Board 8 > Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest Part 2 (ft FO:NV, Ghost Trick)

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I'm glad you posted that, because it gives me an excuse to go on about history and strategy games, which are much more interesting topics than Human Revolution imo. While reading all your posts about Age of Empires II, I did consider booting up the game again but never got around to it, and one of the things that turned me off was exactly the issue with the faction naming that you describe. The example that I found particularly disappointing was the "Slavs" as the sole representative not only for Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, but (presumably) also for Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, which also creates a sort of redundancy/confusion since Bulgaria, which is a South Slavic nation, is its own faction. At least you can sort of simulate the wars between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by doing Slavs vs. Lithuanians, I guess. I would assume that the Tartars are supposed to be the Golden Horde successor states like the Crimean Khanate, Great Horde, and Nogai. And yeah this issue is present in Civ also to a certain extent. Like you said, Italy has always implicitly been represented by Rome except when V included Venice, Scotland used to be represented by the Celts (They spawn in Edinburgh in the Into the Renaissance scenario in V that uses the map of Europe,) and Germany is usually led by someone who ruled over either Prussia or the Holy Roman Empire, again because a united Germany is a relatively new thing. Of course the most egregious of all has to be Canada finally making it into Civ VI only to be represented by fucking Quebec.

I don't think there's anything wrong with having particular countries that you like to read more or less about than others - probably everyone who does like to read about history has their favorites, mine is obviously Russia. Though I will say the severity of your distaste for French and Italian history specifically does seem a little odd, at least the way it comes off from reading your post. For me, there's definitely a connection between my interest in the culture of a country and the history. I got into Russian history because I fell in love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and I also like reading about Japan because I was raised on JRPGs and anime. Britain benefits from producing most of my favorite music and it helps a little that I live in a British Commonwealth country that still swears fealty to Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II. If anything though, I'd be offended by you bashing France rather than Italy, since French is the only non-English language I have even a shred of literacy in and I've always kind of liked them. I think Venice is an interesting enough country historically but I only gravitated to them in Civ V because of the game mechanics. Really though, every European country has a really rich history with plenty of interesting things to read about. France has stuff like the Hundred Years' War, a role in founding both the USA and Canada (some of the same American polictical commentators you take issue with for their attitudes toward China and the Middle East probably also forget how instrumental the French fleet was to the U.S. War for Independence, for example,) an unusual alliance with the Ottoman Empire, and of course the Napoleonic Wars which were incredibly Earth-shaking both for politics and philosophical thought all across the continent. Crime and Punishment, for example was both a response to and a prediction of writers like Nietzsche who created the Ubermench concept using Napoleon as his example. Without having read much about Italy specifically, they were the home of both the Renaissance and the Papal States, Italian merchant republics like Venice and Genoa colonized all over the place, they had a lot period of being pushed around by stronger neighbors like France, Spain, and the HRE followed by a difficult unification and emergence as a major power, and Venice had a leading role in the sack of Consantinople during the Fourth Crusade, which crippled the remains of the Roman Empire and contributed to the later fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, which is generally considered one of the most significant events in all of European history. I think all that stuff is super interesting, but to each his own at the end of the day. But really, its us in the formerly-colonial nations that don't have much in the way of interesting history to speak of, apart from that of the American Aboriginals of course.

I think the main thing that keeps me from spending more time with games like Age of Empires II is that instead of taking the time to learn them I always go back to Europa Universalis IV. Part of that is just because I already know that game pretty well so I don't have to go through the rougher early learning curve, but I also find it more interesting in terms of things like diplomacy and Empire-building, since a 300-year Grand Strategy campaign gives more of a sense that I'm building up an Empire than the (comparatively) short matches you get in an RTS. If you don't know about them already, I might recommend the Paradox-developed Grand Strategy games (EUIV and Crusader Kings II, and also Victoria 2 and Hearts of Iron IV if you're interested in later periods of history too,) to you as well if you're looking for something where the history itself takes a greater focus. They use the real-world map and just about every nation that existed in those time periods is playable, even tiny and seemingly-doomed ones like the post-Byzantine Epirus or individual Irish clans.

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I know Venice and maybe some other Italian city-states were genuine world powers at points, which is why the inclusion of Venice in Civ5 doesn't strike me as completely odd.

Honestly that might just be medieval French history? Like I said, I really hate how I came off in that post. I'm kind of just getting back into history stuff so most of what I said is based on what I'm doing now and past recollections of Civ. And some of it is just the Franks not looking like an interesting civ to use in Age of Empires II. I more meant that I generally don't find French history to be that compelling, but more in the sense I usually wouldn't go out of my way to learn about it. Someday maybe that will change. Half the problem here might be that I'm more of an ancient history guy, which I say pretty much based solely on my most memorable games of Civ being played as Egypt, Greece, and Persia as mentioned before.

The Bulgarians are somewhat justifiable in that they also represent the Turkic Bulgar peoples, but point well-taken! Going by some of the AI player names the Slavs do seem intended to represent Poland. Might also be worth noting is that the Slavs represent Poland in the reworked Genghis Khan and Barbarossa campaigns, which is still an improvement over them being GOTHS in the original campaigns! On that note though, the Goths still stand in for a lot of other cultures in some campaigns and scenarios, such as Austria in the Barbarossa campaign, the Anglo-Saxons in the Hastings scenario (somewhat justifiable because the Goths' infantry focus goes works better than the Britons' archer focus, plus the Goths' unique unit is the Huskarl which Anglo-Saxons did have in reality), Wessex in the York scenario, and the Lombards in the Bari campaign. As far as the Slavs are concerned, the problem might be that they were introduced in the first HD expansion Forgotten Empires which was a fan-made mod originally. Same problem with Indians and Italians. The Bulgarians were introduced later, and your complaint about them being supposedly distinctive enough from "Slavs" is far from uncommon.

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I might be wrong, but I think the only older Italian states that could be classified as serious world powers were Venice and (if you count it) the Papacy, which wasn't a very large state in its own right but had a huge influence on European politics for a long time. The Republic of Genoa was the only Italian city besides Venice that held territory abroad as far as I know with some Greek islands and part of the Crimean peninsula, which makes them an interesting campaign in something like EUIV because they have multiple avenues of expansion. Tuscany and Milan were wealthy areas but they didn't exert that much influence anywhere else in the world, so you only started to see major Italian powers rise up after the Napoleonic wars through the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Sardinia-Piedmont, which was the one to ultimately unify the country.

The book you're reading is The Civilization of the Middle Ages, right? I think that does cover an earlier time-frame than most of the stuff I mentioned so I can see why the French and Italian parts might seem a little less interesting. I think Spain was going through the Reconquista at the time for example, which is probably a little more exciting to read about than Italy being divided between the HRE and Aragon or England and France doing very little except fighting one another for centuries.

As much as I like Civ, it's probably the worst strategy game series I know for serving as a springboard into learning about real-world history because its randomized maps and religion system completely divorce pretty much every country from their actual history and no one plays the scenarios, which are the only campaigns to be based on real events or to really have any kind of context around them at all. EUIV does a good job simulating how scary the Ottoman Empire was for the nearby Christian kingdoms by making them OP as Hell, but in Civ they're a joke and there are no mechanics that deal with the various ethnic and religious differences among people in that nation (a Muslim state that had a majority Orthodox Christian population for a long period of its history,) or its conflicts with Christendom. I don't have any problem with the inclusion of Bulgaria on its own (even if it does seem kind of strange that they're differentiated from other Slavic countries when Poland and Russia aren't given how much more prominent those two countries were,) because I actually really like when games include more esoteric and weird countries. That's probably part of the reason I like Civ V Venice, how it has this status as a glorified City State. In theory, the idea of being able to play as the Papacy in Civ would appeal to me a lot, until I think about it some more and realize the game just isn't designed in such a way as to show off what made that country important and unique - the same goes for the Holy Roman Empire which I've always found interesting just because it was ultimately a really weird country in terms of how it was run.

It sounds like part of the issue with AoEII is that it has so many different scenarios about really specific points in history, but its actual faction pool is comparatively small and limited. If they are still doing updates, then I guess I'd like to see the Russians and the Poles both added, and then maybe the Bohemians to round things out, but then that would make the Slavs start to feel really out of place, and I can see how removing or rebranding them might seem weird now that they're already around. In general, it sounds like a lot of those campaigns could benefit from having new civs added to the game and then replacing the stand-ins that they have there.

I'd say the big difference between reading about Ancient history compared to Medieval is just that there are a lot more surviving sources and accounts from later times, which is both a good and bad thing because it means there's more specificity to read about but there aren't the mysteries that can make ancient history more intriguing - was Troy ever a real city, for instance, and was Socrates a real person? I'm like you at the end of the day, though, in that a lot of what I know comes from video games, lol - I'm probably most interested/knowledgeable on the part of history that fits into EUIV's 1444-1820 time-span.

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To be fair I played Civ and Age of Empires in the first place because of my interest in history. Also the book is actually called Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. I guess I was more just pondering something.

I hate the whole concept of city-states so bah to Venice's inclusion in Civ5. Sorry.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

To be fair I played Civ and Age of Empires in the first place because of my interest in history. Also the book is actually called Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. I guess I was more just pondering something.

I hate the whole concept of city-states so bah to Venice's inclusion in Civ5. Sorry.

No need to apologize to me, I'm not important to me if you play it or not. Though maybe I explained it a little badly because yes, I agree from a mechanical standpoint that city states are the worst but Venice's existence itself doesn't share mechanics like city state influence or anything like that - in fact, its special power is to permanently remove a city state from the game by converting it into a Venitian city, though you do have to play with city states on for them to be any good which is a bummer in and of itself.

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But let's conclude the story of Adam Jensen, protein bar addict. I think we last left him as he was about to return to China. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be over there knew he was coming and decided to shoot down his helicopter, and the pilot character he spent most of the game with didn't make it. Apparently it is actually possible, though quite hard, to save her by taking out all the enemies in that area quickly enough, but on my successful attempt of that part I just went sneaking around and felt slightly guilty when I saw that I had earned the "ghost" exp bonus. After that you have to wander around the city hub area while all the guards will attack you on sight, until you meet up with the mob boss guy who helped find the hacker last time, who is now wearing a cybernetic arm from one of the Sarif scientists. He helps you hatch a plan to sneak onto a cargo ship and wind up in Singapore where the rest of the scientists are held, which is the real final mission of the game with three simultaneous objectives, lots of guards, and no objective markers until you find the source of a signal jammer. It makes the most of the open-ended level design and is quite tough, to the point where I admittedly got frustrated by having to keep reloading saves.

At this point in the story, you find out (somewhat predictably) that almost every major player in the story is involved in the Illuminati conspiracy. You meet the medical CEO lady again who sicks a naked Turkish man on you for the third boss fight. He's had body mod so that everything below his neck looks like an exposed muscular system and fights you in an area full of dummies that look the same way, but he doesn't pull the Blade Runner hiding-among-the-dolls trick outside of the initial cutscene.

The big scheme is to mess with people's cybernetics to shut them down or control them, so you have to do that boss fight without your power-ups and with interference effects all over the screen, which makes it hard to spot the guy since he also turns invisible. It was a slow boss fight for me, since I'd seek him out, get one or two shots off, and then retreat to wait for my health to come back.

Once that's out of the way, Adam finally meets back up with his ex-girlfriend. It's a characteristically cold reunion. They don't hug or anything like that, but Megan at least fixes up his cybernetics. For everyone without a tech wiz GF, a broadcast is being transmitted that causes them to see severe hallucinations that effectively cause them to lose their minds and attack anyone they meet, so Adam has to head off to the Arctic ocean to stop it.

The man behind this signal is named Darrow. Adam spoke to him in Sarif's office at one point a little earlier. He was one of the primary inventors of the cybernetic technology in this game, but came to think the technology was too dangerous and hijacked the Illuminati's mind control signal for a vaguely Watchmen-esque scheme to manufacture a crisis around the tech and thereby convince the world it's a bad idea. You have to talk him into giving you the codes to stop the broadcast. In this final area the gameplay de-escalates quite a bit with the only threats being a little bit of automated security and some half-mad victims who will only run at you and scratch for not much damage. Sarif and Taggart both give Adam suggestions on how to modify the broadcast to transmit a message, with Sarif wanting him to lie about the "kill-switch" and blame it on the anti-augmentation activists so that government won't put any restrictions on research in that field and Taggart wanting you to say the frenzies were caused by a bad batch of the anti-rejection drugs for the augs in order to encourage restrictive legislation without outright banning the stuff. Before you can do any of that, though, you have to have a final boss fight against the Medical CEO lady in a big machine, guarded by turrets. I'd say it was an underwhelming final boss, since it just passively sits there and lets you methodically take out the turrets and then dismantle the machine itself, though it's at least somewhat effectively creepy since parts of the whole machine are seemingly tortured/enslaved people whom you have to kill to beat the boss.

Once that's out of the way, you pick the message you want to give the world with some help from Eliza. You also have the option to just destroy the whole facility, killing all the most important characters including yourself and thus leaving humanity to decide for themselves what to do next. I picked Darrow's message, not because I particularly believe in his stance on the augmentation but because it's the one that presents the actual events with the least amount of lying. I'd say that's a strength for what the game is going for, though, that none of the options seem all that great.

Jensen gives a soliloquy about how whichever choice you picked was the way to go and there's a post-credits stinger in which Megan joins up with some of the remaining Illuminati guys. I thought this was meant as a sequel hook for Mankind Divided but apparently it's actually to set up the OG Deus Ex, since this game is a prequel.

Final Thoughts on Human Revolution coming tomorrow.

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Glad to see your back at it! Also Dark Souls hype!

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BetrayedTangy posted...

Glad to see your back at it! Also Dark Souls hype!

Thanks! And yeah I'm looking forward to revisiting that game too, so I had better not waste any more time:

Final Analysis: Deus Ex: Human Revolution
What I thought of Human Rev: A little uninspired
Would I play it again? Probably Not
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I would say yes, but given its opponent I'm not sure.

I watched Disney's Meet the Robinsons the other day. It's generally regarded as "not that good," and I can see why, since it has a cliche plot structure and the time-travel mechanics make Back to the Future look immaculately well-planned in comparison, but you know what, I actually enjoyed it. The kind of over-the-top comedy and frenetic pacing it goes for was a lot of fun for me, and it was easy to feel for Lewis, the orphan protagonist naively devoting his childhood to a hopeless quest to find his mom.

Oh look, Exdeath is starting the write-up by rambling about some completely unrelated thing to communicate that the game was boring again. Okay, but here's my point: those kinds of kids' movies are refreshing once in a while because they have characters with actual feelings in them. Aside from a straightforward goal, what I liked about Lewis was that he had a passion - inventing in this case, but it could've been anything really. I would argue that those are the two main qualities that make this protagonist from a second-rate movie for children a much better character than Adam Jensen, who just never gave off the impression that he cared about anything. He never does anything unique or idiosyncratic and it's hard to imagine what he'd do in his spare time. He's all business all the time, but usually I don't get what motivates him. There are sidequests based on covering up secrets for the company he works at, but what makes him loyal to them? I couldn't tell you.

Now, Blade Runner had a dull protagonist like that, but it was at least done with a specific sense of purpose: to help pose questions about whether Deckard was a replicant, which in turn serves the film's themes about what the difference between a human and an android is in the first place. Since Adam is more machine than man now, could Human Revolution be doing something similar? Well, maybe, but there are a few problems with that: for one, he comes off the same way when we see him before he gets roboticized at the start of the game, and for another, I get the impression that the game is trying to give him emotional motives and connections with other people and just not quite selling it. He does actually get a clear motivation around halfway through the game, which is to find his ex-girlfriend. They put an exclamation mark at the end of one of his lines when he finds out she's still alive to try and show that he's happy to hear that. The bravado Malik shows when she dies is supposed to show that she and Jensen care about each other and Pritchard has an arc about slowly coming to respect him. It's just all conveyed in such a lifeless way that none of it added up to an impression that Adam ever really felt anything, which made it hard for me to care about him - or anything that happened in the story - in turn.

That was definitely my biggest problem with the game, and it made the overall experience a slog for me, but to be fair that might say more about me than it does the game. I have a strong preference for stories where characterization and psychology are a major focus, and it's important to me that I connect emotionally with a story, but a good narrative can also be one that doesn't necessarily make you feel as long as it makes you think. That's obviously what Deus Ex is going for and what it does best. The main issue it's dealing with is cybernetic enhancements, or "transhumanism," and it extrapolates that into concepts like the dangers of advancing technology and issues of bigotry and class conflict. It creates a dystopian near-future setting with capitalism gone rampant, most visibly through the contracting of major public services including the police and medicine to corrupt private corporations who enrich themselves at the cost of the rest of society and keep the media in their pockets in order to continually accrue more power and [insert cyberpunk here.]

Part of this is definitely my own bias speaking, but I found most of that tired. Still, let me back-track to how it deals with this whole transhumanism issue, because that is the best part of the story. I appreciate how it presents multiple different views on the topic through different characters. You have Darrow with the aggressively anti point of view, Sarif as his opposite, and Taggart whose point of view is a little more balanced but still pretty adamantly opposed to the whole idea, and then the player through Jensen is caught in between them all and has to decide what his own views are. Considering the somber tone the game is going for, I liked how none of those characters were very sympathetic and their points of view had clear flaws, but I did kind of feel like their arguments were usually too abstract when more pertinent, concrete points were available. Sarif raps about how humans have a constant need for experimentation and progress that shouldn't be bound by busy-bodying big government, but I think I would've been more on-board with him if he said something like, say, "we can use this technology to help people with injuries or disabilities" or indeed "hey Adam, you wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for your augments." I always found it weird how when Adam himself was arguing with Taggart or Darrow (as Adam always argues with whoever he's currently talking to,) he never brought up how he needs augments to live. The anti-augmentation arguments are a little better with points about addiction to anti-rejection drugs and how the devices could be hijacked to control people but still had a tendency to get wrapped up in less coherent points about how they could take away people's ability for self-judgement.

I guess it also says a lot about me that I'd take this long getting to the gameplay, but the two things do feed into one another. It's not usually good form to start a film off with an action sequence because the spectacle will be even better if the audience also cares about the characters involved, and I think Human Rev. had a similar problem for me where although the mechanics themselves aren't too bad, I couldn't get invested in them because the surrounding context was doing nothing for me. I think this game definitely solidified my realization that I'm not really into stealth games. You know what I think they need? A short-range rewind power like Braid, so that if you get spotted you can rewind instead of having to incessantly quicksave and quickload. Besides that, I think the big problem that's common to stealth games is a lack of clarity in terms of where people can see you and, when you've messed up, who saw you. Human Rev does have a partial solution with the stealth enhancer power-up that gives you more information on your GUI, and it's competent enough for the most part. You can get by skillfully if you watch your radar and it's fun how the different power ups interact with the stealth, even if the invisibility one is kind of broken. The best thing about the game design is all the different routes you can take through the levels depending on your playstyle, which perks you take, and how much you're willing to look around. That adds a certain depth to the missions and shows a lot of care went into the level design.

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Most AAA games have some mechanics that feel like busywork, these days, because they're always striving to be so expansive. For Deus Ex, the hacking minigame can get that way. I thought it was totally mindless at first but realized it did use some strategy as I came to understand it better, and then got back around to disliking it by the end of the game just because I spent so much time doing it - sometimes you'll hack three doors or computers in a row without doing anything else. Likewise, the game gives you very limited inventory space, and although that's clearly a conscious aspect of the design, I'm not sure how well it combines with a stealth game, because you wind up carrying around a lot of guns and ammo that you don't end up using since you're sneaking past the threats, so they then clog up your inventory which in turn defeats the purpose of fully exploring the areas and looting.

The level-up system and the player-choice in the story are both disappointing. Of course this game should be compared to New Vegas before it should be compared to Disney movies, and although some of the core mechanics are more refined NV this ain't. There are almost no quests where you can choose different characters to side with or change outcomes, and therefore you can't really role-play with Adam beyond your choice of ending, and (to steal a line from Zero Punctuation) it's really not an action-rpg but rather an action game with RPG elements. That's to say that the level-up system doesn't really constrain what your character can do - he can do just about everything right off the bat - but provides little bonuses to make the game easier. There are a couple exceptions, since you have to upgrade your hacking and the abilities to carry heavy objects and ignore fall damage both open up some options, but on the whole it just seems both shallow and poorly balanced, with some perks being either so situational or so underwhelming that I was out of things I wanted before the end, just like I eventually got tired of the hacking and the inventory management and decided not to bother. The two things I did quite like were the persuasion checks against NPCs, where you do actually have to pick multiple precise options to convince the other person and how the game would artfully remove things like quest markers to create an investigative feeling in some of the better sidequests.

I went over a month without being able to motivate myself to play this game. It's not entirely the game's fault, some of that was external circumstances, but it summarizes my opinion well enough. This was to my review of 2011 what Red Dead Redemption was to 2010.

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I'd rather not dwell on negativity, so let's go straight onto the next game:

Dark Souls
Release Date: September 22, 2011
Playing on: Playstation 3
Previous Experience With Dark Souls: Played it through several times.
Expectations for Dark Souls: The Game of the Decade.

So yes, before I started this project my personal choice for Game of the Decade was Dark Souls. I've fallen in love with a few new games so far, but nothing has quite come along that knocks it off that pedastal. I've done multiple playthroughs of this game one right after another. I pulled an all-nighter to play the entire game in one sitting on my Dad's roommate's XBOX when I was 20. I get a little jolt of serotonin whenever I see a picture of Solaire. I love Dark Souls all the way down to my depressive little core.

I don't want to go into all the reasons for that too exhaustively at the very start, because there should be time for that later on, so I'll try to sum it up: Dark Souls has awesome combat mechanics, a huge amount of depth in terms of build options and weapon choices, immaculate visual design, an awe-inspiring sense of scope, tons of secrets and alternate paths, and a hauntingly beautiful story about entropy that makes great use of its medium and the unique narrative devices that come with it. It's a work of art through and through, and at risk of showing tunnel vision my goal with this project for the next little while won't be re-evaluating the game so much as it will be to prove that.

Although that being said, there are actually a few things I've never really done in Dark Souls, in all the time I've played it, so I want to take the chance to get out of a few habits I have around the game and try new things:

- I have never fully explored the Valley of the Drakes
- I have never completed the DLC (I bought it late)
- I almost always go for a strength build and use the Zweihander, so I'm thinking of scaling dex this time around and maining the Uchigatana.

It's been too long since I've played this game, so I'm excited to be back.

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Well, time to finally do this.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

- I have never fully explored the Valley of the Drakes

Eh to be fair there's not much to explore, it's really just used as a four way shortcut, the only other thing to note is the Undead Dragon

Evillordexdeath posted...

- I have never completed the DLC (I bought it late)

Oh that'll be fun, it's pretty difficult. I managed to get past Artorias, but got stuck later on and eventually just stopped trying.

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This will be the first of hopefully a fine number of games that Ill finally play after owning it for quite some time now because this project reached that point. I have never played Dark Souls before to my own shame. Its definitely one of the biggest games I have not played, as I usually want to try to beat all the biggest games released in almost all genres with the only exception probably being online multiplayer games. As such Im excited to finally try it out, even if Im quite late to the party. Ill be playing on Playstation 3.

My knowledge of Dark Souls is not too great either. I have played a bit of Bloodborne, which I know differs to be its own thing, but also has a lot of similarities, but I dont remember it too well, since I dont own the game and only tried the first few hours at a friends place. I know Dark Souls has reputation for being among the hardest games ever game, but Im also expecting that to be mostly because it provided challenge in a time where video games in general were being criticized for being too easy. As far as I know, its more trial and error. I expect to die lots of times, but once you figure out how to deal with something, its not that hard and so I dont expect to ever really be stuck. Not that theres anything wrong with that! I know the game is fairly open, often without the best path being very clear as theres not much story and I tend to love seemingly very tough challenges where the difficulty lies in figuring out how to approach something easily. I also know that the games can never be paused except at the save spots, partially because you can join each others world. Since Im just planning to play by myself and game isnt the hottest thing anymore, thisll probably be a nuisance mostly as I like to play games if I have an hour or so and then pause them for hours until I get back if necessary. Here it seems Ill have to hope Ill reach a new save spot in time, but I understand why its like that. For a few useless pieces of information, I know that theres a wolf boss in the game which Zacian from Pokemon Sword resembles and I know Solaire exists, I own an amiibo of him. Perhaps, Ill recall knowing more things as I play, well see.

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I do like Age of Empires II a lot. I have lots of fond memories of playing it when I was younger too, despite being horrendous at the game (and I'm still not that great at it, but I do have some desire to get better). I do, however, think that Civilization IV is a better empire-building game and StarCraft is a better combat game, so to me AoE2 doesn't fully live up to those two and that might be a bit of reason why I might sound negative about the game at times. It's one of the reasons I opted to delay returning to the game - well that and having exams, although those will be done in two days.

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ctesjbuvf posted...

This will be the first of hopefully a fine number of games that Ill finally play after owning it for quite some time now because this project reached that point.

Well, for what it's worth, it would make me very happy if my doing this project inspired other people to try more games. Bloodborne gives you a decent idea of what to expect from Dark Souls, because although there are some mechanical changes they have a lot in common gameplay-wise. I think you're definitely right that the game's difficulty gets overstated because it came out at a time when most AAA games were super easy - I definitely think it would be an exaggeration to call it one of the hardest games ever. I'd say it's not that it's super hard so much as that it doesn't fuck around - that's to say, none of the enemy attack patterns are exceptionally hard to figure out, but you can never really just tank your way through enemies and letting your guard down tends to lead to a quick death.

I started up the game and played for a few hours. Here was my character's starting information:

Name: Leon
Class: Deprived
Gift: Old Witch's Ring

I wanted to cut down on the role-playing for this game in comparison to how I handled Pokemon or New Vegas, so I wanted to recreate a pre-existing video game character, and after playing around with the character creator for a minute I found out that one of the haircuts looks pretty damn close to Leon Kennedy's 'do, so I rolled with that.

The game begins with a creation myth - in an age long past, the first men discovered the four Lord's Souls, which wound up in the hands of Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, the Witch of Izalith, Nito, the first of the Dead, and the Furtive Pygmy. These four waged a war against the Everlasting Dragons, which came before, and killed them all except for Seath the Scaleless, who betrayed his own kind to fight with Gwyn. All that was followed by The Age of Fire, which is currently in its last days before it fades away - and that itself is heralded by a plague of undeath, whose victims are locked up in an asylum.

Leon is one of those victims. He's sitting hunched up in his cell when a man drops a corpse through the skylight, with the key to his cell on its person. He unlocks the door and the player takes control, and I don't think I ever noticed before how you can just turn the camera to the right and see the Stray Demon at the very start of the game. Leon makes his way through the asylum and has to run away from its guardian demon until he can recover his club and meet up with the man who sprung him from his cell, who says that he's about to die and go insane - in that order. He asks Leon to take up his quest - to escape the asylum and ring the "bell of awakening" and gives him the keys to the asylum and some estus flask, which the undead use to heal, before he kicks the bucket. Leon fights up to the asylum balcony to get a leaping head-start in the fight against the Asylum Demon, takes it out, and leaves the asylum - on a giant bird that carries him to the Firelink Shrine in Lordran.

Like the name implies, the Deprived class that I picked starts with nothing - you're naked with a club and the weakest shield in the game. This is probably the hardest start of any class, but the club it gets does have certain merits, particularly high strength scaling, which is nice because when you wield a weapon two-handed in this game it treats the damage calculation as if your strength is doubled, so it does some hefty damage when used that way and let me take out the Demon really quickly. It's intended to be the most customizable class with completely balanced starting stats but they messed that up a little by giving it a high starting level, so what you should really do is pick one of the classes that has a lower starting stat in those stats you won't use compared to the Deprived's 11. For example, if you want a build that doesn't use faith the sorcerer would be good. I just like the Deprived because it helps create a sense of progression when you go from having nothing to being one of the most powerful people left in the world. The Old Witch's Ring has a specific story purpose but another really good choice for the gift is the Master Key, which makes the game a bit more open-ended from the very start.

In Firelink Shrine, there's a ton of stuff you can do before you go on to your first goal. I started by taking the elevator down to the ruins of New Londo to grab the Estoc in a jar there and buy a sorcerer's catalyst and the Soul Arrow spell from Rickert of Vinheim, who has locked himself in a cell for his own safety, because he's too afraid of turning hollow in the outside world. The Deprived can use Soul Arrow with no stat investment and it makes a good reusable long range attack for the first few hours - it takes out the weakest enemies in one hit. Then I go into the graveyard area and pick up the winged spear and the Zweihander (my favorite weapon in the game) because it's tradition, although I died twice in the process. I also talked to Petrus of Thorolund and joined his covenant, even though it didn't do anything for me just yet - it's a requirement if you want him to sell you miracles, which are the spells that use the faith stat, including heal which is handy to let you restore health a few more times on any given attempt of an area. Before I leave Firelink, I turn myself back into a human.

The Undead Burg is the basic first area that's designed to help you get used to the game. Most of the enemies are weak, but there are a few traps or larger groups that can take you out if you aren't careful, and I remember having my fair share of deaths here when I first played the game. This time around I got through it in one go, though. There's a somewhat curmudgeonly shopkeeper in the lower part of this area who sells basic equipment and a few other odds and ends. I buy the Residence Key from him for 1,000 souls and then I kill him and take his sword, the Uchigatana, which is an excellent dexterity-based weapon for this point in the game with a fast light attack (and a surprisingly slow heavy attack) and I'll use it at least until I get its brother weapon the Iaito. Since I was already human, I kindled the bonfire in Undead Burg for +5 Estus when resting there and then went on to fight the first real boss, the Tauros Demon. I didn't have the strength to actually use the Uchigatana in one hand at this point so I fought him while two-handing it and sometimes standing way back to blast him with soul arrows which was cheap but effective. He's your typical slow-but-strong giant boss and makes a good introduction to the dodge mechanics if you got through most of the Berg by blocking, which is really strong there.

Once he's out of the way, you get to meet the fan-favorite character of this game, Solaire of Astora. I love this guy. He's a devotee of the Warriors of Sunlight, which is appropriate because he is the ray of sunshine in this game's otherwise-depressing world. He gives you the white sign soapstone which lets you get some jolly cooperation going with other players if you want.

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After you meet Solaire, there's a long ominous bridge guarded by the Hellkite Wyvern which is one of the most powerful monsters in the entire game. He will douse the entire bridge in flame every few seconds which makes it hard to cross. You can take the path underneath the bridge to get around him, but it is actually possible to run past him if you bait him into flying over to you and then making a break for it right as he does, and I always do it this way because it lets you access a bonfire you couldn't reach otherwise. I was still human at this point so I kindled this bonfire too. Just past that point there's a giant metal pig which is one of the few enemies in the game who does not respawn, although that's kind of a shame because he has a low chance to drop his head as a helmet, which is a funny looking item, especially if your character isn't wearing anything else except the pig helmet. I wasn't lucky enough to get it this time around. The pig is pretty much invincible to everything except the backstab, but there's also an item in this area called the alluring skull that attracts certain enemies to it, and it's possible to cheese him by throwing that item into a fire to make the pig cook himself.

The Undead Parish is where you run into the first serious enemies in the form of rapier-wielding knights who can block your attacks and will sometimes even parry you for an instant kill. They're quite vulnerable to parrying themselves though. To the right of the church is a staircase leading down to a bonfire and a blacksmith, which I used to upgrade my sword to +4. I also walked toward Sen's Fortress to chat with Siegmeyer of Catarina, another one of the rare cheerful characters.

The Parish is where you fight the Bell Gargoyles, which represent a really big difficulty spike because you end up fighting two bosses at once. I had been playing really carefully up to this point so I was still human which meant I could summon Solaire to make the fight a fair 2v2 which we won surprisingly quickly. I also let Lautrec of Carim out of his cell. Everything was going really smoothly up to then, but I started dying quite a lot after I kindled the hidden bonfire in Darkroot Garden. I ended up dying quite a few times to the Moonlight Butterfly, which was kind of embarrassing because she's considered one of the easiest bosses. She just flies and launches projectiles at you and then occasionally comes to land and gives you a chance to attack. You can speed up the battle if you had a good projectile attack, but my soul arrows barely did any damage.

Once I beat the butterfly I walked down into the Darkroot Basin and fought the Black Knight that's blocking the way down to the Valley of Drakes, since I'd said it was my goal to explore there. The first blue drake at the very start of the area killed me multiple times over and I decided I had better wait until I've leveled up to come back. I also tried fighting Havel but my backstabs did like than 10% of his health and he flattened me in one hit when it landed so I decided to avoid that fight as well for now. I did take out the Titanite Demon at the entrance to Darkroot though. Then I finished upgrading my Katana to what is essentially the current limit of +5 and went to the Fire Keeper at Firelink to upgrade my Estus Flask with the Fire Keeper Soul before calling it a night.

Most of the time when I think of Dark Souls these days I focus more on its themes and method of storytelling, so coming back to the game was a nice reaffirmation of how fun it is too. One thing worth focusing on is how the game conveys gameplay information to the player. When you first bump into the Asylum Demon and have to hightail it out of there, that establishes that it's sometimes best to look for alternate solutions and even just run from tougher threats, which is useful later on - for example you can just run past the Titanite Demon to get to Darkroot Garden if he's giving you trouble. What really strikes me so far is the sheer breadth of freedom in terms of the order you do everything in, at least if you know the secrets. There are so many different things I could be doing in the game right now - I could keep trying to fight Havel or press on through the Valley of Drakes, I could try and take out the Hydra, I could go back and fight the Black Knights I skipped earlier, I could return to Undead Asylum, and it's even possible to buy the gate key for Darkroot Garden and go on to fight two bosses that are supposed to come much later right now. I could also try and run through the catacombs to fight Pinwheel if I really wanted to. But I'll probably leave all of that stuff for later and progress the main quest by going through everyone's favorite area when I pick up the game tomorrow.

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I played a good bit last night

I chose Pyromancer as my class, semi-randomly, because it felt more unique. So its these bonfires thatll be my save points and etlus flasks the source of healing but perhaps they can be upgraded at some point. My first death comes almost right away to the first boss, the Asylum Demon, because I did not realize I was supposed to run past it initially, but its also pretty clear that the game wanted to teach you that its sometimes better to come back for something later as well as how dying works, as the bonfire is right before this guy. He was not particularly difficult coming back, though I did die once more. I have to get used to the controls, perhaps theyre outdated. The decision to make circle the running and dodging button is very annoying it makes my right-hand grip awkward when wanting to use the camera at the same time. That aside, good tutorial, did what it needed while also not forcing you to spend a lot of time.

So this next place would be the hub area. I joined a covenant without really knowing why other than to be able buy items from him. As I travel through Undead Burg, I realize theres no way to look at a map of the game, which I enjoy the choice of. Seems some bonfires only give you up to 5 etlus flasks if youre below initially. I find myself rarely ever using my fireball spell because its somewhat hard to hit and youre vulnerable for a while doing it. Blocking and slashing has been the way to go. I found someone that could sell me a bow and arrows and god those controls are bad. For some reason, when youre aiming, youre not allowed to aim at as sharp angles from your position. Another QoL improvement Id like would be to be able to move just a little bit while drinking from an etlus flask. After being destroyed twice, I cheesed a strong knight by shooting a billion arrows at him as hes apparently unable to climb a ladder. My idea was initially to plunge attack him. For some reason, he just not respawn after resting at a bonfire. Theres another strong knight at the bottom of some stairs that I think Ill ignore for now.

Next boss fight is the Tauros Demon, which gave me surprisingly little trouble because it pretty obvious you could use plunge attacks as I had climbed the tower before it arrived. I finally met Solaire and joined his cult. The dragon on the bridge seems quite dangerous but since it keeps its distance, Im guessing it just guards a later area and Im supposed to move forward without it. After upgrading my endurance some Im finding myself enjoying the game A LOT more. The starting amount way too little, even if the point was just making the early enemies dangerous. When slashing, blocking and rolling all uses it, it just wasnt as fun before leveling up some.

First thing in Undead Parish I did was dying to a similar knight that I cheesed in Undead Burg. Next thing was a seemingly intimidating boar that was very easy to dodge. There a knights here that look similar to the tough ones that dont respawn, but die a lot easier. Church had lots of them, one of which seemed stronger but was way easier due to being slow. I believe I fought the first magic user here, I just shot him down from below before finding a shortcut back to the hub, cool.

Im not really getting the line for when something is enough of a boss to not respawn again. The easiest knight in the church didnt respawn, so I suppose he was indeed stronger. Turned out there was a bonfire right next to the church. Below is a blacksmith and the first thing I did was buying things from him so that I dont need him lol. In the next him was a boss fight but not enough of a boss to have a name revealed. Once again the strategy of just running around it and slashing from behind worked for me as I just now finally realize you deal more damage using your sword with two hands.

Moving down into the Darkroot Garden where I initially beat another one of those knights that dont respawn and find the Darkroot Basin where Im shot to death by something in the background I didnt even see, nice. Theres a bonfire right here, so well try to deal with that next time.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

Well, for what it's worth, it would make me very happy if my doing this project inspired other people to try more games. Bloodborne gives you a decent idea of what to expect from Dark Souls, because although there are some mechanical changes they have a lot in common gameplay-wise. I think you're definitely right that the game's difficulty gets overstated because it came out at a time when most AAA games were super easy - I definitely think it would be an exaggeration to call it one of the hardest games ever. I'd say it's not that it's super hard so much as that it doesn't f*** around - that's to say, none of the enemy attack patterns are exceptionally hard to figure out, but you can never really just tank your way through enemies and letting your guard down tends to lead to a quick death.

I tend to enjoy playing games when someone else is playing them too. This project is obviously good for this as it covers 129 games.

Yeah, a good many hours into this, I don't think I'll remember it as hard, but as trial and error as I mentioned. Hard is the reputation it has though, which probably helped making it an even bigger name that it would already be.

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Forgot to address this earlier, but in AoE2 the Tatars are basically an amalgamation of a number of Turkic steppe peoples from Central Asia and some of the Mongol successor states. Their campaign is about Tamerlane.

And going back to the Goths, people like to poke fun at how they have access to gunpowder units despite being a Roman-era barbarian tribe while the Chinese don't. And that's all I'm going to say for now.

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Played a little further tonight - the main thing that's been keeping me away from the game is that circumstances are such that I can only really play it at night, but I've been feeling really tired by the time it's late enough.

I stopped working through the tougher optional areas and went down to lower Undead Burg - although I did stop to kill the Black Knight in Undead Burg and pick up the Blue Tearstone Ring that's behind him, which boosts your defense a little when you're low on health. It's not the strongest accessory in the game, but I did save my life at one point when I survived getting grabbed by one of the ceiling-huggers in the depths with a tiny sliver of health.

Lower Undead Burg is the rough part of the neighborhood, swarming with thieves and vicious dogs. The dogs can run around rather fast which can make them tough to lock down. I had a longer duel with one where we both spent a while trying to attack without managing to hit the other. The thieves set a particularly devious trap where they hide in closed buildings until you're in the middle of them and then rush out the doors and surround you - that killed me the first time I played this, so I never forgot it. That's not the only trick they have either. They also pull the classic "hide behind a corner and jump you when you walk by" trick.

Capra Demon is the boss of lower Undead Burg and you need to take him down to get the key to the next area. He's not too scary on his own, being only a little taller than the player character and having a small health bar and attacks you can potentially block, but he starts the fight with two dogs. It's easy to get overwhelmed and taken down in just a few seconds, but the trick to the fight is just to take out the dogs ASAP and then focus on the now-isolated boss.

Next up are the depths, which are essentially the sewer level of this game and probably one of the areas I like the least. There are still lots of dogs here, along with giant rats, brutish butchers (one of which is planning on making a snack out of the Pyromancer NPC, Laurentius of the Great Swamp,) and these goo monsters that stick to the ceilings and drop down on you if you aren't careful. They're really non-threatening once they're on the ground, but they take a while to kill so I sometimes just walk past them. There's one ultra-giant rat which I killed by finding the path to the area above it and then dropping onto it with a plunging attack. I also ran into Domhall of Zena, a collector of oddities that I've always found a little annoying, and bought his helmet despite the exorbitant price because it looks kind of funny.

Now the boss of The Depths is Gaping Dragon, who has a really excellent creature design but doesn't play all that well. Thanks to some lucky humanity drops I summoned Solaire for my first attempt, but he got taken down pretty quickly leaving me along to deal with a version of the boss with padded HP, and then it took me down with one surprisingly-strong swing of its tail. The second time I went it alone and focused on cutting off its tail for revenge, which also got me the Dragon King's Greataxe - a weapon I will never be able to use because it requires 50 strength. With its tail gone, it becomes quite safe to stand behind the dragon, but its attack patterns just tend to be awkward and not that threatening in general. If you lock on to Gaping Dragon, the camera will fixate on his middle instead of the areas you actually need to watch because of his very long body, so he's the one boss that I recommend fighting without the camera lock-on. Once he was down I got a ton of souls, so I went and leveled up and then called it a night.

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I tried out the Goths yesterday and really liked using them. Honestly I could say quite a bit but I don't even know where to start.

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This Hydra boss took a couple of tries, but I did manage to beat it as it does not use its best attack when youre close to it. Theres a way back to the Undead Burg from here past the knight I skipped earlier. Running past him, I realized he does not seem to leave the tower and this was easy to take advantage of so I could beat him.

Going around and back into the Darkroot Garden, I found a pretty good grinding spot until I joined their covenant. Also found and beat the Moonlight Butterfly. I had trouble dodging some of its attacks, but it put itself up for getting slashed at before it could use up my etlus flasks. I realize theres more to explore in the Darkroot Garden, but I decide to take on the church as the next thing. On the way back I give the blacksmith the ember I found and upgrade my longbow a good bit. I free some dude and get to the top where another boss appears. My initial strategy cut off its tail. Its a good bit tougher once the second one comes, but I felt like I had it under control just running a lot trying to take out one of them first, then I rang the bell here, which so far doesnt make much of a difference.

The guy I freed seems to hang out in the hub, hes pretty creepy. Thinking about how the hub is a weird area I wander around a bit exploring. This ends up getting me back to the tutorial area. Theres a new boss here and its without a doubt the least fun boss in the game so far. It just seems cheap. I mightve gone here early, but due to the stun and damage from the fall it seems like theres a small chance that I just dont get to try for real depending on what attack it chooses to use first, which just sucks. This definitely took the most tries so far and even coming here later, I doubt Id have any fun with it, it would just be less of a nuisance. In any case, it was a good soul horde and I believe Im finished with this place now, but I need a break.

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I gave the Bulgarians a try and I liked using them even more than the Goths who were already one of the factions I liked more. Honestly what I most wanted was a classical strategy game, and Age of Empires is delivering so hard on that regardless of my misgivings. Maybe it just feels so good to be back playing after those weeks of exams! I also gave the booming tutorial a shot and tried the third Genghis Khan mission again, with the latter attempt aborted when I made a stupid mistake and found out my last save was too far back.

In general I seem to like attacking with swordsmen in the early Castle Age after some possible raids earlier, often also with swordsmen. I'd still prefer to give every civilization a try before attempting Moderate difficulty again, but it'll be nice to experience some of these civs' other bonuses. With the Bulgarians I never even built any Kreposts (a special fortress only the Bulgarians can build, cheaper than castles but with less utility) or utilized any of their cavalry bonuses - instead I effectively leveraged their free swordsman upgrades and powerful blacksmith (they work faster and food costs for technologies there and the siege workshop are halved) to keep pressure on my opponent. I played as the Goths fairly similarly but it felt more effective here. I think the problem is that the Goths don't have any particularly good economic bonuses early game so they rely on their infantry discounts to keep pressure on their opponents - their poor defenses not helping matters!

Also, this was my first time using an Eastern European civ and the building art is magnificent! I'll have Exdeath know that according to a leak, Age of Empires IV has the Rus as one of the eight playable factions instead of grouping a bunch of Eastern Europeans together as "Slavs".


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ctesjbuvf posted...

Thinking about how the hub is a weird area I wander around a bit exploring. This ends up getting me back to the tutorial area. Theres a new boss here and its without a doubt the least fun boss in the game so far. It just seems cheap. I mightve gone here early, but due to the stun and damage from the fall it seems like theres a small chance that I just dont get to try for real depending on what attack it chooses to use first, which just sucks.

Yeah, I'd say you went there a little early - the item you get for taking down that boss doesn't come in handy until almost the end of the game - but either way I agree it's a poorly-designed boss anyway, and it doesn't really help that it reuses the model of an earlier boss.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Also, this was my first time using an Eastern European civ and the building art is magnificent! I'll have Exdeath know that according to a leak, Age of Empires IV has the Rus as one of the eight playable factions instead of grouping a bunch of Eastern Europeans together as "Slavs".

Cool, I'll have my main. One of the only campaigns I started in Crusader Kings II was as the Kievan Rus'. Actually I did finally get around to playing a couple games in AoEII the other day. I didn't have the DLC that unlocks the Slavs (since it turns out their units do at least speak Russian,) so I settled on the Teutons. I found out that the AI will never really seriously attack your base on the lowest two difficulties so you can just do whatever you want, whether it's spamming villagers early on and not bothering to build army or defenses or just playing really lazily like I did by getting to the castle age, putting out a huge army of Teutonic Knights, and then just selecting them all at once and right-clicking in the direction of the enemy base. I was trying to get to grips with what all the different buildings do and what the general build path should be, so I needed a really simple undemanding strategy. Whenever I play next I'll do a few more games like that for practice and then bump up the difficulty.

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I played so late last night that I wound up passing out without being able to do a write-up, though I made comparatively little progress in all that time. When I started I was about to head into Blighttown, which both for the characters in this game and the players is one of the most dreaded areas in the game. In lore even the people who live in The Depths, which again is basically a sewer, built a massive gate to avoid any contact with Blighttown. The place a dark poison chasm that leads down for miles. You have to deal with giant mutants, rickety architecture where it's easy to slip off and fall to your death, low visibility, and blowgun-wielding little men who stick you with the toxic status from long range, which is an extremely fast-acting poison that you need a rare/expensive type of purple moss to cure, though thankfully those guys don't respawn. It's also one of the most confusingly laid out areas in the game where it's hard to get your bearings, and waiting at the bottom of it is a massive open bog that you can only trudge through very slowly and that poisons you if you stay inside for more than a few seconds. The bonfire here can be almost impossible to find unless you know exactly where to look, since it's hidden in a little corner of a huge area with no real landmarks, and I died a few times by running lost through the swamp slowly dying of poison until some enemy or other finished me off.

I managed to get myself in a really rough situation because I had neglected to buy the weapon repairbox that lets you restore weapon durability at bonfires. Normally weapon durability is an almost irrelevant mechanic that only really serves as an ammo system for a few unique weapons that have magic attacks, but the Uchigatana also has really low durability and was running low by the time I got into blighttown. I didn't want to walk all the way back through the depths to repair it, so I picked up the unupgraded Iaito that you can find by doing a slightly-tricky jump near the start of the area and used that for the whole of blighttown. The Iaito is identical to the Uchigatana in stats and scaling, but since it was brand new while my Uchi was +5 that meant taking a big hit to my damage output already. The difference between the two swords is entirely down to their R2 attacks. The Uchi has a slow stab while the Iaito has a slow charge. I almost never used the stab but found a few times where the charge was handy, so I'll be favouring the Iaito from now on. Either way, by the time I reached the bottom of blighttown, with a good few deaths under my belt, the Iaito was almost worn down too and I had to switch to the Falchion, which was the weapon I used in endgame in my very first playthrough. I had been saving my Uchigatana durability for the boss, Quelaag (a half-human, half-spider woman) - but when I reached her I found out that even that weapon took away 49 of her 3000+ HP per swing. Meanwhile she could practically blow me up with one shot, and I would always start the fight poisoned to boot because of the aforementioned swamp which I had used up all my purple moss wandering through looking for the bonfire. I used to know how to locate it relative to the Boss' Domain, but I can't remember any more. It's to the immediate right when you come off the scaffold structure of blighttown and into the bog.

So that was all pretty disheartening. Blighttown is designed to be a tough area to get out of, so I didn't want to go back to fix my weapons or level, or buy new moss, but the stat disparity made the boss seem way too daunting. I even thought about restarting a completely new character to come back to blighttown better prepared, but in the end I persevered and managed to slowly chip Quelaag down in a Monster Hunter-length boss encounter. My one saving grace is that overall Quelaag's attacks aren't too hard to dodge. If you're standing in front of her, her human half will use some slow sword moves on you, and her spider half will often sit still to bellow magma around the area, which gives you a long opportunity to attack, though it leaves the magma on the ground for a long time. The main thing you have to watch out for is her AOE magic burst attack, which does a ton of damage - if you're backed up against a wall or trapped by the lava it can be tough to get away in time. It was this attack that caused most of my deaths since it could usually finish me off after a small amount of poison damage.

But I did finally win in the end, and I rang the second Bell of Awakening, which in the far distance opened up the gate past Undead Parish. I went down further into Quelaag's Domain and took down an illusory wall, where one of the spider-egg covered mutants that lie around the demon's nest was guarding a hall. I talked to him and told him I was the new servant and he let me pass and speak to "The Fair Lady," a pale-haired spider-girl like Quelaag, but too sick to move. Since I was still wearing the Old Witch's Ring, I could speak to the Fair Lady, who, blind and delirious from illness, assumed my character was her sister.

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The daughters of chaos make a decent place to start talking about the lore in this game and how it's conveyed. After you take out Quelaag, you get her soul as an inventory item, and the description tells you that she's one of the daughters of the Witch of Izalith from the intro, one of the four great lords of old, but that she has now transformed into a Chaos Demon. If you do happen upon the secret room where the Fair Lady is hidden, and you have the Old Witch's Ring, you get her dialog that indicates Quelaag was taking care of her. You can also join her covenant and become a Servant of Chaos, whose ranks you can move up through by feeding humanity to the Fair Lady, which in turn implies the reason Quelaag attacks you - like the red spirits of other players that invade you, she's trying to attack undead to take their Humanity, but she's doing that to help her sister. You as the player can't get through the game without killing Quelaag, but you can replace that part of her role if you want.

Going further ahead, I made my way to the Demon Ruins, which is so flooded with lava that it's impossible to proceed - however you can go through a fog door and find another boss, who goes by the euphemistic-sounding name of Ceaseless Discharge. He's a giant, sad-looking lava demon. He won't attack you unless you hit him first - he will just stand by an altar and pay you no mind. If you loot the corpse on that altar, though, then Ceaseless Discharge will attack, and he'll be permanently aggressive any time you come back. The corpse is carrying the Gold-Hemmed Black set, and the description for that says it belonged to Quelana, the inventor of pyromancy and another daughter of the Witch of Izalith. Obviously that strongly implies that she was important to Ceaseless Discharge in some way - but that's as much as you can find out right now. I didn't take out CD. It's not necessary until later and I was doing just as little damage to him as I was to Quelaag, so I just high-tailed it out of Blighttown, through the exit to the Valley of Drakes and then New Londo and back to Firelink Shrine.

The pool of water at the shrine itself was now drained away because the floor had opened forward like a stone door, and a giant goat-headed snake was reaching up through the space. He introduced himself as the Primordial Serpent, Kingseeker Frampt, and told my character that because he had rang the Bell of Awakening, it was his destiny to succeed Gwyn, which would require him to go through Sen's Fortress to get something called the Lordvessel. That sounds like a sweet deal, so that was where I went next - stopping on the way to visit the blacksmith and buy a repairbox this time.

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I moved further down into the Undead Burg. Its a bit of a scary place because you get ambushed a ton. Freed another guy here. Im sure one of the times it will be a mistake to free them, but Ill learn that the hard way. The boss fight here was tough, not because of the actual boss as much as because it had a couple of dogs to fight with it.

Now Im in the Depths. I suppose Im gonna ring another bell down here as the first one was very high up. I thought there was a shop but then the presumed shopkeeper started running towards me. Behind him I walked down to a point where I could safely kill a giant rat. Wonder how tough that wouldve been to fight against on floor. I go back and continue down the more obvious way, free yet another NPC. The rats appear to be a good place for farming humanities, thats useful to know. Theres a huge boss down here and cutting his tail off yielded me yet another weapon. I wonder how often you can do that, mightve missed some. I didnt die to this one, actually, found it surprisingly easy. Then I get the key to Blighttown but decide to return to the hub.

I decide to farm a good bit here because theres a lot of things to buy. One of the guys I freed allows me to upgrade my Pyromancy Flame. I spend a good amount of time grinding to upgrade that all the way because so far I havent found spells very useful, but I want them to be.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

Yeah, I'd say you went there a little early - the item you get for taking down that boss doesn't come in handy until almost the end of the game - but either way I agree it's a poorly-designed boss anyway, and it doesn't really help that it reuses the model of an earlier boss.

Yeah, I figured, it was an obscure way to get there too that I clutched to find, but regardless, it's probably the only boss so far that I've found straight up bad, the rest have been enjoyable to some extend, naturally some better than others. I think the difference it would have made was that I could kill it faster and probably survive the fall and hit if it used the attack you can't dodge after falling, but again, that just makes it less of a nuisance. Not a better boss.

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Tried the Spanish out, not one of the factions I liked playing as the most. BTW I'm playing the Definitive Edition.

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Blighttown is easily my least favorite place of the game so far, but it's honestly mostly because for some reason it runs at less FPS than any other place, which adds an unintended level of difficulty that is not really offset by anything.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Tried the Spanish out, not one of the factions I liked playing as the most. BTW I'm playing the Definitive Edition.

Yes, I tried the Turks and didn't really like the "feel" of the Gunpowder units, so I imagine I'd have similar issues with the Spanish.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Blighttown is easily my least favorite place of the game so far, but it's honestly mostly because for some reason it runs at less FPS than any other place, which adds an unintended level of difficulty that is not really offset by anything.

Yeah, I don't really know why it has those FPS issues, but it's definitely one of a couple areas you just want to get out of. I completely forgot about Griggs until I read your post, lol - luckily I could still go back and find him, which was the first thing I did when I played last night.

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Sen's Fortress is another one of those areas you kind of just want to get through. I remember having a Hell of a time with it the first time around, then managing a lot better on all my subsequent playthroughs because I had a good idea of where the traps were and how to navigate it. This time around, though, I had forgotten enough of the specifics to lose a few frustrating lives to arrow traps and getting knocked off narrow bridges. One of the trickiest parts comes early on when you have to cross a bridge lined with whirling axes while a snake woman fires lightning bolts at you. The first time I tried this part, I blocked one spell with my shield, which knocked me backward into an axe and then off the bridge to my death. If you can survive the fall damage, there's a tar-filled floor in this area with a titanite demon and some items, but I chose not to explore that section of the castle myself.

For my build, even the enemies in this area were far from trivial. The man-snake enemies could kill me in 2-3 hits and my wimpy katana couldn't stagger or kill them all that effectively. I ended up having to rely extensively on parrying to take them out, especially the ones in narrow hallways or on bridges where I didn't have room to maneuver around and backstab them.

There's also a device that shoots boulders throughout the castle that can cause you a lot of trouble. It's just about mandatory to sprint at the right timing to get between these on two occasions. You probably have to undress if you're in the "fat roll" level of equipment weight for this part. The first time in an open area is not that bad, but the second time is in a very constrained hallway with no alcoves or anything to hide from the rocks in. I found the best way to approach this was to wait for a boulder to pass, run down to the bottom of the room, and take the elevator up there to the top - though the elevator is also trapped and can raise you into a ceiling full of spikes if you take too long stepping off. In the same room as this elevator is the game's first mimic, which in line with Dark Souls' tendency for cruelty will just about instant-kill you if you try to open it. You can check if any chest is a mimic just by attacking it, but they're also distinguishable by the chains attached to the chest. A real chest will have a chain neatly curved into a near-circle while a mimic's takes more of a squiggly-line shape. Either way, at the top of the elevator is a crank you can turn to manipulate where the boulders go - you can also reach this room by running up toward where the boulders come from, but I would always get crushed if I tried that. You can move it so the rocks fire into empty space, which is necessary to progress Siegmeyer's NPC questline, and you can also redirect them to break down one of the fortress walls, which opens up an area where you can rescue Big Hat Logan from a cage once you have a key from later on in the dungeon (or the master key.) You will definitely want to rescue the guy if you're leveling intelligence, since he teaches most of the best sorceries.

There's a semi-hidden bonfire on top of the castle that you have to drop off the wall in the right place to reach, and you can jump across a broken bridge to find an NPC vendor and the path to the cage key. I bought the onion helmet from the guy and wore it for the next little while.

The boss here is the Iron Golem, a giant living suit of armor. He's more or less your prototypical giant boss - he hits hard but he's really sluggish, so he's easy to dodge and wail on between his attacks. I only died once against him, by accidentally falling off the cliffs in his arena - and incidentally you can knock him off too! I didn't take that route though, I just very slowly scratched him down with my sword, which unsurprisingly did very little damage. There are actually different physical damage types in this game, so you'll take down the Golem faster with a hammer or club than with a sword even if the stats are similar.

With the Golem down, some helpful demons pick you up and fly you over the walls to Anor Londo. My goal for the night was to make it to the bonfire with Solaire around halfway through this area. To get there, I had to fight through the Gargoyles from the Undead Parish boss fight (I cut one of their tails off this time,) the same demons that carried me there in the first place, the agile painting guardians on the narrow rooftops (which sometimes just fall off and die before they bother you. I parried against the others to be safe.) and one of the roughest sequences in the whole game, where you have to run along the rafters, at risk of falling off, while two silver knights fire on you with huge arrows that knock you back by miles. This part of the game caused a lot of gamer rage when I first played it, but I managed it on my first try this time, so not all my skills have atrophied over the years. You mostly just run for it without stopping for a second and then parry the silver knight to the right, who is blocking your way to the bonfire. I don't even kill him in a single parry with the Iaito, but he fell off the ledge after he stood back up when I parried him, so I was home free for a relieving bonfire and a rendezvous with Solaire.

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Tried the Portuguese out. They feel kind of bland TBH, with mostly economic bonuses. That being said, it's at least clear to me which civilizations are more geared towards the late game. Also IIRC the last three civilizations I tried out coincidentally get all Blacksmith techs. The same is true of the Chinese who I will be trying out next.

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My playtime took a solid hit when the blueray reader of my PS3 stopped working properly. I have borrowed a friend's PS3 while I look to fix the issue. Apparently, you can not download save files when your online storage before 24 hours have passed since you uploaded them. At least this is true for my Dark Souls file. I suppose this would prevent me from escaping eventual punishment by just downloading a file again if I died without recovering, but it's annoying in this particular case.

What I have achieved is more or less finishing Brighttown, which sucked to say the least. I managed to recover every time I died thankfully, but I also died a lot and a good portion of those deaths were because of how terribly the game runs the place. I mean, I would have died anyway probably. Getting past all the guys shooting toxic at me basically cost a death and then being thankful they don't respawn and that they're incredibly easy to kill. No place so far has been harder to cross in itself, regardless of whether you come from the Depths or Valley of Drakes. I've explored both routes to find everything, though skipping the long route probably wouldn't have been a big loss. The moving bridges and the wheels and basically everything that is pseudo platforming is already intended to screw you over, in particular when enemies are present, but the framerate screwed me over so badly in these parts that I basically had to adjust the camera in the best way possible so that I would not have to adjust it it all before standing on a larger platform again. This is a glaring flaw and I really hope the remastered version runs it as intended.

Brighttown doesn't really have many very cool parts to begin with. It was kinda cool to be invaded by an NPC (that I could then summon later), though she was easy to deal with. I don't care to turn human very often, but I really wanted to kindle the bonfire here and the message that I was being invaded came basically right after that. Realizing that a poisonous swamp counts as a place with bad footing was a bless since it allowed me to equip a ring so I could run through it properly.

I made my way to Quelaag's Domain, which was basically a one way route to a boss. I summoned Mildred to help me, which is cool and then the boss destroyed me in seconds. So much for that. This was one of the tougher ones imo, if not the toughest. The one in Undead Asylum was perhaps harder, but it was also just bad and I went there early, I also never got to kill the dragon on the bridge early on so maybe that. This one was fun, just took a while to learn its patterns. I didn't care to become human so I could summon help just to be killed before I learned to deal with it so I didn't before I just managed to win. This allowed me to progress and finally ring the second bell.

I joined a new covenant here, I'm not sure why, it just pops a trophy every time. Then I went down the Demon Ruins, which seems dangerous, but I managed to cheese a boss by accident. It didn't really seem to care I was there, I figured that was because I was so much stronger than it. Then I picked something up, turned out to be a cool set of armor, but this pissed the big thing off a lot. I just tried to run away from it until the white light before realizing I couldn't escape. Then the boss killed by falling to its own death.

This was the last thing I did before the PS3 incident.

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I tried the Chinese out in AoE2. Not one of my favorite factions so far but their start is interesting and they're very flexible. I relied primarily on archers, with some infantry in the mix to deal with pesky skirmishers and knights. I completely forgot that they a discount on the cost of EVERY technology when I started writing this, so they're a bit of a background Civ bonus, but not to the extent of the Portuguese.

I could elaborate more on the Huns and Franks, but I don't feel like doing so now.

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i still remember beating Ornstein and Smough on my first try and just putting the control down and being like

wat

it was hard as heck and i almost died like 10 times but i somehow did it first try and i was very happy with myself.


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I gave the Magyars a shot a while ago and will try out the Turks tomorrow. The Magyars are kind of similar to the Huns except they get a cost discount on the light cavalry line instead of cavalry archers, with their cavalry archer bonus coming from their Imperial Age unique technology which I didn't get far enough into to use. I just pelted the opponent with light cavalry and archers until they submitted, and there really wasn't much to say. So uh here's my ranking of how much I like the civilizations I've tried out:

1) Mongols
2) Indians
3) Japanese
4) Celts
5) Khmer
6) Vikings
7) Bulgarians
8) Goths
9) Incas
10) Britons
11) Chinese
12) Spanish
13) Tatars
14) Ethiopians
15) Portuguese
16) Magyars
17) Huns
18) Koreans
19) Malians
20) Malay

The most common theme I can think of with some of the civs towards the bottom are that their bonuses are more passive and they might not necessarily be geared towards any one kind of play. For all I know that might change once I get to higher-level play, but for now I'm just trying them out at my leisure. The Malians get wood discounts on all buildings and extra pierce armor on their infantry, which are useful bonuses but are not terribly exciting. Might be a smidge of cultural bias too, for instance my parents are from India.

I could have elaborated on the Chinese but I chose not to earlier. As you can imagine their specialties are in population booming and technology, making it easy to build up an effective economy with them but with the tradeoff that they lack much in the way of direct military bonuses, making it a little on the difficult side to actually finish an enemy off. They start with six villagers and no food (also less wood) vs. most other civilizations starting with three villagers and 200 food in random map games, which has given the civ as a whole a bit of a learning curve in the competitive community since they can kickstart their immediate economy faster at the expense of not being able to train more villagers right from the beginning, and then their Town Centers provide 10 population slots instead of 5 to further the population boom theme. And as I mentioned they get a discount on every technology they have access to, which can result in a roaring economy. The Chinese are specified in-game as an archer civilization, but that's probably mostly due to their unique unit (repeating crossbow, what else?), Imperial Age unique technology (named Rocketry, increases the attack of their unique unit and Scorpions), and full Archery Range roster aside from Hand Cannoneers. That last part is a bit of a joke within the Age of Empires community for supposedly being a blatant historical inaccuracy due to the Chinese inventing gunpowder IRL, but to be fair I'm not entirely sure if the Chinese really used gunpowder like that. Also possibly for game balance reasons.

Speaking of historical accuracy issues, the Bohemians and Poles will be their own playable civilizations as of the next expansion pack. Nice discussion we had there about them. Might elaborate on some thoughts I have on the Huns and Franks later.

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Sorry about the inactivity for the last couple weeks. I've been in one of those strange moods I get into every now and again where I become preoccupied with the inevitability of death and wonder if I'm making the most of my life. I felt it was important to acknowledge that mood and ride it out naturally, which made me a little too morose for much gaming.

ctesjbuvf posted...

My playtime took a solid hit when the blueray reader of my PS3 stopped working properly. I have borrowed a friend's PS3 while I look to fix the issue.

Ouch, that's rough. If you haven't started your new file yet, or you're early enough that you don't mind restarting, one thing that will help you get back faster is to pick the Master Key as your gift at the start of the game. It lets you go through the elevator in New Londo (down the stairs at Firelink Shrine) and take a shortcut through Blighttown that essentially skips the majority of that area.

pezzicle posted...

i still remember beating Ornstein and Smough on my first try and just putting the control down and being like

wat

it was hard as heck and i almost died like 10 times but i somehow did it first try and i was very happy with myself.

Yeah, that's definitely one Hell of an achievement as far as Dark Souls goes. I've only heard of a couple people taking them out on the very first try. It makes me feel a little inadequate considering I still almost always have to summon against them.

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Once you're through the window and inside the palace of Anor Londo itself, you're past the hard part of exploring the area. You're not at risk of falling off narrow ledges any more, you just have to wander around indoors and fight a Silver Knight here and there - another enemy type I have no effective recourse against except parrying, which still makes me feel like the Iaito isn't that great. There are also a surprising number of mimics in this area. There's a hidden basement where I pick up Havel's armor and the Dragon Tooth, which is the speedrunner's weapon of choice. Taking on one Silver Knight at a time is no big deal, but there's a room with three of them in close proximity that you have to clear out to give Siegmeyer a hand. I've had a lot of trouble beating that part in the past, but this time around I managed to aggro them one at a time and beat it on the first go. There's one knight right in front of the door who attacked me on his own, and then I tossed a throwing knife at one of the two remaining knights to make him mad without alerting his friend. There's a Titanite Demon in the castle's church with high stats who's also tough to deal with because he's in a small room where there's not much space to get around him. It took a few tries to deal with this guy.

When I came back to Firelink Shrine after taking out Quelaag, the Fire Keeper there was dead. Examining her body yields the Black Eye Orb, which lets you invade a guilty player's world. The Black Eye orb finally reacts in the giant entry hall of Anor Londo, and takes you to the world of Knight Lautrec of Carim - the guy I let out of his prison cell back in Undead Parish. He makes a hard opponent mainly because he has two friends:a knight with a shield and spear, and a long-range caster. I manage to take out the caster straight away and then run around the area trying to separate Lautrec and the knight until I can take the latter down. Just to make things even harder, you can't use Estus Flask while you're invading. I have the heal miracle, but its animation is so long that it's almost impossible to use in a fight. Once Lautrec goes down you recover the Fire Keeper's Soul. It can be used like any other to enhance your Estus Flask or you can actually revive the Firelink keeper, which is handy because the bonfire there goes out without her around.

Anyway, with all that squared away there's not much left to do here except take on the boss. I don't know if this boss is the best one in the game, but if some very strange man put a gun to my head and demanded that I name a Dark Souls boss, the next words out of my mouth would almost definitely be "Ornstein and Smough." These guys are a nightmare, mainly because you have to fight them both at once. They're definitely the hardest boss in the game, and can represent a major roadblock to a lot of people's playthroughs. They're both designed with a gap-closer type of attack that they'll use if they're far away from you, which makes it hard to isolate just one and fight him alone. You have to watch both of their attack telegraphs at once, they can cover each other's moments of vulnerability, and they can even combo you with if one guy knocks you into hit-stun just as the other is winding up to attack. On my first few attempts this playthrough I didn't land more than two hits on either character, but after a few tries I managed to get Ornstein most of the way down before they finished me off. After that, I popped a twin humanities, kindled the bonfire, and summoned Solaire.

Now, the problem with summoning Solaire for Ornstein and Smough is that his AI can get caught up fighting the cleric knight statues outside of the boss room. A player will know to just run past these guys, but for Solaire's safety I had to clear them out before I summoned him. They have lots of health, giant shields that block all damage, hard-hitting attacks, are hard to aggro one at a time, and they can use Miracles. They have a high-damage version of Force (an AOE proximity attack) and if you're not careful they can heal. I came frighteningly close to dying to these two and losing my chance to summon, and I had to spend all my Heal casts and a couple Estus flasks before even engaging the boss.

But after that things actually went quite smoothly. I managed to get Smough to fight Solaire while I took on Ornstein, who was no big deal on his own. The fight turned into more of a race where I had to defeat Ornstein before Smough knocked out Solaire, which I managed with enough wiggle room that Solaire also survived the ensuing fight against Super Smough.

Whichever of the two you take out first, the surviving boss absorbs his strength and powers up. Tactically, it's best to kill Ornstein first because he becomes giant on his own, and since he's already the faster and more agile boss he's hard to deal with when he has a lot of extra oomph to his attacks. Smough remains more or less the same except he gets a really dangerous lightning jump attack. I was lucky enough that he just didn't use that in my attempt, so Solaire's cooperation turned an insanely tough boss into a relatively easy battle.

What Ornstein and Smough were guarding was the throne room where Guinevere, who self-describes as the daughter of Lord Gwyn and therefore the Queen of Sunlight, is waiting. She gives you the Lordvessel and consequently the ability to teleport between select bonfires and urges you to succeed her father, just like Frampt asked. This is the point where the game really opens up in terms of exploration. For my part, I teleported back to the Sunlight Shrine at Undead Parish and talked to Solaire there. He let my join the Warriors of Sunlight, a co-op focused Covenant that I won't be able to make much use of since I'm playing offline, but at least it lets me toss lightning bolts at people.

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if its an consolation, in my replay it took me probably like 20 tries to beat them

i just somehow got lucky with them the first time.

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I did pick the Master Key!

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I tried exploring the Demon Ruins a bit more and I don't think you're meant to go here anytime soon. Previous bosses are just wandering around like common enemies. I made my way through 6 or 7 Tauros demons because they didn't respawn, but then the boss from lower Undead Burg did respawn and that's the dealbreaker here.

Got a couple new pyromancies in Brighttown before leaving the place for good. The bonfire in Firelink stopped working because the girl below it died. How is it all the others are working then? In any case, I suspect the guy that sat across because he was always kind of creepy and he's gone so. I suppose I should not have helped him but he did award me something for it.

As I approach Sen's Fortress, I make a decision to fully explore Darkroot Gardens first.

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Tried out the Turks, Slavs, and Teutons since. None of them really stood out to me.

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It's funny, I always hear everyone say the same 2 things about Ornstein and Smough: they're such a cool boss, but they're stupid hard even for Dark Souls. I wonder if they're liked more because of their concept than their gameplay.

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I think it's because the first time you fight them you get destroyed, but as you continue and understand the strategy, it's really easy to gain respect and admiration of the boss design. Plus things like their appearance, setting and music are all phenomenal.

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I've had less progress because of vacation and finally getting a PS5, but here's what I've done since last time.

I finished exploring Darkroot Gardens, which involved taking down Sif, a boss I knew existed beforehand because of Pokemon Sword. Optional, but fun boss. It was pretty difficult, I felt like I was here a little early, because it had a very common spin attack that used up all my endurance and then damanged me some, but I amanged to beat it.

Sen's Fortress is up next. I didn't have much trouble with it, expected much worse. I died twice only. The first was from running into a boulder (yes, it had just hit me and damaged me very little, so I thought trying to run past it was possible, but that damaged me way more for some reason). The other time was from the resulting fire in a boulder thrown by some giant that looked a billion times more intimidating than he was. I think I've explored everything here, but it's a bit hard to be sure. I'm really enjoying using the lightning spear I found here, you can block while attacking and the lightning damage seems quite effective. Iron Giant was quite easy, validating my idea that I took on Sif too early.

Suddenly, I've arrived in Anor Londo. I don't know if this was some milestone in the game, but it popped a trophy. Place is huge. You need to not have the whole city in the background or the game starts lacking. Nothing like Blighttown, but still a minor issue. I had fun with the area for a while, but this area also had the single worst part of the game so far, which was running on thin platforms while some knights were shooting spear sized arrows at you. I feel down I don't know how many times, miraculously managed to recover each time though, and often enough it was because the physics straight up didn't make sense. The current camera angle seems to influence the way you're falling, I was often hit by a spear and then forward towards where it hit me from which meant down and to my death. This game should stop trying to have platformning sections. As soon as I got inside, it was fun enough though. Found a blacksmith here and got myself a weapon with fire damage. Also found armor and a huge bow that I'm not strong enough to use. Finally, I invaded Lautrec, confirming my idea that he murdered the person under the bonfire in the hub area, but got my ass kicked be him and his men twice. It's not very risky though, you don't lose anything, you just get kicked out.

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I gave the Persians a try in Age of Empires II. They have only two bonuses, both of which are economic in nature (their team bonus benefits their knights though), however they are designated as a cavalry-oriented civ in-game due to their many options in that category and their infamous unique unit the War Elephant. So naturally I just crushed my opponent with a horde of Light Cavalry after advancing to the Castle Age after an initial Scout Cavalry raid (Scout Cavalry are the only cavalry unit available in the Feudal Age and they upgrade to Light Cavalry in the Castle Age and Hussars in the Imperial Age) with a few Elite Skirmishers on hand to cover against Pikemen. When the game finished I was absolutely shocked this turned out to be such an effective strategy - it was one thing to do this as a civ with a bonus regarding those units like the Mongols or Turks, but the Persians?

Then it dawned on me that both of the Persians' non-team bonuses operated in the background the whole time and contributed massively to my dominance. They start the game with 50 extra food and wood with no concessions whatsoever (contrast the Chinese) and I would not be surprised if this helped me get my economy off the ground nice and early. Second, their town centers and docks have twice the usual amount of hit-points and work incrementally faster from the Feudal Age onwards. That last bonus simply cannot be overstated - the Town Center is where villagers, the main resource-gathering unit, are trained, and I also built a nice fishing armada to help with food too. The Scout Cavalry line of units cost only food but a lot of it, but I was able to leverage my economy to devastating effect in this category. Heck if anything I feel like I should have just trained swordsmen instead of skirmishers to help deal with pikemen since I was putting quite a strain on my wood for reasons not entirely clear to me, but yikes. I think the Persians' main weakness is supposed to be their poor defensive options, but they have strong economy bonuses and lots of military options.

And I'm glad I was able to write so much because nothing really struck me about the game I played until the Light Cavalry decapitation strike. So far here's the order of civs in the game I've tried based on which ones I liked most:

1) Mongols
2) Indians
3) Japanese
4) Celts
5) Khmer
6) Vikings
7) Bulgarians
8) Goths
9) Incas
10) Britons
11) Chinese
12) Slavs
13) Spanish
14) Turks
15) Persians
16) Tatars
17) Teutons
18) Ethiopians
19) Portuguese
20) Magyars
21) Huns
22) Koreans
23) Malians
24) Malay

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Knocked out the Cumans and Vietnamese. Neither civ would rank very high on my favorites but neither would rank especially low either, albeit the latter mostly because of some conveniences and ELEPHANTS (poor Malay). Also I feel like I just find the Central Asian steppe nomads interesting. I liked the Cumans and Tatars about equally which I was not really expecting. They were the two civilizations I've read up the most about since playing the game due to their inclusion in the Definitive Edition. Pretty interesting how the Cumans resided in areas as far apart as Siberia and the Balkans.

I've decided the Burmese will be the last civ I try out, even after the Franks (I feel so sorry for saying I don't find French history especially interesting, it was more in comparison to other European nations though really. I've wanted to elaborate on that for a while but keep putting it off. Maybe when I actually get around to trying out the Franks?). Part of me feels a little disappointed in the Southeast Asian civs since I liked the Khmer so much, but in fairness the four SE Asian factions included in the game were completely different beasts in real life so it's probably not fair to expect. The Khmer were known for building big cities and thus they get bonuses relating to interior development, whereas the Malay are meant to be a seafaring nation and the Vietnamese are a strange kind of defensive civ - their portrayal in AoE2 seems to take mostly after the wars they fought against Chinese and Mongol aggressors AFTER losing their major cities. The official Wiki even posits that the tactics the Vietnamese used much later in history against French and American invasions were essentially projected too far into the past. I think the problem here is that it's easy for me to lump geographically similar civilizations together in terms of the game, especially as all the SE Asian civs were introduced in the same HD expansion and are the only civs that can train Battle Elephants (separate from the Persians' unique unit War Elephant). It used to be worse since they all shared the same building style, but fan demand caused the Vietnamese to change to the same East Asian building style used by the Chinese, Japanese, Mongols, and Koreans to reflect their more Sinicized nature compared to the Indianized nature of the other three SE Asian civs. Alternately maybe I just don't know much about Southeast Asia, even though I've actually been to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Noteworthy is that Southeast Asia wasn't covered in much of any capacity in Norman F. Cantor's book.

For the record, what I said earlier about Italy was due to how last time I spent my winter break there I got tired of spending all day moving around. And with France, as far as medieval history is concerned part of the issue is that what I find most interesting about the low middle ages is the way different peoples would move around and settle everywhere which is really not true for France in comparison to, say, England or Russia. However Charlemagne and his Carolingian dynasty might still be among my favorite medieval figures due to their impact on the rest of Europe. Playing as the Bulgarians and Slavs has also gotten me more interested in Eastern Europe.

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Soon home again

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Updated list of civilizations I've tried in Age of Empires II, in order of how much I liked them:

1) Mongols
2) Indians
3) Japanese
4) Celts
5) Khmer
6) Vikings
7) Bulgarians
8) Goths
9) Incas
10) Britons
11) Chinese
12) Slavs
13) Spanish
14) Turks
15) Persians
16) Mayans
17) Tatars
18) Cumans
19) Teutons
20) Ethiopians
21) Saracens
22) Vietnamese
23) Aztecs
24) Portuguese
25) Lithuanians
26) Magyars
27) Huns
28) Koreans
29) Malians
30) Malay

Only the Berbers, Byzantines, Italians, Franks, and Burmese left to go!

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BetrayedTangy posted...

I think it's because the first time you fight them you get destroyed, but as you continue and understand the strategy, it's really easy to gain respect and admiration of the boss design. Plus things like their appearance, setting and music are all phenomenal.

I think the reason they're so memorable is both this and their role in the story. They're the last challenge you face to prove you're worthy of the Lordvessel, which opens up the game so much, so they stick in people's minds because they feel like a tough roadblock at a defining moment in your journey.

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My next step was to head back into the Darkroot Basin and then the Valley of the Drakes. It's true - there's not much to the place except a few shortcuts to other areas and a giant undead dragon who breathes poison at you. He drops a short sword that scales with faith, which might make a nice secondary weapon because I've been levelling faith so I can throw lightning bolts, and after a couple failed attempts at fighting the dragon close up that's exactly how I brought him down - I did just enough damage to kill him from afar by using all of my charges of Lightning Spear.

Back in Darkroot, I cleaned up a few side objectives I was too low level for earlier, taking down the Hydra and the undead Havel, and then I forked over 20,000 souls for the Crest of Artorias to unlock the rest of the area. Darkroot has an expansive back-yard full of bandits based on the player's starting classes, ents, and roly-poly Chesire Cats, but you don't need to wander around too much - the only mandatory goal is the gate leading to the grave of Sir Artorias. Incidentally, one of those Chesire Cats can talk, and offered me to join her covenant. I said no out of loyalty to the Warriors of Sunlight, and she called me (and I don't think I'll ever forget these words,) a pernicious caitiff.

The grave is guarded by Sif, the Great Grey Wolf, who was Artorias' travelling companion when he was alive. She's not called "great" for nothing - she's around twice your character's height on all fours and wields a giant sword in her mouth. It's easy to feel bad about having to kill Sif - she's just protecting the memory of her master at the end of the day - but there's no avoiding it, and I take her down on the first try. Once she's gone, I can pick up Artorias' Ring from the grave, opening up the way to the Abyss.


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Putting off playing Age of Empires II for a month because reasons, but I'll probably come back in September. I consider playing it to have gone better for me than playing FFVII two years ago.

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Bump, haven't been in the best state the last little while. I'll try and get back to this soon.

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