Between Load our Last Souls, Patrick Klepek's Youtube playthrough and EpicNameBro's quality output, I've ingested a lot of Dark Souls over the last year or so. That said, I've only played maybe 6 hours or so of the game itself. The reward of discovery and exploration has in part been ruined by all the videos I've watched.

With the release of Dark Souls 2 I'm really tempted to just jump right into DS2. I've grokked the mechanics and have a deep fascination with the series' lore, but I am still a very bad Dark Souls player.

Rumours are coming out that DS2 is going to be way harder than the first game, so my lack of mastery of the DS1 has me a little scared, though the promise of going into a Souls game without having its world spoiled for me from the outset is really tempting.

Is anyone else jumping right into DS2 without having beaten DS1?

Yeah Jeff's almost done with it, from what I've read of his twitter.

I haven't beaten Dark Souls yet. Farthest I've gotten on several different occasions is Blighttown. And yeah, screw that place. I'll definitely be picking up Dark Souls 2 though. On PC as well, so I've got another month or so to finally go back to Dark Souls and try to make some progress.

I haven't played either of the souls games, but have thoroughly been hyped by all of the sites content!

I watched plenty of the first two, I'm just gonna jump in.

Only ever played Demon's Souls a bit past the first boss, never touched Dark Souls. But like many others, I watched both GB features, so I'll probably feel comfy enough to dive into DS2 right away, if the interest rises to that level.

You aren't going to be that bad off, there are enough changes this time around that I had to relearn some of the basics from the previous game. The timing on parries and transitions is just different enough to throw you off, so in this case I don't think missing Dark Souls is going to hurt you very much. At least you'll have the general idea down and what is expected of you as far as exploration and (some) itemization.

Dark Souls vets are going to be pretty surprised the first time they get wrecked by a lowly zombie because they missed every parry or weren't getting their shield up in time. Took me a couple of hours to get used to it.

Ive never played much of Dark or Demon Souls, but after watching the guys play over the past few months, im all in on Dark Souls 2 and even pre ordered it. Going to a local midnight launch. I hope i can hack it.

I've consumed all of the site's content on Demon and Dark Souls but I've never touched Dark Souls and only beat the first boss in Demon Souls. I don't have a lot of time to dedicate to games anymore so I decided to stop there and jump straight into Dark Souls 2. Hope I won't be missing out on too many lore references.

Brandon the guy who played Dark Souls a ton said that this is the hardest game he has ever played but also the best one. So if you want a real challenge go for it. But maybe it is really hard if you have not played much Dark Souls before.

According to Steam, I have played Dark Souls for thirteen hours. About two or three hours of that was with a previous character.

I would play more of it if GFWL wasn't getting shut down. I started to really love it after the initial hurdle of not knowing how to play, but then I got that news. If I'm not mistaken, my saves are going to be gone even if the game gets turned into a Steam game, and I really don't want to see dozens of hours of gameplay disappear, so I'm going to sit back and see what happens. If Dark Souls becomes completely unplayable, then I guess I'll never play it. I don't want to go through the crap frame rate in Blight Town, I'd rather just play the PC version of DS2.

Until today I've never had much luck making it past Sen's Fortress, but since I began a new character last week I've been making so much headway in this game it's ridiculous. I actually just beat (the ever-living shit out of) Dunkstein and Slamough about ten minutes ago. I've had DSll pre-ordered on PSN for a while now, but since I've started making progress in the first game, I'm not sure if I want to move on just yet.

@rainvillain: I beat DaS just recently, don't even understand what the fuss is about when it comes to being hard, sure it is a game in which you'll die more often than any other but it's not legendary hard as some imply. Just learn the controls well and the game mechanics and most likely you'll be fine, most of the people who suck at it don't understand how the game works.

@believer258: It's important to know that the game will not become "completely unplayable." Even if Bamco does nothing to update Dark Souls on PC, you'll still be able to play it as a pure singleplayer game by using an offline GFWL profile. Only the multiplayer functionality, important though it is, is imperiled.

@mb said:

I felt like I had that experience going into Dark Souls from Demon's Souls so I'm definetly gonna be more careful this time.