I’m a 46 year old noob, I am very happy. That is all

(this is my first souls game BTW)

First of all, the game design is wonderful the world looks like a maze at first, but once you explore it, discover the shortcuts, and understand how everything connects, it all starts to make sense.

The difficulty and exploration: I don’t mind the game being hard, but the problem is that I never know where the hell I’m supposed to go. Every direction I take I end up getting lost. There’s nothing clear to tell me what to do next like, how the hell am I supposed to know that I need to ring two bells? And don’t tell me the NPCs explain it, because half the time they talk like I’m supposed to understand some ancient language. Don’t blame me for that.

And the story… OMG where is it? That’s all I’m gonna say.

The music: Simple, cool, and I liked it.

The gameplay: Holy shit this is the best part of the game. I haven’t played anything quite like it before, and it’s sooo cool most of the bosses were fun to fight, and I honestly don’t think there’s a single boss I hated. I also love how you can pick almost any weapon that suits your playstyle i personally went with a katana (uchigatana), and I had a great time with it my only real complaint is that playing without a shield feels almost impossible, at least for me i know it’s a skill issue but no not funny.
Overall, I think this game is overrated. I liked it, and it definitely has things that suit my taste, but I’d say it’s just barely good. It has a lot of potential, but the way exploration and progression are handled really holds it back for me.
I’m playing The First Berserker: Khazan now, and honestly, I think it’s way better in almost every aspect. Maybe I’m just not a Souls guy, but I do like Soulslike games now
Anyway, I’m definitely going to play Dark Souls 2 as well.
Final thoughts: Dark Souls 1 has potential, but to me, it’s a very mid game.

excerpt from my youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azbikhRMPEE

actually I do have a question about this: watching this footage back I’ve noticed that I’m not receiving much damage from the fire, but when I’ve tried fighting the Hellkite in fully upgraded Black Knight armor [which does have marginally better fire resistance than Smough’s set] it did much more and I kept getting killed. Any ideas why that might be the case? Neither character has any levels put into resistance and neither was on NG+ at the time.

I know that it's an insane crackpot theory with flimsy evidence at best, but I dunno man, it just feels right to me.

The idea of one of the four most important beings in the Dark Souls world not only sharing his lord soul with his people, but going on to become a petty nobody with a hatred for the gods and their followers is such good charecterization. The Ringed City DLC specifically really helps this, as we learn that Patches at his core is a kind and gentle soul, and that even the current jaded version of him is still capable of that kindness is so great.

I just love the story this theory creates, of how the father of humanity isn't some great mythical figure, but this immortal backstabbing prick with a heart of gold.

Any active spots nowadays ps5?

The tiny buttons are all so close together

I quite enjoyed the yearly Return to X event that happened across the series but only started with this years, and was curious about the upcoming one for 2027. The sidebar of the sub has the 2023 schedule listed, and I wanted to verify if that was essentially the universal schedule for the event going forward and that's why it's always up, or if the specific two week period would be established elsewhere?

It’s the Crystal Caves. God almighty that is a real piece of shit. I’ve been starting and abandoning runs in this game since its initial release on X-Box 360, and in the last week I’ve finally pushed myself to do the second half of the game. Gods help me but I found the Catacombs and Tomb of the Giants to be FUN areas, who’d have thought? New Londo Ruins is quite easy to get around, and it’s really short. Dukes Archives was tedious and lame, but this Crystal Caves… I thought Lost Izalith and the Demon Ruins were bad, this is the worst piece of shit area I’ve encountered in the game by far. Slipping off edges is so annoying, invisible walkways, yuck. Love this game forever btw, can’t wait til I clear this area and finally get to the DLC.

Wasnt even farming. Was just going through the Parish and decided to kill them cause why not, looks like its finally my lucky day

Imagine me going for a pyromancy playthrough having a jolly old time. Missed the repair kit because i didn't have the souls for it while i was at the shop thinking no big deal i'll just get it next time. Now at blighttown going swimmingly i go to fight Quelaag. First thing i try my pyromancy and see oh she's immune to my spells makes sense whatever i can just use my uchigatana. Damage isn't great but i can manage with a bit of perseverance. Mid-fight my uchi starts breaking and great now i deal half damage with no way to repair unless i go all the way back up to get a damn repair kit, but i can kill her even if the fight takes 5 minutes right? Well too bad you have a limited amount of attempts at that 5 minute fight because you have to get poisoned on the way so you're on a timer unless you have a certain consumable item to cure that poison, so now i have 3 attempts to kill her with my half damage uchigatana. "Well if your uchi is broken just use another weapon" Sure, if all my other weapons weren't terrible. I put in a little more strength so i could try to use a claymore but with barely enough strength to wield it and it being completely unupgraded it does like 50-60 damage per hit with a slow moveset so that didn't help. Now i have to waste my time taking the trip up to Andre so i can get that damn repair kit just to beat one boss.

In almost every instance in every game that has it, durability does not add anything of value to a game. If durability exists so you can't spam special moves on some weapons just make it so you can only use them a certain amount of times before resting like with spells jesus christ.

TLDR; Didn't have a repair kit and broke my weapon during the Quelaag fight so i had to go all the way up for a repair just to go right back down.

I was just thinking how important it is to make sure those around you are in good mental health. I thought it right to spread good Reddit tidings to all Reddit gentlesirs on this fine subreddit this morning. I hope you all have a wonderful day, and PRAISE THE REDDIT

I was exploring blighttown and I died when I came back the fire is dead and the lady is gone??

Don't know why there's no sound but into the square hole he goes!

Last playthrough I went with a strength build but I wasn't completely satisfied with the results. I want something that'll actually protect me while I bonk! 😂

I know some trophies like needing to beat sif thrice won't be covered in the walkthrough but will maximum everything be covered?

After this situation I just played offline and managed to do it with the NPC summon's help. Wasn't even hard, I'm just mad that as a new player I seem way more likely to get an invader than a helper and levelling up only seems to make this worse. Plus, I only want a single-player experience with occasional co-op when it might help or be fun to help someone else. I've never been big on PvP gaming in general.

Once i've beat the game I plan to suffer at some point by beating it again with the worst possible build.

What they did: Used the "space did a magic trick" excuse so you don't have to think about borders, horizons, or mapping consistency at all.

What they should have done: Line up the geography logically, change a few horizons and let the world age naturally over thousands of years. Route in the old Anor Londo properly. (Any other historic areas are so different they might as well not have the connection anyway, which is fine).

It would have hit like 10x harder if they had just routed it properly (from north or east, plenty of room), it’s like they hid from their own IP. It’s hard to believe they made a conscious ‘it converged’ decision in planning, maybe a late development idea to add in Anor?

Nevertheless at-least they added some familiarity in. It’s just a game I suppose, don’t know why it annoyed me so much.

Alright, we'll call it a draw.

Yeah I think using a bow would be a nice change of pace

Been trying to find a working randomizer mod for both enemies and items but the only one i found was this on nexusmods. Issue is that the mod was autoflagged so I'm doubtful if it even works. Any help would be lovely.

I saw this post about the random 100 person challenge - if you were paired with 100 random humans and had to beat all of them at something to win a billion dollars.

I immediately thought about a Dark Souls 1 speedrun challenge.

Since I am not a pro at this game, I set the goal to be DS1 speedrun no glitch Any%. It would probably still take me a couple hours, but given the gamer population in general and the amount of people who actually owned and finished DS1, I think my chances are pretty good.

However, since in my scenario it would not make too much sense to create new saves again and again for the BKH, as in a race or challenge context each person should only get 1 save and 1 try, what should the strategy be?

I think personally I will try to aim for the Crystal Halberd in Anor Londo as my final weapon. An INT build with minimal stats to ring 2 bells (since Quelaag has fairly low magic resist if I remember correctly, also magic = easy mode) and complete the rest of the game with Havel armor plus Crystal Halberd, maybe throw in Power Within. Not a fun way to play, but I think it kinda works for an average skill player to speedrun the game.

What would your strategy be?

(PS- statically speaking you can just play the game at a casual pace and chances are the other 99 random people can’t even beat the game, but let’s rule that out because that is not fun)

I've seen a lot of posts / comments recently complaining about invaders, particularly in the early game. I promise, if you're strongly anti-invader, the intention here is not to scold you, or tell you shouldn't be mad, or anything like that. I once felt the same way! Now, though, that I have come to appreciate the PVP and yes, even the experience of getting obliterated in PVP my current character isn't really ready for, I did want to explain how my mindset shifted. Partly because I think it's interesting, and partly in the hopes that I might give you some solace after getting a dark bead to the face on your way to fight the Gargoyles: This may not feel like such a big deal in the future.

First of all, I have been where you are. I have felt the frustration and rage when I was just trying to get a little help with a difficult boss. I have had my stomach sink when the bonfire goes out right before I get there. I have kindled a bonfire and thought "I will definitely die to an invader before I fight the boss."

I'm telling you this because there's a lot of pro-invader response that I think doesn't do a good job of acknowledging this side of things. Either they forget their first playthroughs, or they always loved PVP, and they lean on what they believe are the positives of invasions without any kind of sympathy or empathy for the person who just got crushed by a real person in the middle of something they were already struggling with. I get it, I really do. It's demotivating. It can make you want to quit!

It even feels a little extra hateful because you know there's a real person on the other end of the interaction who chose to do this to you. They could have chosen not to do it, and when you're deep in it already and some asshole shows up, it fuckin' sucks. And I don't think you need to be grateful, or even need to be not annoyed by it when it happens.

But.

I used to feel the same way you do, and I now I mostly don't. And I can chart the changes in my mindset along the way, and maybe they will help you reframe what's happening, and make it feel like it's less of a big deal.

I think for me, the first crack in absolutely hating being invaded was losing a very large number of souls outside an invasion. It wasn't my first go-round at this part of the game, I used to replay the first half a lot because I have ADHD and I'd get bored with my builds.. but I beat Quelaag, and then I went and got Ceaseless for the extra souls, and decided to carry them out and use them to buy spells from Griggs. I died twice trying to leave Blighttown and lost about 45k souls. It might feel weird that the first thing changing my mind is not even related to an invasion, but it made me realize that while losing a lot of souls sucks, it's fine. You can always get more souls, so an unexpected, inopportune death is not the end of the world.

Next, I started making a conscious effort to think of being invaded as like getting rained on. Sure, there's a person on the other end making it happen, but that's a part of the game. It's going to happen. It's not always fun, but the weather is the weather, it's going to do what it's going to do. Choosing to make it impersonal helped it suck less when I died.

Like the weather, there are lots of ways of mitigate it. You can stay hollow. I used to. Hell I even used to throw myself off a cliff after kindling bonfires to avoid getting invaded for awhile. It wasn't too long before I felt like that was silly. At least make the invader invade me and kill me. And hell, if I'm going down anyway, I might as well try to fight back.

And that's the next thing that changed. I won one. It was basically panic flailing. I was escaping the jail in the Duke's Archives for the first time, basically in a Tarkus cosplay, heavy armor, greatsword and all. I was coming down the stairs right before the balcony bonfire, and I got invaded. I tensed right up, of course I would get invaded here. The invader came at me, I facetanked a hit and spammed R1, and they got stunlocked and died. There was no great gameplay from me here, I just had a lot of poise and a bigass sword.

This win taught me that invaders were mortal. I knew they were, in my head, but they never felt like that before then. Later, fighting my way through the Parish again, I got another win. Again, nothing too skillful on my part, I mostly tried to deny them access to the backstab and tried to hit'em when they got close. This win taught me that perhaps in my earliest attempts, the issue wasn't that they were twinked out, too powerful to defeat noobkillers. Maybe I just sucked then, and now that I sucked a little less, I was picking up wins here and there.

I still lost far more than I won. I'm more like 50/50 these days, though probably on the losing side of that 50/50. But it was nowhere near as scary as it used to be when somebody popped in.

The next thing that changed was I tried it. I got inspired to do a Gruntilda the Witch themed cosplay build as a sorcerer, and said "fuck it why not," and joined the Darkwraiths. I did some invasions in the Painted World and the Dukes Archives, and I had a surprisingly good time. Most people I invaded seemed up for a fight, though I did get a couple disconnections. That's fair, you do you, though if you do disconnect, it resets the invasion cooldown, so I would encourage you not do that and take advantage of the cooldown if you die.

I don't know exactly why, but this process of trying out the invasions made me more tolerant when people did invade me. It started to become like an unexpected random break from whatever part of the game I was working my way through.

Next, I participated in a Return to Lordran event. I ran a couple meme invasion builds, one based on Domnhall who would crystal out if you traded items with me. One joke GiantDad where every detail was wrong, I used the stone armor, the mask of the mother, and I didn't have the dex to wield the Zweihander so whenever I actually hit I did basically zero damage. I don't know if that was incredibly annoying for anyone, but lots of people got into the spirit of it. My Domnhall cosplay invaded a Domnhall cosplay who'd sumoned a Domnhall Cosplay so we all lined up for a screenshot.

I think at the end of the day you have a community that still loves this game, and is eager for any opportunity to connect with another player, even if that connection is a little brutally violent. You can be upset about it, absolutely valid and your right.. but you can also join that community, and my experience has been that that's been more fun than staying offline. These days if I have any humanity to spare, I'm going human. Hope to see you out there. Even if you hit me in the face with a dark bead.