No no no. These games are much more civilized now.
You kill the last boss and refuse to start a NG cycle. You chill in your post ending gameworld getting everything ready, farming, smithing.
Then right before you go to the main bonfire to accept the NG+ cycle you go around meeting everyone, buying all their stuff and killing them afterwards to steal their boots.
The Bells are a convenience for when you “oh shit killed that guy before buying this and that”.
As you can see, very civilized.
[edit]
Really no need, the game as more seeds than you can use.
I didn’t engage with Ranni’s questline til after beating Radahn, though I did team up with him to kill Darriwil before that and then had to go back post-festival to free Blaidd from the Forlorn Hound Evergaol because Iji imprisoned him there (for reasons (idk if that’s further down the sequence of events though, these quests are strange as hell sometimes)).
I’m just now hitting on the route they expect you to take after getting your ass kicked by margit the first time.
When I first eyed that roadblock outpost near the war master’s shack, I was super low level, saw the giants roaming in the adjacent field and avoided it til now, heading back towards the start then around the south side of murkwood instead. Now that I’m back I’ve met a cool new character, heard a merchant jamming on his lute, have a bearing on a new dungeon entrance, and am trying to decide if I want to mess with some creepy boat person yet.
Oh, I just remembered these things, the paintings you sometimes discover and collect as items. I never confirmed this, but I think they are paintings either of or from the perspective of locations where certain spirit ashes can be collected. Does anyone know for sure what those are about? I thought maybe I would be decorating the HQ with those paintings, but nope.
I’ve done the Ranni quest in a weird order so far (met Blaidd in the forest, killed Radahn, did the entirety of Nokron but couldn’t get the treasure, then met Ranni). I looked up the wiki to work out where to go after talking to Ranni, and Blaidd wasn’t in Siofra. So I guess either killing Radahn or entering Nokron skips that whole portion of her quest.
For anyone else running this game on Linux, I have had dramatic improvements in performance and stuttering using gamemoderun. I had been doing a bunch of the things it does by hand (nice, ionice, power management settings, etc) but it seems to be doing more.
Blaidd is only in Siofra so he can look up at Nokron and wonder how to get up there and say he’s out of ideas and maybe you should talk to the wizard creep. the wizard creep tells you to talk to sellen and she gives you the information about how radahn is holding the stars back. Then if you go back to blaidd he’s all finally, a target and a mission of violence, something I can do, and you go to the festival.
@Tegiminis pointed out that the effect of Twiggy Cracked Tear lasts a good long while.
Well, I just got smacked by a tree man shortly after jumping to my death and I realized it doesn’t just prevent you from losing your runes when you die. It also protects your lost runes on the ground if you die while it’s active.
Yeah! This is consistent souls mechanical thing: Your bloodstain is only lost if it’s “overwritten” by a new one. Anything that would prevent you from placing another stain will preserve the existing one.
regarding late game areas, I think haligtree did not actually have particularly great level design, or at least not to my tastes. Perhaps it’s because I saw the pattern too quickly: it’s a sonic the hedgehog level. There’s a low road, a middle road, and a high road. High road is the easiest but most platforming dependent, middle road has all the threats before you, and low road has extremely difficult battles but it avoids the biggest battle at the end. Regardless, even though they branched into each other plenty of times, it was still a straight path to the end rather than branching into unpredictable rabbit holes with very little certitude over whether the path you chose is the main path or an optional side-journey.
That ambiguity was absent from this late game legacy dungeon, which is especially curious because this one is the optional one, where you would think they could go really wild with the level design (as they did with the boss design)
On the other hand, crumbling farum azula is wonderful precisely because of the unpredictability of the exploration. The branches were long, complex, and often looped back in on an earlier part of the dungeon but with just enough of a hint that I was still missing something from them.
Sonic level is a good way to put it, and something I liked about that area. But I didn’t really notice how simple it is compared to the other dungeons, even though it’s obvious now you mention it. Not a bad “bonus” imo.
What it did very well, in part because of its linearity, was signpost progress through changes in aesthetic. Going from the upper branches to buildings around the trunk to the castle ramparts before finally reaching the much smaller rot swamp area gave me a great sense of advancing through the dungeon. Each section was paced very well, too.
The first three sections of the dungeon lasted about an equal length, and felt satisfying in an ‘episodic’ way. They each took about an hour and were distinctive enough that they felt like good stopping points. Meanwhile, the final area took 15 minutes at most (and only because I did the optional mini-boss fight) and unambiguously led me straight to the boss arena, giving me a sense of accomplishment—perhaps enough of an ego boost to carry me through the boss fight (which was actually quite fun, imo, even if I lost a half dozen times)
And I can’t deny that it is aesthetically one of the finest looking areas in the game. I just have a taste for more mazey open-ended dungeons.
not being able to pause is frankly already extremely disrespectful of parents’ time, of all the accessibility concessions that From gamely refuses to make, I think it’s time for them to let go of this one
I’m a parent and if parenting calls when I’m playing I just literally quit out. Most of the time this is the same as pausing. Sometimes its the same as dying, but you die all the time anyway, so who cares? Practice detachment.
but quitting out and restarting the game takes an annoying amount of time. and if you’re playing on PC, at least if you’re me, it means the game is going to freeze every 30 seconds for the first hour of play again. I don’t have kids or a life, so thankfully I am immune to this problem.
Plus the game does have a pause feature if you, like, open the help text in the menu or whatever. Just make the map screen pause the game if you’re not online. Easy.