Gwardinen

If you want to know probably the best place to go after ringing the first bell, read this spoiler: Oh additionally, once you've been in the church in Undead Parish you can activate an elevator to the left of the altar that takes you back to Firelink Shrine and permanently opens up a shortcut to that effect between the two.

Both the Minecraft and the levitation videos were too much for my sleep-deprived brain this morning.

If you're talking about the Drake Sword, a much easier way to get it is to get a shortbow from the merchant in Undead Burg and shoot its tail continuously from under the bridge it's guarding. You will need 12 dexterity to use the bow properly though. Then take it in two hands and press L1 (I'm guessing LB on 360) to aim.

I had completely forgotten about the Kinect rumours before the game's release. That would actually explain a lot about how those interface systems worked in the Sanctum if that was the case. I didn't think they were awful, but they were a little oddly designed at times and I can see why they might have been now.

Yeah, having now been in Blighttown I think that's exactly what it was. At the time I hadn't been there, had no idea what toxic status was or how to cure it and lost everything. I'm somewhat in the "up" phase of playing again now because I just killed a boss and that always makes you feel better about everything you've been through up to that point.

I actually made this thread a while back, it's just been dead for a while. It is a strangely interesting and compelling game, yeah.

I don't think I've done anything irreversible on this playthrough, but I am in the depressed phase of playing Dark Souls that alternates with the excited phase. I lost 20000 souls because someone invaded me and cheesed me with some kind of poison bomb that I couldn't counter in any way that I could find and then just ran away and blocked while my health slowly ticked down. At this stage in the game, that is a lot of souls. I am very tired and sad.

Not really. I learned English in the UK and I don't recall having been asked to use the Oxford comma. It is, however, called the Oxford comma because it was traditionally taught at Oxford University, I believe. Nowadays it seems like some institutions (and probably even just some teachers) teach it and not others. There isn't really one group of people you can go to for "correct" grammar right now (that I know of), but the prevailing opinion appears to be that either way is fine.

It can also be rewritten quite easily to almost completely remove the ambiguity. "We invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers." That said I have no real problem with the Oxford comma. I tend not to use it myself, but it doesn't confuse or bother me when I see it.

Yeah, I think mikemariano was actually joking with the tone of his post. We all know the main quest will take much longer than two and a half hours to complete when played in any sensible fashion, and with side quests factored in I'm sure Skyrim will have plenty of content. As he pointed out in the original post, Morrowind was completed in about 10 minutes, and I forget what the speedrun record for Oblivion was, but it was less than two and a half hours I think. If anything, the fact that the speedruns are getting longer is probably due to better structuring and stability in Bethesda's games.

Really? I beat the taurus demon on my first try, took me three with this one, and now that I finally beat them it was with both that NPC knight and a real white phantom helping me. I've left my summoning sign there for a while too so that anyone in my situation can pull me in for some help, but in about half an hour it's only worked once. The servers are definitely either screwed, or there are some very strict requirements on NAT and such for it to work. It doesn't help that actually getting yourself an "open" NAT rating is even harder on the PS3 than on the 360.

I'm standing outside the white mist that leads to the gargoyles, and I desperately want white phantom backup before I go in, but summoning signs are showing up very rarely, and when they do they fail about 7/8 times. I don't want to do this alone.

I want to cry. I found that elevator and used it but was too scared to go further so I went back up, then died, dropping my nearly 4k souls, and a little later died again, losing them all. So I reiterate: I want to cry.

Oh god, the firekeeper souls upgrade your estus flask? Fuck, I found one of those and used it, assuming it would give me souls. It actually mostly just gave me humanity, most of which I think I pissed away in the aforementioned incident that I shall not speak of. Also, do you have any idea where the elevator from the church inside the Undead Town goes? The one that was near the huge dude with the mace?

The Taurus Demon was actually a good lesson for me in the fact that the lock-on camera is a hindrance as often as it is a help. In some situations you just need to turn it off and run around like you're in Devil May Cry. Sprinting at angles from a boss, particularly if you don't have enough room to maneouvre, is not necessarily a crazy idea. In that situation, being locked in to facing them is not a good thing. Also, yes, I can confirm that you can do the plunge more than once as long as you start climbing long enough before he gets to you. He does have a vertical attack that will hit you if you're too low on the ladder, and fair warning: don't spend too long on top of the tower. Edit: Something that just occurred to me that it seems like the game never really explains - to kick someone you have to flick the left stick forwards just as you press the attack button, and to do a lunging attack you flick the left stick fowards as you press the heavy attack button. Just in case anyone didn't know. It's a bit tricky at first but, like backstabbing (and I presume parry + riposte, haven't trained myself into that yet), it gets easier with practice.

I sort of know what you mean, the experience you as a player get is almost as valuable as souls, as I'm definitely significantly better at the combat and understanding most of the enemies now than when I started. That said, I did just lose nearly 4000 souls in an incident I don't want to talk about (it genuinely hurts that much) so I'm thoroughly depressed right now.

There are actually three encumbrance states. One is the obvious overencumbrance that stops you being able to run at all and so on, then there's below 50%, which you mentioned, but if you actually manage to get below 25% you get even faster. I quite like my knight character, but I've gotten so some sections now where I'm not doing too well, and though I can probably push through I'm thinking I might make a pyromancer or sorcerer to see how I feel about those before I commit too heavily to my initial character.

I actually eventually managed to defeat him! Required a combination of firebombs and making my weapon do lightning damage and kiting him like a crazy person and abusing the spear's long reach. When I killed him I actually cheered, which finally gave me an insight into why so many people enjoy it.

My rental copy finally arrived today and I'm actually enjoying it quite a lot so far. Some of the tension is actually quite enjoyable. I'm desperate to get past this particular black knight, though, and it's really not working out for me. I know I should probably just accept it and move on, but there's something that looks really shiny past him and I'm starting to consider weird dodging runs to try to get past him, get the thing and then get back to somewhere where if he manages to kill me, at least I'll be able to recover my souls.

I believe if you didn't get a chance to play the Caspian Border map while it was briefly included in the beta (as I didn't, sadly) you also will have come away with a significantly worse impression than otherwise. From my understanding of those who got a chance to play it, Caspian Border was more of a traditional Battlefield map, large and covered in interesting vehicles and such. Operation Metro was a bad Call of Duty clone by comparison, and DICE having disabled Caspian Border was a very strange decision from a marketing and word of mouth perspective. I get the feeling this is one beta that actually may have been run a little too much like an actual beta rather than the glorified demos we've become used to in recent times.

Actually I think the extra estus flask might be when someone in another world uses humanity to kindle the bonfire you're using. I had heard that before. Of course it's possible both systems exist - but if I remember rightly having your message uprated in Demon's Souls would give you a small heal, so it's possible that is still the way of things in Dark. Moral of the story is there are a lot of weird online mechanics that are even more inscrutable than the general gameplay mechanics. I've thought a little about whether Dark Souls' refusal to explain much of its design is a good or a bad thing, but you can't argue that it is a rather unique and strange thing. Its online systems are perhaps its most unique and innovative features, and yet they're almost never mentioned in marketing and are barely acknowledged by the game itself until they actually happen in front of you. What western developer/publisher would keep so utterly silent on such a big selling point? Bizarre.

Something I've heard from others and jives fairly well with my own experience is Rage is meant to be seen on the move. It's basically supposed to be a pretty backdrop for action, not something to be looked at and admired on its own terms. That feels right to me, as it does indeed look quite nice when you're driving around or in the middle of a fight, but if you stop to consider it it falls down in some areas. Edit: Analogy just occurred to me, it's basically set decoration.

I'm not a big fan of coffee, but I have gone through several religions for the sake of hot chocolate. Seriously, though, there's such a lack of information that the conversion story could mean anything. The witches could just be low-key agnostics or even atheists who had just suffered a traumatic event (he said one had been hurt in a car crash or something, right?) and were grateful to have their basic needs seen to in a warm, safe place. In crises people are often more receptive to religion, and if he was effectively the host they wouldn't want to say anything to anger him anyway. So it's totally possible these are people who weren't particularly anti-Christian to begin with, who were having a tough time and were thankful to be treated well, and whose lack of objection and gratitude towards the church and him he interpreted as on the spot religious conversion. On the other hand, if there actually are photographs of hundreds of ravens hung from a tree (which the host of that show claims but we never see), something clearly went on there and I want to know what. Hoax or bizarre underground occult war, I'm genuinely interested.

So I finally finished this. I completed the prologue and chapter 1 on my old computer in the early patches (unfortunate on both counts), and then played chapters 2 and 3 and of course the epilogue on my new computer, and in version 2.0. I like that game. I like it much more than I did when I started. I really feel like the first hour or two of it is very hit and miss gameplay-wise, and the story doesn't really start going until the end of the first chapter either. It's definitely not a game you can pick up and be hooked immediately. Some of the gameplay concerns, at least, may have been addressed by the version 2.0 stuff - I'm not sure, having not tried it. The last chapter and the epilogue were indeed pretty short, but I didn't really mind because it seemed like the correct place to end it. All of the main questions had been answered and the game was pretty well set up for the seemingly inevitable third entry. I like the fact that there were three big live or die choices at the end, and I hope they have consequences for the aforementioned third game. For those who've finished at least chapter 2, I feel like I immediately want to jump back to the end of chapter 1 and take the other main path and see how different it is, but I could probably do with a break from the game and there are plenty of other things coming out soon that will distract me anyway. Still, I think I might genuinely do a second playthrough of this - probably skipping chapter 1 if I actually have a viable save for it. Side note: goddamn that game takes up a lot of space with saves, it never deletes any of them as far as I can tell and they're not all that small either. I've pruned out most of them myself, but it's still sort of bizarre.