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Just experiment, when you stumble onto a combination, the relevant effects are revealed on the ingredients involved. It just starts coming faster once you have a base to start from. Even if a combination doesn't work, every combination you've tried is remembered by the game, so you just have to work through it. I really like it, i think it's a cool change for Alchemy. Just eating the ingredients raw probably randomly reveals effects too? I haven't really bothered with that. (It probably also still raises your alchemy skill a tiny bit, which it did in Morrowind and Oblivion.)

I had always just played Morrowind and Oblivion on the default difficulty, which is what i am doing for this as well. Protip - Alchemy is your friend, and now cooking is too, because it allows you immediate low-level access to healing items. Pause the game and heal. Pause the game and buff. Pause the game and eat a steak. (The poisons are pretty great too.) If you're playing a mage, having a shield can actually be pretty useful. (The shield bash move staggers enemies, giving you time for casting.) Also, i understand that this game doesn't scale such that you could beat the main quest at low levels like people always did in Oblivion, they have purposefully soft-gated the main quest path with tougher enemies. Which is awesome, that's the way it should be.

A couple more thoughts on the game - I'm undecided on how i feel about them removing all the attributes. I guess they were essentially just an unnecessary extra layer of statistical modifiers, but i kind of liked having all those fiddly numbers. Fiddly numbers are great. What i am glad has changed is the complete removal of the major/minor skill divide. That was always a really dumb, broken part of their leveling mechanic. It was always either easily abusable for min-maxing or, if mismanaged, bound to leave you severely underpowered and unprepared for anything actually challenging. I mean, they were SP games with a difficulty toggle, so it's not like it really ever mattered. It was just dumb, bad design that always really bugged me. Also, i sort of dig the randomized quests. They stand out quite obviously and they seem to settle pretty hard into a predictable routine, but as a way to incentivize you going out and exploring non-quest dungeons, it's kind of awesome. (Because the dungeons themselves frequently actually are interesting.) Has anybody figured out all the economics stuff seeded throughout the game? Every shop has a ledger in the back, for example. I haven't really tried messing around with it at all.

I also unexpectedly ran into M'aiq while playing, his metatextual silliness fills me with glee. "M'aiq has heard the people of Skyrim are better looking than the ones in Cyrodiil. He has no opinion on the matter. All people are beautiful to him." I was informed by a friend who is playing the game on the PC that you can, but that there's some odd roundabout way to do it. I don't remember the specifics, but you can do it.

Twenty hours in, no crashes, seen some quirky behavior out of some things, but nothing detrimental. Of course, twenty hours into a game that demands hundreds isn't exactly a comprehensive picture of how fucked up or not fucked up the game is. So at least right now, it seems solid. Runs smooth, loads fast, looks pretty. I think there's been a fairly linear trend of Bethesda improving their QA from game to game. Going from the days of their games being "tortuously buggy", to Morrowind and Oblivion being mostly playable, and now to this. Anyways, some random unformulated thoughts about the game so far - I wish the frequency of the NPC random chatter was turned down a whooole bunch. It was annoying in Oblivion, and it can be even worse here. Walking down a street and having three or four NPC's try to start a conversation with you, all of them talking over eachother, is completely ridiculous. Spend enough time in a town and they all run through their dialogue options really quickly. On the whole though, the towns are awesome. Bethesda makes kickass, believable RPG towns. I've probably spent most of my time so far just slowly exploring a few of the towns. Dragons are pretty awesome. I had one circle over head for a few minutes, booming and yelling at me, before just moving on having never attacked. I thought that was pretty tense and cool, not knowing if it's actually going to engage you. I am terrified by the perks system, there's just so much shit going on there, there's hundreds of perks to sort out before can figure out what your build should be. Very glad they don't force you to spend your perks on a level-up, you can keep them for later. (I believe i had heard that there are 250 perks? The theoretical level cap for the game would have you top out around 70-80 perks.) I miss item degradation, but i'm probably alone in that. The new and changed crafting mechanics are cool. I like the changes to alchemy, not sure how i feel about the changes to enchanting. Smithing is neat and there's a lot to it, but seems like it will be hard to level. It also more or less requires a significant investment of perks to be particularly useful. Cooking is super nifty, kind of an early-game stand-in for alchemy. Pick-pocketing seems like a weird skill to add to the line-up when so many other skills that would still be applicable to this game have been dropped. Oblivion lock-picking, which was terrible, has been replaced with FO3 lock-picking, which was great. I like that the AI has a search routine now for stealth, they don't just instantly aggro on you. That is a huge improvement. Archery seems potent and actually useful for the first time ever. I completely love the overhauled magic system, but the hard level limits on illusion spells have been making those spells pretty useless. Still, a pure mage build would probably be a hell of a lot of fun in this. The melee feels fine to me, and maybe about the same as Oblivion, but perhaps a bit more... tactile is maybe the word? It's not as floaty, hits have more weight. It also probably seems poorer than it really is for having come out a few weeks after a game that significantly raised the expectations for this kind of bashy dudes-in-armor fantasy melee. The combat here isn't especially deep by itself, but throw in all the other mechanics, there's still a lot going on. A lot of other things about the game will really only become evident with time, like how their revised leveled-enemies/loot scheme feels. Anyways, just a bunch of random thoughts about a game i suspect i will be playing for a very, very long time.

It's going slightly off topic, but if we're going to talk tactical shooters, Swat 3 and 4 were pretty amazing games. More games need a YELLING AT DUDES TO SURRENDER mechanic. Anyways, the Thief games and Deus Ex games are my favorite stealth games. I love how flexible those games can be about your approach, i always found the heavily scripted trial and error design of Splinter Cell to be very off-putting. Kind of thrilled that Eidos Montreal is now making Thief 4.

Saying it because it's worth reiterating - Being hollowed basically just means you're saying no to the mp match-making. (It also prevents you from kindling bonfires for more healing charges.) You won't see the various kinds of summon signs that let you welcome people into your game, but you also won't be a target for various kinds of invasions. There are also a few scripted summon signs and invasions that can get you rare loot, and you need to be a human to see those too. (They disappear once the boss in that area has been cleared.) Clearing a boss also prevents you from doing online summons in whatever area the boss resided in, and maybe prevents online invasions in that area as well?

-CC3YtVWXh0

Whatever, i already did it, it's something i needed to do anyways.

Ah fuck, i have to change a few passwords because of this. God dammit.

I'm more bothered by the rumors stating that you have to participate in their co-operative PvE meta-game thing to get the best ending in the SP campaign. Everything i've been hearing about Mass Effect 3 just makes me cringe. I have never been so disinterested in a game i want to play. I just want to see my personalized narrative through to completion and be done with it.

I just finished Resonance of Fate, really great game. I think i would count it among my favorite RPG's. The battle system and game mechanics are just so unique and well conceived. Everything is very deep and woven together in interesting ways, very rewarding game to sort out and understand. Don't play it for a story. The world is cool, but there's kind of a status quo throughout. The tone is very casual and jovial, it never builds into any particular sense of urgency and the plot never really develops into anything.

I just listened to those myself, i really enjoyed them.

I would just like to say that Ghost Trick is a pretty incredible game that i wish more people would have noticed, it is seriously one of the best adventure games i have ever played. (It is also not a traditional point and click, though it maybe has more of that design dna than some of the other examples provided.)

A lot of people have said this. There have been cosplays with better Phoenix Wright hair. Here, he just looks greasy.

Every time i see this topic bumped to the top of the board, it gets my hopes up about maybe seeing the most recent game localized. Then i remember it's an old topic with an old title.

Before Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood came out, there were all those rumors about an Assassin's Creed game set during the French Revolution, which always sounded awesome to me.

That was surprisingly entertaining.

You're absolutely right, of course. If anything, that the patch is addressing many of the issues you encountered in your time with the game, it could be taken as validation regarding those points. I love how grimy and wet the sewers appear, how impenetrable the darkness is in the tombs, and i love that you can look at the horizon and see places you've been and places you're going to. I think the bosses all look really incredible, and that the environments have an impressive sense of scale. I also think art direction is more important than the underpinning technology, and there's no argument against this game having really amazing art, right? It's clearly not the best looking game on the market, but i don't feel that it's being held back in any especially significant way, framerate woes aside. There's no blurry textures or crudely detailed models that really stand out to me as detracting from the game. (Certain armor sets do have some very odd visual quirks, granted. The wrists on my knight's steel armor twist in a very odd way.) I am also endlessly amused by their hilarious implementation of havok physics. This is something i've been going back and forth on, i'm not sure how i feel about it. I generally am in support of tutorials in games, not just surfacing what mechanics are there, but how you should be using them. Dark Souls does literally nothing on its own to make itself approachable. What it does have, and is quite interesting in this regard, is a built in crowd-sourced hint system. That can be used to suggest strategies, reveal hidden items, warn of strong enemies. It's very cool and very interesting, but there are very obvious limits to what it can do. I mean, I don't feel that the game necessarily needs to allow for itself to detail such minutia as upgrade paths, but it should at least do a better job of explaining how the online systems work and other such fundamental basics. The built-in hint system is kind of covering the middle ground, the fan wikis are holding the high end, which is fine, but it also then kind of comes down to the fan wikis to explain the very basics too. Which is a problem. On the other hand, that's kind of what this game is, it's inscrutable and idiosyncratic. People are enjoying discovering things about the game. It has people talking and sharing stories and explaining things to each other, there's a culture bubble around this game that is fascinating. So then the question might be if From was counting on that happening, and also if it is right to excuse gaps in the game itself because people are doing the work and filling in the blanks for each other. So yeah. Shrug.

I wanted to respond with my own thoughts, but the board is telling me the post is too long, so i've had to cut back on some of the text. Heh. It really is hard to say, but i can say that From Software games have kind of always been like this. I remain convinced that a large part of why their more recent mech games have failed to find an audience in the west is squarely on people being largely oblivious to what those games are trying to do and how they work. Why that same kind of inscrutable design has found such acceptance with Demon's Souls and Dark Souls is very curious. I think this is an odd complaint, are any RPG's really in the habit of broadcasting ahead of time how many supplies you will have available to you? Anyways, the twinkling titanite change is the big one, it's a very rare resource that you can easily lock yourself out of obtaining if you don't understand that there's some behind the scenes nonsense with the crystal lizards. (Essentially, attack too many, they stop respawning. It's a silly hold-over from Demon's Souls.) There is a huge disparity between how rare it is and how many things need it for upgrades, and it's probably a change that needed to happen. Personally, i never felt that any of the other resources were especially difficult to obtain, though. There are actually several different events in which an NPC will murder another NPC, and other avoidable events that can lead to losing critical NPC's. It's kind of ruthless in that regard, everything except the main quest path can be ruined. The game lets you fuck up, and at times even tricks you into fucking up, and it makes you live with those results. I screwed up long event chains and lost important NPC's in my first playthrough. It was frustrating, i was angry and had no recourse, and i appreciate it on that level. It was a unique experience that i wouldn't have had almost anywhere else. I think it also really emphasizes the need to play the game through NG+, which is something the game is certainly seems balanced for and built around. I don't think it's quite that simple, it gives you fire resistance and poison resistance and also double the standard defensive gains other stats would give you. Once your gains-per-level start dropping off in the 70's and 80's, it seems like having taken more resistance earlier in the game might put you ahead of the curve in later progression. If i'm correct in that, it's more for long-term build planning. If i'm wrong in that, then it's kind of useless, but whatever. I kind of feel like the Drake Sword is From throwing people a bone, giving struggling players a hand. It's so easy to get that they must have known that people would get their hands on it. It really doesn't even upset the balance in any long-term sense, that weapon becomes pretty useless later in the game, even upgraded. As for divine weapons, you don't actually need divine weapons for the catacombs section at all. (Skeletons can't revive from falls, and there are a ton of ledges to kick them from. The necromancers in the area also don't respawn, and once they're cleared out, skeletons won't revive anymore.) I have played through the catacombs twice now without a divine weapon, and while it's more difficult, it's not unmanageable. Also, the normal progression path and all stat bonuses are being buffed in the patch. The elemental weapons won't be as powerful anymore, relatively speaking. (Which seems to acknowledge that as a legitimate problem, which it is.) I honestly haven't had any really terrible experiences with PVP, i'm playing a pretty straight forward Knight, not exploiting any of the things people have been complaining about, and have won maybe 2/3rds of the invasions that have happened to me. Still, a great many PVP-focused balanced changes are coming with the patch, and a lot of issues are being addressed. (Many items are being nerfed, such as the Ring of Fog which will now only reduce lock-on range and not prevent it entirely. Pyromancy is also being heavily nerfed, sorcery is being nerfed, specific miracles are being nerfed. Magic just in general clearly isn't working as intended.) It's almost certain that the game was balanced primarily for solo, and that PVP probably wasn't given the consideration it needed. The upcoming patch is going to be changing a goddamned lot of things, it's going to be a pretty radically different game. I like the structure they have here, i've had several totally delightful experiences working through areas with anonymous people, using the system of gestures to direct eachother. (In fact, i had one encounter where the person sent me a polite thank you in very broken english afterwards, and without that emphasis on non-verbal communication, i don't know if i would have had that experience.) More directly responding to your comments, summon signs should at least appear to everybody within the appropriate level range. That's apparently how it worked in Demon's Souls with that game's dedicated server structure, and people who really wanted to co-op with their friends dealt with it. How it is in Dark Souls, with its troubled peer-to-peer networking structure, your summon signs will only appear to a small random selection of other players in the vicinity. (As player population dies down, it seems like it will probably become easier to match up with the intended people.) Definitely major issues here, especially up in the rickety narrow paths, especially if you're in the unlucky position of being surrounded on the rickety narrow paths. Combined with the tricks they're pulling to limit your vision in that whole region, it can be terrifically unpleasant. I certainly don't agree with this at all. The game isn't pushing any top-shelf visuals, but i do think it is a really gorgeous game. I have heard this story several times now, and it is absolutely disheartening hearing about how many people go into that graveyard and just beat their head against those stupid skeletons and never get the hint about that being the wrong way to go. I don't think the game should be blamed for that, i think it's a fairly dire indication of a much wider issue about how brain dead many games have become. People aren't even trying to step back to evaluate their situation intelligently, they're just throwing themselves at the most obvious path and hoping that something will give. You're not wrong, but things like that are kind of what makes the game so appealing to the people who love it. It's the nature of playing a game made by a developer from Japan. From Software actually seems to interact with their fans pretty regularly, just... their japanese fans. When they released notes for the upcoming Dark Souls changes, it took nearly a week for western fans to translate it. Ideally, From should be having a direct dialogue with their english fans as well, but they aren't, and it's not a problem distinct to them.

What aspects of the game weren't really working for you? What was it that drove you to finish it?

I've felt frustrated by a lot of the writing i've seen on Destructoid, but it is mostly Jim Sterling. I mean, i get it, he's being an internet troll, and that's exactly the problem. If there's no sincerity to anything, there's nothing valuable being contributed to the broader dialogue on a topic. That he also seems to be a genuinely horrible person outside of his troll persona, it makes it an easy choice to just ignore his writing.

Seconded, Destructoid is seriously grating.

Translated patch notes! Personally, i think the most important change is that they're fixing the dropped-inputs bug, which has been a massive pain in the ass for me. Another big one is adjusting the cracked red eye orbs to only be consumed if the invasion actually goes through. (Which is a good change, but it's kind of side-stepping the connection issues.) Also a whole host of PVP-focused balance changes. A lot of of duping exploits are being plugged too. Boss drops are being adjusted to include humanities, tweaks to souls earned, and include extra homeward bones. (An item that lets you warp to the last Bonfire you used.) Also seems like the souls earned from bosses aren't divided up amongst the host and summoned phantoms anymore, all players will get the full reward in co-op. Merchants are being modified to carry more items of more types, generally alleviating some of the back-tracking for basic supplies. I don't like some of these changes though, being able to buy Twinkling Titanite is a fairly major cop-out. Some of the other things though, like getting homeward bones from bosses, will really only affect people who are still learning the game. (If you're playing wisely, you would already have several homeward bones on you at all times.) You'll also be able to buy a master key from one of the merchants now, which... sure, fine... whatever. People shouldn't keep being punished 140 hours into their playthrough while on NG++ for a choice they made in hour one. Lot of changes, mostly good. Seems like there's still a lot of issues unresolved though, but at least they're doing something. I also started an NG+ playthrough, it was extremely satisfying stomping through the first four areas of the game in about two hours, dying only once. (The first NG+ apparently makes all of the enemies 40% stronger, but it's not enough to make those early-game hollows trouble my Knight. Though it's also certainly a lot of muscle memory now, since many of those enemies can still kill you in two or three hits.)

Battletech, it's the Battletech universe. I mean, and i'm not opposed to a Mechwarrior MMO, there have already been many Battletech MMO's based around a factional match-making meta-game. Certainly many other mech games have been built around that kind of structure too, It's a good formula. It's the freemium part of it that concerns me. I have no interest in playing a game where people can buy victories. As somebody who has wanted for years to see a new Mechwarrior game, it's a little frustrating to see it happening in a way that would be so easy to screw up. In the provided article, they were quoted as saying the have no plans to sell anything that can interfere with the competitive balance, but i am skeptical of those claims.