It's another one of those games where you actually have to READ THE MANUAL.
Oh, and WELCOME TO DIE!
Oh, and WELCOME TO DIE!
Demon's Souls... Why did it get good reviews?
- Thread starter McNinja
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It's more the fact the first time I versed Tower, I had no idea how to kill him, or even get close to him before he smacked me twice and I died.demoman_chaos said:
-Tabs<3-
The reason why your character has stamina when he/she rolls? Because you're carrying a shitload of weapons and gear and jogging/sprinting everywhere you go.
Play defensively and your life will be easier.
The boss battles are hard because they're boss battles.
Play defensively and your life will be easier.
The boss battles are hard because they're boss battles.
I thought it was brilliant because it's so difficult but almost completely fair at the same time. You can probably run most of that game blind and not die, you just need to be cautious. But for the times you do die you feel as though you can definitely learn from the experience and do better the next time.
In contrast to that, most games that are this difficult take a huge amount of luck.
In contrast to that, most games that are this difficult take a huge amount of luck.
I'm picturing Demon's Souls as developed by the OP...
There's no stamina bar, so you can swing your weapon and roll around indefinitely. There's no reason to learn proper timing or combat sequences, and there's no feeling of character progression because you don't get to expand your stamina bar with souls.
There's an excess of exposition. Every person you run into talks for two minutes about exactly what's going on in the world. Every aspect of the storyline, from setting to enemies to NPCs, is pain-stakingly laid out in expansive text and voice over.
You rarely die. In the event that you do expire, the game lets you start right over at the spot of your death in exchange for a gold star. Gold stars are plentiful throughout all levels as well as purchaseable for souls at every vendor.
The dreary, depressing graphics are no more. Now it's a lush, flashy, pretty game world with colorful characters and personalities. Everything feels alive.
Sounds like the dumbest fucking game ever, and I'm pretty sure you can already buy it in 10 flavors on any given platform. Go buy one of those and let us have our dreary, punishing, unique action rpg. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from the shit that keeps getting rereleased nonstop across this stagnant, boring industry.
There's no stamina bar, so you can swing your weapon and roll around indefinitely. There's no reason to learn proper timing or combat sequences, and there's no feeling of character progression because you don't get to expand your stamina bar with souls.
There's an excess of exposition. Every person you run into talks for two minutes about exactly what's going on in the world. Every aspect of the storyline, from setting to enemies to NPCs, is pain-stakingly laid out in expansive text and voice over.
You rarely die. In the event that you do expire, the game lets you start right over at the spot of your death in exchange for a gold star. Gold stars are plentiful throughout all levels as well as purchaseable for souls at every vendor.
The dreary, depressing graphics are no more. Now it's a lush, flashy, pretty game world with colorful characters and personalities. Everything feels alive.
Sounds like the dumbest fucking game ever, and I'm pretty sure you can already buy it in 10 flavors on any given platform. Go buy one of those and let us have our dreary, punishing, unique action rpg. It's far from perfect, but it's also far from the shit that keeps getting rereleased nonstop across this stagnant, boring industry.
Congratulations. You?re not a masochist.
I?ve never played it myself but have you looked in the manual? It might just explain some things in there. As for stamina, I?m sure it?s a matter of management and making the moves really count.
Personally I don?t know if I would like this game myself, I dislike having to do large section over and over if I die.
I?ve never played it myself but have you looked in the manual? It might just explain some things in there. As for stamina, I?m sure it?s a matter of management and making the moves really count.
Personally I don?t know if I would like this game myself, I dislike having to do large section over and over if I die.
I loves me some demons souls, but i havent played it for a while, i think everyone else summed up the point nicely, you just need to get better at the game
My only complaint is the pause system, i know why its in there and its an interesting mechanic that teaches you to stay on your feet, but usually in games i pause them for a bit and go get something to eat. However this is my fault not the games
My only complaint is the pause system, i know why its in there and its an interesting mechanic that teaches you to stay on your feet, but usually in games i pause them for a bit and go get something to eat. However this is my fault not the games
Demon's Souls is back to oldsk00l in pretty much everyway. The punishment, the story (which you have to look for yourself) and the explanation. You want to know things and how they work?
Talk to friends. Read the manual.
The game isn't hard though. It's smart and fair. Every confrontation you lose is because you made a mistake. Not because you are simply outnumbered or that they have an insane amount of HP. That's mostly the reasons it got such good reviews. The difficulty was fair and you never felt like you were cheated when you died. It wasn't the camera that killed you or unfair balance. It was your stupid decisions that killed you.
The downside of what I just said is that the game becomes way too easy once you know everything about it. Since you know all the patterns and ambushes by heart.
Play through it some more and don't give up. If you die, sit down for a second and think about what killed you and what you could do differently.
EDIT: about the Staminabar. It was quite possibly the best thing in the game because it limits your options. You can't roll spam or just spam the attack button. Every move you make has to be strategically chosen or you die a lot.
The artstyle personally is amazing since it's a realistic Western Styled RPG which is pretty rare these days and I enjoyed it.
About the dying having you redo everything, well, you haven't played much old games I reckon? Back in the day you couldn't even save which was somewhat of a good thing. Why? Because it made you afraid to die. Dying ment losing a LOT of playtime which made some battles all that more exciting and scary. These days you simply reload a checkpoint that was 1 second ago.
That's why they did that.
Talk to friends. Read the manual.
The game isn't hard though. It's smart and fair. Every confrontation you lose is because you made a mistake. Not because you are simply outnumbered or that they have an insane amount of HP. That's mostly the reasons it got such good reviews. The difficulty was fair and you never felt like you were cheated when you died. It wasn't the camera that killed you or unfair balance. It was your stupid decisions that killed you.
The downside of what I just said is that the game becomes way too easy once you know everything about it. Since you know all the patterns and ambushes by heart.
Play through it some more and don't give up. If you die, sit down for a second and think about what killed you and what you could do differently.
EDIT: about the Staminabar. It was quite possibly the best thing in the game because it limits your options. You can't roll spam or just spam the attack button. Every move you make has to be strategically chosen or you die a lot.
The artstyle personally is amazing since it's a realistic Western Styled RPG which is pretty rare these days and I enjoyed it.
About the dying having you redo everything, well, you haven't played much old games I reckon? Back in the day you couldn't even save which was somewhat of a good thing. Why? Because it made you afraid to die. Dying ment losing a LOT of playtime which made some battles all that more exciting and scary. These days you simply reload a checkpoint that was 1 second ago.
That's why they did that.
Looks like the majority of your problems are lack of skill and lack of reading ability. About Graphics, they don't matter, one of my favorite games is Dwarf Fortress and it's done in ASCII.
Stamina, makes bloody sense to me. Yeah your character is wearing armor, know how hard it is to roll around in full plate? Try doing that a few times and figure out if your "real life ability to roll without tiring" takes a bloody hit.
It's people like you whom make good games bad. Good games give a challenge, they make you think, they make you have to fight to finish them so you can feel you've acomplished something other than sit on your ass for a good 10-20 hours staring at the TV and twiddling your thumbs.
I hate games these days, I really do, not because they don't look pretty, don't tell a good story, or aren't inventive. They're fucking jokes compared to difficulty! I used to play WoW before they mucked it all up after the first expansion and made it so everyone and their fucking grandmother could bloody get top tier gear just by doing the same bullshit pull and whack crap.
You sir, aren't playing a bad game. You're just a damn poor player. I see it all the time these days. I watch let's plays because I don't think a game is worth buying, I just wanna see the story, but the people that do the majority of them are so bloody stupid that they can't hear the game telling them what to do, they can't see the FUCKING FLASHING THING INFRONT OF THEM, or they fail at simple gravity based puzzles(which are everywhere in this physics based failure steam of games we have today.)
Play the game, enjoy it for the time it gives you from living a real life, and go stick your damn thumb up your ass the next time you think an added difficulty piece ruins a game because it doesn't!
Stamina, makes bloody sense to me. Yeah your character is wearing armor, know how hard it is to roll around in full plate? Try doing that a few times and figure out if your "real life ability to roll without tiring" takes a bloody hit.
It's people like you whom make good games bad. Good games give a challenge, they make you think, they make you have to fight to finish them so you can feel you've acomplished something other than sit on your ass for a good 10-20 hours staring at the TV and twiddling your thumbs.
I hate games these days, I really do, not because they don't look pretty, don't tell a good story, or aren't inventive. They're fucking jokes compared to difficulty! I used to play WoW before they mucked it all up after the first expansion and made it so everyone and their fucking grandmother could bloody get top tier gear just by doing the same bullshit pull and whack crap.
You sir, aren't playing a bad game. You're just a damn poor player. I see it all the time these days. I watch let's plays because I don't think a game is worth buying, I just wanna see the story, but the people that do the majority of them are so bloody stupid that they can't hear the game telling them what to do, they can't see the FUCKING FLASHING THING INFRONT OF THEM, or they fail at simple gravity based puzzles(which are everywhere in this physics based failure steam of games we have today.)
Play the game, enjoy it for the time it gives you from living a real life, and go stick your damn thumb up your ass the next time you think an added difficulty piece ruins a game because it doesn't!
I have to say I completely agree with Mcninja's thoughts on it being very very outdated for a 2009 game, and frankly I don't know why it recieved best rpg and best game of the year. Character creation is a big thing to me so this may be biased but I restarted my character 3 times to see if there was some class that started out better than the others. Rogue, Barbarian and Hunter. They all were rather the same thing at the start, The rogue had a sword, the Barbarian had a club, and the Hunter has an Axe and a bow which is rather off and rather makes choosing a character one sided, do I want a character with one weapon or two. I got the farthest with the Hunter but I ran out of arrows and died.
Frankly to make this game 1000 times better is just a save mechanic, not one of those oh I have to get to certain places and do some random huplah to gain a save point just go into the menu and save, hell a pause function would help. And I don't really give two shits for anybody who says "Thats what makes it hard and unique" its annoying and nothing else. This is not a game, this is a life sucking contraption. You can't pause the game to go take a piss or you die, you can't save the game to continue your progress later if you need to take care of something, and your starting character recommendation is long range or you die alot I haven't tried the mage class yet but frankly melee classes are looking incredibly poor choices.
This game in my opinion is unfinished, someone needs to brake open their game modding tools and add a save mechanic and/or a pause mechanic as a patch for this God of War 1 2 and 3 were fun and hard but they had save points they were unique and their combat mechanics were incredible and although the choices in the third game were just different sets of chained weapons (I used the Lion fists ) they still tried to make it hard by making the enemies hard. I will quote Thomas Bertam "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" in this case if everybody else is doing something and they have incredibly successful games go with the crowd. If I could compare God of War series to Demon Souls and I can I would compare them to two different women. The God of War series is an incredibly attractive woman, though has had a bad past and has trust issues the more you work at getting her to know and like you will get you the end result and a great one at that. Demon Souls is a slightly attractive woman in shiny skimpy clothes, who is abrasive and constant amnesia attacks, you can try everything you can think of to get her to like you and some things work out great but the next day she forgets and your back to square one.
Frankly to make this game 1000 times better is just a save mechanic, not one of those oh I have to get to certain places and do some random huplah to gain a save point just go into the menu and save, hell a pause function would help. And I don't really give two shits for anybody who says "Thats what makes it hard and unique" its annoying and nothing else. This is not a game, this is a life sucking contraption. You can't pause the game to go take a piss or you die, you can't save the game to continue your progress later if you need to take care of something, and your starting character recommendation is long range or you die alot I haven't tried the mage class yet but frankly melee classes are looking incredibly poor choices.
This game in my opinion is unfinished, someone needs to brake open their game modding tools and add a save mechanic and/or a pause mechanic as a patch for this God of War 1 2 and 3 were fun and hard but they had save points they were unique and their combat mechanics were incredible and although the choices in the third game were just different sets of chained weapons (I used the Lion fists ) they still tried to make it hard by making the enemies hard. I will quote Thomas Bertam "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" in this case if everybody else is doing something and they have incredibly successful games go with the crowd. If I could compare God of War series to Demon Souls and I can I would compare them to two different women. The God of War series is an incredibly attractive woman, though has had a bad past and has trust issues the more you work at getting her to know and like you will get you the end result and a great one at that. Demon Souls is a slightly attractive woman in shiny skimpy clothes, who is abrasive and constant amnesia attacks, you can try everything you can think of to get her to like you and some things work out great but the next day she forgets and your back to square one.
The problem is simple: Almost every game now has been engineered to keep you playing and avoid frustration; which is good.
You see articles on here a lot about how important a good and natural tutorial is, how less punishing death mechanics keeps players involved and reduces frustration, how story telling in games has changed over the years.
All these design choices are to make gaming more enjoyable, immediately interesting and friendly to people without years of gaming behind them. That's pretty sensible if you are making a product and need to hit a broad market and all of them are important to make the experience of gaming pleasant fun.
But here's the thing, believe it or not, not everyone is in gaming for a pleasant experience.
Some seek exploration - gaming offers access to a world of someone else's imagining; there is no greater exploration than wandering around the product of someone's mind, anything could be there.
Some seek to learn new things - simulation and role-playing allow them them to experience an aspect of the world that otherwise might only be a concept.
Some seek competition - for them there Starcraft, CoD and their ilk; pitting player against player in a stripped down game with clear rules.
And some seek only challenge - for them there is Demon's souls.
The sad thing is that players after purely challenge have been out of luck since the late nineties when gaming companies serving niche markets got chewed up. The most challenging games in recent years have been small indie offerings and competitive games.
Demons souls is not 'old skool' as many have said, it just requires you to pay attention and work within the limitations defined for you.
The game got good reviews because it tells you everything you need to know and presents an interesting and reasonable challenge that gradually gets harder. You need to pay attention and test your boundries to beat the game and you get punished for not doing so. It is hard for being hard's sake but, even though it precludes a lot of people from playing, doing so isn't a problem, merely a design choice that many people will appreciate.
Maybe it's not for you (nor I really, I am an exploring\learning type player), or maybe you should come back when you really want a challenge.
Tl;dr - get back to the top of the post you lazy reprobates.
You see articles on here a lot about how important a good and natural tutorial is, how less punishing death mechanics keeps players involved and reduces frustration, how story telling in games has changed over the years.
All these design choices are to make gaming more enjoyable, immediately interesting and friendly to people without years of gaming behind them. That's pretty sensible if you are making a product and need to hit a broad market and all of them are important to make the experience of gaming pleasant fun.
But here's the thing, believe it or not, not everyone is in gaming for a pleasant experience.
Some seek exploration - gaming offers access to a world of someone else's imagining; there is no greater exploration than wandering around the product of someone's mind, anything could be there.
Some seek to learn new things - simulation and role-playing allow them them to experience an aspect of the world that otherwise might only be a concept.
Some seek competition - for them there Starcraft, CoD and their ilk; pitting player against player in a stripped down game with clear rules.
And some seek only challenge - for them there is Demon's souls.
The sad thing is that players after purely challenge have been out of luck since the late nineties when gaming companies serving niche markets got chewed up. The most challenging games in recent years have been small indie offerings and competitive games.
Demons souls is not 'old skool' as many have said, it just requires you to pay attention and work within the limitations defined for you.
The game got good reviews because it tells you everything you need to know and presents an interesting and reasonable challenge that gradually gets harder. You need to pay attention and test your boundries to beat the game and you get punished for not doing so. It is hard for being hard's sake but, even though it precludes a lot of people from playing, doing so isn't a problem, merely a design choice that many people will appreciate.
Maybe it's not for you (nor I really, I am an exploring\learning type player), or maybe you should come back when you really want a challenge.
Tl;dr - get back to the top of the post you lazy reprobates.
I really agree with most of the posts praising the game in this thread, I absolutely love it as well, it's been in my top 3 ever since I figured the game out. I had problems with it in the beginning as well and yes, it can be frustrating at time when you die and lose 100k souls(as someone further up said) and then dying again just before you get to your bloodstain, losing those souls for good. Now, however, as I said it's one of my favourite games I think I've beaten it 4 or 5 times so far. It's also the only game I've gotten platinum trophy on, that's how much I adore the game.
While the story is not amazing or anything, it's solid if you care to look around. It's quite sad at time, especially Maiden Astraea in Valley of Defilement. Speaking of which, I think that's my pick for most frustrating level due to the swamp and the no dodging except on islands itself. I lost count of how many times I died there.
If you listen to anything I say, I would tell you to not give up and keep on trying. I don't remember how good the manual is for the US version, but if you're in need of help or instructions, take a look here: http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/ . It's an awesome wiki site for the game, has all the information the need. It's so good in fact, that when the game was released in Europe, the guys behind that wiki was asked to do the manual.
Final words, it's a fantastic game if you give it a chance. Dodging and rolling is everything, even on boss fights.
While the story is not amazing or anything, it's solid if you care to look around. It's quite sad at time, especially Maiden Astraea in Valley of Defilement. Speaking of which, I think that's my pick for most frustrating level due to the swamp and the no dodging except on islands itself. I lost count of how many times I died there.
If you listen to anything I say, I would tell you to not give up and keep on trying. I don't remember how good the manual is for the US version, but if you're in need of help or instructions, take a look here: http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/ . It's an awesome wiki site for the game, has all the information the need. It's so good in fact, that when the game was released in Europe, the guys behind that wiki was asked to do the manual.
Final words, it's a fantastic game if you give it a chance. Dodging and rolling is everything, even on boss fights.
No joke, the stamina bar makes you have to think before you charge in like an idiot and wind up dead.delta4062 said:
Also, your use of the word contrived is.......contrived.
well if you didnt like this steer compleatly clear of resonance of fate.
its not that bad of a game, iv played it a few times, its hard as hell, but manageable, i dont play it because i dont have that much time to invest into playing it, besides it got good reviews, but every single review warned about the sheer difficulty, so why are you so surprised?
its not that bad of a game, iv played it a few times, its hard as hell, but manageable, i dont play it because i dont have that much time to invest into playing it, besides it got good reviews, but every single review warned about the sheer difficulty, so why are you so surprised?
Last I checked, Demon Souls was made hard on purpose. It forces the player to work to reach where they died last and get past it. That said, if you don't like it, then fine. A lot of people do enjoy it, but I suppose you're one of those folks who just doesn't and you have your reasons.
I love the game, and once you really learn it.. the game doesnt even get hard until the NG+ (2nd playthrough)
Stamina would be everything in real life too.. cant run or keep up? then you die.
Honestly, you can use cloth for the first 2 playthroughs. This will allow you to have a really high stats so you can equip the heavier gear, weapons, shields and still be able to roll and tumble out of the way.
Stamina would be everything in real life too.. cant run or keep up? then you die.
Honestly, you can use cloth for the first 2 playthroughs. This will allow you to have a really high stats so you can equip the heavier gear, weapons, shields and still be able to roll and tumble out of the way.