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-UE
Dark Souls has absolutely gorgeous visual design.
That's part three of the setting prologue, but what took my attention was the sword of 0:45. At first, it simply looks gracefully-designed, but I had another look and there's some even more ingenious elements to it. Look at the hilt. Firstly the ends of the crossguard are sloped like axe blades. That's a great combat design choice, because the crossguard can be used improvisationally as a weapon. Even better, though, is the pommel. You'll notice that it's flanged, like a mace. It just so happens that the pommel's secondary role for longswords was to inflict blunt trauma attacks. They've taken this another step by designing the pommel as per the spec of another weapon.
Now that is showing your work. Showing it to the extent of most people missing it and not realising the significance.
Comments
Or am I totally wrong?
The biggest challenge is dealing with the game's economy. While the combat encounters are often challenging, they're not as hard as some would have you believe. The environmental obstacles are tougher and take more thought and skill to pass, but are still doable. It's just that when you die, you lose all the game's currency unless you go back to your point of death. That currency is used for everything, including leveling up. So one of the most important aspects of learning Demon's Souls is having a sort of financial strategy.
I tended to divide things up by priority, which was
- Repair gear
- Level up
- Resupply high-priority items
- Upgrade gear
- Resupply low-priority items
And then I was broke.
Seriously, once I worked out the economy of the game and did a little grinding, most of it became very reasonable. Work out how to defeat the silver skeletons quickly and grind that realm. You'll get a shitload of exp, and the bosses are really easy. You can get a composite longbow there, too, which will allow you to take on the fat cyclops. The Adjudicator boss is ridiculously easy up close, and then the next boss has a crippling weakness you can take advantage of, especially at range, to dominate the battle. Then the last boss fight of that realm gives you an out with which to take care of the boss quite well, too.
After that realm, you'll be rolling in cashbux and can easily do just about everything else, except for the bog. The bog sucks. That, and the very final parts of the Boletarian castle.
Plus, strategise! Almost every boss is just as vulnerable to status ailments as you. All the large ones telegraph their moves quite blatantly. Many of them have a specific weakness; I suggest using fire-based attacks against the bosses of the fifth realm, which includes the aforementioned bog. Or really, against anything in there. One of the great things about Demon's Souls is that it forced me to consider my fights carefully, especially as a melee-centric knight that made a mockery of mooks but was vulnerable against bosses.
I knew it was going to be awesome after the tension of the first boss fight. Drawing out the amorphous mooks, leading the boss around and just working things out. At times, I actually felt like a hero from mythology or legend as I had to think, prepare and strategise to overcome my strongest adversaries. The challenge was brilliant. So immediate.
THOSE BELLS.
And I'm kind of hoping that Dark Souls will have bosses like Demon's Souls, where if you know their tricks, you can pretty much kill them without any danger to yourself. There's just something amusing about wading through hell and back to stumble on a boss who dies standing in one place because it can't see you even when you're attacking it.
Holy shit I am so buying this game