It's definitely a love/hate type of game. When I first played it I didn't like it at all but I wound up giving it another try because I read about it now and then and wanted to figure out why people seemed so enamored with the game.
Once I beat the first boss (this was in DS1) I was hooked.
What makes this game special is the combat mechanics. Just like Q3 has excellent arcade style controls and physics dark souls has an amazingly in depth combat system that isn't very difficult to sink your teeth into. You should definitely not expect this to be like Skyrim.
There's none of that picking flowers, collecting crap and cooking shit. There's the next monster which will fuck your shit up and whether or not you'll be able to beat it using WHATEVER technique you can muster. Each weapon has it's own move set and each weapon has the potential to be an epic weapon which you use to finish the game with. It's all up to you which weapon you feel more comfortable with. I'd recommend a regular long sword on your first play through or any 1 handed weapon you get early on.
Spend your souls on upgrading your gear whenever you can, especially your weapon and your shield. Definitely use a shield your first time, do not try 2 handed weapons or duel wielding until your comfortable using a shield. Each swing will use up stamina, never use all your stamina. Always keep a little so you can roll out of the way in an emergency.
You level up by increasing stats for your character. I recommend only leveling up your stats when you need to. IE: you got a nice sword you wanna use but need x strength so level up your strength so you can use the weapon but no higher. monsters don't scale up like in Skyrim but that doesn't matter, even the lowliest of monsters can kill you if you're not careful and that's going to happen.
Summon other players to help you, don't feel like you need to do everything solo your first time and join covenants when you come across them. They do funky things for you sometimes.
If you ever see a casket go ahead and lay down in it. It will change your character in a way that represents your actual play style.
Another thing is that there's a ton of shit going on in the areas you roam. Whether you notice it or not there's tons of lore and stories depicted in the backgrounds and characters that roam the game. It's pretty epic honestly, recently one guy figured out that the game only uses 9 corpses throughout the game which are female and hints surrounding the locations where you find the corpses suggest each one is actually a firekeeper (people that tend fires in the game) and how they died etc... I've passed these corpses many times and never noted anything about them other than it being a random corpse but in fact each tells a story. Stuff like that is the kind of stuff you won't notice your first play through but that starts to jump out at you after playing through the game about 20 times. (i've seriously played this game to the end like 20 times, only game I've ever done that with)
I could go on and on about this game honestly. If you think of games as an art medium dark souls is high art. It's something most people won't understand unless they've been educated in it.
It's too bad your not on xbox one cause I'd be happy to lend a hand, it's a super fun game to play with a friend.
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