The Stoopid Unikorn
EXP's House Hippo
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- Oct 4, 2024
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forums are dead, time to dance
The Experience Point Social Thread
- Thread starter DaybreakHorizon
- Start date
Yung
Member
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 37
- Reaction score
- 26
- Pronouns
- He / Him / His
I beat Demon's Souls on PS3 this morning. I was originally going to post this on Discord, but I ended up typing a lot. It felt too disorganized to put onto a Google Doc to link, however, so the forums felt like the next best place to put them. Even if the forums aren't active, believe me when I say they are appreciated as an alternative.
Keeping in mind that it's the first FromSoftware Souls game (though they've made several other games before and since), it's remarkable how interesting it is for its time, even if you come at it from a newer entry like Elden Ring.
Instead of one continuous world, instead the game is split into 5 zones, each with a theme, that you can choose to progress in whichever order you want, or in whatever way suits you:
They're also helpful in different ways: the Shrine of Storms has stronger enemies than the other zones, but consequently they give you the most experience, so if you need to level up, it's always optimal to return to it to clock in another upgrade to your stats. Conversely, if you want stronger weapons, you generally want to go back to Stonefang Tunnel, as the items there improve your weapons, with an accompanying NPC as well. Of course, there is the usual benefit: if one of the zones is giving you trouble, go to another zone for a while, so that you're stronger and more knowledgeable by the time you return to the zone you were having trouble with.
The game has almost no music, so you're dealing with silence and environmental noises in terms of audio. It could feel empty at times, but you'll learn to appreciate hearing the ambient cries of nearby enemies, as well as their footsteps, since they can all easily kill you if you aren't careful. The sound design is great in general, with the metal creaks of cages that raise and lower you in the Tower of Latria, to the bubbling lava in Stonefang Tunnel, to the howl of the wind in the Shrine of Storms. It definitely helps set the desolate and oftentimes bleak atmosphere. Boletaria is not a kind land anymore with its demon infestation, if it ever was in the past anyway.
Despite the lack of music being appreciated in a way, due to helping deal with enemies, the actual combat to deal with them is pretty simple. Movesets with your weapons are very barebones: light attack, strong attack, running attack, and then the two-handed variations on these moves. It's far from mindless, however, as you have far more options than just swinging your weapon. You can use magic using two different categories (one with wands, one with talismans), you can shoot bows and crossbows, you can throw consumable throwing knives and firebombs, etc. I mentioned that you can two-hand a weapon: it's what lets you use it in case you don't meet the strength requirement for it, and if you do meet it then it also raises the power of your attacks with it by 1.5 times, so that's another feather to put in your cap.
To use an example from a modern game, it's like how Breath of the Wild's combat sometimes gets criticism for feeling a little simple: the limited moveset of your weapons is only part of the fight, sometimes it's luring enemies to a better spot, or shooting them from afar before they become a threat, or tricking them into falling off the level.
Even so, it could feel very samey and dull, especially when you keep dying in a certain zone's segment over and over and thus have to keep repeating the same enemy encounters. Demon's Souls is classified as an action-RPG but that's not especially descriptive to what kind of game it really is. Like previous FromSoftware games like King's Field and Shadow Tower, it's far better described as a dungeon crawler. The point of the game isn't to feel badass and show mastery over the movesets of the different weapons you can wield, or anything like that. It's to be presented with several dangerous scenarios one after the other, and choose the best available options to you to survive. Don't get cocky with your weapon's moveset unless you have pitch perfect mastery over it, go ahead and use magic and arrows and firebombs or whatever, you have to survive a whole gauntlet of them to even reach a segment's boss... and if you die, you have to repeat the whole segment over again anyway. Sometimes, running past certain enemies is far wiser than fighting them, as well. Abandon your pride, it will only get in the way of demon slaying.
Demon's Souls is a very tense game, since it asks you to be aware of lots of different things, like enemy placement and behaviors, but one very important thing to keep in mind is the cumulative weight of all your items. You won't be able to pick certain things up if it would result in exceeding your carrying capacity. Weapon upgrade items are plentiful but also surprisingly heavy if you forget to offload them onto the NPC who stores items for you. Similarly, armor sets you don't plan on using should be stocked away immediately, as they will quite literally weigh you down otherwise.
This extends to weapons you find in the zones, which leads me to share a horror story that happened to me two nights ago: one of the bosses in Demon's Souls advises you to pick up a weapon in the boss arena. I picked it up, but I was over carrying capacity. There's a ring you can equip to raise your carrying capacity, so I was scrambling to equip it, but some enemies in the boss arena killed me before I could pick the weapon back up. Because I was killed after picking up the weapon without the required item capacity, it despawned from my game forever. I was royally pissed, but I calmed down when I realized the boss was still doable, surprisingly easy even, without the weapon. But if you ever play Demon's Souls, don't let this happen to you.
Demon's Souls is a game made with a lot of surprising decisions like that. Letting a weapon made specifically for a certain boss despawn sounds horrifying, but the boss is perfectly and reasonably beatable without it, so they let it happen to better impress upon you the importance of item weight. You can rescue all sorts of NPCs to take them back with you to the hub, but at least one NPC is a bad idea to rescue, and you won't find out until after you beat a boss or two and keep dutifully checking the hub level. There's a barely-explained mechanic called World Tendency, where different events will happen in each zone depending on your actions, and you're not told what those actions are, mostly for the chance of you simply stumbling upon those changes.
One of the rewards for killing the boss of a zone segment is getting your health bar restored: for most of the game, you play as your soul, which always has half health, so unlike most games beating a boss doesn't improve you so much as remove a handicap you are otherwise stricken with. You will lose half your health bar again the next time you die, too, but eventually you will gain enough of the rare items that restore your body so that it won't feel like a big deal anymore. This is another way that Demon's Souls feels unique today, the way it flips the idea of a boss victory empowering you.
The most interesting decision Demon's Souls makes is with online play: you are given the ability to assist players in other worlds with bosses (and be assisted by them in turn), or to invade other players' Demon's Souls playthroughs to kill them, which always rewards you with getting your body back no matter which of the three choices you decide to go with. You can also leave messages to other players to help them or troll them with misinformation.
Unfortunately, I played the PS3 version of Demon's Souls, so the servers have gone down and this is now impossible normally, so I partook in none of that. The PS5 remake, inferior visuals and all, nonetheless has online play working perfectly at the moment, meaning you can make a convincing argument that it's the better version to play solely for that reason, considering how core online play was to the original release of Demon's Souls. This game has a lot of cryptic solutions and side quest progression, and seeing in-game player hints may have been able to help with this, but I could not participate in any of it normally. Looking up a guide to figure out several things (especially using the rewards from bosses to make specific weapons) is how I eventually played the latter half of the game, grumbling all the meanwhile that if I played DeS back in the day I would be able to learn a lot of things more "organically" from other players.
This is where I admit that there *is* a way to play the original PS3 Demon's Souls with online play, but I wasn't aware of it because I just assumed that once Sony's servers shut down, then it wouldn't work anymore period. While typing this after finishing my playthrough, I learned that a fan server for Demon's Souls called The Archstones that has this addressed. It looks like it's a pain for anyone playing on RPCS3, but it's *far* more straightforward for anyone playing on an actual PS3: simply go to a specific menu and type in a number, then when you boot up Demon's Souls you'll have the option to connect to it. Don't be like me, everyone: If you ever plan on playing Demon's Souls, make sure to type in the number listed here! I really wish I knew about this before playing Demon's Souls. It certainly would have improved the Archdemon fight for the Tower of Latria, which involves online play in a way I won't spoil, but which is less interesting if you play offline like I did.
Lastly, some personal thoughts on Demon's Souls: I admire the game more than I like it. I've enjoyed dungeon crawlers like Shin Megami Tensei in the past, and Demon's Souls level design is very very memorable. You know you've made some great dungeons when you don't provide any maps, but you can close your eyes and mentally map out the entire level in your head. But playing a tense, gradual-progression game ended up taking almost all the free time away from me this month, especially due to the whole "you lose your experience points if you die before picking them up where you died last time" mechanic, which would oftentimes make me feel like I wasted an hour or two of progress. This is something you'll 100% need to be in the mood for with any Souls game (it happened to me a few times in Elden Ring for sure), but for me at least there's now an additional level of "I only have a few hours of free time after driving home from work, which I spend at least nine hours a day at now".
Also, I decided to go with a Dexterity build this time, as I went with a Strength build in Elden Ring and wanted to switch it up, but the items for fully upgrading weapons to scale with Dexterity are ludicrously rare (to be clear, the items to begin upgrading a weapon to scale with Dexterity are common). I spent two entire evenings trying to grind for items that fully upgrade a weapon to scale with Dexterity before throwing my hands up and going "okay I just wanna finish the game now". Unlike later Souls games, you can't respec your levels, so I couldn't change my mind to do a Strength build without grinding even longer for level ups into Strength, and I was spending so much time with Demon's Souls already that I felt I had to wrap it up by the end of March to not go insane.
While I still want to play the Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, it won't be for a while, as I want to make sure I'm in the proper mood for them, knowing that they will be big potential time sinks. I'm still curious about other FromSoft games though, in particular the Echo Night games on PS1. I think I'll play those soon.
If you're someone with a lot of free time, and are open-minded to the idea of a tense dungeon crawler action-RPG, by all means give it a try. Otherwise, if you have a job and thus value your free time more, I would still recommend playing it, but with a guide open. Much of my negative experiences with Demon's Souls came from deliberately going into it blind and referring to a guide as little as possible. But if you play with a guide open, you can always take back any potential loss of progress with strategies for each zone and segment to get through them in better shape, with minimal deaths involved. It's worth it imho to see how a juggernaut like the Souls meta series started from relatively humble beginnings, having already figured out several staple Souls mechanics. And if you play with the fan servers, you can even receive help from other players, rather than stumbling around in the dark like I did.
Keeping in mind that it's the first FromSoftware Souls game (though they've made several other games before and since), it's remarkable how interesting it is for its time, even if you come at it from a newer entry like Elden Ring.
Instead of one continuous world, instead the game is split into 5 zones, each with a theme, that you can choose to progress in whichever order you want, or in whatever way suits you:
- Boletaria Palace (medieval castle, also Boletaria is the name of the country the game takes place in)
- Stonefang Tunnel (mines, fire themed)
- Tower of Latria (prison, ominous towers, marsh)
- Shrine of Storms (distant windy cliffs, enemies that practice necromancy)
- Valley of Defilement (shantytown, constant threat of poison)
They're also helpful in different ways: the Shrine of Storms has stronger enemies than the other zones, but consequently they give you the most experience, so if you need to level up, it's always optimal to return to it to clock in another upgrade to your stats. Conversely, if you want stronger weapons, you generally want to go back to Stonefang Tunnel, as the items there improve your weapons, with an accompanying NPC as well. Of course, there is the usual benefit: if one of the zones is giving you trouble, go to another zone for a while, so that you're stronger and more knowledgeable by the time you return to the zone you were having trouble with.
The game has almost no music, so you're dealing with silence and environmental noises in terms of audio. It could feel empty at times, but you'll learn to appreciate hearing the ambient cries of nearby enemies, as well as their footsteps, since they can all easily kill you if you aren't careful. The sound design is great in general, with the metal creaks of cages that raise and lower you in the Tower of Latria, to the bubbling lava in Stonefang Tunnel, to the howl of the wind in the Shrine of Storms. It definitely helps set the desolate and oftentimes bleak atmosphere. Boletaria is not a kind land anymore with its demon infestation, if it ever was in the past anyway.
Despite the lack of music being appreciated in a way, due to helping deal with enemies, the actual combat to deal with them is pretty simple. Movesets with your weapons are very barebones: light attack, strong attack, running attack, and then the two-handed variations on these moves. It's far from mindless, however, as you have far more options than just swinging your weapon. You can use magic using two different categories (one with wands, one with talismans), you can shoot bows and crossbows, you can throw consumable throwing knives and firebombs, etc. I mentioned that you can two-hand a weapon: it's what lets you use it in case you don't meet the strength requirement for it, and if you do meet it then it also raises the power of your attacks with it by 1.5 times, so that's another feather to put in your cap.
To use an example from a modern game, it's like how Breath of the Wild's combat sometimes gets criticism for feeling a little simple: the limited moveset of your weapons is only part of the fight, sometimes it's luring enemies to a better spot, or shooting them from afar before they become a threat, or tricking them into falling off the level.
Even so, it could feel very samey and dull, especially when you keep dying in a certain zone's segment over and over and thus have to keep repeating the same enemy encounters. Demon's Souls is classified as an action-RPG but that's not especially descriptive to what kind of game it really is. Like previous FromSoftware games like King's Field and Shadow Tower, it's far better described as a dungeon crawler. The point of the game isn't to feel badass and show mastery over the movesets of the different weapons you can wield, or anything like that. It's to be presented with several dangerous scenarios one after the other, and choose the best available options to you to survive. Don't get cocky with your weapon's moveset unless you have pitch perfect mastery over it, go ahead and use magic and arrows and firebombs or whatever, you have to survive a whole gauntlet of them to even reach a segment's boss... and if you die, you have to repeat the whole segment over again anyway. Sometimes, running past certain enemies is far wiser than fighting them, as well. Abandon your pride, it will only get in the way of demon slaying.
Demon's Souls is a very tense game, since it asks you to be aware of lots of different things, like enemy placement and behaviors, but one very important thing to keep in mind is the cumulative weight of all your items. You won't be able to pick certain things up if it would result in exceeding your carrying capacity. Weapon upgrade items are plentiful but also surprisingly heavy if you forget to offload them onto the NPC who stores items for you. Similarly, armor sets you don't plan on using should be stocked away immediately, as they will quite literally weigh you down otherwise.
This extends to weapons you find in the zones, which leads me to share a horror story that happened to me two nights ago: one of the bosses in Demon's Souls advises you to pick up a weapon in the boss arena. I picked it up, but I was over carrying capacity. There's a ring you can equip to raise your carrying capacity, so I was scrambling to equip it, but some enemies in the boss arena killed me before I could pick the weapon back up. Because I was killed after picking up the weapon without the required item capacity, it despawned from my game forever. I was royally pissed, but I calmed down when I realized the boss was still doable, surprisingly easy even, without the weapon. But if you ever play Demon's Souls, don't let this happen to you.
Demon's Souls is a game made with a lot of surprising decisions like that. Letting a weapon made specifically for a certain boss despawn sounds horrifying, but the boss is perfectly and reasonably beatable without it, so they let it happen to better impress upon you the importance of item weight. You can rescue all sorts of NPCs to take them back with you to the hub, but at least one NPC is a bad idea to rescue, and you won't find out until after you beat a boss or two and keep dutifully checking the hub level. There's a barely-explained mechanic called World Tendency, where different events will happen in each zone depending on your actions, and you're not told what those actions are, mostly for the chance of you simply stumbling upon those changes.
One of the rewards for killing the boss of a zone segment is getting your health bar restored: for most of the game, you play as your soul, which always has half health, so unlike most games beating a boss doesn't improve you so much as remove a handicap you are otherwise stricken with. You will lose half your health bar again the next time you die, too, but eventually you will gain enough of the rare items that restore your body so that it won't feel like a big deal anymore. This is another way that Demon's Souls feels unique today, the way it flips the idea of a boss victory empowering you.
The most interesting decision Demon's Souls makes is with online play: you are given the ability to assist players in other worlds with bosses (and be assisted by them in turn), or to invade other players' Demon's Souls playthroughs to kill them, which always rewards you with getting your body back no matter which of the three choices you decide to go with. You can also leave messages to other players to help them or troll them with misinformation.
Unfortunately, I played the PS3 version of Demon's Souls, so the servers have gone down and this is now impossible normally, so I partook in none of that. The PS5 remake, inferior visuals and all, nonetheless has online play working perfectly at the moment, meaning you can make a convincing argument that it's the better version to play solely for that reason, considering how core online play was to the original release of Demon's Souls. This game has a lot of cryptic solutions and side quest progression, and seeing in-game player hints may have been able to help with this, but I could not participate in any of it normally. Looking up a guide to figure out several things (especially using the rewards from bosses to make specific weapons) is how I eventually played the latter half of the game, grumbling all the meanwhile that if I played DeS back in the day I would be able to learn a lot of things more "organically" from other players.
This is where I admit that there *is* a way to play the original PS3 Demon's Souls with online play, but I wasn't aware of it because I just assumed that once Sony's servers shut down, then it wouldn't work anymore period. While typing this after finishing my playthrough, I learned that a fan server for Demon's Souls called The Archstones that has this addressed. It looks like it's a pain for anyone playing on RPCS3, but it's *far* more straightforward for anyone playing on an actual PS3: simply go to a specific menu and type in a number, then when you boot up Demon's Souls you'll have the option to connect to it. Don't be like me, everyone: If you ever plan on playing Demon's Souls, make sure to type in the number listed here! I really wish I knew about this before playing Demon's Souls. It certainly would have improved the Archdemon fight for the Tower of Latria, which involves online play in a way I won't spoil, but which is less interesting if you play offline like I did.
Lastly, some personal thoughts on Demon's Souls: I admire the game more than I like it. I've enjoyed dungeon crawlers like Shin Megami Tensei in the past, and Demon's Souls level design is very very memorable. You know you've made some great dungeons when you don't provide any maps, but you can close your eyes and mentally map out the entire level in your head. But playing a tense, gradual-progression game ended up taking almost all the free time away from me this month, especially due to the whole "you lose your experience points if you die before picking them up where you died last time" mechanic, which would oftentimes make me feel like I wasted an hour or two of progress. This is something you'll 100% need to be in the mood for with any Souls game (it happened to me a few times in Elden Ring for sure), but for me at least there's now an additional level of "I only have a few hours of free time after driving home from work, which I spend at least nine hours a day at now".
Also, I decided to go with a Dexterity build this time, as I went with a Strength build in Elden Ring and wanted to switch it up, but the items for fully upgrading weapons to scale with Dexterity are ludicrously rare (to be clear, the items to begin upgrading a weapon to scale with Dexterity are common). I spent two entire evenings trying to grind for items that fully upgrade a weapon to scale with Dexterity before throwing my hands up and going "okay I just wanna finish the game now". Unlike later Souls games, you can't respec your levels, so I couldn't change my mind to do a Strength build without grinding even longer for level ups into Strength, and I was spending so much time with Demon's Souls already that I felt I had to wrap it up by the end of March to not go insane.
While I still want to play the Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, it won't be for a while, as I want to make sure I'm in the proper mood for them, knowing that they will be big potential time sinks. I'm still curious about other FromSoft games though, in particular the Echo Night games on PS1. I think I'll play those soon.
If you're someone with a lot of free time, and are open-minded to the idea of a tense dungeon crawler action-RPG, by all means give it a try. Otherwise, if you have a job and thus value your free time more, I would still recommend playing it, but with a guide open. Much of my negative experiences with Demon's Souls came from deliberately going into it blind and referring to a guide as little as possible. But if you play with a guide open, you can always take back any potential loss of progress with strategies for each zone and segment to get through them in better shape, with minimal deaths involved. It's worth it imho to see how a juggernaut like the Souls meta series started from relatively humble beginnings, having already figured out several staple Souls mechanics. And if you play with the fan servers, you can even receive help from other players, rather than stumbling around in the dark like I did.
MorganOni
Plague Doctor
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 168
- Reaction score
- 74
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Damn I was trying to go (mostly) blind other than KTG poking their head in to give me tips (like telling me that i had been fat-rolling for hours without realizing) and i wonder if i could do better with an acual guide.
but god i gotta get back to demon's souls. It has become the new game constantly nagging at the back of my soul to "just play me already!"
"I admire the game more than I like it."
This is always a line that feels so much like a backhanded insults but i get it
but god i gotta get back to demon's souls. It has become the new game constantly nagging at the back of my soul to "just play me already!"
"I admire the game more than I like it."
This is always a line that feels so much like a backhanded insults but i get it
Yung
Member
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 37
- Reaction score
- 26
- Pronouns
- He / Him / His
I don't meant it in a backhanded way to be clear! I just wanted to be honest with myself on my feelings after wrapping up the game. Like I said near the end I do still really recommend this game, Demon's Souls is very unique even today.Damn I was trying to go (mostly) blind other than KTG poking their head in to give me tips (like telling me that i had been fat-rolling for hours without realizing) and i wonder if i could do better with an acual guide.
but god i gotta get back to demon's souls. It has become the new game constantly nagging at the back of my soul to "just play me already!"
"I admire the game more than I like it."
This is always a line that feels so much like a backhanded insults but i get it
But if you're having too much trouble or are really upset that certain segments are too difficult despite your best efforts, feel free to look up a guide so you can start enjoying the game again. There's no shame in that.
And yeah, if your equip load is past the halfway mark, your roll is way worse. Although, at least in the PS3 original, your roll dodge is pretty stiff compared to later games anyway, what with not being able to roll diagonally a lot (be very careful with rolls in the cliff sections of Shrine of Storms... don't roll off the cliffs like I did... at least 3 times
)
MorganOni
Plague Doctor
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 168
- Reaction score
- 74
- Pronouns
- Any
I started as Knight. The DEFAULT equipment makes you fat roll. I assumed it was the normal roll! it's default armor!
<--- dumb
The Stoopid Unikorn
EXP's House Hippo
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
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- 290
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- He/Him
You are absolutely right and it should be so I gave you an Everett True
The Stoopid Unikorn
EXP's House Hippo
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 290
- Reaction score
- 38
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Pisscord? Shitting the bed? Must be a day that ends with a Y 
MorganOni
Plague Doctor
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 168
- Reaction score
- 74
- Pronouns
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If anyone wants to hear a silly story about being queer, here's one.
So like 6 years ago, i had the idea of doing a big exhaustive analysis like the 7 Hour Analysis for Omega Ruby, except i did it for platinum. Remembered that essay yesterday, and found out i still have the unfinished first draft. (my laptop got bricked before i could do battle frontier :kinzo
As im going through it, i find this image i had in the essay
And im thinking . . who the FUCK is Eli?????
And then it hits me. I was going by "elise" on the time, because i had not settled on Morgan. I fucking gave a FAKE name for my online trans name because i was worried about being outed as trans by a fucking POKEMON ESSAY
So like 6 years ago, i had the idea of doing a big exhaustive analysis like the 7 Hour Analysis for Omega Ruby, except i did it for platinum. Remembered that essay yesterday, and found out i still have the unfinished first draft. (my laptop got bricked before i could do battle frontier :kinzo
As im going through it, i find this image i had in the essay
And im thinking . . who the FUCK is Eli?????
And then it hits me. I was going by "elise" on the time, because i had not settled on Morgan. I fucking gave a FAKE name for my online trans name because i was worried about being outed as trans by a fucking POKEMON ESSAY
MorganOni
Plague Doctor
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2024
- Messages
- 168
- Reaction score
- 74
- Pronouns
- Any
I just finished the D&D podcast module that i started listening to a couple weeks ago.
like 2 years of their lives finished in like . .2 weeks of mine.
But now it's OVER and i'm LOST. :kinzo: they have more campaigns but they arent done!!!!!!!!! and the other one ended on a weird meta-cliffhanger where the story isnt over but they swapped to a different story for now. I dont even have closure!
GAH
like 2 years of their lives finished in like . .2 weeks of mine.
But now it's OVER and i'm LOST. :kinzo: they have more campaigns but they arent done!!!!!!!!! and the other one ended on a weird meta-cliffhanger where the story isnt over but they swapped to a different story for now. I dont even have closure!
GAH