SL 1 NG+7 Fresh start challenge

For those looking for the ultimate "legitimate" Dark Souls challenge, you may be interested in this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfuQ8U00BLc

So just to be clear, are we staying at SL1, or is the intent just to turn the difficulty all the way up?

I'd like to get the PC version because I want to add Black Phantoms to the challenge if one can level up.

You stay at level 1. The idea of the challenge is that much of the difficulty of ng+ is lost due to starting out with fully upgraded gear which cheapens the first half of the game. This takes that advantage away and forces you through ng+ with nothing. Earning that gear and being limited in damage from the start makes it a whole new ballgame. Ng+7 gargs with only +5 weapons is quite challenging.

Well, there's challenging, then there's smashing your head against a brick wall until it cracks, it'll break eventually, but sheesh...
Wouldn't NG+7 get tedious? And how much more difficult is it from NG+?

I find an SL1 challenge destroys the entire purpose of Dark Souls, i've never understood why people like these challenges. At SL1, on NG7, every mob in the game is just going to one-shot you, while it takes ages to kill them... for not liking Artificial Difficulty, you honestly constructed a challenge filled with a large amount of it.

If I had the ability to set the game to NG7, I would probably also find a way in cheat engine to set it so that Black Phantoms spawned, and would not take the master key. This would force me to play through the game without any shortcuts, and even with leveling up would make my journey absolute hell, honestly, even -if- I summoned people on the journey. To add to the challenge I'd force myself to always have the cat covenant ring on, which reduces my ring slots to 1 while making me have to go through area's expediantly to avoid PvP, which would possibly result in heading back to the start of the level.

I think I'd find it far more challenging than simply forcing myself to stick at level 1, getting one shot by enemies that take half a century to kill.

Rynn wrote:I find an SL1 challenge destroys the entire purpose of Dark Souls, i've never understood why people like these challenges. At SL1, on NG7, every mob in the game is just going to one-shot you, while it takes ages to kill them... for not liking Artificial Difficulty, you honestly constructed a challenge filled with a large amount of it.

If I had the ability to set the game to NG7, I would probably also find a way in cheat engine to set it so that Black Phantoms spawned, and would not take the master key. This would force me to play through the game without any shortcuts, and even with leveling up would make my journey absolute hell, honestly, even -if- I summoned people on the journey. To add to the challenge I'd force myself to always have the cat covenant ring on, which reduces my ring slots to 1 while making me have to go through area's expediantly to avoid PvP, which would possibly result in heading back to the start of the level.

I think I'd find it far more challenging than simply forcing myself to stick at level 1, getting one shot by enemies that take half a century to kill.

The problem with leveling up in NG+7 is that you get so many souls that it's not hard at all. I got 62500 souls from the Gargoyles.. at SL 1 I could have gained like 30 levels or something(I made that up I don't actually know ).

I don't think I said I didn't like artificial difficulty, I was saying that it's the only thing NG+ offers and starting out with fully upgraded gear nullifies that. I happen to enjoy the first half of the game more than the 2nd, but you can't really savor it in NG+ and beyond when you start with uber equipment. It took me 3 minutes to kill the Gargs in NG+7 with only +5 weapons and no resin.. had I went in there with a +10 fire weapon it'd have been over in 30 seconds or less which is faster than standard NG.

About the black phantoms, to my knowledge there is no pointer value that can change that or I'd have added that as well.

I think anyone that has experience with dark souls, such as yourself, knows that leveling up doesn't actually offer all too much in the way of advantages, it just increases the options available to the character. If I've begun with no gear, than it's rather simple to imagine that even if I was SL200, my +5 gear would have some difficulty with the gargoyles.

I imagine a tweak I would personally pull on your challenge, would be to declare that if I die, I am not permitted to go retrieve my blood stain, and so to use those souls I'm obtaining, I'd be forced to survive to return to the bonfire. To make certain this is actually a problem, I'd restrict myself from ever using the same bonfire twice in a row.