What made everyone get into this game?

A friend told me about it. Didn't think this would become one of my top 10 favorites games.

Many people find it fun to play. Shocking idea on Anon Babble I know but here we are.

Gaslighting and astro turfing mostly. Just like my little pony it's one of the greatest internet pranks ever played on a large group of people.

One of the few games that didn't fucken baby the player all the time. Also the online implementation were everyone is ''connected'' and you see their ghosts real time is still the coolest thing ive seen in vidya

The amazing atmosphere and setting.

It's the Dark Souls of video games

Journalists for no reason decided that Fromsoft was good eventhough they shat on their previous games nonstop in magazines. Most likely paid off by Sony or Bamco to not say any mean things about it.

Overrated garbage proped up by the media to shit on Skyrim.

I think people were tired of "games" that were little more than interactive multimedia spectacles
these games give you a challenge, show you almost immediately what happens when you fail, and give you tools to overcome that challenge. that's fun. you know, like a game is supposed to be
and from actually designed failure. too many game "designers" rely on lazy checkpoints. or even worse, save scumming. I think that played a big part. think about how successful roguelikes became at roughly the same time

This is the Fromsoft game I like replaying the least

Midroll - I don't get the hate for ADP in Dark Souls 2 as a stat you NEED to level up. Midroll is such an annoying system in Dark Souls 1 I end up being forced to level up endurance every run through so I don't run slow as molasses in any armor. It wasn't a thing in DeS, Dark Souls 2 dropped it and Dark Souls 3 made it basically irrelevant. In Dark Souls 1 I end up putting like 30 points into endurance by the time I reach Gwyn whereas in Dark Souls 2 I stop levelling it at 20. So I usually only put at most 10 levels into it.

Only two ring slots is really annoying in Dark Souls 1 because they force you to equip certain rings to progress in certain areas

The difficulty curve in Dark Souls 1 is bizarre. It has this great difficulty curve culminating in Ornstein and Smough which feels like a wall in terms of difficulty. Then you get to the rest of the bosses and you end up going "That's it?" Like Nito just waddles around and occasionally hits you with his orange blade attack. The only hard part about Seath is cutting off his tail because it's often sticking outside of the arena etc. I think this ruins the game to an extent as it makes the rest of the bosses feel kind of like a waste of time.

I genuinely think several areas are straight up unfinished. Like Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith. Like Ceaseless Discharge straight up hits the player from behind walls and 100% of players just do the cheese strat that kills him instantly. Demon Firesage is just the Stray Demon but orange. Bed of Chaos is just a puzzle which feels like an enormous letdown.

The game is secretly really linear despite how sprawling it feels. And it takes a really long time to actually get really powerful. Most challenge runs end up using exploits to skip into later parts of the game to acquire powerful weapons/spells in-order to make the rest of the game bearable. Every other Fromsoft game doesn't have this issue.

Word of mouth because the journos who played them wrote the worst guides imaginable, so normies had to talk to each other for once.
Nowadays, everyone is good at this shit genre, so the magic is gone.

demons souls was a revolutionary game.

Borrowed the game from a friend and hated it at first. Couldn't beat Asylum Demon, went back and told him the game was bullcrap and cheated. Keep getting the insatiable itch to go back and beat it. I did, made it to Firelink Shrine, took the detour to blighttown, new londo, and the catacombs, before finally seeing the staircase to Undead Burg that blended in to the wall from my perspective, and the rest was history.

It may have been the first of its kind, but Dark Souls 1 was the most impactful, and in a way, revolutionary

Most of these critiques make me think you've never fucking played it.

Atmosphere of the first one. Ps3 version looked much better than remaster.

i bought it cause i used to buy games that just interested me when i went to best buy. Same thing happened when i got fallout new vegas, just got it cause i liked cowboys and that kind of stuff had no idea what these games were about which just added to my amazement when they turned out to be good

without demons souls, dark souls would never have happened. they invested very little into developing the game and it formed a huge fanbase that surprised fromsoft.

I played dark souls 2 first and I thought it was amazing.

No idea
I can't even beat the first one

People forget just how dire the shit coming out of the games industry was at the time. The Souls games were a breath of fresh air compared to most of the slop that came out from 2010 to 2015.

picture of a computer screen

No wonder you can't beat the game. You're retarded

Vril game about overcoming pain, struggling and achieving greatness in a broken world.

Unga bunga enemies, lonely journey through a bleak, surrealist landscape.
Whats not to like?
The sequels are all shit and so is its predecessor.

Interesting world, difficulty and being unlike any other game at that time. DS1 had a magical feeling that the other games have not replicated.

I enjoyed Dark Souls 2 and found 3 to be really boring and never finished it.

it's a dungeon crawler with palatable action gameplay

are you satisfied now?
what difference this really makes is beyond me, but as long as you're satisfied since that's my responsibility and not yours, apparently

Also the online implementation were everyone is ''connected'' and you see their ghosts real time is still the coolest thing ive seen in vidya

Its like Monster Hunter, but easier and with shittier combat

The game is hard. And I don't mean simple difficulty of gameplay; the game felt hostile, unforgiving and not forthcoming with information in regards to how to play successfully. You can't pause the game, which is understandable in pve but in singleplayer it feels like an imposition on the player. The levelling system feels extremely stingy, allowing for a single stat point in a single stat rather than multiple points in multiple stats. Even after you "git gud", there is a profound plethora of sheer bullshit to deal with that causes nothing but frustration, and tests nothing but the player's masochism/tolerance for bullshit.

t. Likes the games

man you have shit taste

Also better levels and monsters that actually fight back instead of standing there and taking it.

Well yeah, he has fromsoft games.

sure, but the difference between me and most posters here is i actually play video games, even if they are shit, and a big fan of anything with cooperation, drinking with friends is better and so is gaming, simple as

It scratched an itch that everyone had for a dark fantasy game that wasn’t generic hand holding slop

Vril game about overcoming pain, struggling and achieving greatness in a broken world.

this, what got me into it late was making out with an arthoe and DS1 is quantum entangled to sex with real beautiful women, the first DS I actually bought and finished tho was 3 but there is just the wikipedia references to the vril wave function collapse that playing DS1 is, DS1 contains so much beyond it's software

Besides the fact that it's truly an amazing game, it came out at the right time. There was an awful trend going on at the time where every single game coming out was piss-easy. I'm not even a "hard core" gamer but I would buy a new game and play it and it would just feel like the "tutorial section" never fucking ended, and I'd quickly lose interest. Gaming was just kind of becoming shitty, they weren't games they were just bad movies with 0 actual gameplay.... and then Dark Souls comes out and it's 100% videogame. Just fucking wrecks you and tells you to 'git gud'.

The game is alluring as well, and creative. We hadn't seen anything quite like it yet. You WANTED to "git gud" so you could see the rest of the game. "I wonder what the next boss looks like?" "I wonder what the next armor set I get will be?" "I wonder what crazy demonic sword/axe I'll be able to craft with this boss soul?" It was the right game and it came out at the right time.

3D Metroidvanias for the most part were rare and far between and most of them were irredeemably garbage.

biggest factor was probably totalbiscuit who made the little wind of demons souls imports into a storm up until fromsoft released a pls stop importing edition. Then they considered on how to bring their stuff into the west and crapped out a shitty pc port with windows live that people ate up because of the viral marketing the previous entry amassed. Then the pseudo elitists labelled it as a hardcore game in a gaming landscape that was all about treating players as retarded toddlers and it fueled what would become a mass following. Downside is that the community went from one of the nicest and most accommodating ones to a bunch of self-entitled rancid cunts but that's just the price of popularity.

Action slop became unbearable and ruined franchises like Castlevania forever. I had low expectations going into this but found it much more appealing than that piece of shit Lords of Shadows.

The gameplay gave me the same feelings as dragon's dogma with the dark arisen expansion. Both have areas that are connected with each other providing shortcuts between them, and both for the most part allow a large variety of playstyles to play around with

The hard content in mh games are harder than in souls games but the base game is easier in mh than in souls
They are completely different types of games though apart from somewhat similar combat mechanics

without Dragon Ball there would be no Dragon Ball Z, so ACKSHUALLY Dragon Ball is the important one

and then there's this faggot cunt in every one of these threads

demon's = dope
dark1 = dope
dark 2 = wtf is dis???
bb = dope
dark3 = eh it aight but lmao wtf is dis???
sekiro = dope
elden ring = eh it aight but lmao dis open world ain't it senpai

Anon Babble had a few threads of people saying good things about demon souls. couple of those and i went to game stop to get a copy. Was automatically sold on the sequel.

MH was locked away on a kiddy console until recently. The rise in popularity for MH could have started a decade earlier than it did, but at least the series finally made it.

good gameplay

I don't get the hate for ADP in Dark Souls 2 as a stat you NEED to level up.

the hate comes from the fact that it becomes a blatant top choice to level and makes dodging inconsistent>It wasn't a thing in DeS, Dark Souls 2 dropped it and Dark Souls 3 made it basically irrelevant.
Dark Souls 3 did the great thing of standardizing iframes across mid and light roll to tightely design enemy attacks and aoe around them.
This is the opposite of the ADP system

The game is secretly really linear despite how sprawling it feels

You've never played Dark Souls 1.

Dude on fire yo
shit cray

t. whitest guy on Anon Babble

There wasn’t anything like it at the time (except Demons Souls). Back then if you talked about fantasy action RPGs it was either mindless click-to-win grindfests like Diablo 2 or games with easy combat where bosses die in 3 hits like Zelda.

the hate comes from the fact that it becomes a blatant top choice to level

So like endurance? It's just an objectively better version of resistance that you barely need to level up to max out. The problem I have with endurance is you need to invest arguably more points into it than any attacking stat in-order to avoid waddling around in the best armors. In my last playthrough I only needed 28 str in-order to kill Manus in 10 hits but I needed 40 endurance to midroll in the Giants set. I also still needed Havel's ring too. This wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't have only 2 ring slots.

Uhm actually you can technically get to blighttown early (if you picked a specific thing in chargen) therefore the game is actually secretly non-linear

Except most of the levels are hard locked off until you place the Lordvessel including all of the best equipment and armors.

The game has a single direction open to you at the start with a clearly well designed difficulty curve but you can technically beat one boss early by reading the wiki and going down a path with much harder enemies.

in DeS after beating the first boss you can get to almost every level right at the start and acquire any equipment you want, it's really fun to replay as it encourages playing levels out of order.

In Dark Souls 2 75% of the game is open to you right at the start and you can even get absurdly powerful using bonfire ascetics

In Bloodborne once you beat Cleric Beast and Gascoigne the game gradually opens up and you unlock large parts of the game world with individual paths beginning and ending in every direction. You can also comfortably beat the game with some of the starting weapons/armor.

It's the closest to what people back in 2011 wished Zelda was, with the exception of puzzle dungeons.

Fuckers who played this over 1k hours and complaining that it's too easy are unhinged losers.

The reputation of Demon's Souls that was spread by word of mouth, and the fact it had been a PS3 exclusive but Dark Souls would be multiplat.

DS1 is much easier than some of From's other games. Like Sekiro is by far their hardest game objectively. DS1's hardest boss is Ornstein and Smough. Ornstein and Smough would be like a miniboss in Sekiro in terms of difficulty.

It standing out in the era of hand holding game design as other have already mentioned.
Unique Multiplayer that incentived community collaboration right before all game were analyzed to their raw data on release day.
Art Style that stood out for drawing more upon Medieval Italian and Classical Greco-Roman than standard Anglo-French Fantasy
Kino trailers
youtube.com/watch?v=o1780AqAa20
youtube.com/watch?v=QNpLhv21BS0
youtube.com/watch?v=93LFz_j5fQA

Sekiro's difficulty was a progression of Dark Souls' difficulty. When people played each game for the first time there was no prior frame of reference, and it was only when experiencing the next game with more difficult action that the previous titles were retroactively seen as easy.

The main thing that makes it so challenging is in Dark Souls the game encourages you to use things to make fights easier. Like miracles or sorcery or items. Or just exploring and levelling up first. With Ornstein and Smough you can even summon Solaire to make the first half of the fight way easier. Sekiro has none of that you either are good enough to beat the boss or not. You can unlock certain tools to make certain fights easier (like the fireworks stuns the bull) but From often throws fights at you where the only solution is to just get good.

Going back to DS1-3 after playing Elden Ring is an absolute cakewalk

Elden Ring was pure unfun but I agree.

Good reviews. Demon's Souls' reputation helped too.

That first trailer made me realize, the way you were meant to deal with the hellkite drake is to summon two dudes to help you, and in turn you were rewarded with the PvE covenant.

midroll

if you're wearing armor you're doing it wrong. you're supposed to wear just enough armor to get the poise you need to trade blows and that's it. you only need 40 poise to tank at least one blow, so most people wear havel's ring and supplement with a few pieces of armor, not enough for a full set. there's no reason you can't have a fast roll, enough poise for most situations, and swing big.

two ring slots

yeah, it's a good criticism, especially when most people will do what I said above and use havel's ring. if you remove the FAP ring it will break and you only get one per playthrough, kinda lame.

difficulty curve

eh they're gimmick bosses is why.

unfinished areas

yeah sure seems that way. even though it's unfinished, it's mostly a 8/10 all the way through. I never dread having to go to demon ruins or any of those unfinished areas. it's just another level to go through.

game is secretly linear

it's not, though. the only main progression walls are bells --> lordvessel and that's it. anything after the lordvessel can be done in any order. everything prior to it can be done in any order with the exception of sen's fortress. the only other requirement is lordvessel for the DLC.

long time to get powerful

nah, by the time you hit anal rodeo you can get the silver knight straight sword, the best sword in the game. before then, it's a crapshoot whether you'll get a black knight weapon. if you really want you can pump strength at the beginning and go demon hammer from the start, but you still need upgrade materials. I say anor londo is the bottleneck because by then you should be able to hit twinkling titanite weapons to max and regular weapons to +10. there are certain weapons you can get earlier that are quite good, like the lightning spear in sen's fortress but failing that you can use consumables like resins to do extra damage.

My friend recommended it to me and even helped me through it and i cant thank him enough. Truly a one of of a million game.

Friend whose a massive souls fans bullied me int playing Demon's Souls OG and Dark Souls 1 prepare to die after he bought me a steam key.

Love the series since.

if you're wearing armor you're doing it wrong

You're supposed to ignore a core mechanic of the game even though this wasn't an issue in any other Fromsoft game. In DeS it's just 50% encumbrance and there were only like 10 armor sets. In Dark Souls 2 it was 75% and it was actually hard to hit the upper limit. Bloodborne even only had fastroll.

yeah, it's a good criticism, especially when most people will do what I said above and use havel's ring. if you remove the FAP ring it will break and you only get one per playthrough, kinda lame.

Whenever I play Dark Souls 1 I use Havel's ring for 99% of the game and just swap out the other one. The FAP ring is too risky to use because you're swapping out ring 2 depending on level (Like the rusty iron ring for wet areas, the abyss ring for four kings, the lava ring for Lost Izalith etc). This was also an issue they fixed in Dark Souls 2 by having 4 ring slots and they balanced it by making it so rings had carry weight.

the only main progression walls are bells --> lordvessel

anything after the lordvessel can be done in any order.

While that is true the lopsided difficulty curve ends up making the bosses after O&S feel pointless. 75% of my playtime ends up being to get past that one boss and after that despite half of the game remaining I end up sweeping through it anyway.

This wouldn't have been as big of an issue if they didn't structure the game in such a way that you need to go through a very specific series of events in a specific order. They noticeably avoided doing this in DeS where you have 5 mutually exclusive directions to go in. And they avoided doing this in Dark Souls 2. Sekiro even went for a hybrid approach where they had modular level paths alongside a sprawling hubworld. I genuinely think at this point the reason why Dark Souls has such a linear structure in comparison to all of the rest of their games was a compromise due to making such a layered seamless world.

It's a cozy adventure game where you stab stuff. Why wouldn't it be popular?

Souls games are best enjoyed in winter with a hot apple cider and a blanky.

Meme difficulty
Soundtrack
Lorefags
It's a bit of a twist on western fantasy

hop on Bloodborne again for spooky season fun

forgot my save was corrupted and had to start over

think I won't see many white specters of beginner players on a nearly decade old game

still see folks in starter gear running around aplenty, like it was in the old days

Feels good to know it's still getting players

the Demon's Souls threads were the best threads on Anon Babble at the time and I didn't even play the games until Dark Souls on pc

nah, by the time you hit anal rodeo you can get the silver knight straight sword, the best sword in the game

It takes so long to get there that whenever I replay Dark Souls 1 I end up slotting into the same build every time. Usually a strength one because they place two really powerful STR weapons in two early areas. (The Zwei and Claymore) and you can sweep most of the game with them. While you could use the Uchikatana it requires murdering the Undead Merchant (or joining a covenant and spending a shitton of souls) which is something I generally prefer not doing.

This isn't an issue in DeS for example as I can for instance get Demonbrandt as early as World 1-1 by just murdering Ostrava and killing Old King Doran. You can also get the Dragon Knight Sword by beating one of the main bosses then going straight to World 1-4. And upgrading it to level 5 makes it one of the strongest weapons in the game. This sort of thing really encourages replayability.

it is perfect

if they didn't structure the game in such a way that you need to go through a very specific series of events in a specific order

not sure what you mean, you just need to ring the two bells. you can do them in either order. if you start with the master key, you can go immediately to blighttown. if not, well then you either have to take the scenic route through the burg or you can still drain the water in new londo from the start and get to the valley of the drakes that way. after you get both bells you can go straight to sen's fortress and ignore the rest of the game until you've got the lordvessel.

it takes so long to get there

see above, it shouldn't take that long at all. you go to blighttown, kill quelaag, go back up with homeward bone, go through valley of drakes to darkroot garden and up the parish, kill gargoyles. then turn around and go back to sen's fortress, kill the golem. that's 3 bosses minimum. you just have to know where to go.

builds

well if you're not rolling for a black knight weapon early on then you can get the morning star, club, straight sword, and at least a few other good weapons if you're willing to grind for them like baldur's side sword. if you drained the water in new londo, you can get the very large ember before you even go to sen's. the only bottleneck at that point is upgrade materials, and you can grind for those too.

For example if I want to replay the game and build an int character I need to wait until 75% of the game is done to acquire the moonlight greatsword since it's after Ornstein and Smough. So prior to that I need to slug around another weapon that I'll then abandon for it. Very often I'll pick up weapons in Dark Souls 1 where I'd go "man it'd be cool to use this" but I never do because it takes so long to acquire it that it's not worth investing in it stat wise. I might as well just use one of the early game weapons like the Zwei or Claymore and fully upgrade it and use it for the entire game.

In Dark Souls 2 if I want to use the Moonlight Greatsword I just need to get to Brightstone Cove Tseldora, which only requires 2 or 3 levels beforehand to get into. And after that I just need to burn a bonfire ascetic and beat The Duke's Dear Freja's NG+ version. And after that I get it. Once I've beaten The Duke's Dear Freja's NG+ version I still have a good 75% of the game left where I can actually use the weapon properly. It ends up feeling really fun to replay as my prior knowledge of the game is rewarded. This is proper non-linearity. In Dark Souls 1 by comparison it feels like most of the game is over by the time you finally pick up some of the coolest weapons.

Dark Souls 2 also encouraged NG+ playthroughs by remixing every boss fight and adding in black phantoms that only appear in NG+.

Interesting world to explore, grounded combat. Damn, there still isn't another game like DS1.

Why does your Dark Souls looks like AI slop?

Live stream, speed trannies and idiocracy

Isn't the case anymore thanks to normies finding out about it and cheatengine but when it first came out you were a badass if you were a low level darkwraith and terrified new players trying to progress. Now everyone studies wikis and wants people to invade them which is gay.

Nihilism. ds1 helped get out of that state of mind.
I still remember you brotha, sending me a fren request after I summoned you for help, then telling me to change my queelag blade for claymore, which I didn't pick up because I was running for my life from the dragon. You would always join my world whenever both were online, exorcising ghosts in new lando, A true anonymous brethren.

matchmaking being tied to weapon upgrades became a thing specifically thanks to subhumans like you. thanks for nothing nigger

The hype from Demon's Souls which escalated further with the petition scoring a PC port.

Elden Ring, unironically. Not that it was exactly niche before, but, since ER every normie on earth has played this fucking game

Right place at the right time.

It came at a time when the industry was dumbing down their games to the point even a toddler could beat it blindfolded(I.e., journalist tier), then suddenly a game that was unforgiving came along which gained a cult following slowly building up with each subsequent release, then after the dark souls 3 it reached enough followers to reach into mainstream and exploded in popularity from there

You mean 2

sequel to demon souls

this niche japanese import game that managed to get release in the US is getting a sequel??????holy shit!!

Monster Hunter was on the PS2 and the PSP before going to Nintendo. It just goes to whatever was the most popular console was in Japan at the time. World pushed the series into the eyes of many because of graphics and making the game easier. If World looked exactly like the rest of the series prior, a lot of people would’ve ignored it

FOMO

name 5 people who said that exact sentence.

Dark Souls (1) and Demon's Souls had pretty shit combat, but that wasn't the draw. The draw was the feeling of accomplishment, the world, the level design, the fact that the games gave you freedom to explore and rewarded that exploration without retarded open world bullshit. If combat is more your bag, Bloodborne is a much better combat focused game because you aren't going very far until you learn to get up in a mother fucker's face during fights with zero protection.
The Souls series also aren't hard games, they are punishing games. You know how to win, you have the tools to win, but YOU fucked up and get slapped for it. The second and third title, however, introduced outright bullshit segments that cheapen the games. ER is chock-full of bullshit segments and bosses. ER is king of bullshit because enemies are either laughably easy or have stupid long AoE spam combos that just melt stamina so blocking is pointless (so why even have the option).

Dark Souls and Demon's Souls are just great examples of overall video game design. DS2 had HINTS of genius scattered about but shat the bed kinda hard in enough ways to keep it on the bottom of the pile. DS3 felt like they just wanted to put out another title and it was kinda forgettable.
Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne do it right.

congratulations your tastes are correct. you may hang this post on your wall