NPC interaction is the one thing that is wearing thin the most to me, in Demons was quite the novelty but right now paranoia kicks in when vendor asks you where did you find stuff because you know she might just jump off a cliff.
still kinda cute to see how things go in your blind first run
just chiming in again to say the starting area still rules sorry felix
I don’t know how you’re supposed to see this image, because even unaltered I can only see it as dude looking at you and giving you a thumbs-up
[quote=“Oswald, post:405, topic:1250, full:true”]
NPC interaction is the one thing that is wearing thin the most to me, in Demons was quite the novelty but right now paranoia kicks in when vendor asks you where did you find stuff because you know she might just jump off a cliff.[/quote]
Yes! I also refused to answer that question.
Also, I didn’t take the “free” level, figuring I could always take it later after I learned what is the catch. I never did learn the catch, because when I came back to that NPC he was dead. After seeing his corpse, I went straight to go murder the NPC who gave me the Cracked Red Eye Orbs earlier. (I had already mulled whether or not to murder that guy as soon as I heard his dialogue, and I settled on waiting for the first sketchy thing to happen before I murdered him. So there was no need to think any further on this matter: the jury was in, his fate was sealed.)
… I’m still fully sane and rational, right? That was all completely logical?
Sometimes there is a fog gate in Firelink Shrine’s front portal and I have no idea why.
Also I guess I’m a super bumbo because I can’t figure out what the Key to Defeating Yhorm is. Got the Stormruler and tried it out every which way, but… nothing? Am I misinterpreting the Metaphor near his throne?
[quote=“diplo, post:409, topic:1250, full:true”]
Sometimes there is a fog gate in Firelink Shrine’s front portal and I have no idea why.[/quote]
That’s just a loading zone optimization. If the game waited until the outdoors was fully loaded before letting you spawn in Firelink, it would probably double the loading time. It’s kind of weird and the first time the series has resorted to this, but I think it’s worth the shorter waits for sure.
EDIT: Come to think of it, boss fog gates have probably been loading zone optimizations all along. They’re not needed on the first encounter because there is time to load during the cutscene.
You’re not. You need to hold down a button for a while before it works. (I once brought back my first digital camera to get a refund because it wouldn’t turn on. It turns out you needed to hold the power button for 5 seconds. I felt like an idiot, but it’s the designers who came up with long-press-based UX who are the true idiots. Or at least so I tell myself.)
I did that but was still doing piddly damage even when it was fully powered up. Hm.
or just bring siegward to the fight and he’ll handle it all on his own, which is pretty great for a gimmick boss that you wouldn’t have enjoyed fighting anyway
did I mention I somehow triggered every NPC questline without trying this time around
Just checked it out right now and I definitely was powering it up long enough but I guess you need to do R2 once it’s in that state? Idk. Going to try the fight again and see if attacking that way instead of R1 is the key.
Edit: Ah, weird. So you need to hold L2 before pressing R2 to make it do the special attack.
Congratulations for using a Skill Art in anger for probably the first time this playthrough. Now back to our regularly scheduled R1 mashing.
(More mocking the game’s kind of useless Skill mechanic than anything else here – at least in my case, that’s the only place I used Skills in my entire playthrough. The design book for Yhorm probably says “this boss will be based around Skills!”. It’s just not worth equipping Ashen Estus for them.)
I recommend getting over total nonuse of shields. It’s true that they’re a crutch that’s not strictly needed, and the real PvE pros (speedrunners) never use them except to parry, but the game was still designed around them. The problem is that you’re signing up for a lot of unnecessary deaths against enemies whose movements you don’t know how to predict yet. It saves a huge amount of time for the consequence of a mispredict to be a block instead of a death. You can learn to roll against attack types one at a time and block the less understood ones. Eventually that can evolve into a 100% roll style. By forswearing shields, you’re committing to the advanced style before you can possibly have the knowledge to do so. (In DkS3 this mainly matters for two hard bosses near the end who will not allow you to observe by standing at a distance – feel free to roll your way through everything else.)
As for parrying, I’ve recently decided that it’s a shitty mechanic that should never have been in the Souls series. Many attacks are unparryable and the only way to learn that is by dying to them (and you might still suspect it’s just because your timing was off). I understand it’s supposed to be high risk/high reward but when there is not even a possible reward it’s just dumb. And the latency before your player’s parry gesture – that even varies depending on shield – is really frustrating. It’s not even obvious which particular range of frames in the parry animation are the true “parry frames”.
Bloodborne’s gun crits are so much better: they strike almost instantly, the noise tells you the exact timing, and the crit point is during enemy windup so there’s still time to roll away if it doesn’t do anything. It also simply makes sense that a gunshot would stun an enemy, whereas I don’t really see the logic in a special kind of blocking having that effect. Going back to Dark Souls feels like a giant step backwards for this particular detail.
It’s probably a testament to my more conservative approach to these games and what they offer (e.g., I opt out of using like 95% of the spells (although I did get the first one that sounded interesting to me last night; it involves bugs)) that I’d only used weapon arts a couple of times beforehand. I figured that you’d take Yhorm down in a manner similar to the Storm King, once I got the Storm Ruler; I just didn’t expect the special attack to be executed in the way it is.
to illustrate the hilarious extent to which I play this way, a story:
so I turn on the game and I get back to this dude. my corpse is on the rafters. usually I kill the halberd hollow guy patrolling around the ledge here, but he’s on the opposite side and I see my souls, so I get greedy. I run in, but it turns out my corpse is close enough to aggro the knight, which I did not expect. I haven’t cleared out the idiot hollows around the rafters, so I kind of panic and decide to just book it back out to the ledge, where I won’t have to deal with those guys at least. the knight follows and fucks me up, but he manages to run his dumb ass of the ledge, which drops down to an earlier part of the level. only he ain’t dead, he’s just sitting there on the earlier ledge.
nah, bro, do not think you gon get away like that
so I jump down to chase this motherfucker because we still got some honorable combat to engage in.
needless to say this also aggro’d all the hollows back around that part of the level and I got shit on, so I had to backtrack even further to get my souls back when I could have just ignored this guy and continued on with the level.
I still can’t beat this guy. he swings that god damn greatsword very quickly. it tracks well. he has like infinite poise. anything I block drains 90% of my stamina bar. can I parry ultra greatswords in this game? guess I have to try. I suck at parrying.
Yes, and they have very wide parry windows. Still, if you get hit you’ll probably lose half your health bar or more. You can simply circle strafe around them and backstab them to death.
Near as I can tell, no enemy has infinite poise in this game - it seems that there are damage thresholds and special moves that determine whether or not your move’s animation will continue, and enemies seem to play by these rules as well - granted, Cathedral Knights need to be hit for about 400-ish damage to cause them to stagger, if I remember correctly.
Thinking about it, “Fine Work!” probably would have been better here.
Bloodborne has “gun crits”? I just started playing it and got to first boss and this is news to me.
Also Bloodborne is really good guys.
Every Souls game should take on a new aesthetic in a new narrative universe. This is totally a better way to do it.
yes, the guns basically replace parrying. They have nice long windows and do a bunch of damage besides, it gets to be an absolute necessity in later areas and bosses, whereas in (for example) demon’s I don’t think I’d ever have tried to parry a boss.
there are a few weird guns which are obviously not suitable for parrying but you’ll cross that bridge…
From what little I played of BB, I was impressed with how quickly I was turned on to parrying as soon as you replace the shield with a gun. And this is coming from a guy who can’t parry Gwyn.
I decided to restart as a male character because the bloodcurdling scream every time i died was just too much to take.
Steamrolled through the tutorial level without dying once, which is the opposite of the slow, tortured progress i was making the first time around.