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Dark Souls II

 
Online features for the PC version of Dark Souls II have been reactivated.Nov 30, 2022 - Community AnnouncementsOnline features for the PC version of Dark Souls II (DX9) have been reactivated. We thank you once again for your patience and support regarding the restoration of the Dark Souls servers. https://store.steampowered.com/app/236430/DARK_SOULS_II/AnnouncementApr 8, 2022 - Community Announcements{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/32835102/6ec5a97acab49d37b302a901253499c9fa04c15e.jpg Click on the thumbnail for full sized picture: {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/32835102/5406f6505d8f8656e8bcffb0dde21e1689f9044a.jpgBecoming the Dark SoulSep 22, 2021 - EurogamerIt's somehow 10 years since the release of Dark Souls - perhaps the most significant release of the last decade, in fact, given the huge impact From Software's meticulously designed adventure has had. To celebrate we're returning to one of our favourite pieces of writing about the game, from none other than Souls connoisseur Rich Stanton. I love the Great Grey Wolf Sif, and have fought alongside her. I have killed her five times across PC and Xbox 360, and the last was the one that mattered. With other Dark Souls bosses, I enjoy Summoning other players to help. But never with Sif. The fight is one that saddens me. It is a duel to be savoured, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Even the first time, before knowing much at all about Dark Souls, there was something special about Sif (the wolf's gender is up for debate, incidentally). I reviewed the game back in the day, and so was playing through weeks before the internet had unravelled Lordran's mysteries. An occasionally panicked email chain of reviewers from several publications swapped hints and tips about Dark Souls - the only time I have ever known this - and one rumour, since debunked but persisting to this day in dark corners of the community, was that you could somehow save Sif. Read more Have you ever gone to great lengths to save an NPC?Sep 6, 2021 - Eurogamer Spoiler warnings for Mass Effect 2. I'm not sure why I liked Kelly Chambers so much. There's definitely more exciting characters in Mass Effect 2. She was just cool is all. They seemed so good together, her and my Shepherd, two straight-talking women on a ship full of neverending melodrama, quipping back and forth along the bridge. But I was trapped in a loveless relationship with the odiously boring Kaidan Alenko. So Kelly remained elusive: the steadfast second in command, a constant source of warmth, good sense and pragmatic kindness. Anyway, she melted. In fact, most of my crew died in that final mission, but Kelly was the first, melting down into flesh chowder in a giant frosted glass tube. Afterwards I read that the only way to save everyone was to max out your relationship stats, upgrade your ship to the nth degree, and hightail it over to the suicide mission the moment you can. Reader, that's exactly what I did. I went back to the start and put another 30 hours into that game, telling myself I was getting value for money. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was all for Kelly. Read more Dark Souls 2 player beats the game without talking to anyoneJul 15, 2021 - PCGamesNIt's not until you see someone decide to forgo something like talking to people that you realise how much you rely on it. One player decided to beat Dark Souls 2 while staying silent in-game, waiving levelling up, shopping, upgrades, repairs, or Estus Flasks as they went. Content creator Ymfah's latest video features some impressive boss fights that offer little leeway for them to get hit, though it's the goofs I'm keener on. Sometimes starting a boss fight without talking to them requires you to simply run up to them and bop them on the head with a club though other times, Ymfah has to think on their feet. The Dark Souls 2 player took questions about the run over on Reddit, explaining to one person that item breaks were often unplanned, though most of the run went pretty smoothly. "I was not sure if the Shrine of Winter would open without lighting all four first bonfires since Aldia pops up after the fourth," they say. "Was half expecting to farm one million souls using Melantia's ring and the Maughlin set. Thankfully the door opened without a hitch." Read the rest of the story... RELATED LINKS: Dark Souls 2's Covetous Demon was nicknamed Jabba the Hutt by the developers Hundreds of people are competing to finish Dark Souls without being hitJul 22, 2020 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Beating the final boss of a Dark Souls game can be an overwhelming experience. You reflect on your journey, the countless hours and failed attempts that led you to this moment, and a wave of emotion rolls over you. The Twitch channel of Eric “McRaptor” Harper was host to a litany of these moments during the recent “Souls-4-Souls” (SFS) charity tournament that ran in late April. When you think of competitive gaming tournaments, Dark Souls probably doesn’t spring to mind. However, SFS featured 25 challenge runners racing through Soulsborne games as quickly as possible whilst trying to take zero hits. Thousands tuned in to watch. (more…) Five of the Best: Game Over screensMay 29, 2020 - EurogamerFive of the Best is a weekly series about the small details we rush past when we're playing but which shape a game in our memory for years to come. Details like the way a character jumps or the title screen you load into, or the potions you use and maps you refer back to. We've talked about so many in our Five of the Best series so far. But there are always more. Five of the Best works like this. Various Eurogamer writers will share their memories in the article and then you - probably outraged we didn't include the thing you're thinking of - can share the thing you're thinking of in the comments below. Your collective memory has never failed to amaze us - don't let that stop now! Today's Five of the Best is... Read more Modder Superior Dark Souls Trilogy RemixedFeb 3, 2020 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunEvery other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods with Modder Superior. Dark Souls modders are forged in the flames of adversity. While mostly limited to technical improvements (such as Durante’s fixes for the wonky original PC port) and small texture packs, the past few years have brought about a whole new genre of Souls mods for all three games. While limited in what can be added to the trilogy (though breakthroughs are being made on that front, too), it turns out that by creatively rearranging what’s already there, you can get what feels almost like a new game. Today, we take a peek at a bundle of B-Side adventures across the entire series. (more…) Tough Love: On Dark Souls' DifficultyDec 7, 2019 - EurogamerYou Died: The Dark Souls Companion is one of the great gaming books of the last few years - it's passionate, perceptive and wonderfully partisan. (We should also mention that it's the work of two friends of Eurogamer, Keza MacDonald and Jason Killingsworth.) Killingsworth is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to produce a beautiful hardback version of the book, which will include a new chapter. He's kindly allowed us to publish this extract as a taster. Dark Souls' most obvious trait also happens to be its least interesting; fixating on 'gosh, this game's hard' seems a bit obvious when we could be talking about its themes, its lore, its fascinating game design. Dark Souls is more than a Tough Mudder challenge for the couch-bound. But Dark Souls' difficulty is also inescapable and, rightly or wrongly, it's what the game is most famous for. Ask players for their recollections, and they will tell you the moments that made them cry, the moments when they felt physically and mentally broken by a boss fight, the moments when they nearly gave up. And if you dig a little deeper, examining Dark Souls' difficulty yields a lot of insight into what makes it work. Read more Games of the Decade: Dark Souls is the cold at the heart of everythingNov 25, 2019 - EurogamerTo mark the end of the 2010s, we're celebrating 30 games that defined the last 10 years. You can find all the articles as they're published in the Games of the Decade archive, and read about our thinking about it in an editor's blog. What I remember most about Dark Souls is the cold. This is impossible, of course, and may seem to fly in the face of the game's most celebrated maxim - is not Dark Souls the game that commands us to praise the sun? Nonetheless, eight years since From Software's Gothic labyrinth of an RPG overturned an entire industry's notions of challenge and myth-making, everything I love and dread about the game seems to resolve itself into a question of temperature. The huddled damp of Firelink Shrine. The shivering darkness of New Londo. The ashpiles of the Kiln, where long-ago-melted iron pillars stream sideways like windblown icicles. Even Anor Londo, the heavenly citadel on which the sun never quite sets, is a frigid place, its god rays brightening the marble but failing to pierce the skin. The game feels most hospitable, at first, when it comes to the bonfires that pin its singularly ominous layouts together. Those bonfires! I can hear the noise they make in my head as I write this - that strange, airy, undulating note, more like the hum of a machine than the crackle of a blaze. I can see the light bronzing my character's emaciated features, hollowed out by death after death. But considered against the fatal arc of the unspoken plot, the bonfires are the chilliest elements of all. Dark Souls is a game about entropy and the way vital forces consume themselves: it invokes the flame as creator and destroyer. Its bonfires might be places of rest, but they are also places where the souls of living things are burned in exchange for power. Read more Eight years after release, Dark Souls modders figure out how to make custom mapsNov 5, 2019 - EurogamerIt might be surprising, but until this point it's been pretty much impossible to import a custom map into the original Dark Souls. According to Souls modders, the closest you could get was importing maps from Demon's Souls - and while modders have worked on custom maps for some time, problems with the specific file format used for collision detection in Dark Souls 1 meant that progress was stalled. Until now, that is, as several modders have figured out a way to import working custom maps into the game. As explained by modder Zullie, progress began in earnest when modder Meowmaritus created a tool to import models, but without collision detection (in layman's terms, the physics required to make things actually solid). The next step was carried out by modder Horkrux, who recently developed a way to create collision maps. Read more Watch us play 21 games from the last 20 yearsSep 6, 2019 - EurogamerOK, so I know Eurogamer's actual birthday was two days ago, but as is our style, the Eurogamer video team is once again Late to the (birthday) Party. Over the past three years, we've been introducing each other to our favourite (and/or least favourite) games from yesteryear as part of our Late to the Party series. During that time we've shared our love (and/or hatred) for over one hundred and fifty different games and thanks to this, we've been able to make a compilation episode of LTTP that features one game from every year that Eurogamer has been alive. In this video, Aoife, Zoe and I are joined by some friendly video team faces from the past (who?!) as we play our way through the 20 years worth of games, including 1999's Dino Crisis, 2006's Gears of War and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Basically, if you want a healthy dose of nostalgia (or just want to feel rather old) this is the video for you! Read more Developers and industry legends on the games that defined the last 20 yearsSep 5, 2019 - EurogamerAs Eurogamer turns 20, we thought, you know what? It's not all about us. It's also about the developers, the people behind the virtual magic that inspired the creation of Eurogamer two decades ago. Without the developers, we wouldn't be here. And so, we thought we'd ask a few of them (20, in fact!) to pick the games that defined the last 20 years, and see what would come of it. We approached a broad range of people, from top executives and legendary talent to tiny indies. We asked them to pick a game that defined the last 20 years, but left it up to them to interpret the question. It could be a game that defined the industry, that meant a lot to them professionally or personally, or is just a favourite. We're delighted with the responses (thank you to everyone who contributed!). There's some fantastic insight here, super cool anecdotes and the odd surprising choice. We hope you enjoy it! Read more Meet the mind behind the first Dark Souls mega-modMar 19, 2019 - EurogamerIt might seem strange to frame it this way, but the act of modifying your favourite game is tantamount to admitting it could've been just a bit better: that maybe the developers should have taken a turkey baster to the gloopy Blood Soldiers of Un-Garth, that the instant-kill spike trap right before the save point was perhaps just a bit too punitive. It's ironic it takes an ardent superfan to recognise the true flaws in a work, no matter how great - it's only by fully internalising where the brilliant design shines through that you can recognise the dusty corners that could use a bit more illumination. Of course, mods can never truly complete even the most flawed games, at least if we hold the creator's original vision as the blueprint - the modder's own voice adds to the experience, editing and compensating and harmonising in a way that might be more pleasant than the original, but irrevocably changing the nature of the performance in the process. It should be no surprise, then, that Scott "Grimrukh" Mooney's Daughters of Ash project for the PC version of Dark Souls gives us one of the all-time great examples of this dichotomy. The Souls games aren't exactly known for their mirth - what with the shattered world full of wandering eidolons and all - but there's a vein of deeply weird humour that hums underneath the windswept cliff-faces and desolate settlements. While this usually manifests itself in the cackles of depraved merchants and the ragdoll-like flailing of the series' memetic yet indomitable skeletons, perhaps the most-misunderstood example is Pinwheel, the sorcerous boss of the Catacombs. Most agree Pinwheel is laughably easy to defeat compared to the series' gallery of fearsome foes, casting easy-to-avoid spells and floating aimlessly in place while the Chosen Undead hacks at its bulbous hide. You don't have to scroll very far on any Souls forum to find some well-meaning player referring to this particular part of the game as disappointing or badly designed. What many players don't realise is there's fairly strong evidence Pinwheel was intended to be a joke boss fight from the very start. According to multiple fan sources, the boss's Japanese name refers to a comedy act where two people share an oversized coat in order to engage in some clumsy antics, similar to the Whose Line Is It Anyway? skit Helping Hands. Viewed from this vantage, since Pinwheel is little more than three bodies Frankensteined together, the punchline seems to be he's far too uncoordinated to put up much of a fight beyond cloning himself endlessly. Read more Huge and ambitious Dark Souls 1 mod reimagines and expands FromSoftware's masterpieceJan 5, 2019 - EurogamerA new and ambitious mod for Dark Souls 1 has reignited the game's community after surprise-launching this week. Dark Souls: Daughters of Ash is Dark Souls re-imagined and massively expanded, according to its lone creator. Redditor Grimrukh said they spent over 1000 hours over the course of 2017 and 2018 building the mod for Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on PC. Read more… A guide to loving Berserk, the manga inspiration for the Souls gamesJan 3, 2019 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun A Panel Shaped Screen is a monthly column where Giada Zavarise explores how comics and video games inspire each other. This week she wants you to try Berserk, a manga inspiration for Dark Souls You might have heard of Berserk already. A few people have pointed out the similarities between Hidetaka Miyazaki s Souls series and the manga Berserk. Perhaps you ve even gotten curious, toyed with the idea of getting into it, but without a clear idea of where to start. Or perhaps you got the impression that Berserk is not for you. You may have heard Berserk is filled with violence, sexual assault, gore, grim characters and questionable content. And for the most part, you would be right. But at its core, Berserk is about love. (more…) An ode to video game doorsDec 11, 2018 - EurogamerIt's easy to underestimate the humble door. You open it, you go through. Sometimes, you must find the key first, and for many games, that's the whole extent of the player's interactions with doors. They're something to get past, something that cordons off one bit from the next bit. A simple structural element, of special interest to level designers, but not the ones who turn the knobs. And yet, the fundamental nature of doors that makes them seem so mundane also imbues them with a kind of magic. How do I open it? And what could be behind it? A good door is a locus of challenge and mystery; mystery that could give way to delight, wonder, or even a good scare. A good door is a teasing paradox that does everything in its power to entice and invite, but also puts up a decent effort to keep you out, at least long enough to intrigue and fire up your imagination. Some games highlight the versatility of doors by turning them into especially dense knots in the possibility space. In games like Thief, Dishonored, Prey, Deus Ex or Darkwood, doors can be lockpicked, hacked, blown to bits or cleverly circumvented. In emergencies, they can be barricaded, blocked by heavy objects or even taken off the electric grid. For the tactically minded, they can serve as choke points to lure enemies into traps or ambushes, while the patient can use keyholes to spy on the unsuspecting, or simply get close enough to a door to eavesdrop on an important conversation. Read more… Playing today's games in a thousand yearsSep 22, 2018 - EurogamerAsk a young adult today what a floppy disk is and you'll likely earn puzzled silence. To them, they are ancient artefacts. Demonstrate an "old" game (say, from around 2000) to a kid today, and they might look at it with disbelieving curiosity. Did games really look like that, once upon a time, in the unfathomable recesses of antiquity? Similarly, to me, 30 years old, games of the early 90s (and the machines that run them) already exude a certain alien primitivity. Revisiting them several decades after their prime with a historian's curiosity is as fascinating as it is frustrating: it's easy to bounce off old games and their archaic workings. The advance and change of technology is rapid, and, as many have pointed out, presents daunting problems regarding the preservation of older games. But there are other issues that may be less urgent, issues that are just as real. Let's assume for the sake of speculation that game historians and preservationists manage to address the problem, and that, say, a thousand years from now (if we're still around by then), at least a fraction of today's games will still be playable in some form. A thousand years may seem excessive. Given the breakneck cycles of hype and disinterest, of novelty and jadedness, surely no denizen of a future world a millennium from now will be interested in playing, say, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare? But consider that when it comes to older media, literature first and foremost, some texts are still alive and well. You'll have no trouble finding a copy of Beowulf (ca. 1000 years old and surviving in a single manuscript which was almost destroyed in a fire in 1731), The Iliad (almost 3000 years old) or the Epic of Gilgamesh (a whopping 4000 years old). And it's not just historians who read them either. Read more… Dark Souls best gift and best class explained: Why Pyromancer and the Master Key are the best starting choicesMay 25, 2018 - EurogamerRead more… Have You Played Dark Souls 2?Mar 5, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunHave You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Dark Souls > Bloodborne > Dark Souls 3 > Demon’s Souls > Dark Souls 2. But if you like the rest, you should still play number 2. It’s good. Being good just isn’t quite enough when you’re born into a family of geniuses. (more…)