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.