What's different?
There's still a lot to learn about this title, but here's what we know so far:
# The world is far more colorful than the previous game. Take a look at screens of Dark Souls to see for yourself.
# Instead of a hub world to access other areas, the world of Dark Souls is seamlessly connected. We saw a forest, castle grounds and a hellish area surrounded by lava.
# It will theoretically be harder than Demon's Souls.
It's still difficult, right?
According to the game's creators, yes. We saw lots of traps and undead soldiers and archers attacking together. We were told that Dark Souls would still have areas where "the player has no chance" so be prepared to die a lot.
What happens when you die?
In Demon's Souls, when you perished the game forced you to start the level over at the beginning and you lost all your currency, or "souls." If you managed to make it back to your body you could recover the souls you lost, but if you died again before reaching your corpse, all your souls were gone forever.
Although there's not a lot of information on how death will work in Dark Souls, it may employ a similar system.
How does combat work?
There was no opportunity to play the game, but from what we've seen it's similar to Demon's Souls. You'll block until you can get close to enemies and finish them off with melee attacks. There's magic as well -- things from a standard fireball to iron armor that makes you incredibly strong, but slow.
There are 100 types of weapons to try out and different strategies to test. We saw a mini-boss fight against a sort of ogre-thing where the player used a powerful, but slow weapon called the Great Sword that he acquired from a treasure orb (it looks like a fireball). Then the knight switched to an average sword, climbed a ladder and jumped off the edge of the tower, stabbing the ogre in the back. You can also mix magic spells with melee.
There are no "safe spots" in Dark Souls -- during the ogre mini-boss demo mentioned above, the player went up to a higher zone only to have the mini-boss jump up to the same platform.
Is it still a PlayStation 3 exclusive?
In Japan, Dark Souls will published by Atlus (the same company that published Demon's Souls) and will only be available on the PlayStation 3. In North America and European territories the game will be published by Namco Bandai and produced for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
When will it be released?
Dark Souls is expected to hit store shelves this holiday (2011) season.
