DARK SOULS: if you need me i'll be in an induced coma so mvrch comes tomorrow

ANORRRRR LONDO!

I've heard so much about this place.

It's interesting coming to these older games (Dark Souls / Demon's Souls) and seeing exactly where Elden Ring gets its DNA from.

There are areas of these games that correlate directly to each other. Boletaria / Undead Burg / High Wall of Lothric / Stormveil. Anor Londo / Leyndell. Valley of Defilement / Blight Town. Stonefang Tunnel / Ruin Strewn Precipe etc... And yet it never feels like theey're just rehashing themselves. They're more like callbacks or self-references.

Anor Londo features IMO the most difficult bit of any of the Soulsborne games, so much so that first time around I had to give up for a while before going back

Welp, that's been my experience with almost every area so far

All of these games (with the exception of Bloodborne and Sekiro, though not entirely) are essentially the same games over and over again, with subtle tweaks and refinements. That's something I like about them. Oh, here's the poison swamp, here's the fire lake, here's the palace in the sky, etc. They all feel thematically linked, but are all different enough to feel distinct and fresh.

Anor Londo features IMO the most difficult bit of any of the Soulsborne games, so much so that first time around I had to give up for a while before going back

And it's funny how much of the difficulty of that bit is psychological, and the placement. Assuming you haven't spent much time in the first half of the game fighting black knights and working on your parry skills, you're faced with this silver knight in a high-stress situation without any room to circle around or maneuver. But after that, there are silver knights all over the place and you get very used to their moves and timing.

Or of course you could just block and step backwards so that he falls off the ledge, lol.

yeah, it's a proper sweaty palms moment when you get that far, and then a bit later you wonder what all the stress was about!

My most-recent replay of DS1, having become "good" at From Games, I just cruised on through, beat every boss first try, basically didn't die at all, even Kalameet was a softie...

...except for the archer run. It's amazing how bizarrely arbitrary that moment is. Just when you get a handle on facing your adversary, you get an arrow in the back.

Huh! I rarely get shot at by the other archer, if you hoof it to the knight on the right it usually puts you out of aggro range from the one on the left, I thought.

Update: I thought for a minute I was really smart examining that gigantic painting

ha!

*sigh*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERcN6frKuB8

lol, good stuff dl. Congrats on (presumably) escaping the painting though! No mean feat.

I took the coward's way out. Killed the pukey dragon and spared the furry fox lady. I'll come back to them

yeah watched your video DL and... it do be like that

Finally I'm at Ornstein and Smough. Only given them a couple of cursory shots but mostly I've been grinding to improve my weapons as the Lightning Claymore I have felt too big and slow to deal with these guys.

So I've managed to upgrade a Silver Knight Straight Sword to +5 and try them a few times before I use humanity on summoning Solaire.

So far I've hardly used any humanity, save to kindle bonfires. is that a normal thing to do in this game, or do people run around unhollowed all the time? Is there even any point if I don't really care for PVP?

Aside from bonfires, you don't really need to use humanity unless you want to summon help, except for:
-some weapons scale with humanity (Chaos Blade etc)
-you can pop one for a full heal. PVPers ran around with stacks and stacks of them.
-random other stuff: http://darksouls.wikidot.com/humanity

But I ran around hollowed for basically the entirety of my first playthrough I think.

Do what you want, but I highly recommend not bothering with Solaire (he's not that much help anyway), O&S is a good chance to get some 'fighting multiple enemies' strategies together -- kiting them, experimenting with playing unlocked and controlling the camera, etc.

Iirc in most of these games, summoning NPC help is a double edged sword, since it increases the boss's health pool, and the NPC is rarely as good as you are (something Elden Ring sort of changed with the addition of the mimic tear), and in my experience usually dies well before most enemies are even close to defeat. Which is to say, you still need to get good, while at the same time the bosses get harder.

I found O&S doable by constantly being on the retreat, like always backing away (and never into a corner), attempting to angle oneself so that one of the two is "engaged" with an intervening column, and then smatching at the other.

It's generally seen as being "easier" to kill O before S, and superpowered-S is definitely an easier fight than superpowered-O, but I usually found myself thwapping S before O, as he tended to be more aggressive and more reachable as I backed away, backed away, backed away

Fun fight

Don't summon anybody

Huh, I thought O was more classically aggressive, always lunging at you as you backpedal.

fgti, did you play Sekiro? If not, you simply must play Sekiro!

I too would like to know what fgti makes of Sekiro

Oh I’ve talked about it elsewhere. I fought the immortal dummy extensively, had zero issue navigating the first proper level, and then found I had absolutely no facility in fighting the very first mini boss. I even was getting a free jump hit in on him, still just died and died and felt insanely stupid and bad at games. Never made it any further

Ohhh, you really should give it another go. It just has a different feel and approach than the other games, but especially post-Elden Ring it's so worth getting over the hump. Maybe their best single player game.

it's Dark Souls as a parkouring rhythym action game, it's fantastic

I do like it. I really struggled on that first mini-boss too, I'll be honest. It takes a bit of getting sed to the flow, and the combat is lightning-fast and intimidating. I know fgti is a big fan of creating different builds, so I wonder if it would appeal as much as the Souls games. I'll def get back to it once I've ploughed on a bit with DS1.

The run back to Rogers & Hammerstein is a toughy. Even though I've fought them so many times now, I find it fairly hard to fight or dash through those Silver Knights without a scratch and I usually arrive at the fog gate breathless and needing to top up my health. I was feeling mentally fragile last night so I only gave them about three attempts. Pleased to say that on my last attempt I managed to get Ornstein down to a slither health before losing the rhythm of the fight and getting splatted. But one more hit and he'd have gone down. I know from vids that this is only about a third of the fight of course. But I got pretty good at kiting them around the arena, as you do.

To boost my Warriors of Sunlight covenant stats and get the lightning spear, I did the Captain and Tennille fight many, many times, as it was one of the more fun and it was good to help others. #jollycooperation

Once you are down to one of them, it does get easier and goad them into hitting the columns, keep columns between you and them... also learn the big AOE attacks as they will wreck anyone with less than 50% health..

What is it with these games that one minute you're really close to beating a boss, getting used to their move set, getting them down a little more each time. Next they're destroying you before the fog gate has barely cleared? Grrrr...

Yeah, I lose months of my life to video games, historically. Can’t remember when it was but I remember I took a two week vacation to someplace lovely a decade ago but I was so addicted to ADOM that I spent the entire vacation lying in bed working on getting some Ultimate Avatar Of Order ending

I remember in 2012, I bought Skyrim but told myself I’d only play it once I got sick with something and had nothing else to do, and then I got sick and I did end up spending two weeks just hoovering up that adventure like a dump truck of digital cocaine

Aside from iPhone bridge and Worldle I haven’t played a game since March, which is great… I was finding myself killing Pthumerian Elders on repeat attempting to farm rare Bloodborne Cold Abyssal Gems and it was the pinnacle of “wasted time”; I’m glad to be game-sober right now!

xpost I think it's just sloppiness/impatience, tbh. At first we're really cautious and strategic, then as we improve we get a little too confident, forgetting that the boss is still really tough. That's usually a sign that it's time for me to take a break. There have been a few From bosses where I kept getting so close, over and over, that eventually I just turned it off. Then the next morning I would get up, make a cup of coffee, and beat the boss on the first or second try.

Quite right.

Also WAHOOO!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AehYxWvsn6I

I think it helped that this was one of the few occasions Ornstein didn't just bumrush me the second I went through the fog door. That's only the second time I've managed to kill one, let alone two, of them

(Apologies, I left the mic on my controller switched on so if there's a lot of button hammering noises 😆

Hell yeah, congrats.

I've been playing so much Sekiro that while watching that I felt the strong urge to Mikiri counter Ornstein's thrust attacks.

That's what's cool about these games, of course. On the surface they could just be re-skinned versions of each other. And of course there are major similarities. But even the subtle differences in combat completely change the type of game it is. Sekiro's combat comes from lightning-fast one-on-one combat - crowd control is incredibly not its thing. Bloodborne is more about aggressive fighting, whereas the Souls games are more cautious and defensive.

And a lot of health management on all From fronts, too. Knowing when to heal is vital.

Started a new run while home this week for medical treatments, I was zooming through things (went through the backdoor for Light town, etc), so I ended up at O&S around level 30 with only a +5 longsword because I forgot all about the Depths. I had to resort to summoning Solaire and using the Crystal Halberd I got from the mimic chest, the only weapon I had that was doing decent damage to them. It's amazing how every run of this game can be completely different.

It is kind of interesting, how so much of this game is set - the level design, the progression paths, where the enemies are, their attack patterns, where the loot is - and yet there is all this potential variety to each playthrough.

Beat the Four Kings today. I think the hardest part of it was the long run from the Firelink Shrine. It's pitch dark and those Darkwraiths come at you from nowhere. Think I beat the bosses themselves on the third or fourth actual time, but it took a lot more attempts to actually get to them

Nice! Yeah, I had really forgotten how long some of the runback are and how few bonfire options you're given even once you're able to warp.

Congrats dl

I hate that boss, it is like a DPS test and it made my low level characters ashamed

Well, I made it to Gwyn on my 'casual speed run'. Wasn't trying to optimize or explore, just run through the game with a vanilla shield & longsword. Naturally came out to 16 hours, level 65. Not sure yet if I'm going to do the DLC.

Wow, that's fast. They do say that once you've played through once, subsequent runs can be a lot quicker. I'm coming up to 100 hours and I'm only at Duke's Archives (died mere metres from the second bonfire GAHHHH!) Really really loved the whole bit with the Pisacas - how gloriously cool and messed up is that?

So just when I'm thinking, "Hell, this isn't just a good game, it's not just a great game, it is a masterpiece!", it dumps on me the Bed Of Chaos. What is this nonsense?

Obviously I beat it, but not without reading a few guides and still dying a million times. It even managed to one shot me AFTER I beat it

Not to mention there are two bonfires you can run back from for this boss, both placed a ridiculously long way from the fog gate. Nothing new, but I have to say I'm wearing of having to do these long, uneventful runbacks each time.

Even beating this boss left me feeling dirty and deflated. I didn't exactly cheese it, but I didn't feel like I used my wits or skill either

And then to think about some of the enemies and bosses that preceded it. Not sure if I'm overleveled but I had zero trouble with Seath the Scaleless, or the two boring fire bosses in the Demon Ruins - sliced through them like butter.

Starting to get flashbacks to the endgame of Demon's Souls where the levels like the Swamp of Sorrow were indescribably tough but tailed off with stupidly easy bosses like the Dirty Collossus (who died to a couple of fireballs) and Maiden Astreae, whose bodyguard Garl Vinland pretty much stood there and letting me hit him without any sort of fight.

Still, Bed of Chaos is NOT fun or pleasurable at all.

Anyway, on my merry way to the Catacombs and back through the cemetery that I remember having terrible trouble with when I first started my game many many moons ago.
But wait - firs tI'd better do a little research, and it says I will be making my journey a LOT easier if I carry some sort of Divine weapon. So there I am, upgrading the Astoria sword I've been carrying around for half my journey and not really knowing what to do with it.
I fully upgrade it to 5+, go to equip it, but NO - you must be at least 14 FAITH to go on this ride. And guess what I've definitely NOT been putting Souls into?
Well my favourite farming spot is no longer since I shot Gwynevere and turned Anor Londo into a cold, dark void. So I'm now farming human enemies in the Forest. It's going to take HOURS. Hope it's worth it.

Yeah, Lost Izalith is often referred to as 'rushed' or 'unfinished', and Bed of Chaos is infamous as the worst boss in the series. On my recent run, I was happy to do it in the normal three tries (at least it saves your "progress" after death!) -- run at the right sphere, then shoot arrows with blind hope at the left sphere until you get lucky and hit the right spot, then run down the middle and jump on the trunk without getting branched. I remember that last step took a million tries on my first playthrough.

Catacombs was probably the hardest part of my recent run. I had Astora's sword but barely upgraded it -- for the reviving skeletons in the level, you can just run past them until you find the area necromancer if you want. After you kill the necromancer then they'll die normally. I only used Astora's to kill the skellies in the boss room. But since I didn't have a light source, I had to watch a video to find my path from the bonfire to the boss. That's my big Catacombs recommendation -- having a source of light helps way more than a divine weapon.

There's one you can find there (which I totally forgot about until I looked it up now), one in Lost Izalith if you do Solaire's quest, or a spell (which is no help if you're not a wizard).

Haha yeah I shot about a two dozen arrows at the left sphere with no luck for some reason. I ended up giving up and jumping over the ravine and just thumping it with my fist! Jumping down to the middle root was no mean feat either. Too often a hand would just sweep me away mid-air. And when I finally managed to get the middle sphere, it killed me anyway! Not a fun boss.

I've got the Sunlight Maggot so that's a good light source.

I was very pained to see both Siegmeyer AND Solaire die within minutes of each other! Siegmeyer gave me no choice than to let him sacrifice himself to a couple of weak enemies. Solaire had been maddened by the Maggot. Apparently I missed him near the first Izalith bonfire, which is a shame - we didn't get to say goodbye!

For some reason I thought there were some weapons that have innate divine/holy/whatever damage that will permanently kill skeletons that didn't need so much faith. Maybe not.

That's one of my least favorite things about these games, enemies weak to very specific things that, unless you are really grinding, most players don't have the stats to wield or use. Makes some sections super annoying.