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I knew it was going to be good. I can't wait to get home after work today and play. Today is going to draaaaag until that happens.

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I knew it was going to be good. I can't wait to get home after work today and play. Today is going to draaaaag until that happens.

 

Lucky you, I need to wait and work till Friday! Was tempted to buy off the US PSN store, but I have the collectors edition on pre-order...

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Lucky you, I need to wait and work till Friday! Was tempted to buy off the US PSN store, but I have the collectors edition on pre-order...

That's a bummer. I'll never understand why games have to have different release dates in the UK. Does it have to do with customs, or is it simply publisher nonsense? Lame, either way.

 

Pull a Cartman and freeze yourself to make the time go by quicker! :D

 

go-god-go-part-2-20061102015236763.jpg

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Probably a culture thing, UK subscribes to "release entertainment before the weekend so people looking for something to do will buy it", in the US and Asia it's more like "release it mid-week so people commuting from work will remember to buy it". Just my theory.

 

As for Dark Souls 2, decided to get it. Hated Demon's Souls...that game was just designed by evil sadists who relished the misery of others. Dark Souls was getting there....bought it as well, good game, but too much grinding if you wanted to stand a chance (i'm not big on massive challenges). When I heard Dark Souls 2 has plenty of bonfires, teleportation a la Tomb Raider, a lady that resurrects you, and limited bad guy spawn, then i knew they finally pulled a Dead Rising 3 and made it for normal gamers, without really admitting they made it for normal gamers, of course, heh heh.

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Probably a culture thing, UK subscribes to "release entertainment before the weekend so people looking for something to do will buy it", in the US and Asia it's more like "release it mid-week so people commuting from work will remember to buy it". Just my theory.

As for Dark Souls 2, decided to get it. Hated Demon's Souls...that game was just designed by evil sadists who relished the misery of others. Dark Souls was getting there....bought it as well, good game, but too much grinding if you wanted to stand a chance (i'm not big on massive challenges). When I heard Dark Souls 2 has plenty of bonfires, teleportation a la Tomb Raider, a lady that resurrects you, and limited bad guy spawn, then i knew they finally pulled a Dead Rising 3 and made it for normal gamers, without really admitting they made it for normal gamers, of course, heh heh.

Made it for normal gamers? Word is its even "harder" :p
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When I heard Dark Souls 2 has plenty of bonfires, teleportation a la Tomb Raider, a lady that resurrects you, and limited bad guy spawn, then i knew they finally pulled a Dead Rising 3 and made it for normal gamers, without really admitting they made it for normal gamers, of course, heh heh.

 

While some of that may be true. You still lose a portion of your permanent HP when you die (only till you lose half your permanent HP). Also limited spawning on enemies may sound good, it is actually to stop people spamming the same area for HP potions, i believe.

 

From what i've heard, it is just as challenging as DS1, if not more difficult.

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So I have played the game for a good chunk of time now, and I have to say I'm enjoying it almost as much as Dark Souls. There are things I really like about the new game, and things I really dislike. But overall, it pretty great.

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While some of that may be true. You still lose a portion of your permanent HP when you die (only till you lose half your permanent HP). Also limited spawning on enemies may sound good, it is actually to stop people spamming the same area for HP potions, i believe.

 

From what i've heard, it is just as challenging as DS1, if not more difficult.

 

Doesn't the limited spawning make it a lot easier though? You don't have to grind to get to the boss, then again guess you're right, you get to the boss without the benefits of the grind like restored health, leveling up etc. And what about being able to teleport between bonfires Tomb Raider-style? Does that make things easier? At any rate waiting for the PC release sadly, sold the old 360/PS3 dynamic duo to help mitigate the cost of their replacements :|

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Doesn't the limited spawning make it a lot easier though? You don't have to grind to get to the boss, then again guess you're right, you get to the boss without the benefits of the grind like restored health, leveling up etc. And what about being able to teleport between bonfires Tomb Raider-style? Does that make things easier? At any rate waiting for the PC release sadly, sold the old 360/PS3 dynamic duo to help mitigate the cost of their replacements :|

The limited respawns actually make it harder. Once you deplete that area, you can no longer farm it. It does make it easier to traverse those sections on subsequent runs, but losing farmable souls is extremely limiting when everything the game depends on them. It's especially taxing if you like using bows since arrows cost souls and you eventually run out of farming opportunities until you move on.

 

Overall it's not too bad though. I tried farming-to-depletion when I started playing, then I realized that it's not really necessary. If you constantly push on, you eventually get to enemies that drop more souls than the entire previous area, so it evens out.

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Thanks for the feedback spacer, starting to understand the balance they were going for. DS proved too much for my patience in the end, but hopefully DS2 won't. With the changes they implemented it sounds like they definitely warrant our support for trying to do something different. How are the visuals? In the videos I saw characters were clipping into each other and such. Is it better than DS was? (though did that on the horrible Steam/PC version, which was no indication).

 

As long as it's not as flat out batshit sadistic as Demon's Souls, will be fine with it!

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I died. lol

 

Wasn't an enemy, or a fall for my first death. I pressed B and fell off a ladder. Splat! So sad....

 

So far the game is really fun. Chose a swordsman as my first run through. The dual wielding feels really good. :D

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I hope the PC version looks significantly better than the footage I've seen from consoles. I'm used to playing Dark Souls at 1080p 60hz and Dark Souls 2, at least in its console incarnations, looks so... last-gen. Anyway, in the meantime, I still have 90% of Dark Souls 1 to finish. :P

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DS in 1080p on PC makes no difference...actually looks uglier than the console versions. It's just 720p stretched, not even upscaled. Unless you mean post-mod Dark Souls, which i never tried. It seems for Dark Souls 2 they at least had the decency to not lock it at 1280 x 720, so it will be "real" 1920 x 1080.

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Yeah the PC port of DS was poor and to be fair they did warn us beforehand that it wouldn't be a proper port.

This time round, i'm guessing based off the sales for the PC. They've invested in making sure the PC version is ported correctly. I'm guessing it'll still not live up to the PC master race's expectations though.

 

Modded DS1 did look fine and played well on a controller. I don't think i ever finished it though. I think i was the final clean up before the final boss i think.

 

Anyone who has DS2. Does it guide you a better in this one? The problem with DS1 was that sometimes you had no idea what to do next.

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Thanks for the feedback spacer, starting to understand the balance they were going for. DS proved too much for my patience in the end, but hopefully DS2 won't. With the changes they implemented it sounds like they definitely warrant our support for trying to do something different. How are the visuals? In the videos I saw characters were clipping into each other and such. Is it better than DS was? (though did that on the horrible Steam/PC version, which was no indication).

 

As long as it's not as flat out batshit sadistic as Demon's Souls, will be fine with it!

The visuals are on par with Dark Souls in some places and better in others. I'm currently playing on the 360 by the way. The texture work on the player model, shields in particular, is awesome. Then you can get awful textures for some of the environments. In my opinion, unless you're going out of your way to find these things you won't really notice a difference between Dark Souls 1 and 2. And I happened to like Dark Souls 1 visuals.

 

The animations are about the same too, but I haven't been really paying 100% attention to it. Some people have been complaining about the running animation in particular, but I think it looks fine. The game looks and feels like a souls game to me. And that makes me happy.

 

The frame rate is pretty consistent, and I certainly haven't found any place as bad as Blighttown. There is a little bit of tearing, but I hardly notice it unless I'm at a bonfire and not doing much of anything.

 

My brother and I have noticed that summoning people takes into account both your level and your soul history, which is lame if you want to play with friends. It means that instead of just having your friends stay within a certain range of your soul level, you now have to coordinate staying within the same history level too. It's incredibly frustrating, to be honest.

 

Soul history is basically a counter on your character status screen that keeps track of every soul you've acquired, whether you spent them on attributes, items, or lost them from consecutive deaths.

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Consensus seems to be 360 version tears, PS3 version doesn't but has lower FPS in parts than 360 version.

 

Anyway, my copy has shipped!  \[T]/

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Consensus seems to be 360 version tears, PS3 version doesn't but has lower FPS in parts than 360 version.

 

Anyway, my copy has shipped!  \[T]/

Praise the Sun!

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Thanks for the detailed feedback spacer, that was helpful. Bland background textures are not a great thing to have, but hardly a game-breaker. So long as it looks even a little better than DS1, then it's all good. What you said about having to match friends based on character progression if i understood correctly? That is...weird. Playing with friends is not supposed to be so restrictive. Maybe they want us to work as a group, so that everyone levels up more or less in tandem?

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Picked it up today for PS3, couldn't wait for PC version (although I'll get it at some point). Put about 7 hours in so far and actually rerolled from a Knight to a Warrior after about 1.5 hours (when I get the PC version I want to play as a Deprived). I never did play DS on console, only PC, so can't comment on the differences there but its definitely got a slightly different aesthetic in terms of artwork and such. Not better or worse, just different.

 

I do like that Fast Travel is available right from the jump and having a "hub world" makes it more like Demon's Souls. The explanations are also better in terms of stats and being able to see what changes with different equips. Still have to figure out the best way to distribute those stats like any other RPG. I've died quite a few times but have yet to feel cheated in any way -  most are due to either my impatience or just the enemy being an absolute tough bastard. To me, its more of the same Souls game so if you like the series I wouldn't hesitate. 

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Arriving today :D Going to be playing a Cleric or a Knight. STR/FAITH build.

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Thanks for the detailed feedback spacer, that was helpful. Bland background textures are not a great thing to have, but hardly a game-breaker. So long as it looks even a little better than DS1, then it's all good. What you said about having to match friends based on character progression if i understood correctly? That is...weird. Playing with friends is not supposed to be so restrictive. Maybe they want us to work as a group, so that everyone levels up more or less in tandem?

Yeah, it's a little strange trying to group with friends.

 

In DaS1, all you had  to do was make sure you were within their soul level range. I think it was soul level +- (10 + 10%soul level) or something like that.

 

In DaS2, it seems like you need to be within the same range like before but ALSO have accumulated around the same amount of souls in your soul history. So for instance, my brother and I tried summoning each other when we were both soul level 20. However we couldn't get it to work. We were both human, and we tried for about 20 minutes and could never see each others' signs. We've done this for Demons and DaS1 plenty of times, so we know all about the server switching when you refresh your sign and all of that. Still we had no luck. Then we noticed that I had a soul history of about 50k and he had around 20k. So, as a test I put my sign down and he started using his soul items one at a time. As soon as he when past 30k, my sign appeared.

 

I realize that that's complete anecdotal evidence, and it could have been a total coincidence. No one knows exactly how summoning works yet, but it seemed pretty consistent every time we tried it going forward. What this means in practical terms is that you and your friends might want to group up for a boss and be the same soul level, but still be unable to summon each other. Soul History never goes down, even when you die. So say one of you farms every area over and over again until it's empty, or dies a lot and has to keep killing things over and over. Or if one of you like to PVP or help randoms with their bosses. Or you farmed a ton to buy items from NPCs. There are lots of things you can do that affect your soul history, and it will quickly get out of sync with your friends unless they do the same amount of things.

 

The only reason I could see FROM doing something like this is to encourage random coop rather than familiar coop. Maybe they wanted to cut down on the number of people duo/trio'ing the entire game with their friends. This kind of falls in line with all of their other changes to summoning. (like having a finite timer on how long you can be a phantom) I really hope what my brother and I noticed, on multiple occasions, was pure luck or coincidence because the alternative sounds awful.

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