Major Info Blow Out! Mega super spoilers below! Read at your own risk...

THE START:

Opening cinematic is similar to Curse trailer with added scenes. Your character is told to go to Drangleic and jumps into the whirlpool. You wake up and talk to the three old ladies who help you "remember" your class, starting gift, and appearance.

CHARACTER CREATION:

Not as many classes so far, maybe 7? One new one that I noticed was Explorer who had some cool armor that featured a bird on your shoulder. I picked Sorcerer. Starting gift items were similar, HP ring, healing item, something that sounded useless. I took Human Effigy. Character creator seems much improved and has more options. I used all the pre-sets and made a smexy pink-haired girl. Seemed to be missing Twin-Pigtails... No twin-piggies, no buy...? You can add a tattoo to your character's face.

TUTORIAL:

Forest area with gravestones that tell you all the controls. Area is bright but there are those braziers you can light everywhere. Will we return here later when it's all dark...?

MAJULA:

Pretty seaside town with many NPCs already there. The BGM for the area was...interesting.

The Emerald Herald-She tells you to become the new king and gives you an Estus flask. She hangs around the Majula bonfire in various poses. Leveling up can only be done with her, it seems. Kind of annoying that you need to warp back to Majula to level up. Maybe this changes later?

Crestfallen Man-Same character as in the comic. He talks a lot and lets you join Way of Blue. I think he said something about four powerful foes you'll run into along the way.

Armor Merchant and Blacksmith-Items are for sale but everything was too expensive for me. You were not given many free souls at this point. Perhaps there will be a tutorial boss added in so you can start with a few thousand souls. The lack of early souls ended up being an issue for me...

Cat-A nice looking cat who seems to be a Pardoner and sells some cool rings. One is a cat ring that negates fall damage. One strengthens connections to those in the same covenant. One allows you to hear the voice of your foes... Co-op and voice chat rings?!

Siegmeyer 2-A scruffy guy with a huge sword who is stuck because the door won't open.

COVENANTS AVAILABLE:

Way of Blue-Already known

Covenant of the Fittest(forgot actual name)-In this one, you win fights and receive Awestones. By offering them to the covenant, you rise on a leader board. Basically a dualist covenant with bragging rights.

THE BONFIRE:

Big changes here. You cannot level up but a new option called BURN has been added. By Burning Human Effigies you can weaken the connection to other worlds and stop invasions. So you can turn human to summon or use it at the bonfire to turn off multiplayer. You can also burn another item that increases the difficulty of the area. Self-Gravelording! This item may have been one of the starting gifts... Either that or I saw it in a loading screen.

TORCH:

Seems to have a time-limit now. I saw numbers that looked like 5 minutes. Torch not needed in these early areas.

ESTUS:

Remember people complaining about too many Lifegems...? Heh heh heh... From trolled us hard... We will really need those! The Estus you start with only has...ONE CHARGE! You need to upgrade it to get more. Everyone will be using only Lifegems early on. I was starting to run out of them after dying a few times. Yikes!

ITEMS/GEAR:

There's a Horn item that is used to "be forgiven for unjustified disconnecting." Yankers are in trouble in this game!

Bronze Coin-Shatter this item to temporarily increase drop rates.

A brittle armor that breaks quickly but gives you a big power boost right before.

Great Scythe!

Bleeding and Dragon upgrade stones.

Looks like we have FOUR ring slots!

Part 2...

STATS:

Seems like the Resistance stat is gone. Back to only 9 stats. From what I remembered, it seems Agility was nerfed but also had Resistance rolled into it. Each stat also increased your HP slightly so maybe Vigor is the useless stat this time...? The stat page and menus were much improved from the Beta and have text on them now. However, they still need some work.

THE EXPERIENCE:

When picking a class, I noticed very few of the characters had shields and Sorcerer was one of them. Starting weapon was a dagger. The Soul Arrow magic was powerful but dagger and no shield was making things rough. After dying a few times I figured I'd get something better. The weapons I could buy were all too expensive and I couldn't wield them. An okay shield I had looted required 6 STR. The Sorcerer starts with 3 STR!! I had to use all my itemized souls and farm just to get those three levels! The best weapon I looted that I could use was...Broken Sword! Yes, I played for an hour with a freak'in broken sword as my strongest weapon. Prepare to die... Enemies in packs will swarm you and you have no chance. I think they've made it harder to run through the levels by using bottleneck areas. You need to be patient. I got pretty far and then died when I was trying to show off something to a friend. Then I tried to rush through and died like 3 straight times. Had to take it slow to get back to where I had gotten originally.

THE ONLINE:

The game feels super empty and lifeless without the online features. Playing this connected is definitely the way to go. Getting your messages rated may be very important early on because of the lack of healing items.

GRAPHICS:

These were a big step up from DS. Some really amazing stuff. The art style is quite different however, felt cartoonier. I noticed some hitches in the frame rate but I think it was loading going on in the background as you crossed zones.

ENEMIES:

Some really creepy ones. Those naked things with the giant...sacks... Terrifying! There are some weird rat things that follow you long distances. Some giants. Good stuff! You would also hear what sounds like ravenous beasts in the background. You never know if that means something is going to jump out at you. Very unsettling.

BRANCHING PATHS:

I was confident they were going to make the start of the game more straightforward... Trolled... Seems like there's at least four different ways you can go and they were all hard! I'm pretty sure I found the proper way and got through a forest area to the place where the first demo was. (with Turtle Knights) However, this area was altered a lot and I ended up in a totally different spot. It felt like I went pretty far, including two bonfires, but there were no bosses yet. I did see another player encounter a boss in what I assume is the "wrong way." It was a giant you face on a somewhat small platform. The player got knocked off it immediately. Since I had seen that, I didn't go that direction. There's also a cool scene where you see giant footsteps in the mud and if you follow it you find one of the giant Cyclops guys.

Source?

From what I understand agility wasn't nerfed, it was buffed to an absurd level because it dictates your movement/action speed.

I'm not reading the majority of this due to spoilers, I want to go into the game fresh but I did read this part.

Man, if that is true, that's awesome, I would so go through a Souls game with a little bird on my shoulder.

THE BONFIRE:

"Big changes here. You cannot level up but a new option called BURN has been added. By Burning Human Effigies you can weaken the connection to other worlds and stop invasions. So you can turn human to summon or use it at the bonfire to turn off multiplayer. You can also burn another item that increases the difficulty of the area. Self-Gravelording! This item may have been one of the starting gifts... Either that or I saw it in a loading screen."

That's a neat way to create a tradeoff for people who don't want pvp. Woop, Woop.

Source discovered

I hope at least the part with emerald lady is true. After ENB posted about how she would be your "new best friend" I had been wondering if she would turn out to be a Maiden in Black type of character.

Skipped the story related part of the post but...having played in one of the network tests, it's really good news to hear that the world is different. I like thinking that From played their cards so close to the vest and didn't actually give too much away with what they let us play already. There were definitely not 4 ring slots and 1 estus in the network test. But I'm not too sure how I feel about 4 ring slots. I'll be curious to see how much of this turns out to be true.

I haven't looked forward to a game so much since probably Vice City, Half-Life 2, or maybe Portal 2. Stupid 'nother month and a half. At least Left Behind will distract me for part of that time.

@fredchuckdave said:

@fredchuckdave,Thanks. @jz, seriously bro, unless you are SteamyPunk, make note of your source.

Anyway, I'd take it all with a grain of salt for the time being.

Boom a bunch of stuff confirmed by the podcast

Some other streams are confirming the one flask thing.

I can hardly contain my excitement. I am ready for this.

4 ring slots confirmed!

I'm not thrilled about not leveling at bonfires any more. Well, maybe the level structure is different enough that it won't be an issue? I dunno.

Interesting info on the rings. I'm also liking the idea of a starting town. I wonder what the odds are of it being burned to the ground at some point.

So, you actually got to play the game? How'd you swing that?

@viking_funeral: nope this a collection of stuff

Here is the stream I'm watching

http://www.twitch.tv/brandon505 he was at the same event as brad and vinny.

That's clever. I was nervous reading about the invade-anytime news but that seems like it could turn out to be an incredibly simple, effective, and rightfully punitive way to do it.

Depending on drop frequency it could totally give you the ability to do what you want when you want. Maybe some would consider that too forgiving but I play more for the satisfaction of the combat, exploring and risk/reward of soul collecting/retrieving. I love the PVP concept but not when I'm deeply focused on a goal.

Can't wait to see how it plays out. Even if turns out that I have to pull the cord, I'm fine with that.

@professoress: there will be a disconnect penalty.

The disconnect penalty sounds annoying. If a glitcher who might mess up my stats or an invincible cheater invades, I'm supposed to bend over? And what if my internet keeps randomly disconnecting, like it has in the past? It's not like I don't see the benefit, though. I'd be frustrated if someone disconnected right before I killed them. Hopefully the penalty isn't too harsh. They better not put me on a dishonor list or something.

@ezekiel: play offline

I am

@ezekiel: I bet there is gonna be covenant based lists for disconnects. You might get tagged for target practice by someone.

"The game feels super empty and lifeless without the online features. Playing this connected is definitely the way to go."

@dudeglove: actually the guy on the stream said it was open to anyone in the bay area.

Oh yay, the Effigy thing seems cool. I will farm the hell out of those.

Wonder what the disconnect penalty will be. Haven't had trouble with my connection so far when playing. Temporary stat penalty? Covenant hit-list?

I just wish the PC version was closer to the console one, instead of a ways off as...Brad? Made it seem on the stream earlier.

@ezekiel: I like playing offline

Well Super empty and lifeless is what many love about the games and many finds the invasions very annoying.
Getting messages rated? Do you know how many just read the messages and just move on? Just look when brad plays :D.
Lack of healing items is hardly something that goes on through-out the game.

For me personal the Souls games are single player experiences and nothing I have seen yet seems better with multiplayer.
Except the AI phantoms, I think they only appear if you are online not sure tho.

Do you have any other objective facts about the multiplayer for the players who don't like the invasion part?

Yeah, nobody EVER rated my messages in Dark Souls. I liked seeing the "Your message has been rated" message when I loaded my Demon's Souls files. It was probably common there because you didn't need to take out a stone. You don't have to take out the stone in Dark Souls either, but the other method is so obscure that nobody knows. How do you rate messages in Dark Souls II?

While on the subject, I hope the negative rating has more value, for those messages that are intentionally placed in inconvenient interaction spots.

From a video by Video Gamer's Matt Lee, he said you can respec your character by the use of a Soul Vessel. The details of how it works wasn't known.

@jz: Thank Christ for 4 rings. Dark Souls had a massive problem with the Ring of Favor and Protection I felt, with it being so good that almost everyone (at least all the gameplay I've seen), was using it, and if you were using it, it was way too big a risk to change to something else to see how other ring combinations would work out (obviously this issue is slightly negated by NG+). It effectively took away one of only two ring slots for the rest of the game for a lot of players.

None of my characters have ever used the Ring of Favor and Protection. It's a fairly recent thing that became popular with new people that didn't play the game when it first came out. I'm sure it's a great ring for someone who just wants to beat the game once, but there are way better options out there for PVP builds.

@adequatelyprepared: That's the point, you'll have to choose between using that ring or save the slots for other combinations. Personally I never used that ring and instead stuck to Havel's Ring and Covetous Gold Serpent Ring for better loot drops. I'd imagine there won't be a ring like Favor and Protection this time around if they let you use four rings, otherwise they're making it too easy for you to equip the four best rings for any situation.

Every time you use the word "trolled," I just want to smack you.

I wouldn't say its recent at all. The FAP ring has always been extremely popular with those that were not trying to optimize a PvP build, and almost everyone I know used it for their first playthrough back when the game first came out.

Well there you go. It would be popular with people that weren't going for PVP builds. I'm all about PVP and low level builds so I couldn't waste a ring slot on it. People who PVP wouldn't waste their ring slot when there are other options that complement their play style. Chatter in various forums wasn't focused on PVE talk.