Dark Souls Catch-All

WipEout wrote:

So, I had a hard time playing this on my Win7 machine (dual AMD 6950s). Was just too choppy to enjoy. Either that or it's just too prohibitively difficult. Or a combination of both. I just wasn't having any fun.

Either way, I went to install it on my Win8.1 office PC to see how it ran on a single Nvidia 770 card (and to give the game another shot), but GFWL just won't run when i launch the game, forcing me to play offline and thus lose all my progress. So I tried to install the latest version of GFWL straight from Microsoft, and that seemed to go okay, until I actually run it. At which point, I get a generic "Connection Failed" (no error code) that GFWL won't get past, nor does MS's troubleshooting page even cover. Does anyone have any idea how I can get this mess to run on a Win8 machine, or should I just wait until they eventually get it patched with Steamworks? Or should I just chalk up the loss and eventually get DS2...?

I have a machine running Windows 8.1.
I followed this tutorial:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/211420...

Totally worked! Thanks! Also, it's running WAAYYY smoother on my newer machine, and immediately feels more responsive than the last time I tried to play. I might actually enjoy it this time around!

WipEout wrote:

Totally worked! Thanks! Also, it's running WAAYYY smoother on my newer machine, and immediately feels more responsive than the last time I tried to play. I might actually enjoy it this time around! :D

Glad to hear it! Have fun storming the castle!

I'm playing both DS2 and DS through sorta side by side.. I'm trying to understand DS weapon upgrade vs DS2. I have a Faith build in DS and I'm trying to figure out how to proceed with upgrading my weapon.. Do I have to upgrade it to +5 normal first before applying the Divine buff to it and then take it back up to +5 and eventually +10? Or can I skip going to +5 normal and immediately buff with Divine and start going up to +10 Divine?

Yes, you have to upgrade to normal +5 first then you can upgrade to the divine track.

http://darksouls.wikidot.com/divine

Upgrades are handled differently in all three games, so playing two simultaneously may prove even more confusing than otherwise.

Plan your upgrades carefully in DS1. The DS2 system is more forgiving, because there's no tree, just straight upgrading and sometimes adding a trait. Still good to plan, but not as crucial.

LudensCogitet wrote:

Anyway, it is niffy. And, I've finally started looking at wikis and whatnot for some things. Once I reached the +5 reinforcement cap I decided I needed a little guidance, as I would simply be shooting in the dark when upgrading otherwise.

Yeah, I found that is about the right level of progress in the game to start looking things up.

LudensCogitet wrote:

I got him on my second or third attempt with the Zweihander, and he dropped a Titanite Catch Pole! Woo! This thing, it is the bomb. Fairly quick weak attack, I can use it one handed, and it has over a hundred physical and magic attack each, so my attack power is over 300. I likes it, but apparently it scales with intelligence, and I have a strength build (sort of).

Wow, that's great! I never got one of those to drop.

So, I was grinding for souls to upgrade my Zweihander to +5 (I'm fighting the Gaping Dragon and thought a heavy hitter might be a good idea), and I decided to fight that headless dude with one leg that is just out the door from Andrei.

I got him on my second or third attempt with the Zweihander, and he dropped a Titanite Catch Pole! Woo! This thing, it is the bomb. Fairly quick weak attack, I can use it one handed, and it has over a hundred physical and magic attack each, so my attack power is over 300. I likes it, but apparently it scales with intelligence, and I have a strength build (sort of).

Anyway, it is niffty. And, I've finally started looking at wikis and whatnot for some things. Once I reached the +5 reinforcement cap I decided I needed a little guidance, as I would simply be shooting in the dark when upgrading otherwise.

danopian wrote:

Wow, that's great! I never got one of those to drop.

When I was looking into the weapon online, some guy had posted something like "some lucky noobs probably got it to drop on their first run." And I thought to myself "I am that noob!"

My main problem with this game vs Dark Souls 2 is that it's so god damn "janky". It runs like sh*t even on my PC's.. half the animations look like they have 4 frames in them.. you get all sorts of weird frame drops for apparently no reason..it's not Resident Evil bad in terms of control but it does seem counter-intuitive to make a combat demanding game and then saddle it with a craptacular engine. The upside with DSFix is it looks great lol.. I can see why many people prefer this look vs Dark Souls 2.

The worst performance hitches I ever noticed were in Blighttown, and with Sif - there's a puddle in his arena and the framerate can tank if you fight in it. Otherwise, I have never had an issue elsewhere in the game on PC.

Since the 360 version is free this month, I did pick that up, and have noticed it has more performance issues that the PC version. I'm not sure how it runs on a PS3.

I noticed a couple dips in Female Doggotown and random other occurrences, likely due to my aging PS3. Otherwise, no problems whatsoever.

Should I uncap FPS in DSFIX?.. all sorts of warnings not to.

No, don't. The engine goes bonkers. I'm not sure what the issue is. I know the game crashed outright consistently with AA on with my old video card, so I doubt that's your problem, but you could check.

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

maverickz wrote:

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

Ok, pardon me for my ignorance, but what are these DSFix and DSCFix that you speak of? Besides running as an administrator and whatnot to get things going in Windows 8, I haven't touched the game at all and it runs fine for me (a little slow down when both Bell Gargoyles breathed fire, when the Gaping Dragon stomped right by me, and when new areas are loading, but nothing serious).

maverickz wrote:

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

I vary between three.. all are fairly top of the line. In short I get crappy performance on two of them (especially compared to other games)..have not tried it yet on my Steam PC in my man cave

My main system is i7-4930K w/64GB of Ram and 3 AMD 290x's connected to 3 30" Monitors running DS at 7680x1600 resolution... I also tried it on a i7-4770K w/32GB of Ram and 3 Nvidia Titan's connected to an Asus 4K 60hz monitor... in both cases its a very "janky" game.. perhaps the sub 30fps is the real issue.

Both systems ran DS2 very well..seems like that uses a completely new engine.

LudensCogitet wrote:
maverickz wrote:

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

Ok, pardon me for my ignorance, but what are these DSFix and DSCFix that you speak of? Besides running as an administrator and whatnot to get things going in Windows 8, I haven't touched the game at all and it runs fine for me (a little slow down when both Bell Gargoyles breathed fire, when the Gaping Dragon stomped right by me, and when new areas are loading, but nothing serious).

http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?tag=...

If you haven't been using this yet, install it and prepare to be impressed with the bump in visual fidelity.

TheGameguru wrote:
maverickz wrote:

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

I vary between three.. all are fairly top of the line. In short I get crappy performance on two of them (especially compared to other games)..have not tried it yet on my Steam PC in my man cave :)

I have ran the game on 2 different PCs. The 2nd PC was better, but I got some pretty big framerate drops that I never had on my weaker machine. It is just a janky engine that seems to run poorly on some machines =/

My suspicion is that even though I force an SLI profile.. its not really working at all thus I'm trying to push all those pixels across essentially 1 GPU.. I'll have to turn on the visual SLI scaling indicator to see if my 2nd and 3rd GPU's are getting used and if so how much.

Did you try to play on one Monitor with normal resolution? Sounds like SLI issue, with a good PC like yours you should have no issues except potentiall Blighttown, Sif and a ladder in New Londo.

TheGameguru wrote:
maverickz wrote:

Gameguru, I don't know what kind of PC you're running on, but I never ran into any graphical problems at all. With DSFix and DSCFix installed but essentially untouched. I had momentary framerate slowdowns if I Alt-Tabbed out of the game and came back. Other than that, silky smooth the entire time.

I vary between three.. all are fairly top of the line. In short I get crappy performance on two of them (especially compared to other games)..have not tried it yet on my Steam PC in my man cave

My main system is i7-4930K w/64GB of Ram and 3 AMD 290x's connected to 3 30" Monitors running DS at 7680x1600 resolution... I also tried it on a i7-4770K w/32GB of Ram and 3 Nvidia Titan's connected to an Asus 4K 60hz monitor... in both cases its a very "janky" game.. perhaps the sub 30fps is the real issue.

Both systems ran DS2 very well..seems like that uses a completely new engine.

Hmm, so I'm not up on what the current state of PC game specs are, but this is what I have on my laptop and it runs DS great.

Intel Core i7-2670QM Processor, 2.2 GHz (Max Turbo Frequency 3.1GHz), 6MB Smart Cache
16GB, PC3-12800/1600Mhz DDR3 - 4 x 4GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570M w/1.5GB GDDR5
Windows 7 Home Premium Edition 64-bit

I've played both DS and DS2. I think that DS is the best.

It's great reading people's fresh impressions of the game, helps wash some of that DkS II taint out of my mind and remind me why I love this game. I think I'll have to do another playthrough soon.

TheGameguru wrote:

My main problem with this game vs Dark Souls 2 is that it's so god damn "janky". It runs like sh*t even on my PC's.. half the animations look like they have 4 frames in them.. you get all sorts of weird frame drops for apparently no reason..it's not Resident Evil bad in terms of control but it does seem counter-intuitive to make a combat demanding game and then saddle it with a craptacular engine. The upside with DSFix is it looks great lol.. I can see why many people prefer this look vs Dark Souls 2.

Yes, DkS II is a lot smoother. I would find it hard to play both games in parallel. If you stick with just one you'll get used to its particular feel. It's a bit like Mass Effect 3 vs Mass Effect 2. ME3 is a lot faster, if you go hop into ME2 right after playing ME3 the combat feels slow as molasses. However, I actually prefer ME2's slower pace even though it can be off putting initially, you have to play it for a while to get used to it again.

GameGuru: Try running without SLI enabled (difficult to do with multiple monitors, I know :\ ). When I first tried out this game, I was running dual 6950s and it chugged the framerate no matter what settings I ran it at. I didn't think to turn off Crossfire at the time, I just chalked it up to being a horrible port. Now that I have this computer from you (single GTX 770 3GB) it runs buttery smooth at full bore.

WipEout wrote:

GameGuru: Try running without SLI enabled (difficult to do with multiple monitors, I know : ). When I first tried out this game, I was running dual 6950s and it chugged the framerate no matter what settings I ran it at. I didn't think to turn off Crossfire at the time, I just chalked it up to being a horrible port. Now that I have this computer from you (single GTX 770 3GB) it runs buttery smooth at full bore.

Yeah I gave up.. played with all sorts of various Crossfire and SLI profiles to try and get it running on my main PC's but nothing could fix the performance. SLI just flat out doesnt work and neither of my main systems can run at my full resolution with just one card working (7680X1600 or UHD). So I have to play in my basement at 1080P on my HDTV which is fine for this game since that really seems to be the sweet spot.. since you can max out the DSFix eyecandy settings and still run well with a single GPU (my Steambox has a Nvidia 780Ti). I just hit Blighttown after doing some Green Titanite Shard farming in the Depths on the slimes to bring my Claymore to +5 Divine.

Off to Darkroot Gardens first to farm up more Moss before I tackle Blighttown.

I'm playing through La-Mulana right now, and if any of you folks are looking for a Dark-Souls-level challenge I highly recommend it. It's a punishingly difficult 2D platformer with metroidvania-style open world exploration, pretty challenging puzzles to solve (like trying to find the DS DLC), and very difficult bosses that require near-pixel-perfect timing and reflexes to beat.

It has a risk-reward system similar to Dark Souls in which death sets you back to your last quick-save (only possible at certain locations), but you can teleport back to those save locations and save whatever gains you've made at the cost of having to traverse back to where you were - and the world is sprawling and complex to navigate, so it may take >5 minutes and several attempts to get back. But like in Dark Souls, you open up routes and memorize paths to the point where you're pirouetting through enemies and dodging through fireballs and whatnot because you've done it 20 times. It feels very much like Dark Souls.

Last night I spent 2 hours on 20+ attempts to defeat one boss. I perfected the timing on all its attacks only to find that a new attack enters the rotation at some % health which was nearly impossible to dodge. Felt that Dark Souls rage. Kept trying.

/end pitch

TheGameguru wrote:
WipEout wrote:

GameGuru: Try running without SLI enabled (difficult to do with multiple monitors, I know : ). When I first tried out this game, I was running dual 6950s and it chugged the framerate no matter what settings I ran it at. I didn't think to turn off Crossfire at the time, I just chalked it up to being a horrible port. Now that I have this computer from you (single GTX 770 3GB) it runs buttery smooth at full bore.

Yeah I gave up.. played with all sorts of various Crossfire and SLI profiles to try and get it running on my main PC's but nothing could fix the performance. SLI just flat out doesnt work and neither of my main systems can run at my full resolution with just one card working (7680X1600 or UHD). So I have to play in my basement at 1080P on my HDTV which is fine for this game since that really seems to be the sweet spot.. since you can max out the DSFix eyecandy settings and still run well with a single GPU (my Steambox has a Nvidia 780Ti). I just hit Blighttown after doing some Green Titanite Shard farming in the Depths on the slimes to bring my Claymore to +5 Divine.

Off to Darkroot Gardens first to farm up more Moss before I tackle Blighttown.

Going with a Faith build? Make sure you do some co-op to get SunBros rep so you can throw lightning bolts like a BAMF.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
WipEout wrote:

GameGuru: Try running without SLI enabled (difficult to do with multiple monitors, I know : ). When I first tried out this game, I was running dual 6950s and it chugged the framerate no matter what settings I ran it at. I didn't think to turn off Crossfire at the time, I just chalked it up to being a horrible port. Now that I have this computer from you (single GTX 770 3GB) it runs buttery smooth at full bore.

Yeah I gave up.. played with all sorts of various Crossfire and SLI profiles to try and get it running on my main PC's but nothing could fix the performance. SLI just flat out doesnt work and neither of my main systems can run at my full resolution with just one card working (7680X1600 or UHD). So I have to play in my basement at 1080P on my HDTV which is fine for this game since that really seems to be the sweet spot.. since you can max out the DSFix eyecandy settings and still run well with a single GPU (my Steambox has a Nvidia 780Ti). I just hit Blighttown after doing some Green Titanite Shard farming in the Depths on the slimes to bring my Claymore to +5 Divine.

Off to Darkroot Gardens first to farm up more Moss before I tackle Blighttown.

Going with a Faith build? Make sure you do some co-op to get SunBros rep so you can throw lightning bolts like a BAMF.

Yes.. so far I havent had much luck with smart hosts.. mostly they end up falling into sh*t and dying before we even get to a boss. Probably just will wait until I get my Faith to 25 and join up that way.

danopian wrote:

I'm playing through La-Mulana right now, and if any of you folks are looking for a Dark-Souls-level challenge I highly recommend it. It's a punishingly difficult 2D platformer with metroidvania-style open world exploration, pretty challenging puzzles to solve (like trying to find the DS DLC), and very difficult bosses that require near-pixel-perfect timing and reflexes to beat.

It has a risk-reward system similar to Dark Souls in which death sets you back to your last quick-save (only possible at certain locations), but you can teleport back to those save locations and save whatever gains you've made at the cost of having to traverse back to where you were - and the world is sprawling and complex to navigate, so it may take >5 minutes and several attempts to get back. But like in Dark Souls, you open up routes and memorize paths to the point where you're pirouetting through enemies and dodging through fireballs and whatnot because you've done it 20 times. It feels very much like Dark Souls.

Last night I spent 2 hours on 20+ attempts to defeat one boss. I perfected the timing on all its attacks only to find that a new attack enters the rotation at some % health which was nearly impossible to dodge. Felt that Dark Souls rage. Kept trying.

/end pitch

yeah that game is great, really looking forward to the sequel. Although I'd say some of the puzzle sequences are pretty impossible to work out without a guide.

Like DS many bosses are a lot easier with the right weapons IIRC.