Dark Souls is bigger than Skyrim

This game sounds a little like Divine Divinity. That game was stupidly hard. Died all the time, but made me so intent on progressing through the game.

The excitement for both this and skyrim is getting beyond a joke now... When are we supposed to fit things like sleeping & eating in around all this awsomeness?

Few questions -

Regarding the 60 = hours of playtime : How many of those hours are from trial and error deaths? Or repeating sections again and again to try and pass it?

ALSO - For a game that you are guaranteed to die in a hell of alot: How are the load screens? And can you have multiple saves? Or character class specific saves?

You can have multiple character accounts, but as with Demon's Souls it's auto-save all the way - once you've done something, that's it.

Load times aren't too bad to be honest - they're not instant in the build we're playing, but having a bit of time to think about what you've done wrong is usually quite useful!

What's the combat like? Not having a PS3, I've never played Demon's Souls. If it's hack-and-slash, I might have to give this a look.

It's hack and slash, but in a bit more of a thoughtful & considered way than in other games. Each attack uses up stamina - a green bar that quickly recovers, but won't if you keep using it up. Heavy weapons use lots of stamina, and blocking with a shield munches up loads too: Run out of stamina, and you can't attack, evade, or block. I.e. EEK.

It's pretty simple, but you've got cool moves like the kick and shield parry/bash to make use of too. It's basically awesome.

Couple things I'm looking forward to that I have not heard about so far in any reviews ... World tendencies and upgrades.

Can you give any insight if either of these mechanics have carried over?

Loved hunting the white geckos in DeSo for shards and using them to upgrade weapons. Wonder if a similar setup is done in DaSo in regards to weapon upgrades. World tendencies were kind of a pain in DeSo, but offered some unique replay value and new content as well as a sort of good guy / bad guy type of personality to the game. I'd love to see something similar to this implemented in DaSo, but won't cry if it's not there. Just felt that was part of the *soul* of the game.

Appreciate any info you have regarding!

"Touch the demon inside of me ..."
Dev.

Upgrades are still in, and they've added to the system a bit to make it more interesting.

Tendency I'm still not sure about - I think the system has changed a bit, and it's now more to do with humanity. Murdering an NPC seems to do something bad, as there's a guy who'll atone my sins for 64,000 souls...

I'm still trying to get my head around some of it - not a lot of people playing, so the discovery rate is slower.

You can have multiple character accounts, but as with Demon's Souls it's auto-save all the way - once you've done something, that's it.

Load times aren't too bad to be honest - they're not instant in the build we're playing, but having a bit of time to think about what you've done wrong is usually quite useful!

Thanking you for the reply! (any word on my 60 hours theory?)

Ive heard/read somewhere also that you cant technically pause the game? (much like sacred 2 if anyone played that)

Bizarrely this is very important to me - as im a stay at home dad my game time is limited and i need to be able to pause what im doing at any given point. (hence why MP centric games like MW3 and BF3 are off my radar)

This game looks epic. However after trawling through many sites I still dont understand the direction of the game. Is it a wide-roaming world with rpg elements and interaction with npc's like skyrim? Or more a hack and slash follow a set route/level like tomb raider with little interaction with the world except hitting it with a sword?

This game looks epic. However after trawling through many sites I still dont understand the direction of the game. Is it a wide-roaming world with rpg elements and interaction with npc's like skyrim? Or more a hack and slash follow a set route/level like tomb raider with little interaction with the world except hitting it with a sword?

From what I've read it's open-world, but with distinct linking areas that join up at various points along a winding route.
As for interaction - you shouldn't expect to be reading tonnes of text or be collecting loads of collectibles. Demon's Souls had minimal voice work and text, its more about the combat. There will be NPCs dotted about but they will generally all have a role to play. Its not the sort of game where you get given random sidequests etc. Of course I'm basing this on Demon's Souls mostly.

Ive heard/read somewhere also that you cant technically pause the game? (much like sacred 2 if anyone played that)

Bizarrely this is very important to me - as im a stay at home dad my game time is limited and i need to be able to pause what im doing at any given point. (hence why MP centric games like MW3 and BF3 are off my radar)

Confirmed - no pausing. If you want to take a break, you'd better find somewhere safe to stand.

Luckily it saves so frequently that you could just turn off the console and resume from your last save. Not ideal. There are apparently areas dotted around called 'beacons' where you're safe and have your health etc refilled. But they also reset all the enemies in the area.

I really can't understand the rationale for not providing a pause facility for a game. Obviously it adds another degree of immersion with not being able to pause it, but let's face it ... how many pissed off friends, partners, parents etc are there going to be as a result of this lol. Just seems to be taking things a bit too far imo.

I really can't understand the rationale for not providing a pause facility for a game. Obviously it adds another degree of immersion with not being able to pause it, but let's face it ... how many pissed off friends, partners, parents etc are there going to be as a result of this lol. Just seems to be taking things a bit too far imo.

The game is online the entire time you are playing. How would you even go about pausing the game? If, for some reason you are playing offline, you can pretty much find a spot with no enemies and stand there. Generally you won't ai enemies randomly spawn and kill you.

I'm not sure comparisons betweent his and Skyrim are justified to be honest.

For one thing, the 60 hour theory is a big valid question, would this content still take that length of time if there were an 'easy' mode for example? Skyrim on the other hand has such freedom that you can either play the game only putting in, say, half of those hours to just complete the main story, or completely eclipse it by doing everything possible, racking up hundreds of hours in the process of just one playthrough, and those numbers are steady across any sort of difficulty, not relying on being infuriatingly difficult and repeated attempts at the same section of game to bolster them.

also, the big factor is that these two games seem to be entirely different beasts. Comparing them is like comparing Gears of War to Call of Duty just because they're both shooters-that doesn't mean they have much in common. Same goes here, they may both be RPG's, but ES games have always thrived on freedom and measured, paced gameplay, whilst this is an open world game, it feels like a game that will be intense and brutal to play with little in the way of levity or down time. An ES game is about the world it creates for you to experience, sure the story and gameplay is strong, but its real strength lies you being able to 'exist' in that world as you choose, experience everything you want to at your own pace. This seems just the opposite, thriving on its action, it's difficulty and its intensity. Two entirely different propects with very little in common apart from being RPG's. There is no set recipe for creating an RPG, Bethesda go for immersion, allowing you to fill the role of the character, this appears to be all about the gameplay, and may be a good option for those unfortunate souls who can't get to grips with a game so grand and immense as Skyrim.

But to suggest that this game, that prides itself on being infuriatingly difficult, is not only a match, but a better prospect than Skyrim, that is just utter lunacy.

This game sounds a little like Divine Divinity. That game was stupidly hard. Died all the time, but made me so intent on progressing through the game.

That's because you never found the difficulty settings did you?

Ive gone off this after reading more about it -

Being online constantly is no excuse for not having a pause button - Dead Island springs to mind...

@ Grummy

Dark Souls does offer a thriving, dynamic world, though - that's one of the main reasons it's such a glorious play, the other being the precision and physicality of combat, which pretty much knocks every other action RPG out there into a cocked hat. They're different games, sure, but they share an interest in non-linearity, personalisation and "fossilised" backstory.

Ive gone off this after reading more about it -

Being online constantly is no excuse for not having a pause button - Dead Island springs to mind...

...which also doesn't have a manual save and suffers for it.

Really someone needs to explain good game design to Japan, they haven't got a clue. It's one thing to make a game based on the premise of being very very difficult, but you need to compensate that in other areas so that it dosn't just become an exercise in frustration. I'm sure it might amuse the devs to know that people playing it are dying over and over, but it's not much fun for a person spending £40 to enjoy a good game.

Lack of a manual save is just an inexplicable and inexcusable lapse of design. It's 2011 ffs.

I got a chance to play Dark Souls and Skyrim yesterday at the Euro-gamers Expo in London, and I have to say: Dark Soul's is really blowing Skyrim out of the water for me.

In Skyrim's defence - the version of Skyrim I played was more of a demo, whereas the version of Dark Soul's I played seemed more like a complete product.

However, I could see that the improvements in Dark Souls when compared to Demon's Souls were extremely vast, but the improvements in Skyrim over Oblivion didn't seem as overwhelming. Either way I'm going to be buying both, but after playing both: I am so much more interested in Dark Souls. I think this game is absolutely stunning and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently receiving.

At Euro-gamer Expo, Skyrim had a 100+ Queue of players waiting to play, whilst Demon's Souls didn't even have a Queue. It is really sad that the game just doesn't receive the acknowledgement it truly deserves.

I've got a single story-based question about this. How much of the game world will we miss out on if we haven't played the first game? I know they're calling it a spiritual sequel, but to me that's another way of saying "We were too lazy to come up with a new idea so we rehashed the old one in a slightly new way." On the other hand you've got people saying it's a direct sequel and I'm wondering just how familiar the game expects you to be with its predecessor.

I got a chance to play Dark Souls and Skyrim yesterday at the Euro-gamers Expo in London, and I have to say: Dark Soul's is really blowing Skyrim out of the water for me.

In Skyrim's defence - the version of Skyrim I played was more of a demo, whereas the version of Dark Soul's I played seemed more like a complete product.

However, I could see that the improvements in Dark Souls when compared to Demon's Souls were extremely vast, but the improvements in Skyrim over Oblivion didn't seem as overwhelming. Either way I'm going to be buying both, but after playing both: I am so much more interested in Dark Souls. I think this game is absolutely stunning and deserves a lot more attention than it is currently receiving.

At Euro-gamer Expo, Skyrim had a 100+ Queue of players waiting to play, whilst Demon's Souls didn't even have a Queue. It is really sad that the game just doesn't receive the acknowledgement it truly deserves.

Well, you just can't expect that a game franchise that has been around for 15 years has the same following as the franchise that has been around for 2 years, and that is console exclusive (it used to be PS3 exclusive). People might want to buy it, but they will just go nuts for the thing they have been expecting for 5 years. I for once don't care for it, since I don't have a console. Its nice to see that people are praising it though. If I had a PS3, I would probably get it.

As for the article, Skyrim seems everything but repetitive. All dungeons are hand crafted, and creation engine takes care of the dynamic environment. From what I've seen for now Skyrim has been a huge improvement over Oblivion in terms of recycling.

It sounds as though we're going to be enjoying two great fantasy RPG's this winter - arguably my favourite genre of game! I'm sure Skyrim will be an epic, thrilling experience but Dark Souls is the game capturing my imagination at the moment. I must play it, to see this legendary challenge for myself and to satisfy the old-skool gamer in me.

I'm almost sold on this game, bar one last question. Will it seem crippled if you play it offline? I've heard about co-op and adversarial multiplayer, seeing "phantoms" of other players and being able to leave messages, helpful or otherwise, for other players. Are these features needed to get through the game, or are they just bonuses?

Wow, lets take it easy on Skyrim. I half expected him to say Skyrim fails in comparison. LOL. I particularly like the little jabs he throws in Skyrim's direction; case in point:

"""Forget about running around the hills collecting flowers to make potions - it's time to start preparing for a road trip straight to hell."""

Isn't that completely optional in Skyrim? Strange as it may seem, some folks actually like doing that. Comes with the territory of RPG'.

'''''Unlike Bethesda's RPG beast, there doesn't appear to be much recycling in Dark Souls. Each area feels different, and enemies are rarely re-used for the sake of it.''''''

I thought Skyrim had a number of different regions and 150+ hand crafted dungeons? Regardless, has the author actually played through Skyrim? I thought most of press barely got an hour with it. I'm not sure how anyone can ascertain which game surpasses the other; particularly at this juncture.

But I digress, since I realize this a blog.

When I first saw the title of this post my first thought is: No it isn't. And I still stand by that.

First off, I'd like to say that I'm a fan of Demon's Souls and I'm sure Dark souls will be insanely awesome. And the fact that it's more open world oriented makes me slobber. But in reality, it's not going to be as large as Skyrim. As far as areas that are explorable and landmass, no it's not going to be as big as Skyrim. Just a fact before it even comes out. As far as the amount of content available, as far as different enemies, bosses, etc, possibly. But Skyrim and the other TES games are all about game world immersion. Somewhere where you can create anyone you want and be that character in another world. Dark souls is a different type of game. So the comparison between the two on the sites lately is just plain retarded and ignorant. That's like trying to compare Call of Duty and Fallout.

Dark Souls and Skyrim are both RPG oriented and have a fantasy theme. That's the only thing they have in common. Dark Souls is more of an advanced hack and slasher. Skyrim is for more of a ROLE PLAYING experience. The two cannot be compared on the same level very well IMO.

But as far as which is bigger, Skyrim has it. I'm getting both titles because I'm a rabid fan of both games already. So I guess I'll see how big the world really is in Dark Souls next Tuesday

I don't want one to be better than the other, bigger than the other or anything else, i just want them both to be awesome!!

I may just about be nearing 50% completion of them both by February when Kingdoms of Amalur comes out and then ME3 the month after, wow, busy few months RPG fans - which can surely only be a good thing?