Dark Souls II: Reaching for too much.

I tried to do another stream, but I flew too close to the sun. I cranked the setting for my local capture, and set my upstream quality rate for 4 Mbps. I had gone to speed test and it told me I was getting around 5.5 up. Well the stream kept hanging so I stopped and started it back up, this seemed to be the thing that messed up my local recording. I'll get this down yet.

Had three major things happen during this time, I'll try to chronicle them here.

Fire Longsword:

During the previous session a Twitch viewer had mentioned the Fire Longsword. I had figured that this hallway full of fire would probably be a good place to look for it. I looked it up online in the time between sessions. This had me running past the fire salamander rather than fighting it. Probably wise at this point. It also warned of two hollows near the chest that held the fire sword. These guys never showed up, so maybe I had cleared them out of the area before I went to grab the sword? I'm not sure.

Super Knight:

Hi there, can we be friends?

So after beating up on some hollows I get to this platform and this bird carrying a guy flies by. Oh, okay that's neat but there is a guy throwing firebombs at me so I go and knock him off the little battlement he is standing on and turn around and this massive knight is standing behind me.

Then he hits me, I can't quite remember if I get time to heal or not, but he's fast. And he can also shoot magic rays out of his sword, I don't have a shield out and I'm trying to heal and then...

Was that fair?

Doing a quick scan of the DS wiki I couldn't find any information about him. He didn't seem to come back when I went to retrieve my souls. Does he come back? Does anyone beat him the first time they meet him?

Finding the Cartographer:

So the next little section involved me doing my best impression of an Assassin's Creed game jumping from dilapidated rooftop to dilapidated rooftop killing guys with my swords. I think I've nicknamed them "Sparky" and "Lefty." I get to a cave and start slowly walking in and a large boulder rushes across the cave in front of me. I think to myself would anyone really be sprinting through here? Then I see this:

I made what I thought was a really funny Courtney Love joke while I thought I was recording.

I touched a couple bloodstains nearby and decided that the trap was trying to explore the hole left by the boulder. That's a little more devious. In any case I rounded the corner and found the Cartographer I've seen so many people talking about. At least I think he's the one. He gave me a key to the mansion in Majula, so that might be the next area I scope out or I might push on to try to find the next bonfire. I'm not sure which I'm more likely to do at this point.

I made a joke about GIS here that probably wasn't as good as the Hole one.

Looking at this after it's done I'm not sure if this works better than the videos or not. Maybe I should do both for a while and see which I like better? I'm also going to give creating a little Piltdown Gaming banner for the top of this a shot, it'll probably take me a while to come up with something I like.

Dark Souls II: Drangeleic Explorer Society Application

Threw my hat into the ring in this forum post.

I decided to check out the Dark Souls II forums on GiantBomb and noticed a sticky post at the top which was looking to collect all the various streams, Youtube channels, and blogs covering Dark Souls II from the community. I saw that and thought, hey I may just be starting this thing up, and currently not very good at it, but "Hey, that's me!" so I let the original poster know about my blog.

I hadn't really thought about this in any of the posts I've made so far but it should be fairly obvious since I'm just chronicling my play through of the game but there are going to be spoilers.

So last time I played I spent most of the time running up the the Heide Knight in the Forest of Fallen Giants over and over again without much luck. This is how these games can get the better of me. I'll get frustrated at a point and just start making silly mistakes. From being even the least bit present on the internet I can tell that I'm not alone in having this happen to me. After last time though I had accumulated enough souls to level 3 times. So I did and took off to try to get him again. After taking a wrong turn I got to him and came oh so close to killing him. There were at least a couple times when I was pretty sure I was going to die but didn't. I had him whittled down to an imperceptible amount of health when he got me.



One of the great things about playing these Souls games is how they can make even these relatively minor combats in the greater scheme of the game seem epic. However I did not give up and as I returned I noticed all these throwing knives that I had been picking up and thought hey these might be useful. Indeed they were. I'm not sure how much of it was the increased stats, how much was softening him up with the throwing knives but my first little victory in Dark Souls II felt pretty good. After this I took his lightning sword and noticed that I had picked up a couple viewers on Twitch. After this I proceed through some very poor gameplay to lose around a thousand souls. I think these may have been the first that I've permanently lost so far. It was bound to happen at some point.

After this and being clued in to another sword I'll probably want to look for I did a little more exploring and found the next bonfire with a crazy lady sitting by it. Cleared a bit of the area after that saw a big fire looking lizard and decided that was enough for this bit of exploration.

I'm still trying to figure out the best settings and way to do this streaming to Twitch and posting of videos to Youtube. I figure the best way to approach this is to just keep at it and keep tweeking things until I get them where I like them. That sounds like a sentiment that has an eventual endpoint but it probably doesn't.

I don't think I have my sound levels quite where I want them yet. I do think the latest video is better than the previous one in this regard, but I think for the sake of watch ability I need to increase the voice level over the gameplay by maybe a fair chunk. I've been setting the levels when I'm at the loading screen which is much quieter than when there is action on the screen, either that or I'm speaking too softly.

I think I'm starting to figure my capture setup a bit. For this video I switched from an old dual core AMD computer I had lying around to my main PC. I still can't get the ElGato to play nice with OBS but I'm getting further than I did on the other computer. I'm also a little more confident in turning the capture settings up on this computer than I am on that old one. After looking at this video on Youtube compared to the old one it isn't great but it isn't quite the pile of garbage visual fidelity wise as that one. I thought I was capturing it at 720 and the file I have on my computer is, so I'm not sure why Youtube isn't displaying it as such. I think it has something to do with the bitrate of the file I uploaded. I think I'm headed in the right direction though.

The other thing I'm not sure about is how often and how long I should be making these little videos. Should I be doing the whole playthrough online? Should I make some progress offline and then just stream every once in a while? Is an hour too long, or not long enough? Should I stream for an hour then break the video into smaller chunks? That might work better for these little write ups.

I know one thing that I need to do to increase my success at this is to have a consistent schedule for doing this. I'm not sure what that is yet but I'm pretty sure two posts every 6 months or so is not the ideal for engaging any kind of community. I think I'm going to shoot for at least one broadcast a week and see how things shake out from there.

Dark Souls II: Super housekeeping and a renewal of effort edition.

Remember when games would put out fansite press kits? I got this from their Facebook page.

So, I'm still not super sure what I want to do with this space. I do want to return to Shadowrun for the SNES, but I realize that there are newer games I want to play. With school and work the time I'm able to dedicate to this sort of sub hobby of my hobby is pretty limited, as evidenced by my lack of posts or streaming output. I had the idea of making a post on my initial impressions of the Xbox One and I had the idea of making a year end post, but I think the window has closed on the latter, and after I maybe capture some footage of me getting killed a lot in Titanfall I will probably return to the former idea, but currently the zeitgeist I'm following and vainly trying to be part of is Dark Souls II.

The format I've chosen so far is to stream some gameplay out live then archive it to the Youtubes then embed it here and post my thoughts on the game clip and game in question. I'm inspired to do this by my two favorite gaming sites Giant Bomb and the CRPG addict. In a way I'm trying to emulate both of them while trying to do my own thing. Probably succeeding at neither but there you have it. I suppose as this goes on and if I get any feedback I might find a direction.

The last little bit of housekeeping is that I'm going to try to make these blog posts closer to the actual times I make the videos I have a video or two that I've made for Shadowrun that I haven't made posts for. They're upcoming in 2050 don't worry. My problem is that I don't really take notes during these gameplay sessions (I'm pretty lousy at notes in classes that aren't pure lectures either). I might be better if I weren't live streaming all of them but trying to make the stream interesting with my rapier wit (I want to go there) but that is the most efficient way for me to create content.

Enough of me complaining, Dark Souls II is out and all of us who are going to play it are going to die quite a bit. Why did I choose this game to be my return to live streaming? Well I was mistaken in thinking that streaming a popular game might get some viewers. I now realize that all the popular streams are streaming the same game and I'm buried underneath people who have been doing this more than like once.  Whenever I tweet out I'm going live I usually get 2 viewers, I'm not sure if that is a function of my tweeting things out or if two people who just don't want to have anything to do with chat are watching my channel for a while after I log out, I'm guessing the former.

In any case, my plan going forward is to try to post a summary as close to the streaming date as possible as such here is my first foray into Dark Souls II.

Unfortunately I was using a new video capture device and computer and apperntly I hadn't set up the stream to correctly take audio info. There are a lot of bits where I try to do dumb things and make pithy comments that just look like me standing around, fortunately it's the tutorial area and just me fumbling my way through it and it should be largely ignored especially how many times I died. I'm also thankful you guys didn't see how I got the "This is Dark Souls" achievement. I'm slightly embarrassed/proud of how dumb I got that achievement.  I wanted to get through the character creation bit before I started streaming and I managed to die twice before that area. The first time I died I thought hey the pathway in front of me looks like the way they want me to go. It would be like a Souls game to put something in the opposite direction, so I went the other way, I went too far. My running the opposite direction took me off the side of a cliff and well I died, I didn't lose any souls but I did lose my chance for a perfect run (ha). The second time I died that wasn't chronicled was when I saw all the creatures running around before the house with all the creepy ladies in it, and they kept running away from me I thought it might be advantageous to kill one or two before I "started the game" or "praised the sun." Yea, they didn't feel like having any of that. They all quickly ganged up on me and I died but I did get the 30 or so souls back when I respawned, maybe you can farm that area, it's weird. I don't understand why it's there. I'm sure there is a reason if I started reading the internet would become apparent. So then we go into what I actually played through and that first section is going to be super boring, or at least it would be to me since I just go through the tutorial area a few times and try to crack a few jokes which don't get recorded because of some problem I had with the Elgato capture device I was using and the software, I tested my mic going into broadcasting and it seemed to work, with their software, and it captured gameplay and failures against those hippo looking monsters at the beginning of the game. But for some reason it catches a bit of my mic at points and I don't really understand what is going on with it, I'll discuss some of that at the end of this post. In the end I fought the hippo guys enough to understand I'm not supposed to kill them at that point in the game. I moved on and went to the starter/only "town in the game" which lead us to this clip. Which is just as if not more embarrassing as far as skill goes. That is my first foray into really gonna a lot. It does seem that my VO is pretty quiet vs Game Audio, next time I'll pump my mic back to where it was a the beginning of the stream.


 

Yea, I'm still trying to figure things out as streaming goes, A, that rapier wit I was talking about. I know I fall short a bunch of times. B, I'm going to boost the volume of my VO (read rapier wit) next time around. C, I'm not going to ingest a ton of fluids next time.

Lessons learned during part two of DS stuff first empty the bladder, I'm really sorry about that. Don't take sips of a soda durning the stream because that will cut it off early, I feel for Breaking Brad segments now.  This video kind of sucks because it shows me sucking it up against the same stupid semi boss several times if anyone has good suggestions on how to use my 3 leveling points I would be glad to hear them.