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I don't feel bad for them, they're the ones choosing to charge people 100 dollars. Never say never, but I couldn't see myself doing that for something I was working on. The arguments I've heard (the ones in this episode included) don't sway me, there are better ways of reaching your most dedicated fans than asking them to pay more than everyone else just because you know they will. It's just a way to get more money out of them, I think it's sleazy. If you want feedback then invite them to a closed alpha. If you're dead set on paid early access you can still limit who gets to buy it without slapping an insulting price tag on it.

Some amazing Dark Souls screenshots. Some day we'll all be playing in 4k / 8k and it'll be glorious.

That's the Stone set (which is also good for poise). Giants is sold by a blacksmith (guess which one).

There is also:

Do the Catacombs before you do 4-Kings. Farm Darkwraiths for chunks until you get to +14 (+15 if you have a slab which you probably don't). Put Charcoal Pine Resin on your weapon, they're weak to fire. Like osmosisch said, putting on high poise gear (Havel's set) so that you can just keep swinging is the easiest way to beat them. Two hand your weapon and whack away.

@Gridde at the point you're at you can access the DLC (if you have it, comes with the PC version). You'll probably want to look up how to get to it because it's not the kind of thing you're likely to figure out on your own. @JonCole yes, they're both Greatswords. They have slightly different attack speed, range and movesets. The Bastard Sword isn't bad actually, give it a try. Another very popular sword is the Zweihander (an Ultra Greatsword), but with 16 Strength you'll only be able to wield it with both hands. You can find it

Did you find the blacksmith? He'll let you make weapons that use it. It can be a bit annoying to get the upgrade materials for it, it doesn't actually upgrade very well, but the main problem is that its damage doesn't scale with your stats. Upgrading the longsword is definitely a good idea, but you can also try getting the Claymore. It's on the far side for the bridge that the Hellkite Drake is guarding. Upgrading armor doesn't help you as much as upgrading your sword and shield, putting those souls towards levelling is usually a better idea. As long as you do some mix of strength (or dex), endurance and vitality it's hard to mess it up. If you haven't put any points into vit then throw some in there, I like to get vit / end to 20 and then focus more on end. How much strength you want is up to you. There are some cool weapons that require a lot of it and will do huge damage, but you can also stick with the base requirements and make elemental weapons (they aren't affected by your stats). Just feel it out, if your health is doing fine then drop some points in there to get more damage.

You can buy smithboxes that let you upgrade (but not ascend) weapons at bonfires. There's also more than one blacksmith in the game, you'll find the others eventually.

I'm trying to think of what you could be referring to. The boulders when they hit a corner and stop for a second? Maybe I'm having a brain fart.

He was waiting for the door to open, wasn't he?

Did you find the Large Ember? Getting your weapon past +5 really helps. Unfortunately, the best place to get the shards is down in Blighttown (from the slugs in the swamp). There are shards scattered about Sen's fortress though, a good amount of them. So if you can make it partway through it should get easier.

It's weird. They definitely give the player more freedom to do stuff than most games, you can attack anyone, go anywhere, steal anything, but I still think of the games more as being about the hand crafted events / quests. When you talk about generating your own stories, do you mean more in a roleplay sense than sandbox / systems type stuff?

That actually let me ruin my own playthrough. I wasn't having very much fun with the combat early on (got pretty frustrated with it actually) but then I found out about alchemy. When I realised I could enter an endless recursive loop of making potions that would buff my potionmaking, I couldn't resist it. I don't entirely blame the game, because I did have to put in a lot of effort to break it, but at the same time it's hard to resist a boring but effective way of beating a game. The problem for me is: when do I stop? If you can break the game systems to that degree then any difficulty is in some sense self imposed. I didn't want to gimp myself by not doing it, because I hated the combat when my charcter was weak, but being a god was only marginally better. The "don't use it" argument might work for some people but it doesn't work for me. It's also why I don't like how in Path of Exile's permadeath mode your character doesn't get erased, it gets turned into a non-permadeath character. Then it's on me to bring myself to not play that character! It's totally different from the game taking it away from me.

Like standing outside the boss room

You're right about bleed Ninja, it's not a DoT it's just a chunk of damage. For all but one or two weapons in the game the damage is 30% of the enemy's total health. It does work versus bosses, but it can be quite hard to trigger. The hard part about parrying is that every enemy has its own timing, and some enemies like to delay their attacks to throw you off. That guy you fought does insane damage, so trying to parry him is quite risky. He does telegraph is attacks though so once it clicks you should be able to do it consistently. You want to parry just slightly after his club is over his shoulder and starts tilting forwards. You can keep holding block while you parry, so if you're too late you still block. If your timing is just slightly off there's also something called a partial parry, which doesn't let you riposte but negates most of the damage. For a lot of enemies I like to block until they do the one attack I know I can parry, because some of them are way harder than others. Finally, you can only parry humanoid enemies that are roughly your size.

Yup, you notice it more with some bosses that have very hard hitting attacks. With normal enemies the bleed over damage is going to be quite small, the dangerous part is that if you don't have enough stamina you also get staggered when you try to block. As for the stats, as long as you do a mix of vit / end / str / dex it's hard to get it wrong. Might not be optimised but it'll be fine. Just take note of which attributes your weapons scale with.

I went and finished Tomb Raider I. I got into the series with the second game and never played the first one. If I'm not mistaken TR1 was actually ported to Mac after the second game, so that's probably why. A game I did play though was Tomb Raider Anniversary, which I think is fantastic. Instead of replaying that I figured I'd try the original. People like to hate on the tank controls, but I got used to them pretty fast and as far as the platforming go I think they work pretty well. That part of the game actually holds up, it's fun to explore the levels, solve the puzzles and find the secrets. Where the controls break down is when you need to stand just in the right spot to pick up an item, or grab a ledge above you etc. It can get pretty frustrating. Something I wasn't quite expecting was how much combat there is. Anniversary had some, but it felt more relaxed. Here they throw stuff at you in almost every room (at least later in the game) and the combat is atrocious. Most enemies take too many bullets to kill. Also, I think there's a dip in quality for a while after St. Francis Folly. I put the game down and had to force my way through the rest of Greece, but once you get to Egypt the level design gets way better. Even at its best it still makes me impressed to see what they did with the remake, it made the bad parts good while making the good parts amazing. Anyway, I ended up liking the game on the whole. I love the feeling of isolation, exploring these abandoned environments on your own. There's really not much else like it, even in the same series. I'm also pretty impressed with what they did with some of the level design considering that this was one of the first proper 3D games. I actually started replaying TR2, even more combat in that one so not sure if I'll stick with it.

The bosses play by the same rules as you! That's one of the great things about the game. You should get the souls though, it might be delayed by 10 or so seconds, but you should get them (he only gives you 3,000 though).

Yup, in SL1 runs you stick to elemental weapons which don't scale (except the light crossbow!). The best thing about the RF Club in my opinion is that it's quite effective at staggering enemies. It's just got poor range (it's quite easy to miss because of that), and lacks a proper R2 attack. It's strong, just a bit boring to use.

I dunno man, they tend to get moist and fall apart. Bread is the worst, for example falafel rolls (are they called that in English?). Sometimes you can't eat the bottom because it's all mushy, and they fall apart when you eat them, ugh. It does taste good but still.

Everything in the game levels up with you now (right?) and there still aren't any stat points, so why even have levels? Okay, you unlock some skills, but it still feels like a weird artifact and not the kind of system someone would design if they started fresh.

It might be supported on a game by game basis. I know it works with Dark Souls because

Namco has/is updated other games (Ace Combat I think) and I believe there was a steamworks related tag that popped up on steamdb. It's still selling well for them so I expect them to fix it. However, if the worst happens the game will still be playable as GFWL supports local profiles.

I think Danielle is great too. Guest episodes tend to be good (second only to Nick episodes!) Also, pointless fact, the dagger symbol is the hermitian conjugate in quantum mechanics. I totally forgot people use it as a reference symbol and got confused for a second.

I couldn't resist Origins for €10, I think that's a pretty great deal for a game that came out last holiday season.