Insatiable Chaos well then, ideally it wouldn't be a dark souls game in the first place it's like he said, it's more about the environment and understanding the world than the AI actually knowing what the hell it's doing. if the focus WAS on smarter AI, then you're not really looking at the world with the same discerning eye because you're so much more focused on trying to unravel the enemies' strategies. There's a lot that I like about Dark Souls, but I don't really feel like it can have smart AI without changing into something that's not really dark souls

Kameron Schadt I’m not saying it’d be a good thing. I just imagine it would make the game terrifyingly difficult, more so than it already is.

Kameron Schadt I’m merely gawking at the insane concept rather than suggesting it’s implementation.

nah, I get what you mean. Personally, I think it'd be cool if they could strike a balance between smarter AI and good level design

You've basically described invasions mechanic :)

Woah... good for you to discover it. That's actually smart of the developers, giving players a sort of tutorial for the boss without them even realizing it.

The weapons they have aren't random, they're literally the black knight weapons... And no, parrying the black knights won't help you parry gwyn, if you need help parrying gwyn, maybe you should try another tactic, because gwyn is literally the easiest enemy in the game to parry :)))

@@meyes1098 I mean if you can parry a black knight then you can parry Gwyn. So they do help you prepare by practicing test 3 for test 2

I clocked about 3000 hours in dark souls and did almost everything there is to do and I still struggled with Gwyn as I was slowing down to the end of my hardcore playing. Just one of those things lul.

@@meyes1098 But the black knights in the other locations of the game have randomly chosen black knight weapons. That's his point.

I started playing dark souls in the darkest period of my life too... I feel that effect too. I think it comes from the fact that you are constantly exposed with decay and tragedy, mostly tragedy instead of evil, evil is something you can control, tragedy is inevitable, you just have to accept it, just like the things that are in the past. It teaches you to embrace that which is so hard to embrace... and move forward.

Same here, I didn’t lost someone in that period, just myself. I find myself again in the light of a bonfire, i found the courage to throw away 15 years of study to just do what i like.

There it is!

@@EMalachi Where?

THE RISER there

@@AbThere There where?

THE RISER look under

Or if they were programmed to adapt to how you played... Fighting Ornstien and Smough when they can learn how you fight... That would be a real nightmare.

That actually reminds me of the final Valkyrie from the newest God of War (spoilers) Basically there's 8 standard Valkyries, they all have a similar moveset along with a few moves specific to them (one has shielded wings, one has an AoE attack, etc) but after you beat all of them and there's a final one and she's all of them in one. All together she has something like 20 or 30 individual attacks and she'll mix and mash them in just about every way. This was exceedingly difficult for me because I'm used to Dark Souls style bosses and I was looking for patterns in whole movesets, not individual attacks. She might rush you, follow up with an AoE and then do her fly up/crash down grab attack, or she might just spam her grab attack 5 times in a row. You never know.

That would be much more interesting

@@quite1enough play the newer souls bosses, then come back and talk to me.

@@MsMelia Cries in crucible knights.

I was hoping someone could write this better than I could, thank you for it as this is exactly how I feel about DS as well.

maaan truest words could not be spoken about this game and how it has real life lessons

Guys! How are you doing today?

This is both a lovely and tragic story. I'm sorry for your loss and appreciate you sharing. It sounds like you really made the game into something rather unique for the two of you. Have you read the You Died book? There are some fun as well as touching stories of how players engage with the original Dark Souls in there. It's nice to see how players interact with the game in different ways and what it means to them personally. I realised only after completing the book that my experience is another chapter of that story.

Thank you. both of you. For sharing your stories with dark souls. I love to hear other peoples experiences with the game no matter how happy or sad the stories are. And thanks for mentioning the book that I now need to get my hands on. To me too dark souls ended up being something more special than just a challenging game even tho i did buy it just to try and tackle the difficulty. I personally had very long periods of feeling lonely before I played the game. Can't say how close from depression it was but probably not far. the way DS handles it's atmosphere and world building especially during early game areas hit me hard. I felt like I was experiencing my own feelings and problems through a game. Dark souls ignited a spark of self-examination in me that both helped me to overcome my personal problems and even made me enjoy the solitude to some extent and most importantly it helped me understand myself. Also no other game, movie, book lesson have ever managed to manifest the importance of rising up and trying again better than this game has and that is also something I very much needed back then. Today even after several dozens of playthroughs dark souls never fails to give me that warm feeling of home whenever i start a new character.

I get the warm home feeling when I play ds aswell

@Crawcrawc are you a special needs child?

it isn't prepare to die edition for nothing

+Billy Greggory Yes! Damn. I didn't think of that.

I don't remember first four (except third) Catelvanias have even resemble of something from DS1

John Smith the design theory not any specific mechanic.

Lol

@Carl Marchiano The Assassin's Creed games are pretty easy to me. It's actually really difficult to die in the first four games because of your insanely large health bar and the enemies' weak attacks, unless you jump off a really tall building.

+RetrO Thanks for the feedback and welcome aboard.

Recording softwares will do it for you

I was soo focused with what he's saying , didn't even realize there was a mouse cursor flying around.

That's exactly what happened. :)

@Brotmeister lol

Thanks for watching dude. Glad you enjoyed the video.

Don't forget the saying of "Praise the sun"

No... YOU'RE awesome! :D

u want scholarship, bruh?

@@Yetipfote Nah, but once you've played a game so long you become so good that it's hard to quit, I can pump it up to the highest difficulties and still chill out while playing, can't do that in any other game :P

I can say that mostly it's just because the player character tends to be the one in front of the group so tend to take the blunt of the attacks from the common infected.

+sammetju08 Fair point! Y'know it was pretty hard to find other players to grind the bosses during my most recent playthrough. Even during 'Return to Lordran'. Must've been invaded about 30 times though. Anor Londo seems to still be a pretty bad spot for invasions.

*AI and Games* The best time to try and find cooperative multiplayer is during steamsales nowadays. During the 'resurrection' events most people tend to gravitate towards invasions, myself included. A lot of the participants want to relive the magic of the early days, invasions are the only part of that magic that can be recaptured sadly. I always get a little sad when I think of Dark Souls, it is nothing but a husk of its former self in my eyes. The majority of the fun I experienced with Dark Souls was created by foreign elements. Getting invaded by very creative Darkwraiths, invading people myself, trying to desperately find that darn gravelord's sign, but also things that were nearly completely seperate from the game, like trying to unravel the game alongside the rest of the community. All of those beautiful things have become -nearly- impossible for new players to experience. If I were to play the game for the first time today I am not even sure if I would get enamored by it like I got in 2012 and remained enamored by until 2014. Atleast the _death_ of its online hasn't been as hurtful to the game as it has been to Demon's Souls, which has been gimped thanks to the World Tendency mechanic. A mechanic that only works with an active online community, but has a rather huge impact on the game if you want to truly experience all of it.

There's certainly a lot of what makes Dark Souls fascinating that is effectively lost now. An experience that only really existed during those formative months of the games launch, that I missed even the first time. The 'You Died' book shows a lot of that from the perspective of games journalists as well as lore scholars and it was a great read. I wasn't aware of the World Tendency in Demon's Souls (I own it, but as I intimate, playing Souls games has not been a priority for me for a long time) and am now curious whether the game even 'works' in the sense of its original intent?

@@Yzerbruh As someone who didn't play until much later, I think the relative absence of people is also quite special. I was invaded maybe twice total during my first playthrough, and rarely did I summon or was I summoned: it just adds to the sense that the world is empty, that there's no people around for you to interact with, and it makes those encounters feel even more atmospheric and precious, like you've just briefly crossed paths with one of very few other wanderers in a large, empty world.

Thanks for watching, it's been great to see so how many people have engage with these games in a similar manner . I do plan on doing a follow-up about Dark Souls 2 - which I started playing a couple months after this video was launched - which is more about how I learned to let go of my issues with the franchise in part due to how they differ from one another.

I had thoughts of quitting as well, not at lord of cinder, but at demon prince, but I decided, on a random day, I just decided, fuck it I’m just gonna do it, and did it first try. It was such an amazing feeling.

All the best to you, and I hope you get through as best you can.

Eh, gonna have to disagree with you there. For one, "it's practically criminal how much Dark Souls has been actually ignored." It's been done to DEATH on the internet, it even has it's own subgenre as far as the gaming community at large is concerned. It's been analyzed to hell and back, and for good reason, but I don't feel like there's anything left to be ignored about this game. I will agree that he didn't touch on design as much as he could have, but he still noted things like the learning effect that Dark Souls' respawn system has on understanding the world. You say that he didn't cover the actual design, but he was explicitly stating that you learn about the design of the levels and enemy placement through constant death and rebirth, and having to start right back at the beginning and enticing the player to find shortcuts and to look at the level around them with a more discerning eye. Punishment should always be a learning experience, but he touches on the fact that it's exacerbated through the central design philosophy of Dark Souls. I'm also not sure where you're coming from about the "supposed toxicity", because I believe he only mentioned "toxicity" once. As for the difficulty, I feel less like he's ranting about the difficulty and more noting how it's not actually THAT hard, but challenging in an unorthodox way that takes a lot of new players off-guard. More to the point, however, he notes that it's almost a detriment to the game's image to label it as such a difficult game by focusing on the enemies and challenges in front of you. Yes, this is a game, you need to have a focus on those, but Dark Souls puts just as much focus on the world and aesthetic feel as well. The AI isn't actually all that challenging in terms of behavior, and that's GOOD for this game, because it works into the system that is put in place and that the player must learn about in order to traverse the world without unneeded roadblocks. You're not just fighting against the actual enemies in front of you, but also the world itself: bottomless pits, poison swamps, huge architecture with traps that require careful timing. It's all put in place so that a player who just tries to blast their way through without any prior knowledge will just fail again and again, yet also feels rewarding and makes the player feel like a master of the game when they do start to understand how the levels work. Does he say any of this outright in his video? Not all of it, but that's kind of reflecting the nature of Dark Souls itself: it doesn't tell you everything. You have to seek out the information you want and discover what the world has to offer for yourself. By noting things like the base rewards system and the mechanics of respawning in this game, he's touching on the fact that the game is about exploration. You explore to find new items, souls, bosses, and other story paths, and THAT is what makes the game awesome. It's not about the difficulty, the difficulty is just there to encourage the exploration.

Yeah, every single games critic who has written anything after 2011 has written about dark souls, and yet despite everything everyone has written, only maybe 10% of the actual things worth talking about in dark souls have been covered by critics, who are more content to repeat everyone else's points and not bother to talk about the things passing them by every second they play the game. If you think the game has been done to death, you haven't played it. For example, find me a critic who talks about why Bed of Chaos is actually a bad boss. Find me a critic who reviews the level design of any given area in the game, or who comments on the general level design patterns across the game. Find me a critic who talks about the relationship between stamina, attacking, dodging, and shielding. Find me a critic who discusses, or better: diagrams, the interconnectedness of the early areas and all the different ways you can progress, who discusses how dark souls 1 limits your capability to warp to only specific bonfires, making pathfinding to your actual destinations still a difficult task. Find me a critic who analyzes the way secrets are hidden across dark souls, the "secret language" that is built up over the course of the game. Find me a critic that can actually explain all the different ways dark souls subtly points you towards learning how the mechanics work. Find me a critic that explains the designs of the enemy movesets and how they're used in combination to complement one another. There's stuff littered on the ground waiting to be discussed. He should have said what you said in the video. This isn't a game, this isn't prose. This is a critique. If he didn't say it, if it doesn't come across, then that's on him. In a critique it pays to be simple, direct, and to the point, which he generally did not do. I don't agree that the game is "about" exploration. A lot of people want to say, "Nah, dark souls is actually about this other thing besides difficulty, and it's only difficult in service to this other thing which is the actual thing that makes it good" almost like people are ashamed to admit that difficult things are fun. There are any number of linear NES games that are more difficult than Dark Souls, and they don't have that exploration aspect going for them. There's plenty of garbage games with new items, bosses, areas, and other story paths. Those things can add to a game, but they can't replace a good core combat system (or platforming, stealth, racing, or whatever the core mechanics are). There's a saying, "As a beginner, dark souls is hard, as an intermediate, dark souls is easy, and as an expert, dark souls is average." Beginners tend to perceive the games as being impossible, because they are intimidated by its reputation, intermediates want to flash their bravado by saying the game everyone calls difficult is easy, and people who are more mature recognize that it's actually pretty challenging, but there's harder stuff out there. I think it made sense for the marketing team to label the game as hard, because compared to most modern games, it's pretty hard. There's harder out there, certainly, but difficulty is something people enjoy about games, something that is intrinsically enjoyable for us as people. The article that the video cited misses the point that difficulty is older than video games, and also that computer games prized themselves on difficulty on a parallel evolutionary scheme to arcade games. Arcade games were just an outlet, a crucible, where difficulty was magnified by the monetization scheme, in a way that oddly bred a certain type of good game design. Arcade games needed to be difficult to force you to pay money to continue; they needed to be fair, so you'd never leave the cabinet because of something you felt wasn't your own fault; they needed to be fun, so you'd continue to play them; they needed to be easily understandable, so you could pick them up and play them quickly; and they needed to be over in 30 minutes or less, but still have a reason for someone who cleared the entire game to keep coming back to it. The human instinct towards difficulty and rewards is far more ingrained in us however, and games (even single player games) were difficult before computers existed. People went rock climbing for entertainment purposes long before we made games. Ski slopes are labeled by difficulty, with skiing down a Black Diamond slope being a mark of pride too. Consult Raph Koster's book: A Theory of Fun. There's like, a pathological denial that a big factor in the reason people like dark souls is because it's hard among some people.

Chris Wagar If that's what you're looking for in a video about Dark Souls then I'm not exactly clear why you're demanding it of AI and Games. Don't blame Tommy for your need to consume content and ideas that differ from the channel's objectives. I think your expectations are misaligned, and if you don't believe the game has been fully explored then why not explore it yourself?

It says design dive, not "AI of Dark Souls" like his other videos do. I am working on that. I write a lot. critpoints.net/ I'm also looking into a ton of other games as well, and I can't write about everything. That and I want to see other people do good games writing too, step up their game.

Not sure why it has to be a critic that talks about all those things. I've seen critics, and lets play people, and friends on forums who have all talked to death about likes and dislikes and what they've noticed and analyzed about how Dark Souls is as a game. If you're talking about things being unsaid about Dark Souls on a more mainstream platform, then yeah, I guess it hasn't been talked about as much in that sector. I do respect what you mean on the difficulty, and maybe to some degree the game is about difficulty. But I still argue that the difficulty is directly connected to exploring the game world because a lot of initial difficulty comes from not understanding the rules that the world sets since the game doesn't tell you all the rules. Take the ghosts that require you to use a transient curse to fight for example, or the ring back at the asylum that you need to get if you want to move easier at the bottom of blighttown. Hell, even factions like the Forest Guardians can be a strange and frustrating experience for new players just because they don't understand that there is essentially a "turf" faction that exists to punish players trying to get through the area to Sif. There's no shame in a game having difficulty to its main credit, yes, but personally I like it when a game isn't just about "being difficult" and nothing else. I feel like focusing on difficulty when it comes to Dark Souls is doing it a disservice given the amount of effort the developers made in designing everything else, from the world design to the subtle storytelling. Besides, the difficulty can be a detriment to it when it's an unfair difficulty, like the aforementioned Bed of Chaos or the part in Anor Londo with the silver knight archers. Does that mean the difficulty is bad? Of course not, but I don't feel like it should carry a game on its own. With all that said though, it probably was the right move for the marketing team to focus on the difficulty given the public opinion on difficulty in modern video games at the time (and even now to some degree) I personally don't have a problem with people liking Dark Souls because of the difficulty, and depending on how you look at it, it can be pretty hard. I just feel like the difficulty is way overblown compared to the rich lore and atmosphere it offers, and thus it overshadows those aspects that I like so much more. I'll admit, it probably doesn't help that I get frustrated at games a lot more easily than some other people, and I gave up a couple of times trying to play this one. But I've got three playthroughs down now, so there's definitely something that it's doing right that appeals to me

+Nicole Dubois Thanks for watching. Glad you enjoyed it. Given I couldn't bring myself to play the first Dark Souls again until now, I've never touched the series again. I actually own both a special edition copy of Demon Souls and Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin, but never played them. But now I think I'm finally going to give them a shot.

I hope you enjoy them both! I love all of FromSofts titles (especially lesser known ones like Echo Night and Shadow Tower Abyss!) but DKS1 will always have a special place in my heart, so I hope you find something as enjoyable in each title you play :D.

+Phil Rodgers Hah, hey Phil! In hindsight, yeah Dark Souls was not a smart choice. It's interesting that despite my contentious relationship with it, it's a game that has continued to sit in the back of my mind about it's novel design choices. Hence all these years later I finally went back to it. And yeah you're right, my KZfaq voice is kinda ridiculous.

AI and Games - I had no idea you did these videos until KZfaq popped one up as a suggestion. Great stuff! Moar AI plz!

Heh, the to-do list is pretty huge right now. Next up is a multi-video series on Total War, so it's pretty much HTN planning, genetic algorithms and MCTS.

AI and Games - MCTS? Are you going to go head to head with "The Doc"? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i76HZdyL08rQZ4k.html 😃

That's a good video! I'll probably link to it in an effort to give some more 'meat' to it. Many of my videos are a lot more surface level rather than explaining everything (the case studies are typically 10-20 minutes). A lotta ground to cover in very little time. So I may well give him a nudge for people to check out. :D

+Gravious I totally understand that intimidation, to a point that many people I know have refrained from playing for the exact same reasons. I'm on the other side: I've only played DS1. I would really love to try Bloodborne. Gonna try and save up for a PS4 so I can also cover PS4 games in case studies. 😀