Dark Souls Review/News

[Iv000]

Yup, I just checked steamprices.com

We Europeans (UK included) get screwed over, again.

 

So Gamers Gate is a nice alternative for Europeans to get it for the same price as you Americans do. :thumbsup:

[Yoshh]

Gamers Gate price: €39.95

Steam price: €39.99

 

Are you really that miffed about 4 cents? If it was around €32, that'd be the same price.

Edited July 15, 2012 by Yoshh

[Iv000]

Gamers Gate price: €39.95

Steam price: €39.99

 

Are you really that miffed about 4 cents? If it was around €32, that'd be the same price.

Uuum. Gamers Gate price is 40$ and on Steam it's 40€

Why the hell would I want a 4 cent lower price?! :psyduck:

 

Here's what it looks like to me:

 

 

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/9059/78187681.jpg

 

 

 

Are you even logged into GG? It lets you choose your currency as far as I remember. I have mine set to USD (Which is my only option strangely enough).

Edited July 15, 2012 by Iv000

[Yoshh]

 

http://snag.gy/pBA1o.jpg

 

 

It probably sets the currently automatically depending on your location. In fact, I'd have to pay more Blue coins than you, so I don't really know what to think about that :/

Edited July 15, 2012 by Yoshh

[Iv000]

Your pic won't show up.

I even manually set my region to Croatia and it gave me the currency in $, strange :confused:

[Yoshh]

No idea why. It shows up on my end. Price is €39.95 / 48 679 Blue Coins.

[Iv000]

I read a few other forums.

It seems it uses IP localization and the system is heaving trouble with localizing mine or something, so it gives me the currency in $. I got lucky there, I guess.

 

Oh well. If anyone else has $ as currency on GG.com and is from Europe, we have an advantage :thumbsup:

[Aegrus]

I wonder if we'll be able to enforce ambient occlusion using Invidia Inspector. . .

 

Anyway, relating to Dark Soul's performance issues, there are a few reasons that the performance could be so low at points, barring bad coding. Dark Souls saves almost constantly, which can drop the framerate. It also periodically checks the internet to add soul signs to the world. Third, and this is the most important one, it's an open world game with no load times after the start-up. That is murder for consoles. Look at Skyrim; It has long load times in most population centers and every building (sometimes more than one load time per buildings), and its framerate is still bad. (Down to 7, in places, and with prolific, sudden stutter from bad coding resulting in sudden, non-gradual lod pop-in and zone loading).

 

Fourth, examine the water graphics in Dark Souls- they're amazing for a console game. So are the fire graphics. Blight Town has a lot of water and fire, coupled with constant wide-open vistas. In Dark Souls, fire is visible from almost any distance when not blocked by a wall- so large open areas with lots of torches (Blight Town) are running a ton of affects at once. Note that the New Londo Ruins, which also have tons of water and wide open spaces, also experience some frame rate drops. Fifth, havoc physics are tough for consoles to run, and Dark Souls has tons of breakable items that shatter into dozens of peices. All the enemies are also ragdolled. In both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, this would lead to slow-down whenever many items were broken at once. Complex water, fire, particle affects, and physics were still pretty new when the current gen-consoles released. They're not optimized well for those effects at all. But pcs are.

 

Bad coding is more likely to create memory leaks or sudden stutter than framerate slowdowns. A paradox in a character's AI could cause slow-down, but for a paradox to be at work, every time your framerate slows down, there would need to be an active enemy or npc nearby, and sometimes the framerate just drops while gazing at scenery. Bad coding would also damage the gameplay throughout the game, not just in Blight Town. AI scripts and atmospheric effects are common throughout the world, so if they bugged out in one area, they'd most likely bug out in many areas. This isn't the case in Dark Souls.

 

Bad coding would also lead to glitches- like in Skyrim. In my time playing Dark Souls, I didn't see any glitches. I heard there were a few, but they were promptly fixed, because From Software has always valued accurate, efficient coding. Skyrim has yet to be fully fixed- most likely because the code is so buggy, trying to fix something breaks something else. In short, quick, affective patches indicate good coding habits.

Edited July 22, 2012 by Aegrus

[hector530]

but dark souls isnt a good looking game. especially the FPS killing fire and water. compare it to the best looking console games, halo and uncharted. both look better and run better. before i become a PC gamer i was a console gamer and i cant think of a console game that ran as bad as dark souls, given ive really only played AAA games on consoles but still the worse running game ive seen on 360. i havent played skyrim on console but i hvae they seen hours of it played on a 360 never lags downs to 10 fps unless youre playing the non patched PS3 game as i know that one would lag to death.

 

dark souls has what i think is perfect combat in a RPG. easy to learn, hard to master. combat is pretty straight forward you have you normal and power attacks, block and counter, bows and spells all which can be completely different depending on your weapons and/or build. great enemy variety makes sure you cant kill everything the same way. the combination of the straight forward combat with deep RPG elements fighting against enemy with different weakness and strength makes what i think is the best way to make combat in a RPG.

 

with that said, it still runs like crap. now i can actually understand others when they say 30FPS lock isnt that bad if that can keep it stable because after playing it, getting it to keep running at 30 FPS would be a big HUGE improvement.

[Rennn]

but dark souls isnt a good looking game. especially the FPS killing fire and water. compare it to the best looking console games, halo and uncharted. both look better and run better. before i become a PC gamer i was a console gamer and i cant think of a console game that ran as bad as dark souls.

 

From a style point of view, it's one of the best looking games on the market. Looking purely at the polygon quantity, texture resolutions, etc, it doesn't look very good. It looks better than Skyrim, but compared to, say, Uncharted 2, it's not great looking. Having said that, the art direction is almost perfect and each screenshot could almost be a very good painting.

 

The performance drop is because of a few things. Firstly, it saves almost constantly in the background, which is a cpu killer. Second, the game is open-world with almost no loading and extremely high quality distance structures, which consoles can't really handle. The open-world nature of the game and the almost constant background saving with almost no loading is what makes the game run and look worse than KZ3 etc. Being open world, it can't use many of the huge performance tricks that totally linear games like KZ3 or Uncharted use. There's a reason those games leave a tiny hallway for you to run along...

 

with that said, it still runs like crap. now i can actually understand others when they say 30FPS lock isnt that bad if that can keep it stable because after playing it, getting it to keep running at 30 FPS would be a big HUGE improvement.

 

Agreed. In addition, DkS was made to be run at 30fps, unlike most PC games, and as a result a capped 30 fps in DkS should actually look smoother than it does in most other pc games.

Edited July 23, 2012 by Rennn