In World of Warcraft and other RPGs, being dead means being unable to interact with the world, with a one way ticket back to your corpse and back to the land of the living. It goes without saying that in most games, giving up your humanity in order to wander throughout the world as an undead being is the equivalent of a game over state.
This is not the case with Dark Souls, where being bereft of your humanity is the only way to ensure you aren't invaded by other players. You see, players can't invade your world while you're undead so short of disconnecting your PS3 from the internet, being undead isn't a bad way to be. This is changing in Dark Souls 2, a game with far more emphasis on multiplayer interaction.
Dark Souls 2 Game Director Yui Tanimura and the developers at FromSoftware have revealed that there will be significant disadvantages to playing the game as an undead. You see, each time you resurrect as an undead, the game will knock off a fraction of your total health up to a total of 50 percent. In other words, it's a death penalty.
Due to the game's increased difficulty, players will be able to re-earn their humanity through new ways, one of which is to use an item called the Human Effigy to revive instead of spending Humanity items at a bonfire. This allows you to proceed through the game at a faster pace without having to backtrack at a bonfire each time you die.
Furthermore, the developers have revealed some of the game's multiplayer aspects, which—like the first Dark Souls—come in the form of Covenants. New to the game is the Way of the Blue, which summons a Blue Sentinel to defend you against Black Phantoms who invade your world.
To that end, there are two types of White Soapstone which you can use to summon up player allies—a smaller one which lasts around 5 minutes, and a larger one which provides the summoned player with a Token of Fidelity for successfully helping the host. How long the summon lasts depends entirely upon the size of the Soapstone, which decreases each time the summoned player kills a foe.
Needless to say, 5 minutes isn't a long amount of time, but it should be enough to keep you company for the duration of a boss fight.
Source: 4Gamer
