Played a bit of Dark Souls today and the build at E3 was online enabled. The demo started with a couple of class options, many that look an archetypical warrior or rogue, to pick. I wanted to try something new so I selected the Pyroclast, a mage-like character with an axe in one hand and six giant fireballs in the other. My hero started in the middle of a castle. I ran downstairs and touched a bonfire. Bonfires act like in-dungeon respawn points and these are more plentiful than Demon’s Souls.

I moved my character up a flight of stairs and a skeleton greeted me with a spear to the gut. The bony fellow must have been hiding there a long time just waiting for adventurers to pass by. Up top I saw an armored boar ready to charge.

Chipping away at the boar armed with a hatchet in hand wasn’t effective. I switched to fireball mode, which luckily was the beast’s weakness. I made my Pyroclast toss a fireball, but missed the running boar and set a group of skeletons ablaze. Well, at least I didn’t have to fight those monsters anymore! The downside about Pyroclasts, aside from low stamina, is this class has a limited number of fireball charges. After those are used up, the only way you can defeat enemies is with your melee weapon.

Namco Bandai gave the Pyroclast another "ability" or perhaps I should say special item. In the E3 demo, the Pyroclast had an item that allowed him to curse another person’s game. The effect is similar to changing the world tendency in Demon’s Souls, but it only affects a single player chosen at random by Dark Souls. An immediate effect are larger mobs instead of a few enemies that attack cursed players. Cursed? You can break the hex by finding the item the other player dropped in your world.

Before i knew what the item was for, I used it and probably made someone else’s game even more difficult. But, revenge is a dish best served cold in Dark Souls. A few minutes later someone else playing Dark Souls must have used the same item. All of the sudden my game was full of pink zombies that mercilessly tore my character apart forcing me to restart at the last bonfire I visited.