DEMON'S SOULS A GAME FOR SONY PLAYSTATION 3

i loved demon's souls, which i played and never beat at a time when i had neither internet nor a smartphone. the sheer incomprehensibility of it all was kinda sublime in the burkean sense, something i never got from the other games (perhaps because i was more plugged in by then).

if dark souls 3 captures some of that magic i might gotta check it out

I don't think anything other than Demon's or the first Dark Souls ever really captured it. Could be because I've spent so much time with these games, but I played Demon's years after Dark 1 and I got the same juice. Not so much with the other ones.

DS3 brings back some familiar levels and enemies from Demon's but... not quite the same magic.

And one of the great things about these games back when they were fresh is that friends and I would be texting/talking to each other about secrets or tactics or mechanics (which were so wonderfully obscure) in a way that hasn't happened for me since the 90s. Series got a little too user friendly (relatively speaking) and popular and you'd get like play through videos online almost immediately and a lot of that charm was lost.

yeah DS3 is far more friendly and comprehensible than DeS. not quite the same.

i played through DS1 the same way, no summons, single-player, off-line. this is how i played every RPG so it didn't seem weird. first game i used summons for was DS3 and while it was cool it also made it so rather than struggling w a boss on my own and having to learn it, it was too easy to just get help instead. in some way i'm glad i don't have that issue for DeS!

Dark Souls 1 >= Demon's Souls > Bloodborne = Dark Souls 3 > Dark Souls 2

same, except the multiplayer element clicked for me in DS3 more than ever before, which adds so much.

i used the wikidot a ton in Dark Souls but it didn't feel like it took anything away, it was a fun meta element where i'd be at the gym researching the area i just went through to see if i missed anything and figuring out how all the systems work.

I'm also anti bonfire teleportation from the get go. Loved how in the first Dark Souls you'd be down in damn Ashen Lake or something and get cursed or in over your head and you felt totally fucked and scared. Added a certain intensity. Helped you learn the world a lot better too, running back and forth. Was bummed about that concession in the later games.

One of the most painful experiences I had in a game was in DS1 trying to fight that hydra in Ashen Lake and being cursed and just completely unable to do it and then biting the bullet and fighting my way back up to the surface. Was super rough but exhilarating and typified what made the game so unique and refreshing. Games need heavier consequences, basically, but I feel like I've rattled on about that in other Souls threads.

Yesss, exactly. For me it was being at the bottom of Blighttown fighting Quelaag, and having already used up my humanity summoning Mildred, and being forced to actually learn all her moves and tells. Finally getting back up to Firelink and seeing the sunlight again was probably the best moment I've experienced in a game.

I also remember getting cursed in the Depths and having to fight my way out at half health to go get the purging stone, that was good too.

on that tip, there is no Homeward Bone in Demon's Souls, so if you find yourself carrying a lot of souls and low on health, it's do-or-die. there is a however spell that can warp you back home, it goes for 20k, i'm saving up for it now. this only takes a handful of runs through 4-1.

Shrine of Storms is amazing. for that i am glad this game is designed w teleportation from the start. windswept ruins littered with high-yield one-on-one skeleton battles, while malevolent manta rays are circling in the air above you, sniping you from the sky. the atmosphere in this game is incredible. i really like the early version of Blighttown. Valley of Defilement not only has one of the coolest videogame level names ever, it's really twisted and cool. the waterfall constantly running in the middle of this ascending spiral is such a cool design idea. it's claustrophobic in an evil yet cozy way.

really love Tower of Latria now that i have made more progress. the art design here is wonderful, and the lighting/shadow and colors are very vivid and surreal. this a giant proper dungeon, a deep green jail with Cthulu-headed sorcerers capable of one-hit electricity stun kills. there are stacks of coffins everywhere, and some rooms have iron maidens that you can open if you want to test your luck. then there is the giant steampunk machine that shoots arrows! getting by that is hard af. amazing level!

there is no Homeward Bone in Demon's Souls

http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/shard-of-archstone

yeah i just found those damn rats. damn rats, giving me the plague!

made it to Leechlurker and was kicking butt w some fire spells but i fell off the ledge to my death like a fool

i love how you can hop over ledges/climb up little barriers in this. back in Boletaria i was running and reached the end of the hallway and my dude LEAPED OVER THE RAILING woah dude, this rules

magic is pretty sweet, i just got my 2 miracle slots, healing/evactuating all day long

defeated Storm King last night with the Storm Ruler sword. man, Dark Souls 3 referenced Demon's super hard, people don't even know...

i have left: 1-4 & False King boss fight and 3-3/3-4 plus Maneater/Old Monk boss fights. then the endgame stuff. i got to Maneater a while ago but that's one tough fight.

had a really rough weekend. my grandpa died on saturday and the funeral was sunday. sunday night i got home and played DeS for some video game record spinning cat petting soul love. defeated Maneater & Old Monk both in one go. both very fun battles! now I'm at 1-4 and it is really tough just getting through the level. there are these red phantoms i usually run past that are insanely difficult fights. one of them has a spear w a huge shield that ends up breaking all my equipment, and it's a struggle just to scrape together enough souls to repair. tried to parry to no avail. so i just run by them for now.

sorry about your grandpa Adam

yeah sorry to hear that man.

have you done everything else? i think 1-4 is the unofficial last level. certainly ime it was the hardest boss.

ty guys

i finally beat those three red phantoms so i'm closing in! think i've done everything else. there aren't any hidden levels are there?

secret boss: http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/walk1-1-oldking

so THAT's where that door goes!

http://i.imgur.com/ZHRQZWw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/g9W8Z27.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/DgP0YdX.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/4jM9uHw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/XIiqQWk.jpg

ah memories

http://i.imgur.com/3yBCTTKl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/DKiqwETl.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/bWkfHbql.jpg

totally beating this game today. only King Allant (and whatever is after) remains, and i've fought him a few times, it seems a lot like the Artorias and Abyss Watcher boss fights.

so far its not going good. im having a hard time just getting up the stairs! at least they drop lots of Full Moon Grass.

fought him only a few times. his attacks are not that hard to anticipate/dodge but you can't afford to make many mistakes. once i got him to 10% and then i healed when i should've rolled.

i beat Demon's Souls late last night/early this morning. really love the ending, very mysterious. great final boss, cool final area and final final boss. Dark Souls tried to pull this off and flailed-failed spectacularly w the Bed of Chaos. no Izalith here - Demon's Souls is very consistently good throughout, maybe the most consistently good game in the series next to 3.

what great game, and great to play coming off Dark Souls 3, which in many ways pays homage to this first entry. Demon's is the essence of souls, it is all here, not even really that roughly, but in a very polished and realized state. it was truly a game-changer.

i would rank it above Dark Souls as a better game tbh. Dark Souls is much more cruel of a game and somewhat inconsistent in its second subterranean half. Dark Souls 2 is a weird spin off and 3 feels like the true sequel to Demon's Souls. one day i will have to buy a PS4 and play thru Bloodborne for the first time. :-p

this game is so good, the level select screen is one of the coolest most memorable areas in gaming.

i got the platinum for this, don't typically care for that sort of thing but i figured why not. pure bladestone took only abt 15 min of farming. so there's that

I don't either, but I did go the extra mile and platinum Dark Souls 1. Kind of a fun experience, but also one that you can fuck up easily and have to go through another play-through to rectify.

demon's souls online termination date feb 28, 2018 RIP

:O

THEY DIED

ive been playing this but never see anyone online. is this Japan servers only?

https://www.facebook.com/events/184088012171130/

demon's souls a game for sony playstation 5

they keep pulling me back in

Cool, I guess? If I had never played it I would be excited. But it's gonna take a brand new From game to get me to think about a new platform.

And in terms of pvp it's hard to imagine going back to the very beginning after all the refinements in the other games, but it would be cool if there some big changes (like finishing the cut content, and doing something more scrutable with the world tendency business).

xp

if they don't do some heavy reworking and expansion, i'll be shocked.

Demon’s is still my second favorite From game behind Souls 1 so I am very onboard with this.

Here's a question for everyone. The original Demon's Souls was released on the PS3, but skipped the PS4. All of the other Soulsborne games *did* make it to the PS4, but often with notoriously erratic performance, at least as far as video game nerds are concerned. Hence, Dark Souls gets remastered, DS2 updated/changed, or the way Dark Souls 3 later got optimized for PS4 Pro (iirc Bloodborne - the only PS exclusive - never got enhanced for Pro or changed in any way). All, iirc, were originally released at or at least aimed for 30fps, right? With 60fps an idealized goal of updates/mods/fixes and so on. So Demon's Souls is getting remade ... but only for the PS5, which is obviously more powerful than the PS3 and PS4. And yet, even with all the added power, the game will offer two modes, one that will focus on fidelity, and the other on frame rate, which implies it's still going to be pushing at the edges of the new system's capacity. The (buried) question is why is this not coming out for the PS4, which was capable of handling each of its From predecessors? What is it about this remake in particular, a remake of the *oldest* and one must assume most technologically primitive game in the series, that makes it suited to the PS5 but not the PS4? Or, for that matter, unable to provide *both* fidelity and frame rate? What makes it different from Sekiro, Bloodborne, Dark Souls et al that it needs PS5 specs (and even then an either/or sort of scenario), or is being it offered as a PS5 title just because, bypassing PS4 strategically rather than by necessity?

My understanding is that it's not technical, but that Sony owns the rights to it, so From/Bandai Namco couldn't do anything with it even if they wanted to.

Seems like it wasn't necessary for Sony to pull out for PS4 because they had Bloodborne as an exclusive and plenty of From games, but now they need some juice for the PS5 (and who knows what's going on with Elden Ring).

Dark Souls originally came out for PS3, right?

not just sony and namco and from, atlus also supposedly had rights to it because they were the north american distributors. this had been talked about ad nauseam by souls fans for years. don't know what changed to allow this to happen or if it really just was up to sony.

anyway remasters are dumb they should do demons souls 2. probably one of the only games that could spur me to buy a ps5 before they start showing up on craigslist for $75.

That's what I meant by "strategically," that it gives PS5 an exclusive with a built in fan base to immediately attract. Of course there is no reason it could not have been released on PS4 in some form, but I'm also wondering if what gets released on PS5 even *could* be released on PS4. That is, will it represent any sort of real, noticeable advance over what's come after the original Demon's Souls? I was looking at the Bloodborne wiki, and saw this: "Miyazaki had wanted ... everything to be as detailed as possible, and felt that such a game was only possible on eighth generation hardware. This need for high-end hardware, and the fact that the PlayStation 4 was presented to the company first, was the reason the game was a PS4 exclusive, rather than a cross-generation release." By all accounts Bloodborne was a lot more stable and detailed than Dark Souls, and Dark Souls III of course took advantage of those advances. So will Demon's Souls Redux be a step beyond Bloodborne/DS3/Sekiro to take advantage of PS5? I was just surprised to see a remade old game still not be able to hit both high graphics or frame rate benchmarks at the same time, you'd think the PS5 would be able to handle that (for example, Control is reportedly already being rejiggered for the new system to take advantage of new tech to better performance).

all games are released "strategically", they're products

i don't know anything about this remaster so i'll take you at your word regarding the two separate modes. the industry has prioritized fidelity over performance for decades because fidelity is what the industry decided to build video game marketing around from day 1. frame rate has always played second fiddle on consoles which are always going to have limitations. even now, 60 fps isn't really a good advertising point (a mid-range PC will always do better than that anyway) as much as it represents The Absence of Badness (30 fps), which isn't how you want to market a new console. and i imagine it doesn't really matter how much better the technology is on the ps5, consoles rarely get to the point where lowering frames doesn't allow for increased fidelity, and the industry will always go for increased fidelity when it's available. especially when marketing a new generation. the give and take between fidelity and performance isn't going away any time soon. and by the time 60 fps can truly be the new standard regardless of fidelity, studios will start aiming for 120, and the cycle begins anew.

sony/from releasing this game with two modes allows them to advertise increased fidelity, the #1 priority for a new console, while also providing comfort to the increasingly large subset of customers who reject 30 fps.

I don't think Dark Souls really had any stability issues?

And personally I don't care about frame rate, although going back and forth between Dark Souls Remastered and Dark Souls 3 was the first time I had seriously even noticed it, it takes your eyes some time to adjust going from 60 to 30 (or at least mine).

Even before I played the game I knew all about Blighttown.

xpost The dialectic I set up was strategic versus technology. That is, some games cannot run on some underpowered systems. Doom 2016 got ported to the Switch, but the latest Doom he is not going to the switch because the Switch can't handle it. It's not strategic.

Now, the new Ori being a Microsoft exclusive, that's more strategic, because its predecessor was ported to the Switch and this one isn't, afaik not because the Switch can't handle it, but because I presume Microsoft needs what few attractive exclusives it can get.