Dark Souls 3

As long as you put up a good fight, that’s the important thing! Helping someone on their way, in a manner of speaking. I loved my turns as the Spear of the Church, even though I got beaten both times.

Both routes for me are kind of hard. I wish I had better armor, so that I could take a few hits. The enemies do so much damage now, both in Smouldering Lake and in Ithryl of the Boreal plains, I can be going along, doing fine, and then make a mistake and I’m dead.

I miss Havel’s armor from the first game. I wish I had it now.

As a summons you can use healing spells, but not estus. Also I think had I knew it was coming I could have added a Divine Blessing, which would have given me one healing. DS2 had lots of healing consumables but DS3 doesn’t.

You get an opportunity to get it later. But there are other choices just as good. Armor really is the least part of the DS3 equation. The biggest is the ability to roll, followed by patience and a weapon that does at least decent damage.

I have never used it but I think that is considered one of the best weapons in the game when leveled up.

Yea, the problem with Friede is getting into that third stage with enough Estus.

I still have this installed, FYI, although I wonder if my reflexes are still up to par after 20 hours of DS1.

Reinstalled on my new PC and I plan on buckling down and doing my best to finish off the ringed city. My souls journey is near its end, and I’m feeling a little melancholy about it. And more than a little lost re: gaming.

Maybe i’ll give Nioh or Ashen a shot. I hear the new star wars game out in November is taking some cues from dark souls.

Playing different genres has helped (Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Oxygen Not Included), but the hole left from dark souls is not easily filled.

To be honest, I’ve been dragging my feet playing Demon’s Souls only sporadically, just because I don’t want any of this to end.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll announce some Sekiro DLC soon. And there’s monster hunter iceborn to look forward to…

Did you also play Lords of the Fallen yet? And The Surge?

I only started The Surge, it’s kind of neat, a science fiction spin on the Souls formula.

Lords of the Fallen I quite enjoyed. It’s definitely much easier than the Souls games, but it had it’s own unique atmosphere and gameplay spin.

In my experience, the biggest performance killer with laptops is heat.

Lords of the Fallen is no Dark Souls, but if you play it based on it’s own merits it is enjoyable.

That changes when you get out of the Dreg Heaps. It gets quite flowery in spots.

So, Alvina in DS1, Shalquoir in DS2…why is there no kitty in DS3?

I picked it up over the preview weekend and requested a refund. It may turn out to be good, but my initial impression was poor. Looked bad, controlled bad, and I think they are trying to get people interested by name dropping souls (worked on me) but it’s nowhere close to being compared favorably to a souls game. Reminded me of Hellgate London.

I haven’t played either of these, no.

You made me picture Voldo from Soul Calibur.

Wow, you killed two angels? I accidentally found one of their “anchors” and killed it, but man was I ever not going to go fucking around in that swamp while getting mangled by the lightspears to find another one.

That boss…yeah, I tried it once or twice before calling in not one but two sunbros. That was at my nadir with the game, like man fuck this it’s just getting absurd, I just wanna be done. It wasn’t until I got well through the city proper that I felt good about things again. People talk about DS2 being just “hard for the sake of being hard,” but I (as a non-DS2 completer) still think that the Ringed City is just sadistic and mostly not really “fun”.

This ain’t giving me the motivation I need to get back in the "ring"ed city.

Well, once I got to the church things really evened out. The Demon’s Souls throwback fight was a blast, Midir was…sure as hell something and beating it was probably the high point of my Souls experience, pulse-wise (although Orphan of Kos sure comes close!), and the final fight was superb, so you’ve got all that to look forward to!

So I spent a couple hours in the Ringed City with my summon sign down in the second bonfire. I was summoned as the boss twice, which is a break for the player because as the summoned I get no estus and I just don’t have the patience (or ability) to win that kind of fight.

I also got summoned for Midir several times. In probably 8 trips to fight Midir the best I have done was me and the guy who summoned me once got Midir down to about 20% health.

But the fun stuff is getting summoned to help a player get from bonfire 2 to bonfire 3. I have done that several times in the last couple days and have been involved in some massive PvP play. Invaders love to invade in that area, and you add in the regular enemies and it gets pretty crazy. I once picked up almost 300k souls from one summon. I can only think it was a not too high NG+ host.

I ran into a very high NG+ Pontiff summons the other day. I don’t think I have ever been hit that hard by any enemy before.

Yea, the second is hardest to find. The third you are actually kind of led to it if you explore the tree area.

Are you talking about the so-called “abyssal swamp” area? I got invaded there a couple times, and one time I was just about to take a run at the Dragonslayer Armor that hangs out on the far side of that when I got invaded, so I just sat down on that big, quiet strip of land to wait for them. Watched them running around over by the sunken cathedral and such looking for me. Eventually they just waved off and exited. Pretty funny. Not sure I’ve been invaded there other than that. Actually I was invaded very, very seldom in DS3, especially if you don’t count covenant invasions for trespassing specific areas.