Dark Souls II: Crown of the Ivory King Previews, Footage

With less than a week to go before the release of the next and last DLC for Dark Souls II, Crown of the Ivory King, we finally learn some information about it thanks to a couple of previews on English-speaking websites.

Polygon has a fairly lengthy (for a DLC, anyway) write-up:

In Crown of the Ivory King, accessed from Dark Souls 2’s Shrine of Winter area, players will experience a new climate that changes over time. Snow and whipping winds will come and go, obscuring the player’s vision and altering the layout of some areas. In one instance, we came across a frozen treasure chest that couldn’t be opened, apparently until there was some change in the weather.

The new add-on will also introduce a new gameplay element to Dark Souls 2, which Tanimura called followers. Over the course of the downloadable content, players can gradually accrue followers allied, AI-controlled characters who will help them in a battle against a tough boss character. The more followers a player has, the lower the difficulty of that final fight will be, he said.

Exactly how those followers are acquired and what they look like, Tanimura wouldn’t reveal; there were non-playable, non-aggressive characters scattered throughout the Ivory King sections we played, though it wasn’t clear what their purpose was or if they are the followers he was talking about.

Meanwhile, GameSpot has some footage with some commentary from one of their journalists: