No multiplayer means that Old Monk just won’t be the same.
I prefer the game mostly without online multiplayer and would actively avoid online multiplayer in Dark Souls around the Undead Church because of the many overpowered lightning enchanted low level characters.
Demon’s Souls will never be the same, if only for the old monk boss fight, and the dynamic elements like world tendency, invasions, summoning and so forth, but I think it’s a game with a fantastic atmosphere and creepy locations that is still worth going back to.
To @miscu’s point about the controller, yeah the ps3 controller doesn’t really hold up, but I’ve found it a welcome experience to hook it up with a DS4, although to be fair you might want to use it wired as my experiences with the wireless implementation gave me a lot of input lag.
There’s really few other games for me that I’ve felt the same way about re: the open thread; I’m just not that precious about multiplayer modes, and often I’ll ignore them entirely if they’re not built into the singleplayer game in the way the SoulsBorne games are, or multiplayer games in their own right, like PUBG or Counter Strike.
For me it’s that effluvial grime that the joysticks on the DS2 and DS3 controllers secreted if you left them out for at least a week. I’m still not sure what that stuff is, but wow it’s gross.
I don’t think direct PvP in the Souls games has ever been very good. The Old Monk fight is cool because your opponent might be totally unaware of what’s even happening, I love seeing really goofy stuff like the old video of the guy pretending to be a level enemy, but otherwise I never understood what people saw in just the basic fight mechanics from a competitive level.
For me the DS3 is hard to use because of its incredibly loose analogue sticks.
Anyway, I wonder what Rob’s process through the levels looked.
I bailed out after a long morning and afternoon clawing my way to about halfway through the Boletarian Palace, where I once again died unceremoniously, and could not face the prospect of restarting once again.
This looks to me like he went 1-1 to 1-2 which is not really the ideal path, as the difficulty ramps up dramatically per level of each world, you’ll want to at least clear X-1 on each stage and then X-2 and so forth if you want the most balanced route.
Idk, can’t really fault anyone for bouncing off the game though, being the more punishing and weirdly structured game in the series.
Actually, and somewhat predictably, there is work being done on server emulation. Apparently you can already see bloodstains, messages, phantoms, and get invaded!
I don’t know where the process for building server emulation even begins without internal documentation available, but I’m happy it tends to happen with games like this.
I mean, there’s user-made servers running for Resident Evil Outbreak operating right now, so I’m not super surprised DeS got this stuff developing almost immediately.
Yeah Demon’s Souls is a game best played after you have gone through a Dark Souls game but I do think it holds up pretty well on the whole if you have. Aside from the world tendency stuff which makes no damn sense but also dosn’t matter that much
I think the actual PvP / Co-op in DeS is all P2P, i.e. it happens on someone’s console. All the server is really doing is matchmaking and hosting the data files for the bloodstains / phantoms. I bet there were loads of peeps dumping traffic before the official servers went offline so they could emulate it.
Hopefully there are lots of good servers running within a few months. Didn’t have time to do a playthrough before servers went offline, but I should have plenty of time later this year!
I tried Demon’s Souls for a few hours and I know there’s quite a few people who love that game; but it never really gripped me. Dark Souls 1 was a struggle as well, although I enjoyed that game once I got the hang of it. The main souls game I go back to though is Bloodborne. It’s the only one I feel that has an incredible combat system.
As for games I wish I could have experienced…nothing specific comes to mind but I do wish I got into fighting games as a child. I see these fighting games coming out, used to have fighting games friends that would talk about this and that, and I desperately want to enjoy it. But I just can’t. I’ve tried so many fighting games that are meant to be “the best first fighting game” and yet nothing. I really wish I did though, because I think they’re an incredibly interesting genre and community. At this point I believe I’ll never get into fighting games and that’s that. It’s somewhat the same with MOBAs but I don’t think there’s enough variety in MOBAs for me to actually care about missing a genre of games.
Whaaaaaaa? That’s what that’s from?! I dug up a couple of my DS2 controllers the other day and and they were covered with some weird slimy…stuff. Thought maybe someone spilled something on it or something.
As far as multiplayer games that I miss, they’re not particularly games I “missed out on”, but games that I enjoyed and can’t go back to anymore. Taking the top spot for me is DJ Hero 2. Didn’t think playing a rhythm game online would be anything too revolutionary, but I loved the crap out of it and sunk so many hours into it! I think the servers are still technically up, but it’s near impossible to find a game now.
I was initially sad about the servers going down, but it’s lead to me actually wanting to play it. I always summon people in Souls games, every single one. I almost never beat a boss on my own. It’s easy to justify summoning people when it’s in the game, but now that Demon’s Souls doesn’t have it, I’m curious how good I will actually be since I can’t have much help.
For what it’s worth (and it’s still totally cool if Rob doesn’t go back to this!), Demon’s Souls is still a fantastic game in offline mode and doesn’t lose too much. I only got an actual online Old Monk once in my four playthroughs and the vast majority of bosses don’t benefit as much from summoning as some of the later bosses in the series.
I will miss the ghosts and goofy messages, but the level design and mechanics of Demon’s Souls totally hold up without servers.
Doesn’t Tendency stuff actually become more sensible (and… cooler, from what I’ve read?) in offline mode, since it’s based more directly on your actions and not a nebulous global variable?
Multiplayer in a Souls game didn’t get good for me until DS3 let me easily and accurately play with my friend, especially since I was super late on the Bloodborne train and was the only person in my friend group with a PS4. Not to mention that you need to pay real-ass money to PS+ to get online functionality.
The idea of going back to other Souls games and working with those multiplayer systems makes me want to chew glass.
It does but it’s still a mess. Even I won’t argue that a game should get harder as you fail more and that’s the way it tends to go if you don’t Know what you are doing.
That seems to be a lot of DeS’ deal and probably why i keep… not fully bouncing off of it but just not having the motivation to return? Dark Souls’ pacing of failure is so perfectly tuned (once you know how Kindling works) that I can get kinda bitter about even Bloodborne, whereas DeS can feel like From’s straight-up kowtowing to the git-gud audience before they actually had the git-gud audience.
Honestly it’s not even that hard of a game it’s just demoralizing as all hell which if you go in know how to get around the systems isn’t really that big a deal and the game for all it’s lows hits some real highs for sure and it’s a game worth playing. I might even say it’s all around better than Dark Souls but that has more to do with Dark Souls Transphobia getting harder for me to overlook even as I know I will play the hell out of the remaster
This is getting me really excited at the idea of a private server where the world tendency could change to extremes at given dates or times. In the early days of DeS, they would have scheduled special events where world tendency would be placed at an extreme. This was long before I got into the series so any world tendency events I’ve encountered have been pretty annoying to get to.
The possibility of seeing some of that content without essentially grinding for it and knowing where it is ahead of time is very appealing. Umbasa.
World tendency is simply a global status that lowers or raises in brightness, black tendency generally makes it harder and spawns in special enemies, while white makes it easier, and both will have special events like open pathways or new npc’s tied to them.
It’s certainly easier to manipulate offline, because online it’ll change with the average online user base, while offline you can brighten the tendency by defeating bosses or avoid dying in body form, or vise versa for black tendency; which, yeah, is kind of a big ask especially for new players if they’re having trouble with a boss, but I wouldn’t call it confusing.
I kind of wish FromSoft kept some of those global systems in following games; they later instead tied similar events to player stats like Humanity or Insight. I was playing Bloodborne yesterday and wondered why in the world Hemwick Charnel Lane was clear of Stalkers (lanky sickle dudes) and they won’t appear until you have at least 15 Insight, things like that.
That said these systems also allow for that player discovery that comes with an obscure modifier, so it’s not like that magic is all lost.
