I’m currently playing the OG Dark Souls (Remastered) for the first time since, ah, since I seriously tried to do a one-bro run. Months ago? Or a year? Probably months. Time has been really weird lately. So has my sleep. In part because of a personal crisis and in part because of Daylight Saving Time. I have no idea why this one has been so hard, but it really has been. For the first time since my medical crisis, my sleep has reverted to being all over the place. I still get seven to eight hours a night (mostly), but it’s interrupted and it takes me a while to actually fall asleep. Also, I snooze on and off for an hour before I finally fall asleep. I’m counting that in the seven to eight hours, by the way.
Back when I was in college, I slept four hours a night. I was so exhausted, I didn’t know which way was up. When I went home over the school breaks, I would sleep for fifteen hours the first night. And be sick, too. I was so sleep-deprived at the time. I could not sleep before midnight for anything, and I had a 7:45 class. I went to bed at three-thirty and got up at seven-thirty. I would race to class and barely made it. I drank 6 Diet Pepsis a day, starting with one as soon as I woke up.
Side note: I don’t understand why people disdain drinking a pop the first thing in the morning, but are fine with coffee. It’s the same thing you’re looking for–caffeine–juust in different forms.
I had a portable alarm clock and one morning, I woke up and could not find it. It was nowhere in sight, and I was so confused. I took about fifteen minutes trying to find it, but it wasn’t anywhere. I had a mini-fridge in my dorm room, and I kept my Diet Popsis in it. I finally gave up trying to find my alarm clock and opened theh fridge to grab a Diet Pepsi. There was my alarm clock, and I had no recollection of putting it in there.
Anyway! Back to Dark Souls Remastered. There is a game that just came out–Dragon’s Dogma II. It’s a reimaging of the first game, which came out 12 years ago. I played about ten hours of the first game and could not get into it. It has very sparse fast-travel, and the combat felt mean. Someone in the RKG Discord put it that way, and he was right. The combat was mean. FromSoft combat, for the most part, is difficult, but it’s not mean.
In fact, the main reasons I quit playing the first game was beacuse of the very sparse fast-travel points (and I cannot emphasize enough just how sparse they were. You can make your own, but those resources were even sparser) and the fact that you could not save upon quitting. Meaning, there were only save points and whenever the game deigned to save. Plus, just the sheer amount of enemies in a dense area made it a miserable experience for me. I don’t think the map was very useful, either.
Ian is playing it and loving it–as are many other people. We’ve had a discussion before about fast-travel, and I am on team fast-travel from the start. Ian thinks it can be a great way to get to know the areas–as it was in Dark Souls. He’s right about that. I know the first game like the back of my hand because of how many times I died in so many areas.
Here’s the thing, though. It’s the game I least play of the trilogy because of the lack of fast-travel from the start. Also, the fast-travel is only to certain bonfires–and you have to do it from a bonfire. In Elden Ring, you can fast-travel to any bonfire–sorry, Site of Graces–from anywhere on the map (except if you’re in a cave/catacomb/mine), and it’s such a breath of fresh air. I can stil make my way through areas, but maybe not with the ease that I can do it in the three Dark Souls games.
I’m old. I’m tired. My eyes are bad, and I have no sense of space. My peripheral vision is terrible, and I can’t read maps that aren’t linear. I hate games with mulitple layers on the map beacuse they never tell how to get around the obstacles. I love the map in Elden Ring, but there are times when I’m really frustrated because I can’t visualize how to get around in a 3D way. That’s on me, though, not the game.
Capcom kept the fast-travel the way it was in the first game (I’m talking Dragon’s Dogma here), and to add insult to injury, added a microtransaction so you can buy the item to make your own warp point–which is bullshit. It’s saying (as more than one content creator had pointed out) that for all the lofty explanations for keeping the meager fast-travel system (to explore the world and really get to know it), they know that it’s worth people’s actual money to be able to fast-travel. It really does diminish their claim that it’s for legit reasons.
Ian has told me that at least you can save before you quit out now–which is good. But on PC, you can only have one save at a time. You can’t start a new game while you have a live playthrough. It’s a glitch, and supposedly, Capcom is working on it. Japanese devs are still lagging behind with the PC ports, and this is not an exception.
Another thing that is annoying is that they’re making players pay to edit their character creation. Thats’ not a big deal, really, but it’s just another needle in the skin. What a way to cheap out, Capcom. Way to get as much blood out of a stone as possible. And, yeah, I know that people can just not buy it, but it’s really not showing any respect for their customers.
One thing I’ve always appreciated about FromSoft is that they have no microtransactions in their games. No skins, no XP packs, no nothing. I don’t even know where I was going with this, and I’m done for the day. Will try to write more tomorrow.