Dark Souls Review/News

[hoofhearted4]

so......

 

anyone know how to get to the new area?

 

ok so you gotta do some things to get to the new area, ill keep in in spoiler tags just in case:

 

 

so you have to go to the Darkroot Garden where the Hydra is. kill it if you havent. go over in the corner of the lake and kill the Gold Crystal Golem if you havent. free Dusk and rest at a bonfire. ocne all this is done, then there will be a black portal thing where she was and you just "Examine" it and it brings you to the new area.

 

Edited August 28, 2012 by hoofhearted4

[Aegrus]

^^^ really sounds like another fan boy comment "dark souls is optimized better then skyrim" yep 30 fps lock and there still will be times when that fps will drop even on a 500 dollar plus card. While skyrim since launch on NaVida cards have seen an improvement about 100% fps also "press start" while no gamepad is connected only port I've played worse then dark souls is the steam release of dead island as that game was shipped being a debugged 360 version.

 

Also Diablo3 isn't a port it's just a so-so game. Bf3 is great running game. Witcher did run like crap but after a patch it ran like a dream. dark souls on the other hand won't get the support like skyrim and witcher did.

 

I think he brought up BF 3 not because it runs like crap- it actually runs incredibly well. However, it's on origin, which incidentally has corrupted quite a few files on my pc as well as Rennn's. I bought BF 3 for $60, installed Origin, Played BF 3 about twice and loved it- and then I promptly had to uninstall it and origin and never play it again because Origin was literally breaking my pc by generating vast amounts of registry errors and crashes.

[Aegrus]

 

The only problem I have is that it often runs like its in slow motion. Controls and graphics are completely fine with me, as I've seen much worse. But the frame rate issue makes it slightly difficult to play, and it likes to kick you from online play because of that. Still fun, even if it wasn't the best port, but certainly shouldn't be considered the best game on the PC even if it does deserve some slack.

 

 

Do you mean that 30 fps is slow-mo, or do you drop below 30 fps? Because if you can run Skyrim ultra, you should easily be able to run Dark Souls, capped at 30, at at least 1600x900. I say this because my pc can't even run Skyrim at ultra without tons of stutter and frame rates jumping wildly from 10-40 (and I only play it at 1600x900), but Dark Souls is pretty much always 30 fps for me. I'll notice a 1-2 fps drop for about a second when I enter a new area and the location text pops up on screen, I assume because the new area is being loaded.

[hector530]

^^^ really sounds like another fan boy comment "dark souls is optimized better then skyrim" yep 30 fps lock and there still will be times when that fps will drop even on a 500 dollar plus card. While skyrim since launch on NaVida cards have seen an improvement about 100% fps also "press start" while no gamepad is connected only port I've played worse then dark souls is the steam release of dead island as that game was shipped being a debugged 360 version.

 

Also Diablo3 isn't a port it's just a so-so game. Bf3 is great running game. Witcher did run like crap but after a patch it ran like a dream. dark souls on the other hand won't get the support like skyrim and witcher did.

 

I think he brought up BF 3 not because it runs like crap- it actually runs incredibly well. However, it's on origin, which incidentally has corrupted quite a few files on my pc as well as Rennn's. I bought BF 3 for $60, installed Origin, Played BF 3 about twice and loved it- and then I promptly had to uninstall it and origin and never play it again because Origin was literally breaking my pc by generating vast amounts of registry errors and crashes.

 

yeah but it seemed like he just went on a rant about every game that wasnt dark souls. while the bottom line is, its a bad port of a great game as others have said. but i cant get enough of it, i liked it way more then i did on 360. i made my guilds wars 2 toon then just left back to DS. i need to take a break from it... and watch others play it on twichtv while reading the wiki on dark souls...

[hoofhearted4]

speaking of GW2, just bought it. downloading it now. probably wont get to it till tomorrow, but soooooo looking forward to it.

 

but yea. ill go back to Dark Souls when the DLC hits. ive tried going back several times and would get to the bell tower gargoyles and beat them within an hour if that, and just lose interest. the fact that its such an open game with minimal fast travel even when you finally unlock it half way through the game, really turns me off. Demons Souls, and the way it was world based, made for a much more fun game once you have beaten it 50 times like i did. it was more about just knocking down worlds, getting what you needed, and making your toon. in Dark Souls its lots of traveling. always running through one world just to get to another (at least until you get the fast travel, but even then, still lots of running) and to me, that just sucks the fun outta the game once youve already been through it, so i have no reason to go and replay content. ive only beaten Dark Souls like 5 times because of this. enough to Platinum it. i have yet to beat it just for fun, whereas in Demons Souls ive literally beaten it probably 50 times, and 45 of those were after i had platinumed it and id be more willing to go back and beat it again, before i go and beat Dark Souls.

 

though i dont think the DLC is coming to consoles till around the holiday season. idk if thats what FROM said, or if thats just what people were hoping/expecting. by then ill be done with GW2 for sure (esp since im not forced to play with a sub lol) and might be done Borderlands 2 (i figure ill need a break even from B2 after a couple of months lol) so the holiday season (for me) would be the best time for it to come out, other wise its getting a back seat to Borderlands 2. then again, if Torchlight 2 comes out by then, i might be playing that instead as well. if T2 comes out for the holiday season, the DkS DLC will be waiting till next year....then there is Dishonored which looks amazing, out the day after my B-Day and then Metal Gear Rising in February. so for me, the DLC needs to come out in November/December. any earlier and ill have Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2 (i hope) and Dishonored on my plate, and any later ill have MGR on my plate. haha but im rambling here. got myself thinking of all the great games coming in the next 6 months!

[Rennn]

I never said BF3 ran badly; Origin infected half the programs on my computer (and Windows 7) and ate them. I spent $60 on it, and I could only play it for a couple weeks.

 

As for needing a $500 card for Dark Souls, that's simply not true. My 460 maxes it easily with no slowdown. It's your cpu you should worry about, with all the backround saving and loading. Even considering that you should have a 3Ghz+ cpu, it's much better optimized than Skyrim. Skyrim looks and runs like crap on ultra.

[Rennn]

This is just a few reasons I don't like Skyrim. The UI was awful at first, I absolutely hated it. It was completely frustrating. There are a lot of things that look horrible for no reason, like the big stumps of trees. It seriously looked like it was only three colors, which doesn't look good. I can't believe spellmaking is gone, I almost forgot that we had that in the old Elder Scrolls until last night. The performance is really weird, it just runs bad in some places for no reason. I have always lagged in Riften, no matter what. And my computer isn't that bad of computer. I run Skyrim on Ultra and have no lag in other places. But pretty much all of these things are fixed by mods.

 

About that weird fps drop in seemingly barren areas (which I also get)... I think I found the issue a couple months ago. I was tweaking some vanilla ruins for a mod in an exterior cell. I grabbed one of the pillars Bethesda had stuck in the ground, moved it, and realized there was a whole ruin attached underground. There was no door, and no way in. There was just a whole ruin sitting below the ground because Bethesda wanted to show the pillars above ground. I looked around, and there were at least three of these undergound ruins in the area, all of which had only a couple pillars above ground. Bethesda cut polygons from the rocks and made them look like octagons, meanwhile some other guy on the dev team was busy sticking whole ruins of 20,000+ polygons underground because they were too lazy to simply cut off the pillars as a new object in a meshing program. You wouldn't even believe how many ferns are at least mostly below the ground. I'm spending hours at a time modding Skyrim's landscape, and so far nearly half the plants I've edited have been nearly submerged. I think they just spammed the "F" key to snap them to the ground without even manually editing most of their positions to be more appealing or more efficient.

Edited August 28, 2012 by Rennn

[Iv000]

I have a 6870 (a $170 card) which isn't getting enough power cause of a weak PSU. I still get smooth FPS in Dark Souls. I don't care if it's capped to 30, it's smooth.

Skyrim, avg FPS is 43 with lots of fps drops and lagspikes, especially while turning the camera. None of that in DS.

 

We should be debating on how to get past the Taurus demon, that thing is overpowered and I am underpowered. Am I meant to grind and lvl up and then face it or what?

I like the fact that this game makes me sound pathetic, I usually find my way around things like that. :biggrin:

[hoofhearted4]

We should be debating on how to get past the Taurus demon, that thing is overpowered and I am underpowered. Am I meant to grind and lvl up and then face it or what?

I like the fact that this game makes me sound pathetic, I usually find my way around things like that. :biggrin:

 

if your having trouble with him, your in for a rough ride lol

 

heres some hints

 

 

if you have the master key, then there is a door where the 3 soldiers are before you reach the black knight, across from the archer sniper in the tower. go through there and get 3 (forget the name) things that buff your weapon with lightning. this makes the boss uber easy. another thing is when in the boss fight (and this is and/or with the first hint) lure him out and run back. go up the ladder to the left where u came in. kill the two archers up there and then youll be able to to a plunge attack on his head taking almost half his health. if you have the buff from earlier, this will do more damage, and the swings you get in after could take him out before he even responds, or close to it anyways. try to stay under him and roll through his legs when he attacks.

 

[Iv000]

I tried rolling between his legs but I couldn't do it. I'm just not used to a controller I guess, I'll get the hang of it sooner or later.

 

Thanks for the hint. :)