From Software The Dark Souls Discussion Thread

[Jaedar]

What's hyperarmor?

 

[Gerrard]

 

[praetor]

What's hyperarmor?

the frames during which your animation cannot be interrupted. it was a thing in DeS that helped the slow weapons land hits but it was removed/replaced by poise in DkS. apparently, it's back in (i guess to balance out the loss of mobility/eq burden with the DWGR nerf)

 

[felipepepe]

Man, my BR huehue internet can't manage PvP, even though I'm playing with a >25% load rapier mage and every time I'm invaded I die backstabed due lag...

 

[Admiral jimbob]

This is a weird question probably nobody will be able to help me with, but here goes. Because British ISPs are awful I have a 40GB bandwidth cap per month, and playing too much Tribes/DayZ for a couple of weeks used up about 20GB. I figure DS won't use as much bandwidth since it's just two or three people at a time (?) but am I wrong, and/or will it still suck up a fair amount if I play a lot? I know it's always connected, which probably won't take up THAT much bandwidth by itself - Steam stuff is fine - but I have no idea how much goes on in the background or how long you spend in co-op/fighting invaders. ne1 advice

 

[felipepepe]

playing too much Tribes/DayZ for a couple of weeks used up about 20GB.

Really? I have a very limited bandwithc too, and remenber seeing that playing WoW uses only 7MB per hour, how the fuck these games use 20GB? I can't say for sure, but I doubt that Dark Souls use that much...

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Yeah, it... kind of came out of nowhere. Downloading ArmA 2 and OA took out about 12-14GB by themselves (maybe a bit more), and a couple of weeks of play later we got an email saying we've used "over 32GB" of our allowance. I know neither of my other flatmates downloaded anything, so yeah. Will have a dig around, though, maybe something else was the culprit.

edit: yeah looking into this I have no fucking idea what's going on. Maybe the previous tenants (who were with the same ISP) used up all their bandwidth in their last few days and the ISP is confused? Christ knows. Thanks for drawing it to my attention at least

 

[Damned Registrations]

I would imagine it's the voicechat. 2 way voice chat isn't so bad, but when you're transmitting voice to and from 4+ other people simultaneously it gets bad pretty quickly.

Also, in WoW you're often in an instanced area with limited other people, so the game doesn't have to give you info on many other people's actions, especially with the relatively close range of combat abilities. Whereas in Arma it needs to keep track of exactly where everyone in a huge fucking radius of you is and all their stats etc, since you can snipe people from incredibly far away, and the servers generally have 20+ people and hundreds of zombies.

 

[felipepepe]

Still, cities are always full, battlegrounds can have up to 20 people and city raids are huge clusterfucks of sometimes 100 characters... I really think is impossible for any game to spend that much bandwicth...

 

[Damned Registrations]

You can download something like netvue, it gives you info on how much bandwidth you're using at the moment and over the last month or so, along with shorter incrememnts like day/week. Makes it easy to figure out how much a given activity is using.

 

[Admiral jimbob]

Yeah, I checked, reports seem to be that DayZ usage is considerably more than that but still generally about 18MB and reaching a peak of about 40 during heavy voicechat etc. Tribes is far less than DayZ and was the considerable bulk of my playtime, so there's no way I came close to using 15-20GB. British ISPs in incompetence/malevolence shocker!

 

[Raghar]

playing too much Tribes/DayZ for a couple of weeks used up about 20GB.

Really? I have a very limited bandwithc too, and remenber seeing that playing WoW uses only 7MB per hour, how the fuck these games use 20GB? I can't say for sure, but I doubt that Dark Souls use that much...

192 KBps * 20 days = 39.55 GB.

You just listen to a music on internet radio for a while, and it would add up. Add into it bandwidth costs of adds, and youtube videos (FLASH forces to redownload video quite often) and you can see that 40 GB per month is rather small bandwidth usage.

 

[commie]

I SO want to drop this game but everyone keep saying how good it is and I am having second thoughts. Not that I am having fun with it, oh no. The difficulty seems to come from atrocious controls and spiralling into chasms to certain death, also from the way in which combat works here - chaining hits and avoiding encirclement seem vital, but with those controls its nearly impossible...

Help guys, should I give it more tries?

Not really unless you have a proper controller. I can't be arsed to keep trying without one but can't be justified in wasting money for one just to play what appears to be an extremely mediocre game in the first place. Better to play Arcania or Fable 3 instead.

 

[made]

Haha one of the few times I go human (to kindle a bonfire) and I immeditaly got invaded by an NPC phantom. Thought I'd get wasted but she was surprisingly easy. Got a nice weapon out of it too. Might have to buy this after all for some MP griefing fun.

 

[Average Manatee]

Haha one of the few times I go human (to kindle a bonfire) and I immeditaly got invaded by an NPC phantom. Thought I'd get wasted but she was surprisingly easy. Got a nice weapon out of it too. Might have to buy this after all for some MP griefing fun.

Yeah, there are some scripted NPC invasions, though honestly they tend to be pretty easy. At least the ones I've seen so far. And some can be summoned as help for bosses after defeating them. Human is nice how it ratchets up the risk/reward ratio. I just wish hollow didn't make me god damned ugly.

The main problem with MP is that it forces some fairly stringent level requirements early on. You can only help/be helped by people +-10% your level I believe, while invading is that + some higher level people the more you invade. And they need to be in the same arbitrary "server", and then the right human/hollow combination with the boss still alive. This means you sometimes have to wait quite a bit if you go somewhere else and come back to an area 10 levels higher. Wish they would ease up on the level restriction by a bit, levels mean very little compared to smithing really strong equipment early.

One cool thing is that if you are summoned or invading, and succeed, you go back to your world in the exact same condition, but at full health and with all limited use skills/items recharged. So you can dump your sign at the beginning of an area, then halfway through help someone out and come back with all your Estus and spells back. Almost a cheat really.

 

[Phelot]

Are the controls really that bad? Is anyone playing successfully with a keyboard?

 

[Raghar]

I would play it successfully with keyboard, when I wouldn't return my GFX 560 Phantom. Download it and show some perseverance. Main complain is they basically ignore mouse buttons, thus I can't easily map few stuff on mouse4 and 5.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

I think it's possible but there's going to some extra pain and suffering. I've heard the game doesn't recognize more mouse buttons than the clickers, which although unsurprising is still annoying. Also, you'd likely need to write down all your bindings as all the text in-game assumes you are using a 360 controller.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm sure it's possible to use some trickery to assign a mouse button to a keyboard button and use that. Aside from mouse buttons being unassignable, numeric keys are also out just to fuck with us. That could be fixed through similar hacks.

Really the main problem is the mouselook. It's so bad that you are probably better off playing entirely with keyboard unless/until this gets fixed by mods. The game really isn't that bad keyboard-only. Not having any analog input at all sucks hard, but OTOH once you get used to them you have less problems actually handling all the keys in certain situations where it's nigh-impossible with a controller. It's still worse off but not entirely useless.

 

[betamin]

Are the controls really that bad? Is anyone playing successfully with a keyboard?

It's very playable but it's ugly since the camera jerks around. Just did the second bell with kb+m. Thinking of restarting since I fucked up assuming the zweihander was a strength weapon and pumping everything to strength and using from inventory that flask upgrade. Was playing melee 2 hander only, I'm gonna try some magic stuff.

 

[Jack]

Are the controls really that bad? Is anyone playing successfully with a keyboard?

It's pretty damn bad. The camera and the menus are the worst offenders, the actual combat and navigation is manageable. Is it worth playing on PC with M+K if you haven't any controllers or consoles? I'd say yes, the game itself is just so damn good even if the port isn't.

 

[made]

So I accidentally killed the spider abomination after Queelag boss and it turned out she was a Fire Keeper (dropped a soul woohoo) and the fire next to her burned out. Ok fair enough, C&C. But when I returned to the Fire Link shrine to upgrade my flask that fire was unusable as well and the Keeper that was imprisoned there slain. Is that a consequence of my action too or did the knight that was hanging out there slay her (think he hinted at that earlier)? Any way to bring either of them back to life? I'm mostly interested in the bonfire at Firelink though as that's kind of the main hub.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Keep playing, you'll find out later on. This is one of the few parts of the story you actually get your face shoved into.

 

[Fat Dragon]

Goddamn, the new dlc boss

Spoiler

Knight Artorias

is one vicious motherfucker. Have died like 10 times to this bastard. Fun and intense fight though.

 

[damicore]

I've just lost 6 humanity to the bell gargoyles and I can't play online as I pirated it, is there a decent way to get humanity back outside of online?