poiumty said:
Drow. Seriously. Stop. Most of what you're saying is misinformed and the result of your rushing through without a shield. Your experience was hardly an optimal one to criticize the game with and if you gave it a bit more time you might have realised that.
Fuck you, too. Just because I don't talk about this game in the group doesn't mean I need to be silent about it elsewhere...although maybe I should talk about it more often, if you seriously think
a shield is the reason I wasn't enjoying myself. I suppose you're right, in order to fix the unintuitive bullshit the game throws at you, a shield was all that was needed. A shield could have worked like a permanent ring of sacrifice and immediately counteracted the occasional bout of random bad luck. I could have gotten immersed if I'd abandoned the playstyle I chose and grew better at if I'd just let myself be railroaded into a heavy armor/shield fighter type. And if I'd just had the ability to
block, that would have transformed most of the "story" into something other than a scavenger hunt of complete irrelevancy and the main story into something other than a glorified fetch quest that tries to herd you into a dickpunch ending.
Really, you seem to think the game's difficulty is what drove me away. That difficulty was the only thing that
kept me playing; the only thing it may have indirectly affected was how frustrating exploration started to feel. It's just that I distinguish between difficulty and frustrating dickishness on the part of the game creators, and losing your dropped souls the second time you die is the rough equivalent of a game erasing your most recent save files when you die. Except every game I've seen do
that at least had the excuse of trying to discourage save scumming.
lapan said:
Souls dissapearing after two deaths is a conscious decision by the developers. It's a similar system as in Diablo 1, only less punishing as in the later you would even lose your equipment. Protip: If you wear a Ring of Sacrifice while trying to pick the souls up the bloodstain won't dissapear if you die.
What a coincidence, I hated Diablo, too (I'm pretty sure Everquest and Final Fantasy XI did something similar with items and experience). Since I only found maybe five rings of sacrifice in the entire game, including Rare ones, they disappear after one use, and I really liked using two actual helpful rings (especially the slumbering dragoncrest and Havel's rings), they didn't help me much.
Humanity isn't hard to come by anymore as rats and the ghosts in the DLC have a rather decent droprate.
The DLC is a whole other story, but yes, I did eventually start grinding humanity out of rats. Unfortunately, that was because I needed them to try farming titanite slabs (having already lost all the rest of my humanity to constant death and humanity items to get my Red Orb), which was frustrating and pointless but entirely my own fault.
Casual Shinji said:
That's why you generally farm in a spot you're familiar with, near a bonfire. I don't know where you farmed, but I never found anything of what you described happening to me when I was farming. And I died loads of times in Dark Souls. Also, farming should make you become more familiar with enemy attacks and weaknesses as you continue farming. To a point where you could almost do it with your eyes closed.
Burst6 said:
Where are you farming? There are plenty of relatively safe spots to farm for souls in large amounts and even if you die, the spot isn't that far from you and you can easily reclaim your souls.
I started farming around the first bonfire in Undead Burg (frustrating time, due to my inexperience and unwillingness to let that black knight live). Then I used the trick with the bridge wyvern (which got boring pretty quick). Then I farmed the Baldur knights in the parish (risky, especially with my playstyle, and I had to restart my grind every so often due to a missed parry, getting double-teamed, or getting swarmed by upstairs zombies). Then I farmed the Forest Covenant people (extremely risky, even after I put those souls to use). Then the stone giant and royal sentinel on top of Sen's Fortress. Eventually, I wound up farming the two royal sentinels and the silver knight near the Smaug & Finklestein bonfire, and then the darkwraiths in lower New Londo, but those were for titanite chunks and slabs, not souls.
That was around the point where I was pretty confident in my build and didn't really need to farm for souls. In fact, that was about the point where I realized that when I was carrying few to no souls, the game suddenly became fun again, so I started deliberately using any excess to bump up my supply of arrows, firebombs, and prism stones. The instant I didn't need to worry about the immersion-breaking threat of my progress being reversed, it was suddenly possible to enjoy myself.
...sort of. That's also when the Duke's Archives, Izalith, and the Catacombs opened up, so the game became frustrating and immersion-breaking for other reasons.
As for humanity, i never kindled bonfires. I usually found that 5 estus flasks was plenty for most situations, and besides, humanity usually comes in the form of items that you don't lose when you die.
Was that before or after you already knew where all the trouble spots were? I would never have finished the game if I only had five flasks. As it was, it took me 124 hours.
Not all stories have to involve the main character. Dark Souls paints a world that's already pretty much been destroyed and it does it very well. You're not supposed to be some special hero that's here to fix the world, the game tries its best to paint you as J. Random Shmuck who just wandered into the world and then decided to try and ring those bells. The game even tells you that you aren't the only person on this quest and there are many other people going after the same thing you are, and that you aren't special. That's sort of the point.
Um...yes, they kinda do. That's the very definition of a protagonist. It's even more important in the case of interactive fiction.
Granted, most of the problem in that came from my own hangups. When I play a character with no personality, I have to substitute my own, and the only in-game reason I had for doing the bell thing was "shits and giggles" (hell, the only out-of-game reason I had was "because that's how the game progresses"). The game certainly made me feel like J. Random Schmuck and my character an amnesiac version of the same, but then why would the unesteemed Mr. Schmuck and his amnesiac better half give two shits, as opposed to simply making friends with the Crestfallen Warrior and living it up at Firelink? And even when you get to the halfway point and get a tangible
goal, the world is basically dead, and none of the lore you can piece together matters even if you go with the dickpunch ending and reset everything. That combination of nihilistic reflection of when the world was awesome functional and the realization that none of it had anything to do with me anyway beyond "this is why there's a giant wolf/lava monster/drider/tree currently in my way" just bred apathy.
I admit, I forgot about Rhea (I did save her in the Catacombs, but after doing that and shoving my rapier down Patches' throat, I figured that was the end of it), but the thing with Logan is a story arc? I rescued him from prison twice, but he didn't even have the personality of the pyromancer I saved from cannibalization, and I interacted with him in about the same way (rescue, then shop). Hell, if I hadn't mistaken him for a podium and killed him on accident, I'd have never run into him a final time. Solaire wasn't especially interesting beyond giving me an item (apparently, you can summon him in boss fights, but I only used one summon the entire game; Mildred was silent, but do most summons talk when you summon them?), and I almost shanked him on my own just because it seemed he would try to kill me soon (<color=aliceblue>I waited a little too long and had to kill him anyway, but I guess his descent into madness was happy, so that's good).
And if that's the way Sigmeier's story ends, I'm glad I didn't run into him again after Izalith. I actually liked him, and he always felt like he was talking
to my character rather than talking
at her (a trait only shared by Andre, who sadly never moves).
