shmups.system11.org

Certainly does. Resi 7 was the last game to have me shaking my head at boss battles and contemplating if there's another way of doing things. SH Downpour is currently making me want to shove the controller down someone's throat for the way it at least gets the aesthetics so bob on, and the combat so utterly, utterly wrong.

But yeah, From have carved a niche with these games and they'd be foolish to stray too far from it. And it's not as if there's anyone can compete with them, just look at the Lords of the Fallen crap.

Considering the pains they went to giving the trial and error combat an in lore explanation (being undead and all that) and how much they built on that, I think it's fair to say that From are very much in the business of using their game's combat as a part of the story telling. Not to say that further diversifying the ways in which the player interacts with the world would be an bad thing, but to me at least the experience of the Souls games amounts to a fair bit more than just hitting things with swords and lore splurges.

Not much information to go on Elden Ring as to whether it will take a substantially different direction from Dark Souls, but considering the experimentation done in BB and Sekiro I'd be surprised if it was just a DS soft reboot, though it's hard to imagine there not being a lot of comparisons to be drawn.

-Didn't mean to come across as snide though I can see how that is the case. I'm old and embittered and I spend a lot of time defending the medium I love from people who will never touch a game due to preconceived notions that keep being reiterated.
-Dunno if that's a postmodern reading (surely character arcs and the development of relationships is the opposite of that tendency). I've only read the first ~ten volumes because of financial reasons and fatigue. I wasn't trying to imply an exact ratio/any kind of full on content analysis. It's worth pointing out that swinging swords is narrative, same as establishment of setting etc.
-To say 'Souls would 'be better without combat' is ridiculous, as the entire narrative is encoded in the process of fighting and dying and desperation and dying and the relationship between the player/audience/user/spectator and the game (now that IS postmodern). Combat is clearly an effective way of exploring narrative and the Soulsfieldring series is exemplary at doing this.
-However a new franchise where all we know is a few superficial details and a bunch of goth coffee stains surely elicits a few wistful offhand considerations.
-Once more I would love to play Deraciné. It's got me written all over it. Yet the entry requirements are too steep right now. Has anyone even seen a PSVR headset in the flesh?
-I'm not demanding anything, though I apologise for the hyperbole. That's uncalled for. Let's rephrase it: "It would be awesome if other avenues aside from a focus on combat could be explored, though this clearly would not be commercially viable.
-The prevalence of combat in videogames does invite further exploration. I don't know if an internet forum is the best... forum for this however. Maybe! Talking about videogames rocks.
-I once ate pizza every day and ended up getting a chest infection due to malnutrition. It was fun while it lasted.
-Berserk is gay as fuck.

*Puts down the pitchfork*
or the..autist pitchfork+10, if you will.



yeah i retract my own snide comment re: deracine.
I'd like to play it too but nothing else makes me want to fork out for VR.

Does anyone know of a good playthrough online without some twat yelling over it and that portrays the game in a good light?


Griffiths' desires don't make the entire manga gay.
It was just one bathing scene, damnit...

If anything, it's pansexual.

I picked up Eternal Ring and Shadow Tower Abyss in a bargain bin over the weekend and I'm really hooked. ER feels too easy so far compared to King's Field but I love it for all the quality of life improvements. Souls combat is obviously objectively better, but I wish from would risk making another moody first person dungeon crawler again...

Shadow Tower Abyss in a bargain bin? o_O

Yep, 480yen.

[quote="MX7-Once more I would love to play Deraciné. It's got me written all over it. Yet the entry requirements are too steep right now. Has anyone even seen a PSVR headset in the flesh?[/quote]

I love mine! Forgot about Deracine though, there was barely any press about it and it never made it anywhere near the front of the store that I can recall, even on the VR page. I'll check it out.

Finally got my CRT set up again after a long and gruelling house move, and I'm champing at the bit to get back into KFIV, Eternal Ring and both Shadow Towers, all of which I'd been making some headway in. Really pleasing to see so many people here playing the same games, and that there's still a keen audience for these incredibly evocative, peerless experiences - hope you'll keep sharing your thoughts as you go along!

What's everyone's thoughts on the best way to play Kings Field 4? As in is it best to go in totally blind and make mistakes, or are there a few general hints and tips to make life easier?

I'm excited to get started!

I think it's always worth trying to beat the game the first time completely organically.

Live by your words, mx...

I didn't get far enough to offer any general tips, but I do have a specific one for the game's opening: by all means take the path to the left and check out the shop, but don't do what I did and start racking your brains about how to progress in this area (I was trying to get through the shopkeeper's waterlogged cellar for longer than I care to admit). Your real goal is along the more treacherous path to the right from the starting area. :p

I'd definitely recommend just diving in blind, though. I got through KF1 and 2 this way not long ago, relying on nothing but the half-finished maps you find*, and had some of the most satisfying gaming experiences of my life. Also, as you know, slowwwwly strafing gets the goods!

*an incredible and underappreciated piece of world-building and storytelling.

Making your own maps can be really fun.

This one.

Got it (:

Yeah there isn't a whole lot you can do to screw up that game. It's all about exploring the unknown.

Well here's how I screwed up in mid to late game KF4

I had a great time with a blind KF4 run. But I did completely miss one pretty basic thing:

LOL holy shit

Just finished Eternal Ring on my JPS2. I finished everything in the game and really broke it by the end. Mirage + Kaiser Knuckle + Stop Time absolutely slaughtered the golden knight at the end of the sealed cave. Though I found it really easy and more on the linear side compared to KF2 it was a really nice and relaxing game overall. I really like the focus on magic and the wealth of interesting spells at your disposal. I did encounter a lot of sound bugs and crashes near the end though which was too bad. Not sure if I'm going to jump straight into Shadow Tower Abyss next given that I kind of want to finish the original first.

Also I thought of a great way to market a new King's Field in 2019... PlayStation VR. I would kill for that and I bet it would work really well. It'll never happen though.

Eternal Ring really sent me down the FS rabbit hole. I hadn't actually made the time to finish DS3 Fire Fades so I got back into that. Since I already cleared everything solo I've been getting more into multiplayer which I hadn't done much in previous Souls games.

I've started trying to learn PVP basics mostly for arena matches. Finding a lot of things frustrating to deal with and really experiencing the salt. Despite that there is something really intriguing about the PVP that keeps me coming back for more.

Hyper armor and spear builds seem to be the flow-chart Kens of DS3; definitely counterable but feels very lopsided for beginners. As I'm still a PVP infant I'm having a lot of trouble with those builds versus my (top tier!) straight sword and shield. Just gotta pay my dues in blood and get more experience I think. Anyone else get into the PVP much?

I've been spending a stupid amount of time with the various Souls games these last two months starting with a first-time playthrough of Bloodborne. From the visual style, to the world progression, to the faster paced gameplay flow, man--what an incredible game. Thoroughly enjoyed my time with it and finished it three times in about a two week timespan. Sorta tempted to start yet another run of it, maybe NG+ since I haven't messed with that yet.

I randomly got the idea to try the original versions of Dark Souls 1/2 for PS3/360 and play them unpatched. That has taken up a lot of my time outside Bloodborne.

The stock disc release of Dark Souls 1 without patches is quite interesting. Enemies drop far less souls, shards are harder to come by in the early game, some enemies seem to have more health, ghosts/slimes/mosquitos/skeletons don't drop souls at all, some item drops have yet to have been tweaked (like the skull lantern from the necromancers in the catacombs), enemies get aggro'd from a greater distance, red phantom enemy types in the Painted World appear (they were cut from later versions), you can't lock onto the cloaked NPCs in the forest, etc., etc (the list goes on). Some changes are subtle but really change the dynamic on how you might normally progress through the game, and as a big fan of the first Dark Souls, it was a fun experience seeing the various differences and having to adjust my strategies as a result. Definitely a fun experiment I recommend for fans of the first game.

Dark Souls 2 was interesting for me more so because I had never played the original release until now, only the updated Scholar version on PS4/Xbone as was recommended to me by others. Scholar never really clicked with me compared to the other games, and after my multiple runs of it I was left underwhelmed by the whole thing (lots of little tiny issues added up to big problems for me in the end). Maybe time has helped whatever problems I had with it, or maybe the original version is simply better laid out, but I had a lot more fun playing through this stock version of Dark Souls 2 these last few weeks compared to my experiences with Scholar. Enemy placement trolls the player much less and feels more balanced. Enemies often appear less in numbers in the early game, better for easing the player in, and throughout the game the more powerful/tank-like enemies are often spaced out farther apart (i.e., the big ogres or the armored beetles). There some other nice flow changes, like there being less stone statues arbitrarily blocking your way to new areas, allowing you greater exploration flexibility right from the beginning. It's obvious that Scholar was intended to be an extended, rearranged "hard mode", but it came off to me less as difficult and more as just irritating. I'm curious what others think of the two variations of Dark Souls 2 (the original versus Scholar of the First Sin).

I will say, one thing I did start to appreciate more in my last run of Dark Souls 2 is the setup of the world. I suppose it's done a bit differently to Dark Souls 1, but unlike Part 3 you still have a bunch of different ways you can go from the early points in the game and it was enjoyable mixing up my normal route. I ended up getting the Silvercat ring early on, fell into the pit and took on the Gutter way earlier than I normally would. I also started to experiment with Bonfire Ascetics and that made things pretty interesting too, bringing in NG+ enemy types to various areas and buffing the bosses significantly. It was a fun way of grinding out for extra souls on a Loop 1 run while also adding a greater challenge for myself.

I never played Vanilla DS2, but I felt the same about SotFS. The difficulty feels very ham-fisted, as though they were trying to live up to the "ooooh DS so hard" hype surrounding the series. Bloodborne is so much harder than SotFS, but it never feels irritating because it feels like it was crafted with such great respect for the player. I don't hate SotFS but it's lack of respect for the player really hurts it for me compared to most of their other RPGs.

On a completely different topic, I really feel like hugely damaging hyper armored attacks from ultra heavy weapons should have more recovery frames before you can roll cancel away in DS3. The risk versus reward of them seems totally off, and it's telling that 90+ % of the arena players choose that weapon type. That shit would never fly in a fighting game. /Endsalt

This paragraph is super interesting to me, because I have never heard of these things being "patched".
Souls from skeletons? Being able to lock on to the ghost NPCs in the forest? What is this, lol.
Now you really make me want to try the newer versions of Dark Souls.

Have you never updated whatever version of Dark Souls 1 you play? If not, then yeah, you've missed out on a lot of tweaks and refinements over the years. There are further quality of life improvements added in Remastered (like being able to use multiple items at once and the extra bonfire in the catacombs).

Here's a patch history for the game. Scroll to the bottom of the page to start at the earliest version: https://darksouls.wiki.fextralife.com/Patches

It looks like Patch 1.04/1.05 is where a huge amount of fixes and alterations occurred. It's where they added in ghosts/skeletons/etc dropping souls as well as being able to lock on to Ring of Fog users (the guys in the forest).

For people that were with the game early I think a lot of these changes won't be surprising, but as someone that jumped into the game first a couple years ago (via Xbone backwards compatibility, so it was already fully patched), then moved on to Remastered when that released in 2018, I was unaware of all these tweaks. It's interesting stuff and cool that it's possible to go back and play it pre-patched if you have the means.

I'm not really into the "regularly replaying an 80 hour long game" business, I have too much other stuff to play, so I haven't played DS1 since it originally came out, but I'm really itching to replaying it some time, and these changes definitely sound interesting to me.


It's surprising to me. The original mechanics definitely felt like the way the game was intentionally designed to work.

I'm generally not either which is why I often don't go back to RPGs (if I even play them to begin with). Dark Souls has been different for me though due to its heavy focus on action and skill, so I find myself firing it up more often just to mess around for a little bit (then before I know it five hours has passed and I've made a ton of progress without even thinking about it).



Being that the game is a direct evolution from Demon's Souls (the mother of treating players like scum), I have no doubt its stingy design choices in the earlier versions were intentional.

I've still got a copy of Demon's that I never got very far into at all. I'm trying to steer away from long games, but I'm oh so very tempted...

This. Vanilla DS2 was fine, the DLC was mostly fine too.

SOTFS is bollocks. Most of the increased difficulty changes are just dull and don't really add anything. I actually prefer the base game with the DLC more than the updated version. You just have to deal with the crappy lighting effects and not so fun Dragon Shrine.