Agreed, it's quite brilliant, but mgah is it hard. 

Its not really hard, try the previous title Demons Souls if you want to play a hard game that constantly punishes you! Dark Souls has lots of new mechanics to forgive mistakes. I still play Dark Souls, I rarely play games much after completing them, but the first half of the game is just so good and the boss battles are awesome. 

i have both dark souls and demons souls for the PS3 still in their cellophane. Never did get around to playing them. :{ 

Play Demon Souls first, the second game Dark Souls is easier. You should hurry up because part of the enjoyment of the games is the co-op aspect for boss fights and the servers will not be around forever! 

Dark Souls is hard, but it is hard in a way that is totally possible to master.
You'll probably get fucked up by a balder knight the first time you meet one, but after a while you handle them easily. Not because you're necessarily stronger, but because you know how they work. Because they'll still fuck you up if you make a mistake.

I haven't played it that much to be honest, just about to go to gaping dragon on my first playthrough, but so far there has been nothing that has been really unfair to me. I lost about 4000 souls right before gargoyles because I got invaded by some prick in a top hat, that's the most unfair thing so far.

I have been watching a Let's Play alongside, so I kinda know what I can expect. I know how the game goes and what I should be doing, and I don't really mind having that "spoiled" for me, because I'm mostly here for one thing:

The level/world design is just A M A Z I N G!
Just stop and look for a moment how Firelink Shrine goes into Undead Burg, how that loops back and forth on itself, how you get up on the ramparts, where the drake bridge connects to the burg (even just the tiny detour on the bridge with the rats is brilliant!) and then to the Parish, and then how the Parish is literally sitting on top of Firelink Shrine...
And how the lower Undead Burg is intertwined with upper, and where the Capra Demon and Depths entrance fits in, and how Darkroot Forest winds around the moonlight butterfly bridge, and the tower with the dead blacksmith butts up against the burg, going to Sen's Fortress and realizing where Anor Londo is and how the entire world is sort of terraced like that...
And all of this just flows together completely naturally and seamless, I could go on and on gushing about the Dark Souls world.

My biggest wish for my "career" is getting to work on something even half so grossly incandescent with excellence as Dark Souls! 

OK I really wanna try Dark Souls now.
Guess i must of passed a Steam sale or 2 for Dark Souls but still.

Hadnt payed too too much attention but the more I look... 

http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=dsfix 

 

The design of the world is good but the actual combat mechanic is what Dark Souls is good for. The way each weapon works and how combat can evolve with different tactics is awesome.

There are plenty of different enemies and they all have key features which makes them deadly if you screw up and make a mistake. The best feature for me is the boss battles because they have phases, good attacks and have unique areas which makes them interesting to fight.

The RPG elements of weapon upgrades, special boss items and stats is fantastic because it gives you so much to play with.

One other key feature, your actions have consequences, the world changes based on what you do and if you are idiot and try to kill everything then your game experience will reflect that play style. 

I'm way underpowered to kill him, so for now Firelink is off limits for me :( 

http://youtu.be/OHhgjKaLHJw 

Just went into Open beta http://www.warframe.com/

It's a fairly old-skool style 3rd person ARPG with randomly generated levels using tilesets.

It's made by Digital Extremes and there is certainly a dose of Unreal Tournament style movement and combat feel while playing the game.

I've been having a blast with this in the last week or so and recommend it very much. 

You can pay the merchant in the bell tower to remove your sins and it will de-aggro Lautrec.
The first time I played the game I accidentally hit Laurentius too hard when I freed him, so I thought I had to kill him (then I found out about the sin guy after I did the whole playthrough without access to the pyromancy spells). 

 

I did enjoy it. By the end, the consolised hand-holding, disjointed progress, gung-ho vocals and tedious immersion-buggering map scenes were annoying me far more than the linearity - but were in turn well compensated for by the gameplay, reasonable diversity, graphics, and spectacle of the city. Sure it is so much COD-like I could feel by brain rotting each time I played it, but as a shooter it's pretty fine and I'm definitely going to get C3.

Continuing with Space Marine...

The clunky controls and utterly on-rails progress (it's like a FPS side-scroller as far as lack of interaction with the cool backgrounds) are still annoying, the visceral combat and excellent level of violence are still good, more so now I've got the Melta too. 

Crysis 3... it's kinda like Far Cry 3 on rails. Great graphics, though. 

TYS 

http://youtu.be/QKuKKBWnPtE 

Play Demon Souls first, the second game Dark Souls is easier. You should hurry up because part of the enjoyment of the games is the co-op aspect for boss fights and the servers will not be around forever!

Hmmm. So the predecessor is even more brutal and unforgiving than the sequel? Mgah.

Is the first game a match for the second in terms of quality? Or will it be a bit like playing a lesser game? I'd be tempted to leap straight into the second game to get the full wow factor.

I guess it's a bit like why I could never really be bothered with Skyrim after playing hundreds of hours of Oblivion. I mean Skyrim was good, but all that time spent in Oblivion completely took the "wow" factor out of Skyrim for me, and I never did play more than a few hours of it :( 

These are painful :) 

Heh, lighting is for losers

:smug: 

The first game "Demon's Souls" is brutal! It certainly not a lesser game but more a rough diamond with raw game mechanics. You will need way more patience to play the first game than the second.

Key differences of first game:
* No checkpoints, no bonfires, if you die then the whole level resets and you are back to the beginning of the level.
* Levels are self contained, no streaming, you teleport to each level.
* When you die your health is halved. You need to use Stone of Ephemeral Eyes (These are rare items) to gain human form.
* Each world has a Tendency scale of white (easy) to black (crazy hard) and plenty of levels of grey in between. When you die this meter goes towards black, so the world gets tougher. Certain events only happen at white or black levels.

Summary: When you die the game gets harder!

* If you attack ANY NPC in the game they are hostile until next game+. There is no way to reset them to be friendly.
* There is a one NPC that has some really cool items and if he dies early it can affect how you upgrade certain weapons.
* It is extremely easy to screw up a whole game and have to rely on game+ to reset events.
* The levels can be occupied with dark shades and they are extremely dangerous and tough.
* Most boss fights in the first game are tough and unforgiving. Plus you often have to fight through a whole level to get to them without dying first. (example - Tower Knight)

If you play the second game first you will dislike the first game because it is tougher and more challenging. I found Dark Souls easier (especially up to Sen's Fortress) but I poured 200+ hours into the first game and think the second game was toned down. (especially after all the patches)

The Online WIKI is a must read for the first game especially if you want to upgrade items. 

Thanks for the info.

So, if I'm reading you right, the game was designed by an insane masochist who was probably locked up in a small dungeon for his entire childhood with nothing but an old Nintendo and a copy of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts.

Hmmm, as much as this sounds like something that I would probably have had a crack at 5 years ago, these days I don't know if I can afford to sink much time into that sort of gaming commitment any more :( 

Haha, that's sort of where I land on those games too. Who has that kind of time? :P 

Got this image of Willem yellin at em to get off his lawn, rolled up newspaper in fist.