tied to faith, but shared the magic stat for power & if I'm reading right, Int's energy pool. In contrast, Dark 1 has Attunement, which is responsible for a shared pool of spell slots, each good for storing x casts of your Sorceries, Miracles or Pyromancies - this game's new 'school' of magic that contained fire spells, but not linked to stats at all. As a result, investing a few points into Attunement will net you some pyromancy, while investing heavily into multiple schools leaves you (somewhat) held back in power by the limited spell slots you can gain via Attunement's diminishing returns. Dark 2 repeated this, taking Dark 1's new school and having it require even heavier investment into all the magic stats, but also moved pyromancy away from being the swordboarder's secret weapon and codifying it as a more generalist form of magic with a lower barrier to entry, but still requiring some stat investment to use effectively. It did somewhat sadly retire the Muscle Wizard. The stats screen for magically minded weapons is also an area that's seen some development. If we looked at Vicas' divine morning star, we'd see information about its regular, magic, fire and lightning attack damages (if it had any of the latter), but, the effects like its divine and bleed effect are harder to gleen any solid information about. It probably says it has 300 of a red splat, and maybe some amount in the 100s of a white circle - that's kind of all the information you get about it, which kinda made it difficult to compare equipment. Then again this isn't abnormal for any of the game's equipment - Dark 2 was much more forthcoming with numbers to attach to 'auxillary' effects, giving solid numbers for pretty much all aspects, but I think it became massively overwhelming, and made many things feel generic, giving scaling to eg the fixed fire bonus effects of Dark's weapons. I dunno if they've managed to really figured this one out yet. Finally, there are the blacksmiths, and the embers hidden around Dark Souls' world. Refining your weapons in Dark Souls is obviously a key element, and still quite vital to success as a magic user - spells simply can't solve all of your problems (they're especially bad at solving problems that are dog shaped), so finding or enhancing a weapon to follow in your primary stat's footsteps helps a lot. It's also important because, your spells have a fixed # of uses, and in becoming more powerful, this value rapidly decreases - as you carry heavier and heavier spells to remain competitive with bosses, you lack the ordinance to shoot the 20+ enemies on the way there. There is a magic blacksmith available though, if you can find him, and much like Vamos, he is already in possession of an ember - one that can ascend your weapon to a magic weapon, if you can source the green titanite to do so. The ember that's most useful to you as a high int sorcerer is also one of the easiest by far to locate, though getting the materials to capitalise on it isn't very easy. However, getting all of this balanced is super hard, and while I don't think they really got it right with Dark Souls (if there even is a balanced solution), they took a good step forward. In Demon's, my understanding is that, magic became crazy overpowered, offering a much higher potential for damage than a regular build, and a much easier time as enemies sucked at dodging. In Dark, a fully enhanced magical or divine weapon with the supporting magic stat is pretty much spot-on level with an equivalent normal weapon with regular primary stats to match. The difference, of course, is that you still have all of that magic to go with it... and ultimately some of that magic is super effective on the vast majority of bosses. There is sort of a lack of depth to the equipment you use; the majority of catalysts and talismans beyond the starting set are gimmick based - your initial equipment is the best choice for you until very, very late in your characters development. There's no move sets or appearances to consider, and they can't be modified by a blacksmith at all. And additionally, for sorcery at least, there is a ring available from Griggs that offers a very large, something like 20%, boost in damage output for all your spells. As a result, you basically always want to be wearing this ring and it ends up feeling mandatory - which effectively limits your versatility as a lot of your situational equipment changes will come in the form of changing your rings around for eg fire defence etc - there are some specific items that are almost too good, which clash with all the regular items that you're already familiar with as being too good. There's a hat that offers similar numbers, as well as Power Within (I'm guessing the 4th multiplicative boost pun pundit mentioned is a specific DLC catalyst). This means that, the breadth of experience is too large, wth the least powerful sorcerer being too weak, and the most powerful sorcerer being too strong. The last thing I can think of is that, if you do find a particular spell is the exact right tool for a situation, acquiring sufficient copies of it can be difficult. If you want another 30 uses of Soul Arrow, you need someone to teach you another copy of Soul Arrow - the trainers will only teach you one instance of their own spells, with the most powerful spells only being available once per play through. Pretty much all of the above changed for Dark 2 (though not necessarily for the better) - The NPCs are easier to find as almost all of them are a stone's throw away from the main path. All the spell casting equipment could be enhanced & modified, with a variety offering damage in trade for cast times, scaling, and a balance of versatility in things they could cast or functionality as a weapon. There were no items that offered large boosts in damage to crowd you out of other rings or armour, but as a result it felt (to me) like there was very little magic focussed armour at all. Some trainers would, as you progressed through the game, be willing to teach you unlimited copies of their spells, and you had some options to obtain multiple copies of world dropped spells. Even enhancing weapons was toned back such that you couldn't just take any weapon and shine as brightly with it as a non magical user, but really this just left you with picking out weapons with a high affinity for your stat already, and enhancing them further, and with the DLC especially, there were a lot of options for this. At the same time, though, the trainers were spread across a large, branching world - if you went down the 'wrong' branch, you might not find your trainer for a very long time. Additional trainers were also eschewed, in favour of depositing many spells just out in the world to be found, or simply giving them to other merchants, so, it both gained usability and lost story depth there.
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Apr 24, 2016 19:08
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I really dig the Iron Golem's theme. It plays for the Stray Demon too, but it suits the Iron Golem fight tremendously better. As for the fight, much like Sen's Fortress itself, the methods by which it intends to gently caress you up could not be more obvious or daunting. It makes for a perfectly straightforward challenge that gets much harder if you're nervous, more satisfying if you're bold.
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Apr 25, 2016 01:12
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I played through Hyper Light Drifter and I upon finding any secrets I keep hearing your voice saying: "If you are paying attention..." You should let's play that one. On an early patch, before they made it easier.
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Apr 25, 2016 01:14
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No Gravitas posted:I played through Hyper Light Drifter and I upon finding any secrets I keep hearing your voice saying: "If you are paying attention..." I've played a few hours of Hyper Light Drifter and really liked it so far, though Dark Souls 3 and the new Hearthstone expansion coming out tomorrow have kinda put it on the backburner (and kinda also this LP, but I'll try to get a recording session done soonish )If you wanna see a playthrough of a somewhat similar, very atmospheric, very difficult game, I did do Titan Souls a year ago: Let's Play Titan Souls I'm still kinda getting my solo footing in those videos, but I think they turned out well overall. If I really like HLD maybe I'll do that one too sometime. Iiiiii dunno
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Apr 25, 2016 13:22
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Anor Londo was def my favourite areas of the game. It just felt so complete in every way. Except that one area. gently caress that one area. You know which one I'm talking about even without me giving a hint.
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Apr 26, 2016 00:16
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Playing a glass cannon sorcerer who knows exactly where everything is is ridiculously strong and will chump ~90% of the bosses in the game. Iron Golem will go down in three hits from long range, well before he can actually attack you.
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Apr 26, 2016 07:54
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This LP Is the only one so far that has made Dark Souls comprehensible for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the game.
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May 3, 2016 20:55
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Yeah, the LP's a bit slow right now because Dark Souls 3 came out. And Hearthstone got an expansion. And my company had a Rocket League Tournament. And Overwatch's Open Beta has been going on this week. And my sister is graduating college over the weekend But I promise I'll get back to it at some point
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May 4, 2016 13:47
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Vicas posted:Yeah, the LP's a bit slow right now because Dark Souls 3 came out. And Hearthstone got an expansion. And my company had a Rocket League Tournament. And Overwatch's Open Beta has been going on this week. And my sister is graduating college over the weekend Please do it's a great LP.
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May 4, 2016 21:31
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My group of friends started playing this game again and we're all running with different archetypes. I got the Faith build and it's actually hella fun if you can get the Lightning Spears early. This was also my first experience in sequence-breaking the gently caress out of the early game because everyone else was at Sen's and I needed to catch up fast. To make a long story short, I did everything out of order and got all the fun toys while I could still play with them, and things are good.
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May 8, 2016 08:16
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Vicas posted:Yeah, the LP's a bit slow right now because Dark Souls 3 came out. And Hearthstone got an expansion. And my company had a Rocket League Tournament. And Overwatch's Open Beta has been going on this week. And my sister is graduating college over the weekend send me your save file and i'll do the rest i promise not use any mods that make the game look like its made out of pizza
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May 8, 2016 10:04
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After bouncing off this game, going on to beat pre-Scholar 2, and coming back only to get stuck at the Capra.... Watching the Burg episode of this really helped me understand how to gather the information I needed for myself from the environment, enemies, descriptions, etc. I went back, after months gone, immediately cleared out Darkroot Garden (before watching that ep), and one-shot both the the Capra and the Moonlight. Ornstein and Smough were beasts, but I am now the proud owner of a Lordvessel. I have seen other Dark Souls related content, but yours really helped me understand the way that the game was communicating certain things... particularly the ways to overcome its obstacles.
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May 11, 2016 16:51
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Hey so I just noticed the post count on this thread is 666 and that almost makes me not want to post this, but lucky for you all: 35 - Anor Londo, At Last I did a session that'll be 2 more videos after this one, but I'll try to get away from overwatch and do more of these, because I do quite enjoy them. We're getting to some really interesting parts of the game, for both good and bad reasons, so I'm sure I'll have a lot to ramble about as we go on
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Jul 5, 2016 04:07
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Good to see you back Vicas!
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Jul 5, 2016 06:19
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My confusion about anor londo is always whether it was strictly the royal palace or a greater town, because if it's a town gwynn seems like an rear end in a top hat for leaving people in the shittier parts of lordran.
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Jul 5, 2016 06:33
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:My confusion about anor londo is always whether it was strictly the royal palace or a greater town, because if it's a town gwynn seems like an rear end in a top hat for leaving people in the shittier parts of lordran. Noble does lovely thing to the Peasantry. Film at 11.
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Jul 5, 2016 11:18
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Glad to see you back. This is a very chill LP, it draws attention to things I would've normally missed, and we only just reached the lore-loaded part. 
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Jul 5, 2016 11:30
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Saw this bumped up and decided to watch through all of it over the past few days. I'm enjoying the commentary and just seeing this game I haven't played in a few years being analyzed and more importantly enjoyed. I hope to see some more soon.
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Jul 10, 2016 02:03
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I've always liked the "exploiting geometry" feel of the paths in Anor Londo, because it makes it feel like you're really not supposed to be there. It's the home of the gods, built to godly proportions, and regular people just can't get past the door.
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Jul 10, 2016 07:27
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One thing that was always weird to me was how your character knows info on items that you pick up, I like to think they know all the information and not reading it means they just don't care about it just like a player who doesn't read it wouldn't.
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Jul 10, 2016 23:58
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Fabulousvillain posted:One thing that was always weird to me was how your character knows info on items that you pick up, I like to think they know all the information and not reading it means they just don't care about it just like a player who doesn't read it wouldn't. Perhaps all of the item descriptions are rumours and legends from the world, that your character is reminded of when seeing the item.
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Jul 11, 2016 00:18
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It'd be neat if at least some items worked like in Bastion: you only got superficial descriptions when you first picked them up, but could use them as basically dialogue options/conversation topics with NPCs to find out more about their thoughts about them and their role in their cultures. The different NPCs' takes on the same items could be very different, too. It might not work for a game that's light on dialogue by design, like Dark Souls, but it was really cool in Bastion itself.
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Jul 11, 2016 00:23
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Whoops, I didn't post this here after uploading it yesterday: 36 - Through The Rafters My next video is gonna be a short one because I edited a bunch of running back out. You know the part
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Jul 11, 2016 17:00
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I have seen a blind player find Gwyndolin before, but most people don't play Dark Souls like Kay does.
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Jul 13, 2016 00:01
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Yeah Vicas, the first thing I noticed about that statue were those two b... lack knights.
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Jul 13, 2016 01:17
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