i'll check that for ya.

edit : no you can play offline, it tells you "You have to sign in to playstation network for online play" then you select cancel and it says "Starting offline mode"

...... also this game AUTOMATICALLY saves your progress everywhere ... i just loaded my save and got hit by 3 arrows , nearly died

It's the one and only PS3 game I bothered getting the Platinum trophy for. Its that good, I'm glad Europe gets to enjoy the game too.

you can play this game offline .. it's just that much better online with all the messages, the blood pools, the white phantoms stalking around and the constant threat of a black phantom invading it just makes the whole world feel more alive

Nope, you can play this game entirely offline and without connecting to the PSN.

That's how I did it, for my platinum run XD  

The main gripe I have with the online is that it messes up the World Tendencies, making it impossible to get either Pure White or Pure Black Tendencies for the events. 

Unless you do massive Black Phantom or Player hunts, and even then you'll need luck.  

Oh yeah, online sounds awesome. But these black phantoms they can't completely destroy your progress right? Like stealing all your souls or something horrible like that?

black phantoms are other people trying to duel you over your soul (sounds nasty) , yes they do take reward but you can get your souls back , you just have to find your blood stain but you have one chance of doing this or else it will be lost.

also you will not be attacked by black phantoms in low levels.

The slow reset to neutral or +1 probably "is a feature", still I managed to do all the WT stuff without playing offline (you have to beat the game 3 1/2 times for plat anyway - enough time for WT stuff, especially because pure white is the only WT that is not as easy to get) and the only time I needed to play offline was for pure bladestone farming.

For Pure Black WT you only have to revive (with stone) and die in body form .. that's not hard at all.

i just hope this sells well in europe because i think most europeans including me that wanted this game either got the asian version (which is the english version aswell) or waited for the u.s release and imported that version. so i just hope it sells well.

Anyways awesome game im currently playing this on my 2nd character soul level 174, im not going any further though as i made that mistake with my first character and power leveled to soul level 243 only to realise that i could no longer co-op or black pantom with people as i was too strong and the game has a soul level range thing so the battles arnt so onesided when battling with other players. it seems people dont bother leveling up that far.

I'm not talking about slow reset to neutral, i'm talking about how the WT shifts in conformity with the overall WT from all the players in the server. So if you're going for any of the Pure WT events and you have the bad luck of playing in a server with a lot of players with contrary WTs, it will counter-balance for neutral. 

Once I literary had to kill over 10 BP players to get my WT in world 4 from 30% White to Pure White, while in normal conditions it wouldn't have taken me over 4 BP players. 

It's much better to do it offline, if you don't screw up and play the game exclusively in Soul Form (to get Pure White WTs), or don't exaggerate on the number of SoEE to go down to Pure Black.