Dark Souls 3 - Jolly Co-op With The Boys

Yesterday me and a couple of the boys decided we were gonna play some games together. Something other than Final Fantasy XIV. All three of us play that game almost every day but we rarely set off time to sit down together, get on Discord and actually play gamer together. We just party up to do the occasional dungeon or raid together.

We had no idea what to play and while suggestions like Worms: Reloaded and Pummel Party were mentioned I had an even better idea. Dark Souls 3! Me and one of my boys here has probably played this game for over 100 hours together on the Playstation 4. We've played the game in its entirety both solo and in co-op. We love this game.

The third guy doesn't have the same relationship with Dark Souls 3. He rage quit the game a couple of years ago after spending over three hours on the first boss, Iudex Gundyr. Even though he has a rough first meeting with the game back then we convinced him to play it. Much helped by the fact that the both of us has been watching Asmongold getting rekt at Dark Souls 1 on YouTube.

Ironically my friend here managed to beat Iudex Gundyr on his first attempt this time around while it took me three whole attempts. I was fuming by the end of a fight as it really shouldn't take me that many attempts. Not off to a great start.

Dark Souls 3 is one of those games that I can play over and over. It's just such a beautiful and perfect game. The world looks great, the lore is awesome although subtle and the combat has some of the crispest mechanics I've ever witnessed in a game.

I got online a couple of hours earlier than the boys because I wanted to farm out my favorite early game weapon, the Great Machete. This is a relatively rare drop from an enemy in the Undead Settlement which is the third area in the game.

Having played this game so many times I just rushed through both of the first areas without barely killing an enemy. I picked up all the important items like Estus Shards and such and went straight for the second boss Vordt of the Boreal Valley. It took me two attempts to take him down which again is one more attempt than I had wished for. This really isn't a hard boss once you've killed him 20 times.

With Vordt down I rushed straight for the enemy to farm him out. I'm used to spending around an hour farming this enemy for the weapon to drop but against all odds the weapon actually dropped on my first kill. With my Great Machete equipped it was time to help my buddies get through the first areas of the game which I had rushed through.

One thing we hasn't accounted for was the fact that this is an old game. There's not a whole lot of new players running through the game for the first time. Most of the player base who still play it are hardcore PVP-ers. This hit us hard.

How co-op works in this game is you have to use an item called Ember. This gives you increased health and lets you summon other players to your world. On the other hand it also lets other players invade your world with one mission in mind; to kill you. We got absolutely face-stomped by some of these dudes. Even though we were three players and they just one. These guys have probably grinded out the game for so long that they're just to good.

We decided to change our style. Each of us started streaming our gameplay on Discord so all of us could watch each other play. We then soloed each area and only summoned each other when we got to the boss room. This was actually loads of fun even though we didn't actually play together that much. A little weird but it was actually awesome. We might even start playing games more like this as it was really cool to just be like "Hey, check this out!" and have them check out my stream instead of sending a screenshot.

We played for about six hours and got a couple of bosses down. We mostly spent time clearing out the different areas and we didn't want to rush things since this was the first time one of my friends was actually playing it. This is a game you just have to enjoy as you go through it.

We probably won't continue our co-op journey through Dark Souls 3 but we're gonna continue playing it. I love this game and have no issue playing it once again. I never played it on PC either so it's really cool to play it with enhanced graphics and in stable 60 FPS.

I'm gonna make it my mission to play this every now and then and beat every single boss as a solo player. I've done this before with all of the bosses except for Gael and Midir the Darkeater in the Ringed City DLC. I never actually killed Midir and I sought co-op help for Gael. Those bosses were just to hard for me but this time around I'll do it for sure. Just need to commit and not be a pussy.

I'm also gonna give Nioh a try after seeing @strawhat raging at it. Need to show him that it's probably not as hard as he's making it out to be.

Did y'all play any co-op games this weekend?