I write these blogs at work, usually during my lunch. It's probably obvious at this point, but as I detail the previous evening's Demon's Souls frivolities, I'm obsessively rediscovering the game while not playing it- digging through wikis and interacting with other fans via Reddit and Discord. Over the last week, I've met some of these fans in the heat of killing archdemons, and I found the that interaction lacking (if I'm being nice).
Yesterday's research period was different, though. The online servers for the game were tidied up on Wednesday evening, and while there wasn't an endgame event running globally (as the devs and publishers have done in the past), the Souls-centric nooks of the internet were all aflutter that online functions were working the way they should be once again. There are curiously few players active on the Discord channel, but the remaining faithful were emphatic.
And so, as I set myself for a few merciless invasions, I took some time to co-op with a few players anyway. I knew that it went against my grand design to do this; I wanted to make a new build every week for a different purpose, and Week 3 would be for abject cruelty toward other players via PvP. I felt a little guilty to go this route, actually. But last night, I had the best of both co-op and PvP, the servers working their magic online magic. I still hate listening to people talk when I play these games, but we had a great time all the same.
In terms of what I was there for, the hot and spicy player vs. player action, it's impossible not be even slightly taken by the prospect of another player invading your game at nearly any moment. With equal measures of thrill and irritation, any preset plans through a level are forced to be adjusted on the fly when the message scrolls along the bottom of the screen that another player found their way into your world. No longer will you search for useful, speedy routes from points A to B. Instead, you quickly survey your surroundings for the best place to take on another human mind with the armament that have currently equipped. You may have time to adjust things according to what you have in your current inventory before this other person finds you, but it's not as if you have an opportunity to run back to Stockpile Thomas for gear more appropriate for what's about to go down. Invasions force you to think on your feet and prepare (or re-prepare in some cases) on a moment's notice. Winning the "match" and killing an invading player is that much more rewarding given these circumstances.
This happened to me twice as I ran the co-op game with other people last evening. The first time encounter was not a happy story: stuck at the beginning of 4-2, I decided to try to kill the Grim Reaper and using the area around his corpse as something of an arena. The other player caught wind of this, and backstabbed me to hell and back for it. The second time was a trip through 3-1. The other players I was with were killed off, and on my way back to summoning them, I dealt with a dual katana-wielding opponent that met the business end of my magic stat. Let's take a quick moment, I told the Discord voice chat channel, to bask in the glory of beating this other player's ass, unprepaired as I was. They were amused
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