Woot, finished Dark Souls yesterday. Great game, I enjoyed it a lot.
It's clearly not for everyone, though. An action RPG (but not of the horde variety) with little to no meaningful NPC interaction. This put me off initially, but after watching it a bit on Daz.tv, I decided to give it a proper try. Everyone always goes on about it being so difficult, and it certainly isn't a walk in the park, but I found the combat to be fair for the most part. It's a learning experience really, where you figure out each enemy and situation and adapt accordingly. Eventually it becomes very rewarding and it feels like a real achievement (unlike other games that hand the victory to you with little effort).

The gameplay and difficulty of the encounters is certainly interesting as it seems to vary alot between players. Depending on their individual skills, character builds and equipment, everyone has a different experience. For example, many people consider Ornstein & Smough the toughest boss fight in the game, but I didn't have any problems - beat them on the third attempt (second even, if you discount the one where I stumbled into the arena by accident). Other bosses went down on the first try even. But then there were some that gave me quite a hard time, e.g. that goddamn Demon Firesage. Of course, everything seems easy after having beaten it. Funny enough, the minions caused me more trouble and deaths than the actual bosses.
The combat itself felt very satisfying once I had figured it out. Guess I was lucky to find the Black Knight Sword early on which is pretty legit to say the least, and I ended up using it for most of the game.

The game's design is very nice. Some good layouts and interconnectivity. It's not apparent at first, but after having travelled through all the areas, one realizes how they all connect and create a big whole. I especially liked how one can often see certain areas in the distance, places that you thought to be far away, but then turn out to be quite close except for their entrances.

I have mixed feelings about the obscurity of certain things - meaning that apparently it's encouraged to look things up on the wiki to have an easier time. This did help me get through more smoothly (as well as asking poor rebb all kinds of silly questions), but at times it almost felt like cheating. Occasionally there were things I think I never would have discovered on my own. Then again, figuring everything out by yourself in such a harsh environment would have been to much for an individual player anyway - I suppose this is where the online aspect comes into play, e.g. messages and summoning. I played in offline mode, however.

On a technical note, even though everyone always says how bad a console port this is, it ran pretty well for me after some initial hitches. Lots of crashes at first while playing around with dsfix (no problems without, though), coupled with an extremely long loading time when starting the game. At some point I installed more RAM and suddenly the game didn't crash anymore even on high detail settings, although I don't know if this is even related. I can see how these kinds of technical problems can put people off. Though, on the other hand, one may consider this the first boss fight!

Anyway, glad to have played this and I recommend anyone interested to give it a try no matter the obstacles. 

Nice review neg. I don't really consider looking stuff up as cheating when it comes to RPG's, there's just so much to explore in some of them and decent equipment can be difficult to find... some developers probably expect a bit of sharing of information and strategies. Researching stuff online is just part of the fun of rpgs, imo. 

I was happy to gaze dreamily at Polge, but then Willem dropped into the frame.

This sounds like it is a combination of passion project, and effective promotional tool of UE4. I am hopeful. 

Translocator, Enforcers, 3 Domination spots please.

Or I guess I could just go on to the appropriate forums where Willem and Polge will be. 

Yet another crushingly boring step back for Epic. Okay so they are going to one-up QuakeLive just as effectively as UT outclassed Q3A, but it would have been nice for things to have progressed a little bit in the last 15 years / 4 incarnations of UT.

UT3(4) in a new engine?? I'd need to find a really shade of paint to watch dry to top that. 

will be exciting if they went back to what made the game was so good in the first place. Bold designs in levels and themes, this means bright colours, sky scrapers, space ships and floating levels in space, ancient temples and cathedrals. Robots, vampires, army guys and aliens. Exciting variety of music, techno, drum and bass, rock music, trance.

It has to be bold, it has to be bright, it has to be beautiful. If it fails on any of these points, if it is a brown boring mess like UT3 then it will fall flat on its face. Hard. 

"but then Willem dropped into the frame."

My sincere apologies. There really should have been a warning on the screen or something... 

...Willem was the chubby blonde, right?? 

Technically there was a warning, I didn't have the tab up until they announced you, then I went and looked. I should have specified that my dreamy gaze merely changed targets.

I posted a few threads on the forums, but they got lost among debates of Lightning Gun versus Sniper Rifle. 

I say have both. I prefer the original UT over everything else but I'm sure the series can accommodate both. 

They literally just announced the game, I don't understand how you can judge what they are doing when they haven't written a single line of code yet :P

I am hopeful! I would love to see something similar to UT99 in terms of player speed and map/mode variety as I feel like ut2k3/2k4 was a little bit too fast.

It'll be an interesting project to follow for sure.

Which person on the livestream was Willem? I didn't recognise your name! Good to see they have some fps and UT veteran developers on the team. 

Warren Marshall, he has the awesome facial hair. Comes in later in, and sits down in David's seat for a bit. 

He kinda looks like an older, taller version of Daz?! Even the names match for the most part! Conspiracy theories inbound. 

Yeah, I was the tall dork on the left side with the "READY." t-shirt. 

Also, anyone not liking what we're doing ... despite us not having written a single line of code yet ... should definitely get into the forums and talk about the game with us. It's a community project so doing what the community wants is kind of important.

And that sounds like lip service, I know, but this is our new direction. Open and transparent. 

Thought UT3 was pretty well conceived. Dispite some flaws, which caused more flak than they warranted. Hope 'community involvement' won't result in too many kooks, because you know at the end of the day they're still going to whine for it not being a carbon copy of their fav entry in the series.

Still, a new UT is the best videogame news I've heard in recent years. 

Willem get them to make a single player campaign pls, thank you. I have no interest in deathmatch with other random players around the globe that'll just kick my ass because they play it 24/7. Even COD/BF have SP campaigns as well as multiplayer.

It's been almost a decade since Epic made a SP game for PC, since they decided that PC gamers don't deserve the GOW franchise anymore. 

It's UT game, so if anything, it'll have some simple bot campaign/tournament like in Q3A, nothing more. I guess few people care about this, most want a solid deathmatch experience with good balance and varied game modes. Those who do care about SP will look elsewhere.

Bots are a must, of course, and hopefully the AI can be made good, as this is something all MP games have shortcomings.

I know this is never going to happen, but imagine there would be a SP campaign using the DM levels in the same way that the DMC episodes work... ;) 

It's a community project - anything can happen. :) If someone makes an SP mode like that and we like what they did, there's no reason that couldn't be part of it.

It's a different mentality this time around. It's not about what Epic wants or decides ... we're the gate keepers and quality control, but the community can sell us on just about any idea with a good prototype. 

Kona - And FYI, Gears isn't our decision anymore. Ask Microsoft about it. :P 

Of course I can judge what they've announced. They've announced a new UT, I am judging the concept of a new UT. If it somehow turns out to be something radically different from UT/2/3/4 then my judgement will of course have been bollox but equally the announcement of it as a UT game will have been bollox.

I will grant that the focus on customer/player involvment every step of the way IS something new. Unfortunately I don't see high hopes for that as it seems a slightly ludicrous task wading through the hordes of fanbois, trolls, teenagers, hasbeens, and general imbeciles that will infest forums and keep spewing out counter-productive opinions like little manure spreaders. I suspect the effect would be designing a game by committee, where the committee is a bunch of ADD homo fucktardus who can barely walk upright. I suspect more strongly the end result will be Epic wisely ignoring 90% of the bollox they are faced with and making something they know will be reliably good i.e. errrrr UT....

Obviously I say this as someone who adored Unreal, loved UT (and thought it suitably trounced Q3A at it's own game), but is getting slightly bored of Epic doing something so similar after 4 incarnations of the game. 

This could be the "final" UT exactly because of the open development. 

God those tomb raider 2013 youtubes make it look like total hollywood wank. Listening to Lara pant on like some pussy actress really peeved me off. After a quick glance it seems to get lots of good reviews too !? 

Because it's a goddamn fantastic game, GOTY 2013 for me. 

Yeah, LOVED that game. Really a lot of fun!