masochysteria

[talbain]

@VastleCania

My favorites are things like playing wearing a blindfold, or with your feet, or other stuff that’s outside of the game itself.

I really enjoy watching these. The Castlevania SotN one is particularly interesting since they have to do the infinite item glitch blindfolded.

[Father.Torque]

I used to play Counterstrike in “ironman mode” when I played at LAN because I was so much better than all my friends. Basically it just means never buying anything and only using stuff picked up off dead people. (Except armor, I did let myself buy armor.)

[Felix]

@mothmanspirit

I imagine your damage output would be really low, doesn’t that make boss fights somewhat tedious?

if you’re good enough to spend all of your souls on buffs and whatnot, that helps

[sleepysmiles]

That and if you keep your weapons up to date they’re still pretty powerful, plus there are non-stat-based upgrade paths you can ascend them to later in the game. And in Dark Souls 1 you can exploit pyromancy, if you want to keep to the letter of the challenge but not necessarily the spirit.

[Father.Torque]

But actually the answer is still yes, it is tedious.

[Tuxedo]

SL1 hurts your defense a lot more than your offense. You’d be surprised by how strong a lightning club +10 gets.

One challenge I really liked to do was going for no fusion in Megaten, especially Nocturne on hard.

Usually in Megaten all demons start to become a blur after a while, you just fuse new ones with the same important skills (healing and buffs/debuffs), fusion only serves to have more stats / better resistances
Going for no fusion makes them really stand out from one another, and makes you look forward to new areas because they have new demons to recruit!

You also get to drag this useless low level demon around for 10 hours because he’s the only one with Rakukaja

[Felix]

one of these days I’ll get past Thor

[CourierRice]

I think I remember SL1 Dark Souls being a slower run because I was more careful, but that made it more exciting than tedious. Using non-stat-based methods to increase your offense made all of your choices more thoughtful. Certain spells exist that buff your weapon temporarily, so I would have to use them before a boss and plan a method of attack so that I could use as much of those buffs as possible. From what I assume, that’s somewhat similar to the Witcher brand of strategy? At least in terms of lore. Also, everyone uses Pyromancy. I consider the challenge equally about learning the system as about skillful play. You end up doing research on bosses elemental weaknesses and what consumable items can be used to exploit those, which is something I rarely if ever did normally.

Dark Souls is a bit fundamentally different from some other games where you increase or decrease numbers for cheap difficulty, in that changing those numbers changes your method of play as well.

SL1 DS2 was probably a lot slower due to constant trial and error. It was certainly more frustrating, and less enjoyable. That said, I do have some of my boss fights documented on twitch, and they were not all that different in pacing than a normal playthrough. Except for Najka, who took about 8 minutes. I actually beat the final boss in three minutes while drunk off my ass.

For true doom murderheads who think SL1 is too exploitable, there’s also a SL3 run, where you play the magic caster class. Your stats are even lower, and your strategy revolves around using spells you’d otherwise ignore. That’s a fragile build. I haven’t done it, but I watched someone on youtube do it and it was pretty thrilling.

[CourierRice]

Here’s one of my saved videos of me playing through the DS2 belfry, doing PVP, and fighting the boss. It…still looks like fun. BUT, I remember that shit goes very south later on with Velstadt. Don’t do this to yourself again, Curry.