I have a problem with Dark Souls

[Olas]

I started playing Dark Souls recently, and there's something about the game that bothers me: farming souls is too easy. I'm only a little ways into the game and already I've found several places you can effectively farm souls infinitely without any risk or challenge. I won't go into details but let's just say one of them involves a dragon and a bridge. The fact that enemies respawn every time you stop at a shrine is really the underlying problem because it turns them into an easily renewable resource.

I just don't understand what's to stop me from doing this non-stop for hours until I have a super leveled up character. Shouldn't becoming more powerful in a game require some sort of actual progress, or at least a challenge that requires real effort? I know that leveling up your character's stats isn't everything in Dark Souls, but it's not nothing either, and even upgrading your weapons and buying stuff requires souls.

And I know farming souls isn't mandatory and I can choose to not do it, but it seems to me a good game shouldn't be easy break at all, and I wonder how much I should be allowed to farm souls until I feel bad about it.

I feel I should mention here that I DO like Dark Souls a lot. I think it's probably one of the best games I've played in a while. It really reminds me of the days of old when games were actually hard, and the stories were minimalistic. I really just have this one issue with the game and I wonder how the rest of you feel about it.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

For one, the more you level the more souls it takes for you to level up again. You're farming souls on the bridge with the drake, which gets you something like 550 souls each time. When you need 10,000 souls just to level up once that means you need to go from the bonfire to the dragon and back 20 times just for a single level. After a while it just becomes incredibly inefficient and boring to keep farming like that. Sure, you can keep doing it if you really REALLY want, and nothing is going to stop you but what's the point since you're clearly not going to have fun doing it?

Second, stats in dark souls aren't really the be all end all of your character. You tend to just get stats high enough to use whatever equipment you want to use, and equipment upgrades are really what make the difference in this game, not your level. There's plenty of people who can beat dark souls at level 1 without too much trouble.

So yeah, farming doesn't really break the game. It's incredibly difficult to farm up to max level, and even players at max level aren't unstoppable (and still have less health than most of the bosses in the game).

Also, PvP really tends to keep people from farming to high levels. Most invasions in dark souls are done through the use of the red eye orbs, but using that item you can only invade people who are higher level than yourself. In that case if you're an invader in PvP it's actually best to keep yourself at a lower level to get more PvP opportunities. Therefore, what would be the point of spending hours farming souls if you don't want to level?

 

[ShinyCharizard]

Like Dirty Hipsters said, that method won't last for long. As you level up it takes increasingly more amounts of souls to do so again, to the point that it will take like 50,000+ souls just to go up one level.

Also levels aren't hugely important in Dark Souls. It's not like many RPGs where you can make your character crazily overpowered and just destroy everything. No matter what soul level you are, the game is still entirely dependant on skill. My character who is soul level 155 still gets killed in two hits by most bosses in the game.

You should avoid being too high of a level also. The higher your level, the harder it is to find co-op partners in my experience.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Ha! I've started playing Dark Souls as well (again, finally) and I've been doing the same thing. However, what everyone says is true. You can farm Souls in any area, and it does make for quick leveling at the start of the game. I'm already level 30ish I think, and I haven't even fought the Gargoyles. However, as everyone else has said, eventually you're going to have to move on because the enemies in the area just aren't dropping enough souls to make it worth the effort. I'm waiting another level, maybe two, and then I'm going to move to the next area. I'm trying to up my endurance so I can carry better gear and still keep my quick roll because man that thing is useful.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

While farming the Hellkite Dragon's bridge for souls is easy it's incredibly inefficient and nowhere near gamebreaking. Plus each level you increase is only one stat point. It not like some other RPGs where levelling up 5 times makes a boss encounter significantly easier. In Dark Souls you have to level up a lot to see any noticeable difference. As long as manage to recover your souls whenever you die (or at least most of the time) you shouldn't need to farm anyway. Later on in the game you'll find yourself farming for materials to upgrade your weapons and armour and you'll get plenty of souls as a by-product.

And as people have said, levelling up eventually becomes ridiculously expensive. Outside of PVP or exploiting glitches there's really no gamebreaking way to amass the huge amounts of souls you'd need in a timely fashion.

 

[michael87cn]

Enjoy that while you can. In the sequel enemies stop respawning after 12 kills, and in order to make them respawn you have to use a semi-rare item that raises the difficulty level of the zone by a new game+.

 

[loa]

If you want to break the game by spending the next year leveling to level 711 500 souls a time, be my guest.
It's not like pretty much every rpg prohibits you from grinding to max level on the first enemies you encounter.
Meanwhile other players can beat the game in 2 hours with no grinding involved and have more fun than you.

 

[Augustine]

In addition to what's been said already...
Dark Souls can only be "broken" by skill and practice. If farming souls helps you get through the first time through - more power to you. But no amount of souls will make this game a cakewalk. Difference between levels 120 and 300, for example, is negligible.
There's built in system of diminishing returns in stats, which effectively makes overleveling pointless.


So yeah, farming souls can be helpful, but don't make a mistake of thinking that it will break the game.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Another in addition to what's been said:

It's already been mentioned that "level-ups" aren't the be all and end all of gaining strength in Dark Souls, and there's been a mention or two of upgrading your items as well. Upgrading your gear is actually very important and, even though there's a Soul cost to upgrading, there's also another very important factor: upgrade materials. Even if you managed to spend tens of hours farming enough Souls to level your equipment up in addition to your character level, you wouldn't be able to do it because you just wouldn't have the upgrade materials you need at that point in the game.

 

[Benpasko]

Another in addition to what's been said:

It's already been mentioned that "level-ups" aren't the be all and end all of gaining strength in Dark Souls, and there's been a mention or two of upgrading your items as well. Upgrading your gear is actually very important and, even though there's a Soul cost to upgrading, there's also another very important factor: upgrade materials. Even if you managed to spend tens of hours farming enough Souls to level your equipment up in addition to your character level, you wouldn't be able to do it because you just wouldn't have the upgrade materials you need at that point in the game.

This. In the souls games, equipment >>>>>> levels. You really just need to level up enough to use the right equipment.

 

[kortin]

Soul Level doesn't mean shit. Anyone can beat the game at Soul Level 1 without any real problems. Now, playing through without any equipment, or no upgraded equipment, is a challenge. Soul Levels exist to allow people to have a slightly easier time beating the game if they're having trouble. Pump enough points into vitality and you can power through anything.

 

[Sateru]

I started playing Dark Souls recently, and there's something about the game that bothers me: farming souls is too easy. I'm only a little ways into the game and already I've found several places you can effectively farm souls infinitely without any risk or challenge. I won't go into details but let's just say one of them involves a dragon and a bridge. The fact that enemies respawn every time you stop at a shrine is really the underlying problem because it turns them into an easily renewable resource.

I just don't understand what's to stop me from doing this non-stop for hours until I have a super leveled up character. Shouldn't becoming more powerful in a game require some sort of actual progress, or at least a challenge that requires real effort? I know that leveling up your character's stats isn't everything in Dark Souls, but it's not nothing either, and even upgrading your weapons and buying stuff requires souls.

And I know farming souls isn't mandatory and I can choose to not do it, but it seems to me a good game shouldn't be easy break at all, and I wonder how much I should be allowed to farm souls until I feel bad about it.

I feel I should mention here that I DO like Dark Souls a lot. I think it's probably one of the best games I've played in a while. It really reminds me of the days of old when games were actually hard, and the stories were minimalistic. I really just have this one issue with the game and I wonder how the rest of you feel about it.

I really enjoy playing Dark Souls, the lore in particular draws me in more than anything else. I never had much of a problem with leveling up or the soul amount because enemies can still easily murder your ass if you aren't careful.

The only issue I have is a sense of lifelessness in the enemies, environment, and NPCs. Even if this is a dying world, there should still be more than simply idly standing around like all they exist for is to oppose you. I'd love to see the Hollows trying to perform tasks that they used to do as regular humans. Monsters roaming the forests, killing occasional critters for food, or even fighting amongst each other for territory. There should still be some level of life, especially in such a lore-rich environment.

I dunno, I still enjoy the game, but it still feels rather empty at times.

 

[Olas]

I started playing Dark Souls recently, and there's something about the game that bothers me: farming souls is too easy. I'm only a little ways into the game and already I've found several places you can effectively farm souls infinitely without any risk or challenge. I won't go into details but let's just say one of them involves a dragon and a bridge. The fact that enemies respawn every time you stop at a shrine is really the underlying problem because it turns them into an easily renewable resource.

I just don't understand what's to stop me from doing this non-stop for hours until I have a super leveled up character. Shouldn't becoming more powerful in a game require some sort of actual progress, or at least a challenge that requires real effort? I know that leveling up your character's stats isn't everything in Dark Souls, but it's not nothing either, and even upgrading your weapons and buying stuff requires souls.

And I know farming souls isn't mandatory and I can choose to not do it, but it seems to me a good game shouldn't be easy break at all, and I wonder how much I should be allowed to farm souls until I feel bad about it.

I feel I should mention here that I DO like Dark Souls a lot. I think it's probably one of the best games I've played in a while. It really reminds me of the days of old when games were actually hard, and the stories were minimalistic. I really just have this one issue with the game and I wonder how the rest of you feel about it.

That is a GOOD THING. It gives you the option of wasting a lot of time, boringly killing the same enemies over and over again, to level up. Trust me, you aren't "breaking" anything. It takes a hell of a lot to actually "overpower" your character. No matter what, no matter what level you are, if you are playing stupidly, even the early enemies can still kill you.

I'm not entirely sure how boringly wasting a lot of time is ever a "good thing" to have in a game. It seems to me if the leveling system really is so insignificant, and it doesn't matter that I can bypass it without doing anything, then why not just cut it out entirely and save us the trouble. Was it crazy of me to assume that levels were put into the game for some sort of reason?

Another in addition to what's been said:

It's already been mentioned that "level-ups" aren't the be all and end all of gaining strength in Dark Souls, and there's been a mention or two of upgrading your items as well. Upgrading your gear is actually very important and, even though there's a Soul cost to upgrading, there's also another very important factor: upgrade materials. Even if you managed to spend tens of hours farming enough Souls to level your equipment up in addition to your character level, you wouldn't be able to do it because you just wouldn't have the upgrade materials you need at that point in the game.

This. In the souls games, equipment >>>>>> levels. You really just need to level up enough to use the right equipment.

But you can use souls to buy stuff like equipment, and also to level them up. Even titanite shards which are necessary to reinforce weapons can be bought with souls so....

I'm sure there's more I probably don't know about, but so far it seems like there's not a whole lot that souls can't get you.

If you want to break the game by spending the next year leveling to level 711 500 souls a time, be my guest.
It's not like pretty much every rpg prohibits you from grinding to max level on the first enemies you encounter.
Meanwhile other players can beat the game in 2 hours with no grinding involved and have more fun than you.

Considering how brutally punishing this game is, I don't think it's all that silly to consider spending a lot of time farming souls to level up my character if it'll actually help. No matter what I do I'm never going to beat this game in 2 hours, and frankly it makes more sense to me to spend time farming souls than fighting a boss over and over because at least with the soul farming I know for a fact that I'm making progress.

 

[IFS]

As others have said levels don't matter in Dark Souls nearly as much in other RPGs, so you won't gain that significant of an edge in the long run (improving your equipment is far more substantial), and your level determines who can invade you, who you can invade, and who you can summon for help so overleveling is a good way to run into problems in those areas. If you don't care that much about the online features then by all means grind to your hearts content, it'll take forever and be quite tedious though so I don't really see why you would bother.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I started playing Dark Souls recently, and there's something about the game that bothers me: farming souls is too easy. I'm only a little ways into the game and already I've found several places you can effectively farm souls infinitely without any risk or challenge. I won't go into details but let's just say one of them involves a dragon and a bridge. The fact that enemies respawn every time you stop at a shrine is really the underlying problem because it turns them into an easily renewable resource.

I just don't understand what's to stop me from doing this non-stop for hours until I have a super leveled up character. Shouldn't becoming more powerful in a game require some sort of actual progress, or at least a challenge that requires real effort? I know that leveling up your character's stats isn't everything in Dark Souls, but it's not nothing either, and even upgrading your weapons and buying stuff requires souls.

And I know farming souls isn't mandatory and I can choose to not do it, but it seems to me a good game shouldn't be easy break at all, and I wonder how much I should be allowed to farm souls until I feel bad about it.

I feel I should mention here that I DO like Dark Souls a lot. I think it's probably one of the best games I've played in a while. It really reminds me of the days of old when games were actually hard, and the stories were minimalistic. I really just have this one issue with the game and I wonder how the rest of you feel about it.

I really enjoy playing Dark Souls, the lore in particular draws me in more than anything else. I never had much of a problem with leveling up or the soul amount because enemies can still easily murder your ass if you aren't careful.

The only issue I have is a sense of lifelessness in the enemies, environment, and NPCs. Even if this is a dying world, there should still be more than simply idly standing around like all they exist for is to oppose you. I'd love to see the Hollows trying to perform tasks that they used to do as regular humans. Monsters roaming the forests, killing occasional critters for food, or even fighting amongst each other for territory. There should still be some level of life, especially in such a lore-rich environment.

I dunno, I still enjoy the game, but it still feels rather empty at times.

On the one hand I totally agree with you, and it bothered me at first when I'd just started playing the game. Then I realized that the reason they do that is because they tailor the enemy encounters very precisely. If the enemies walked around and did other things the encounters would slightly change every time, and it would add a degree of randomness that I guess the developers don't want. It just goes back the the old school design philosophy of Dark Souls in that the game is more about memorizing the areas, and understanding the different movesets and the pathing of enemies, and thinking through every move you make than it is about reaction time and reflexes.

 

[Augustine]

But you can use souls to buy stuff like equipment, and also to level them up. Even titanite shards which are necessary to reinforce weapons can be bought with souls so....

I'm sure there's more I probably don't know about, but so far it seems like there's not a whole lot that souls can't get you.

Up to a point. Higher level materials cannot be bought.

Again, grinding to get you character build set up, and your main gear to a respectable level is fine. After that, souls lose importance. Bridge is a rather poor place to farm souls anyway, in my humble opinion.
Your time is INFINITELY better spent honing your skills - parry, dodge, etc. and planning out an effective char build.

Speaking as someone who beat the game at level 1, and did everything possible (optional challenges like tail chopping, etc.)

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I'm not entirely sure how boringly wasting a lot of time is ever a "good thing" to have in a game. It seems to me if the leveling system really is so insignificant, and it doesn't matter that I can bypass it without doing anything, then why not just cut it out entirely and save us the trouble. Was it crazy of me to assume that levels were put into the game for some sort of reason?

The leveling system is there so that you have to choose a progression path for your character to take. Most people aren't going to make a character that uses both strength and dexterity weapons, and miracles, and magic, and pyromancy just because they aren't going to have enough levels invested into each one to make them all viable. It creates a reason to replay the game again using a different character and a different combination of skills. Play as a strength build one time, as a dex build another time, using magic or miracles another time, etc. The levels are essentially there as gates to using certain weapons and magics, and to give you more health and stamina if you need it (helpful but not absolutely necessary).

But you can use souls to buy stuff like equipment, and also to level them up. Even titanite shards which are necessary to reinforce weapons can be bought with souls so....

I'm sure there's more I probably don't know about, but so far it seems like there's not a whole lot that souls can't get you.

Most of the equipment in the game can't be bought, it has to be found in the world, or dropped by a certain enemy type. Also you can't buy certain upgrade materials, like titanite chunks and slabs, or demon titanite, which are used to get your equipment to the max level. For example to make a max level lightning weapon you would need 9 titanite shards to get it to +5, then 9 large titanite shards to get it to +10, then 6 titanite chunks to ascend the weapon to a lightning weapon and get it to lightning +4, and then a titanite slab to get it to lightning +5. You can straight up buy the shards and large shards that you need, but to get the chunks and slab you have to find them yourself. So while souls are used to upgrade weapons, they aren't going to do a hell of a lot for you past +10.

 

[suitepee7]

Considering how brutally punishing this game is, I don't think it's all that silly to consider spending a lot of time farming souls to level up my character if it'll actually help. No matter what I do I'm never going to beat this game in 2 hours, and frankly it makes more sense to me to spend time farming souls than fighting a boss over and over because at least with the soul farming I know for a fact that I'm making progress.

honestly, it doesn't help that much. early game it's unlikely you'll get good scaling weapons, so other than minimum stat requirements, points in STR or DEX aren't really useful. vitality and endurance are helpful, but only to a certain degree. plus at later levels it costs so much more to upgrade, 500 per 30 seconds is not worth it at all.

when it becomes 71000 per level it will take you around 71 minutes to level up once if you do dragon bridge farming (assuming 30 seconds per run and reset, with 500 souls per run). also buying shards becomes considerably more expensive later in the game, and you cannot buy slabs to do the high end upgrades anyway.

also if you're relying on soul levels to beat a boss, change your strategy because that's what's killing you, not your stats. and keep in mind the enemies up to the boss will respawn, so as long as you retrieve your souls at the boss you're still making gains

 

[Ariseishirou]

Like everyone else has been saying, skill is waaaaaay more important than soul level in the souls games. And the spot you've found is a joke for grinding in comparison to some of the spots that'll be available later on in terms of bang for your buck, but all the same the rewards are diminishing and you could spend all damn day grinding and have Ornstein and Smough hand you your ass because you don't have their attack patterns down right or you have a bad strategy.

I admit the first time I played the game I did some grinding in the forest but on my second I didn't bother to grind at all and it didn't change the game much. You'll earn just as much making progress in the game provided you get to a bonfire and level up before you die. I struggled the first time with the hard bosses when I ground, and didn't struggle the second time when I knew how to beat them and my skills had improved, with no grinding. It's hardly broken.

...That said I think making enemies disappear after a certain number of kills in DS2 was a good idea. It forces you to be smart about how you use your souls, because there isn't always more where that came from.