This is post #3 for Blaugust 2019
Anyone that follows me on Twitter has seem me talking about returning to Dark Souls. This post will be kind of an extended edition of those tweets.
Rewatching the “Let’s Play” videos that got me into Dark Souls in the first place got me in the mood to play the game again. It hasn’t helped that I also have been in a pretty moody headspace lately where I haven’t felt like doing anything, not even play games. So I have been poking my head into random games to see if they would stick and Dark Souls was one of those.
My initial plan was to reinstall the “Prepare to Die” edition and start a new character to relearn the controls. Then once I felt comfortable enough playing the game again I’d try to pick back up where I left my previous character and finish the game.
It worked mostly, in that I relearned the controls. But then I decided to check the “Remastered” edition to see if I could transfer my saves. Since I was planning to buy it eventually anyway and I was already restarting might as well check it now.
Turns out, no we can’t transfer saves between the “Prepare to Die” edition and the “Remastered” one. Apparently it is because the “Remastered” edition saves aren’t as easy to hack as the previous one. I don’t know how true that information is but it could explain it.
The graphics updates aren’t really any better either if you play the “Prepare to Die” with the DSFix mod. The only other incentives to buy the “Remastered” edition were that the bulk of the players moved to it (not something I really care about), an option to start it offline (good for me if I decide to use humanity for farming) and the ability to use a password for Co-Op (which I doubt I will ever use but nice to have).
After some thinking I decided to buy the “Remastered” edition. My rationale was that it would be better to have it just in case DSFix somehow disappears from the internet or I end up forgetting to install it (which happened this time)
With that settled it was time to search for a character build. In a game with a lot of numbers like this one where I am uncertain how they will affect my character, nor there are any way to reset it, I prefer to look at other people’s builds. After some googling I settled on this build. It supposedly doesn’t require grind or a minimal amount of it, which is perfect for me since I hate grinding.
I’d also decided to use a walkthrough because I’d really want to finish the game this time. Or at least not be as lost as last time if I get distracted and go play something else!
All of these has worked well for me so far. I am starting to regain something resembling skill in this game and just killed the Taurus Demon last night.
It still took 5 times to kill him though. The first 3 I was just being dumb and trying to climb the stairs immediately after smashing its face which just wasn’t working well. On the last two tries I tried to run away attacking him then run back to the stairs. That worked way better but I still almost died at the last attempt.
To make it all worse, during one my attempts to get back to the boss, I got reckless and died to some undead on the way. Lost about 3 thousand souls and a couple humanities that way. That is what I get for being cocky and thinking underestimating non-boss enemies.
I am also starting to get the hang of parry. But I wonder if they made sneaking behind enemies harder or I am just bad at it since I tried to do it against a couple enemies on this run and just haven’t been able to.
Small setbacks aside, I am enjoying this return to Dark Souls. Will I finish it this time or just go play another game? I have no idea. I’d really like to get to the end at least once so I could play the other games in the series (and Bloodborne and Sekiro!) but I also know myself way too well. We’ll see how it goes! 🙂