I love these games, but how the frick are you supposed to know shit like "put on this ring and go down this giant hole to progress through the game" or "the key to get through this important door is bought from a common merchant" without using a fricking internet guide? did anyone here beat a single souls game with no guide whatsoever?
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>the key to get through this important door is bought from a common merchant" without using a fricking internet guide?
>see a new dude
>talk to him
>he is a merchant
>sells a key
WOOOAAAHHHH I didnt even do anything *snort*
yeah okay but what about literally every other obtuse progression roadblock
If you are not exploring every inch you're not playing the game.
Play the game. Read the clues.
They fricking tell you, that's how you moronic motherfricker.
>find the 4 kings pit
>player message "ring needed"
>look through rings
>"traverse abyss"
>put the ring on and jump
worked for me in 2011
i pirated the game so i didnt have player messages ):
nobody has player messages because the servers have been down for months
>the key to get through this door is bought from some common merchant.
>The crest of Artorias which you purchase from the smith who upgrades your weapons and who is pretty much sitting on top of a bonfire you can warp to which you can spend a shitload of souls on and which specifically specifies that it leads to the grave of artorias
And this is after you fricking talk to the guy who gives you the key that lets you lower the water level to get to 4kings who specifically says you need to find Artorias to fight 4kings. If you don't remember seeing the crest of Artorias with Andre then you will likely just rattle off every npc you can find which should be quick since you have the lordvessel (unless you fight 4kings early) and then you will see the stupid crest in Andre's shop and go to Darkroot Garden.
Really the only way you are going to miss this is if you don't read anything.
You would still have dev messages which are really not necessary at this point.
>No I will not buy something called "the Crest of moving the plot forward" from the NPC I've likely interacted with the most
If you wanted to beat 4Kings you would have talked to an NPC before even getting close to 4kings who stated you need to find Artorias, why would you not read the description of something that has his name on it?
I swear this is just as stupid as people complaining about getting locked into an ending in ER with people just constantly doing things practically at random that are somehow the equivalent to reading most of a guide but not the actual important parts and then playing the actual game with their eyes closed whenever confronted with any text whatsoever.
|The ring message is a dev message, you don't need online for it to appear.
On one hand I like that the devs put messages in, but on the other hand players have probably seen so many "hidden wall ahead!" messages they're ignoring any they see by the time they get to 4 kings, and if the only sign you're supposed to use the ring is a *literal* sign telling you to use the ring it's a pretty silly design flaw. At least in Elden Ring the dev signs are glowing so you know they're special
>seen so many "hidden wall ahead!" messages
from my experience this was only an issue in elden ring because of the massive amounts of normies. and it died out pretty quickly too.
it wasn't like that in dark souls, or demon's souls at the time
I actually started playing all of them in offline mode for my initial single player playthrough because after playing dark souls 1 I had so much shit randomly spoiled by very accurate and "helpful" messages I wanted to avoid the messages and see if I could actually notice shit, see the hidden walls myself and such
like
said, this was only really the case in elden ring, most of the earlier games had some meme messages around some npcs and some various large holes had the ever popular tongue but hole but otherwise were just helpful/accurate/informative messages
Unorinically google. People pretend this game came out in 1984 but it released at a time where people googled the shit out of games.
>ring needed
>remember ring
>try ring
>you walk into a literal fricking abyss
>you have a ring that lets you traverse the abyss
These games are needlessly obtuse but why the hell wouldn't you check every merchant you see and take note when one sells a key
in most other games, a key sold by a merchant would take me to some kind of optional (and usually useless) content. important keys are usually gotten from bosses or some kind of puzzle-y shit.
what is "most other games"? do you triple A movie game open world ubishit schlock?
or do you mean actual games, because that is literally one of the most common things to have in games, needing to find a key to get through a door to progress
>needing to find a key to get through a door to progress
correct, i'm talking about FINDING a key through some sort of skilled gameplay maneuvre, like combat against a boss, or finding it through a puzzle, not paying 1000 monies to some random crackhead selling mostly weapons and armor and oh yeah, this one key that any normal person would assume just unlocked a door to some optional unimportant content. its just bad design.
if you need to beat the boss to get the key instead of the key just being somewhere then why was the door not just behind the fricking boss? or the boss room in front of the door
what is the purpose of key apart from trying to make it look more complicated than it really is?
your advocating for bad design, which is pointless items and busywork that don't contribute to anything
having a key you need to find and it not being immediately obvious is the fricking point, the game wants to encourage you to explore and go and do shit you moron
just go use a guide like you would anyway, you don't want to actually play games, you want to watch movies that require you to press an extra button every so often to keep your attention because a movie isn't engaging enough for you.
Well good thing the key is optional and you can just walk around the door then.
you cannot "walk around" the darkroot garden door, you need the crest of artorias, and from what I remember, there is nothing letting you know the actual name of the macguffin that opens that fricking door. i had explored every nook and cranny of the game i could and beat every boss/miniboss i could find looking for anything resembling something that would open that door, and lo and behold, i just needed to buy something called "the crest of artorias" from that fricking blacksmith. you kidding me? that is objectively bad design.
so you didn't read the item description?
the short description is
>This crest opens a door in the Darkroot Garden sealed by ancient magic
which appears when u just go to the item in the menu in the shop
with the long version giving a big explanation if you change the view
>The door leads to the grave of Sir Artorias the Abysswalker. Many adventurers have left for the grave, but none have returned, for they make easy prey for local bandits. With such dangers, the crest can do more harm than good in the hands of the uninitiated
fricking moron can't even read
The ladder behind the Hydra.
>you cannot "walk around" the darkroot garden door
Yes you can dumbass. It’s just a shortcut.
You're not just wrong, you're moronic.
>you cannot "walk around" the darkroot garden door
you literally can. your brain was obviously designed in a bad way but you only got your alcholic mother to blame.
>you cannot "walk around" the darkroot garden door
This is it, folks. This is the level of discourse in Dark Souls threads. These are the kinds of people that "git gud" was invented for.
Git gud, Anon.
Why would you assume conventions in an exploration game?
Just look it up on Google
Just buy Key items, dude. 99% of them are dirtcheap and it's not rocket science to figure out they might be needed for something down the track.
>key items
heh amusing unintentional double entendre
You are not entitled to beat the game.
Bad and obtuse game design isn't entitled to be free from solid criticism by people who know what they're talking about, either.
That is your opinion. People are way to obsessed with the term "good design" because they imagine some kind of clinical perfect world where everything is intuitive and convenient. The thing is that inconvenience can work to make a game more interesting, engaging or memorable. And if a few thousand people happen to not be able to beat a game because of a point of inconvenience, that just sucks for them. Yes, it is probably "badly designed", but that does not matter. At all. "Bad design" literally does not matter unless the core mechanics of the game are so broken that the game is unplayable - which obviously isn't the case for Dark Souls.
That is why I am saying you are not entitled to beat the game. If you stop playing Dark Souls at a certain point, that's okay. That is perfectly fine. You can even be frustrated about it. But your criticism is empty. There is no point to it. You didn't beat the game. Fair enough. Go play a different game. There are thousands of others. What you consider bad and obtuse design, millions of people remember fondly because it lead to interesting moments. Why is your desire to beat the game more important than the moments these other people experienced?
no, he is using "bad design" to mean things he doesn't like or didn't understand, not to mean things that are actually badly designed and fail to accomplish their goals
having shops that have items to give you something to spend your souls on instead of having them be hardly different from XP isn't bad design, hes a moron who can't read item descriptions that are right there when you look at the item
hes literally complaining about an optional item to open a shortcut thats completely unrequired to either progress or access the area
he just can't read, doesn't understand when items tell you what they are, and doesn't understand how to read literal messages written to tell you whats needed
dark souls is a throwback to old school dungeon crawlers and obtuse game design
player communication is encouraged as communicated by the message system
>"the key to get through this important door is bought from a common merchant"
Black person lots of video games do this. not everything that's sold in a shop is optional ffs. why the frick would you assume it is? your brain has been rotted by too much AAA bullshit.
AAA games don't even have shops anymore
just crafting systems, shops are reserved for dlc, which is optional, so in this clowns head shops = optional
>"You have to buy the key at the shop"
>"Shop? You mean like, for DLC?"
>can't open that door
>that one guy sold a key that's it!
>hmm I can't progress further maybe I do the forest area for now
>"covenant of the abyss" that's it!
It's not that hard if you have average IQ
Why are you even playing video games if you don't have dozens of hours to try every combination and permutation of items to progress?
Honestly I can't remember how I knew what to do, maybe I summoned someone and he told me.
The game very clearly spells out 70% of all of these things, 20% take the bare minimum of context which is also readily and constantly offered, and the remaining 10% are easily discoverable with basic exploration and experimentation.