Dark Souls 3 Dissected #1 - The World Layout of Lothric Explained

Hello and welcome to the first episode of

dark

souls

3 reviewed today, we are going to examine the

world

design of

lothric

. This game does a great job of showing upcoming locations and allowing you to look back at places you were previously, but unless you've examined everything carefully, it may not always be obvious what exactly you're looking at and even if you recognize a location, how can you be sure it is accurate? Do these distant views have any spatial precision or is it all just smoke and mirrors? The purpose of today's episode is to help untangle any potential

world

design mysteries and help clarify how it all fits together.

Join me as I explore the looming landmarks of Lothric. You can jump to the timestamp on the screen if you want to jump straight to the analysis, but this is another topic I'd like to start with a little context after doing an episode on lordran design for

dark

souls

1. I got a lot of requests for do the same for its sequels, but also some skepticism about it. There would even be something to talk about Dark Souls 1 is a quasi-metroidvania with a lot of interconnectivity between areas, so clarifying the structure of the world helped reveal how they achieved it with the sequels, whether by switching to blatant violations of spatial accuracy or simply becoming much more linear, do the sequels warrant the same kind of analysis?

I think today's episode will make it very clear that the answer is yes, there's still a lot to talk about just because the sequels didn't go for exactly the same thing. It doesn't mean there aren't interesting things to learn about each world, and in the case of Dark Souls 3 I'm going to have plenty of positive things to say now that I'm among the group of people who strongly prefer the labyrinth. I like the interconnectivity of Dark Souls 1, but the more I look at Dark Souls 3, the more I appreciate what they did, regardless of whether you're someone who wholeheartedly loves Dark Souls 3 or if you're someone who prefers another game in the series, I think I'll be interested to see some of the care and effort that went into constructing the game's design.

Let's go straight to Lothric's high wall as soon as we enter the level, before even setting foot outside the starting room. Six distant levels are represented. Allowing Freecam to look outside the room helps reveal that they are already here on display and this only counts the distant levels outside the Loftheart Castle area if we want to include the different levels within the castle, that number increases to about 9 locations in total. Depending on how you slice everything up now, you usually can't see any of this from inside the starting room, but it's just a matter of going outside and looking over the nearest wall on the right, so Dark Souls 3 may have avoided being as non-linear and interconnected as Dark Souls 1, but perhaps to compensate for this and Dark Souls 2's sometimes dodgy area transitions, Dark Souls 3 decided to go out of its way to telegraph distant locations to the player by showing as many areas at once. , it's not something that happens by accident, in fact, they essentially doubled the number of distant areas that can be seen from a single level compared to anywhere since Dark Souls 1.

So, the central trick of Dark Souls 3 is being able to look forward or back in other areas. and it's pretty impressive how much effort was put into this, but to what extent does any of this make sense? Routes to distant areas are often more circuitous than traditional open-world games, and the game generally doesn't show actual levels from a distance from here. None of these distant levels are charged in any way; Instead, we have simplified, low-poly versions of them that belong to the map we're currently on, meaning these pieces could have been placed literally anywhere without regard to the actual levels. locations, since they are merely props, let's start with the broken bridge leading to the undead settlement.

We're taken there by a scene in which bat-winged demons take us there, so there's no reason to assume it needs to be placed with any kind of precision. What we can do to verify its location is to drop prismatic stones along the bridge. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn't work very well because using a bonfire or a homecoming bone to return to Lothric's high wall would put us through a loading screen. and the prism stones would disappear, but I guess because of how the batwing demons brought us here, there is a transition between the two areas that causes Lothric to be at a charge signal where he can charge from here without needing to sit for a burden.

The screen is essentially in a semi-loaded state, which is the game's way of preparing neighboring maps so they can load without problems. The game may not be showing anything from the high wall right now, but stepping foot into any collision will force the game to refresh. fully charge the high wall correctly without losing the prism stones I dropped, so from here I can teleport directly to the coordinates of the high wall bonfire and it should work fine at first glance, it seems worrying that the prism stones are not The view, but if we look closer, we can see that they are buried slightly below the surface and that the end of the bridge and the entrance to the undead settlement are also exactly where they should be, so this distant view is actually very accurate ignoring the fact.

Since we can't see the segment with the steps we're going down now, how do you handle anything further in the undead settlement? We can do the same trick with the stairs leading up to the big cursed wood and once again find things lined up. very well just a few meters from where they should really be, so yeah, it's pretty impressive that they made this distant view as accurate as they did when they didn't really need to. This is not the only view of the broken bridge. we can see it a lot closer when we're ready to trigger that exit scene behind vort.

This view has a lot more detail and now that the finished settlement is back in that semi-loaded state, we can toggle its navigation meshes to the Navmesh view. The general cross sections of the map is what tells the game where enemies can go so its AI can plot a path along those segments to determine how to get to you, as it is overlaid with the geometry of the actual level that we hope it lines up if this view is accurate. and it will not be aligned if it is inaccurate here it is very precise we can see many details aligned perfectly like this bridge the top of the tower with the giant and the entrance to the road of sacrifices there are some details and elements are missing in this simplified version and some Things get a little misaligned, but when push comes to shove, when we look at the undead settlement from here, we know it's actually there and we're starting off with pretty strict adherence to spatial accuracy.

Now note that we don't see any navigation mesh for the opposite side of the broken bridge, that's because it counts as part of the fair and maintenance, which I'll talk about later, so let's continue through these areas in order. we just saw that. the entrance to the sacrificial path is well aligned from the navigation meshes and the use of prismatic stones again helps reinforce that, so the rendering of the entire area leaves a little to be desired. They went with an ultra-simplified interpretation, so there's not much that's recognizable here. Being a fairly simple area of ​​land without many distinctive landmarks, it's understandable that they didn't care as much about it, but what that's supposed to convey when moving to the actual level of the undead settlement gives us a closer view. but even more distant than we can.

See, things have changed for this perspective, the entrance itself is still where it should be, but the land is a little different now it starts to reflect the level a little better, we can recognize some things like the path that goes down to the level and is also The Tunnel Cave and that hanging path, the prism stones reveal to be a little misaligned, but the general idea is still there. This is where things start to relax a bit, we can't see anything that clearly resembles the entrance area where we meet Horse and Anri, but we do see this building, placing prismatic stones across the bridge makes it pretty clear that it is intended to represent the input structure seen here.

It's a little lower here than it should be. I mean this is probably a result of wanting to start exaggerating the distances more. to start to disguise how compact the overall game really is, but this building is also turned in the wrong direction, the entrance should be on this side, but they put it on this side, they probably didn't expect us to look so closely, like this that we have the path that descends to the level the cave tunnel the cliff and a building that vaguely resembles the entrance to the bonfire of the fortress halfway with Horus and Henry beyond that, the detail mostly leaves to exist for the water area with the crabs that should be down here right now.

The tallest building on the right lines up with this structure which is pretty cool, so we can see some more familiar things again further back to the right, we have the entrance to the fair and we keep an eye on those two npcs, I don't know you pay attention. Dropping some prison stones here, so yeah it's pretty cool, we can see this from above at the entrance to the undead settlement, it lines up pretty well once again, the actual prism stones are hidden just below the Low poly version of the map on the left. We can see a piece of land sticking out here which would be where we found the crucifixion forest bonfire behind them are the buildings leading up to the crystal sage.

They are quite detailed. We can recognize this as the building on the left and passing by a small one. The bridge takes us to the building where we meet Orbeck of Vinheim. Here I have surrounded the area containing the crucifixion forest bonfire, as well as the bonfire itself. This helps reveal that the perspective is a little off, but it is in the correct stage, but what is not in the correct stage, however, is the Cathedral of the Depths. You'll notice that the map just disappears behind these buildings leading up to the Crystal Sage, and for me this is one of the biggest flaws in how the world design is conveyed.

It should be located on a hill behind the crystal sage. If we go back to Lothric, we can see the cathedral again more or less where it's supposed to be. Turning the camera to the left reveals the side rooftop entrance we have to take to get there. Inside, another comparison shows that it is again at the correct stage where the building was pushed back approximately 50 feet from its actual location, so if we can see it well from Lothric, what happened to it from the perspective of the settlements of undead instead of being back? there it moved completely to the left now, when we first come out of the bonfire, here we see the building that leads to the sacrificial road and we can also see the cathedral, maybe it was moved here for artistic reasons. we can see both at the same time, seems like a possible explanation, but it comes at the cost of having the map as an awkward dead end from this vantage point where it shouldn't now occasionally Dark Souls 3 renders some of the distant views with files of objects instead of actual map data, what I mean is that most of what you see in the environment is just map, if you turn it off from playing basically everything will disappear apart from enemies and objects like doors and boxes, so large chunks will be created.

From the environment, an item file like a door box is not very common, but it happens from time to time in this game and this is one of those times where the cathedral is a large item file, but only from this point of view. seen by others, it is only a part. of the map again, I'm not sure there's really anything to take away from this, other than the fact that this time where its location is drastically wrong turns out to be the only time they chose to represent it as a completely different asset type. I wondered if maybe they put him closer to the tower of the giants on purpose because you may remember that there is also a place outside the cathedral that he also shoots his arrows at and from up here maybe they wanted it to look closer than it actually was. was, but I don't know if that's a good explanation if we go down to that area the relationship with the tower is accurately represented from down here the giant's tower is actually right there even the giant is represented from here and looking back at the cathedral there it is.

There's no obvious reason why they wouldn't have wanted to put it where it belongs from the undead settlement perspective. It would have looked good here. Well, now we are at the last stop of this particular part of our trip. The fair. AlreadyI know the drill with the prism stones, so I'm not going to bother showing myself by dropping them, but I have marked the three towers of flame that must be extinguished in order to gain access to the abyss watchers. I was curious to know if they fall randomly. These are here because the swamp disorients me and I probably wouldn't have noticed if something was wrong.

The exact location is a little misaligned but they are not placed randomly. The towers are still aligned and spaced correctly from each other and here is a look at the building containing the Abyss Watchers. I mark the branching paths that lead to the door. From the perspective of the undead settlement, we can see that the only path going down a hill is aligned pretty closely with a low poly version of that hill we have. I don't see much of the other path branching nearby, but it should lead to the end of the wall area. Here, going a little below the surface, it is revealed that the path was quite aligned with that, as well as following the prism stones, I was surprised to see. which I even managed to keep Blackhand Gothard's summoning sign was loaded into the game from here and now, from Lother Castle we can see that they actually raised the distant view and brought it a little closer to make it easier to see when the space of actual level is a little lower and further back.

What's more interesting to me is that the other side of the broken bridge we can see is depicted quite accurately from both sides and our view from below towards the fair and the keep and the sacrificial road is much more detailed than before. This is not much. a surprise given that we are technically still on the fair and conservation map and everything is just one big level that includes the path of sacrifices, the incentive to keep assets where they really need to be is much greater now and this is precisely what happened When we look at how the sacrificial path is depicted, we can see the inclusion of the bridges now and the falling of prismatic stones along the paths shows that everything is finally exactly where it should be.

The cathedral of the deep is now very close. Precisely where it should be, part of the path between the crystal sage and the cathedral is not shown from here like the area with the fire and the bridge, but most of the rest is roughly there in low poly forms the part here. The most fascinating thing for me is that from the side of the bridge where the undead settlements are located we can see items on the other side that belong to the fair and keep map, but the Fahren keep is not loaded from here, it is simply we are seeing a duplicate. on the other side, then what are the objects that belong to a different level doing here?

This isn't a situation like before where I could teleport to the high wall of Lothric Farron Keep, it's too far from here and it's not queued up to load. Going there with gravity disabled doesn't force the actual level to load, but I can still pick up the items and they are somehow accurate to what's actually there and upon closer inspection the corpses on both sides don't match up perfectly and even The corpses are in different poses, so there are two different sets of corpses and they both contain the same items, but picking up items from one place will make them disappear from the other place, so you can't actually get them twice.

Turns out I had two different sets of corpses that share the same lot item ID, so it's essentially from the same event, although they technically appear on different corpses in slightly different locations depending on what level you're at. I find this really interesting because I think this could be a unique occurrence in Soulsborne games most of the time, if we see an item that is far away it's technically still on the same level, even the story and dungeons in Bloodborne could show items that are currently on a different layer, but you're still right inside a large map in that situation, in the case of Dark Souls 3, it's not just a large map, so those items shouldn't have been visible on absolute, but they deliberately went out of their way to create a rough facsimile for us, this was not the case.

It's not necessary, but I think they wanted to tell us that we can get there later and they will tease us with items to let us know that there is nothing new for the series, but this might require a longer trip to get there. There they had to invoke an unusual technique to show it to us. This tells me that the developers really put some thought and care into the game's design, so there are a lot more views and area relationships to cover, but I'd like to point out a few mistakes. or inconsistencies in the areas we've seen so far, which go beyond simply being a little misaligned, although I want to clarify that I think they are mostly interesting oddities and pointing them out is not intended as a list of criticisms in a later segment I will talk about the nice job I think Dark Souls 3 does of hiding its spatial inaccuracies.

Really the only issue I have so far is how the cathedral is significantly out of place when viewed from the undead settlement. The rest has been pretty good so far. These things to come may not be so good either, but they don't bother me in the same way. They are very hard to notice and don't really break the illusion of the game space unless you start digging. In depth, let's start with the bridge that takes us to the undead settlement. From the point where it is broken you can see that it is basically just another segment of the bridge with respect to the towers extending above and the support columns below, beyond that it immediately ends in a cliff and we can see that there is quite a bit of space between him and the building that leads to the sacrificial road.

If you've ever looked at the bridge from below you'll have noticed that this doesn't always carry over correctly from The First Bonfire down here, you can look up and see a nearby bridge above, we shouldn't see it at all, it should have ended right here on Instead of going through the entire undead settlement, most of the area below works pretty well. job of making this hard to see, but you can see it pretty decently from inside the cave tunnel area, none of that should be visible, so yeah, I guess whenever you look at it clearly you shouldn't think . about this starts to be portrayed correctly again when we descend to the fair and keep and when we reach the cathedral, so it's a kind of sacrificial path that spoils it earlier when I mentioned the lack of detail when looking down.

In the area with the crabs, I overlooked the fact that another structure is seen down there, as you may remember, there are no buildings or ruins in the middle of that watery area, so it really shouldn't be there at all, surrounding a tree with The prismatic stones down there show where they line up and there's just nothing nearby that can represent it, so I wasn't surprised to see it completely disappear from the more accurate view seen from the fair and keep the side of the bridge . but it appears once again in the view from the cathedral of the depths, it is practically completely hidden by the trees, but it is there again.

Something I wanted to praise Dark Souls 3 for something it almost did right that I thought was great. Extinguish the flames in the fair and the keep will show the corresponding lit pillars when viewed from above. This is by no means a complicated technical achievement, but I still appreciate it because distant views are almost never affected by your progress in any of these games. You may remember that in Dark Souls 1 this distant view of the demonic ruins failed to drain the lava after defeating the incessant volley, so here it seems like they improved on a missed opportunity from Dark Souls 1. until you return to Lothric and realize of that. that view no longer represents it correctly and the flames just stay lit, but that's not the only problem here, it gets weirder.

Something else we can see from the undead settlement is a fourth flame underneath, it doesn't have the same full structure underneath. like the rest of the flames, but it's still the same flame effect attached to the same type of pillar. Special thanks to Jack McClure for pointing this out to me. We can see that it should be more or less in a straight line from where the abyss watchers fight happens and also directly. Below the broken segment of the bridge, but an examination of the actual level shows nothing near there. I managed to find an unused scene to extinguish this fourth flame.

Well, this animation to open the door takes a long time, so you won't miss it. While I show a couple more things while I was editing this video, Zulie the witch coincidentally made a post about this additional flame and brought to my attention something I had overlooked. There is concept art showing a fourth relief for Seath, as he is now in the game, there are only three llamas corresponding to three of the lord's soul locations from Dark Souls 1. and Twitter user Gutter noted that it still exists An unused texture for shrine c in the game. Here he modified it again so that it is not used.

The fourth flame was intended for this. This is only seen from the undead settlement. The distant views from the Lother castle area only have three flame pillars here again, but the distant view from Lothric has more things that we can't see from anywhere else. Beyond the swamp walls we can see another segment of wall and also more ruins that look very similar to those supporting the flames. Now I'm kind of 50 50 about whether or not this is a bug, who's to say it can? There won't be any more ruins out there, we can't see them from the undead settlement, but it's quite foggy down there and the undead settlement loses its right to be any kind of authority on distant views, closing the map here when it should .

I haven't, yeah for now we can pretend they're hiding in the fog, that works pretty well for me when you're closer to that area, there's actually nowhere you can see better over the wall, so that nothing is represented there. This view from the Cathedral of the Deep shows some land and trees again, no ruins yet, but it's not clear enough to not feel jarring with the view from Lothric, however the highest quality view from the fair and keep the bridge side once again. It doesn't show anything at all back there, but there are also other strange duplicates that can be found from up here.

There are four more undead settlements, one of them is in sight. If you think about the

layout

of the level, you might remember that the undead settlement should be all the way to the left. of the building that leads to the sacrificial path, so this is really just the undead settlement here, this means that what we see further back and to the right is just a duplicate, it is mostly familiar, you will find the bridge that leads to the stable and also the bridge that leads to the area over the bonfire under the cliff, but it's also a little different where instead of having a familiar looking building where the big wood should be, there is a taller temple of some kind and this area actually duplicates everything.

A little further to the left you will find the same bridges, the same opening for the bonfire under the cliff and the same temple, so there is already an additional second undead settlement right next to it. Considering the original view, it certainly seems intentional, it helps make the area appear larger and more imposing, so filling in the landscape in this way was definitely an artistic decision, but it doesn't hold up under closer scrutiny since it's not depicted. from no other perspective. This view makes it clear that we should be able to see. Further settlement is easy from the giant's tower, but from up here there's nothing really back there.

I think with additional time and resources they probably would have included it from this perspective, but the low poly version probably didn't look good enough from this close-up and if they used a higher quality version that matched the real level, it could have been more obvious copy and paste, which would have been strange seeing that there is already a rough version of the cathedral of the deep nearby, so they probably had to draw. one line and I couldn't spend more time polishing these distant views, but here's where it gets even stranger: we have those third and fourth copies of the undead settlement further away, you can barely see one of them in the distance, just kind of the landmass around it makes you wonder what the point was and then we have this other one behind these mountain peaks that's better lit and starting to feel a little more purposeful again.

I think all of this extra stuff is just meant to convey more of the land we can actually travel to, much like the other icebergs in Dark Souls 1. So let's continue breaking down some of the distant sights we haven't covered yet. We can also see AnorLondon from the beginning. I felt that darkness. Souls 3 may have been a little harsh at times with references to previous titles, but I really appreciated how Anor Inorlando was incorporated. They hinted at its existence from the beginning. They purposely obscured it with a layer of cloud to make sure we didn't. We have hints of the dead in sight, like the large swing bridge, but every time you get closer, the architecture becomes a little clearer.

We can see a little more when we reach the platform behind Vort and even more when we reach the undead. The deal is a revelation hiding in plain sight and once you discover it's there, you realize you've already been watching it from a distance this entire time. The execution of this was really good and I have to do it. Give it to the developers, but where is Anor Londo marking the steps leading to the front door? We found that the actual level is quite a bit higher than the distant view from Lothric and the view from the undead settlement also pushes it further back, so it's in the right general direction, but the distances are quite exaggerated.

Dark Souls. I did something very similar with Anor Londo, as seen in the Duke's archives. It really wasn't that far down there either. Turning around reveals that we are quite far away. level with the undead settlement and it's actually not that far from us, if the proximity here surprises you, I'll throw in another strange spatial violation while we're at it if we drop a bunch of prismatic stones in this pit area in the settlement of the undead. They will be visible in the sky above the desecrated capital. It seems like these areas should be pretty far apart too, but I think I can make them both make better sense at the same time, but first I should probably clarify how I view these types of distortions of game space.

I don't see them all as glitches or bugs by any stretch of the imagination. The idea that a video game space needs to maintain perfect coherence would be really strange and unfair, that's not a reasonable expectation. I don't think fans of other series highlight the maps as much as the Dark Souls community does, but I understand how we got here. Dark Souls 1 set a high bar. bar by surprising us with a lot of interconnected areas that fit together quite well Dark Souls 2 disappointed a lot of people by not achieving that, instead it had a lot of overlapping maps that did not connect in a logical way with what the environment conveyed, but That narrowing the discussion down to Dark Souls 1 was good because it was accurate and Dark Souls 2 was bad because it was inaccurate is not a valid way to look at it in my opinion.

Dark Souls 1 cheated in a lot of places, it's not that the world design was perfectly consistent and everything always made sense, it's just that its violations were less frequent and harder to detect, so let's go back to Dark Souls 3. Most of the distant views so far have been reasonably accurate, except for that one, but now we're taking a bigger leap by exaggerating the distances even more and having more parts of the map overlapping. This is where the illusion begins to crumble. This is where Dark Souls 3 starts to get neglected. I don't see it that way at all. and it makes me appreciate his sleight of hand.

This will be a very crude analogy, but I will compare it to hidden editing in a film that is presented as one long take and where this hidden editing takes place in the dark. souls 3 is the catacombs, it's easy to leave the catacombs feeling like you've descended lower when you get to Irithyll, it feels like the rest of the world is quite above you and you might not think about it much, but if you stop to think In it, how far did you really descend? We descend those steps after the abyss watchers and approach this really large cavernous room, it's a bottomless pit and it certainly feels deep and I guess it's some kind of big drop, but if we stop to look at it, it's not really much higher than some of the long stairs we've climbed in Lothric and the level is mostly flat after this, yes, so we go down one more short staircase later in the level and also pass through a cave that has a slight downward slope , but when we ascend to the nut room, we are actually higher than when we went down that short staircase.

To put this in perspective, here is a side view of the prismatic stones that I dropped at the beginning of the level so we know that the fight with the abyss watchers in the fair and the keep is aligned with the top of this staircase. Here pay attention to how little we descend as we approach the entrance to Irithyll. This transition sets up this last part of the game. Much more compact with the rest of the game space than you would expect. Remember the prismatic stones in the undead settlement that we could see above the perfume capital.

We can also see them outside the entrance to Irithyll. This building at the top is meant to be the one where we encounter the great curse-defeated wood, but they took the perspective of the undead settlement much higher and further back than it actually is. Using Dark Souls Map Studio, I loaded both maps at the same time and we can see the actual building. the cliff below and how it is positioned compared to the distant fake version behind and above it, let's also take a look at Archdragon's Peak. We can also see it from the beginning of the game which is cool, now it's barely visible behind some clouds.

This is a perspective that we cannot verify, there is not much to validate because, like the painted world or the undead asylum of Dark Souls 1, these are maps that are transported to the real level space of the Archdragon's peak that is overlaps with another castle which of course doesn't say anything about its canonical location in the story or whatever you want to call it, but if you want to see it for yourself you can miss the bloodstain on the bridge where we fight the dragon slayer's armor and then you will find it floating. the archdragon peak sky, as a quick note, i use bloodstains a lot in the lordran design to help align locations, but for this video i've switched almost entirely to prismatic stones.

The reason for this is that blood stains do not appear from super. very far away in Dark Souls 3. The camera has to be within a certain distance or it will disappear. This is easy to see with free camera enabled. Now he's gone and now he's back. We can look out from the Archdragon's peak and see Anor Londo. and

lothric

in the distance this time are simply rendered with 2D textures in the frame. You might not think there's much to evaluate in terms of distance and location for a 2D texture, but there's actually something quite interesting that shows how it was part of the environment.

Planned around this, the thing about skybox textures is that it's not uncommon for them to loop instead of having to create a single texture that wraps around your environment for a full 360 degrees. You could maybe make one that only covers half and then repeat. but it's easier to get away with it if you have a generic sky and clouds or whatever. It's not so easy to get away with it if you have obvious landmarks in your box that aren't supposed to be repeated and it would certainly look bad if there were a second Anna Londo and a second Lothric who weren't supposed to be there, but I had a feeling that if I turned 180 degrees and looked for them, I would find some illegitimate duplicates, and as strange as it may be to see.

I can't see it, it surprises me at all. What I find interesting about this is that they made sure that we couldn't see them by blocking our view with a couple of large mountains and they also carefully considered the size and location of these mountains because they didn't make them bigger than necessary, they could have made them super massive and not cut things too close, but if we go to the farthest viewpoint to maximize parallax, a small portion of anor londo would come into view if it weren't for additional cloud cover, so these might look like mountains random here, but everything is built to give us this exact viewing angle and the distant views of Archdragon Peak hold up reasonably well, it's not just completely generic bridges and towers that vaguely resemble the level

layout

, the specific landmarks They are true to the real level and still made sure to show us the correct side and general angle, there are some differences, like the bridge breaking from this point of view, but otherwise it's pretty accurate. here is the view from anne orlando where we can see it more clearly this time the bridge is intact.

I was also wondering if the view from Irithyll dungeon made any sense because it's quite easy to lose your bearings when you're down here, I thought I could have gotten away with pointing this view in any direction and I thought they might be cheating a little here, but I used Dark Souls Map Studio to toggle loading the maps for a Londo and Irithyll dungeon and we can see that they share an identical location for Archdragon Peak, in other words, what you see from up here and what you see from down here They are perfectly consistent with each other.

Now its location is a little off compared to the view from Lothric, but it is offset in a similar way to Anorlando's location. It is adjusted after passing through the catacombs, so the way it is manipulated does not go unnoticed. The foiled shrine has been completely absent from this discussion so far and that's because you can't see it from anywhere else in the distance and you also can't see other firelink shrine locations besides lother castle, of course there's a reason Pretty simple for this and it's because it's practically on the opposite side. lothric castle obscures firelink from everything else.

Now it's no secret that the Unattended Tombs are in the same location as Firelink Sanctuary, it's basically just Firelink at night with a few different enemies, but calling it a duplicate would be going too far. Instead, it's literally the exact same map, just with a few different settings applied. The same map pieces are loaded at the same coordinates. why a bloodstain that falls on one version can be found in exactly the same place on the other version. This means we can use our entrance to Unattended Graves to help inform us of the location of the fire link.

Let's start first from the garden of the consumed king. the path that takes us back to Firelink, generally speaking, we just enter this building and then turn right now, where is the location of this building? Going back to our view from the high wall of Lothric, it's basically straight ahead and down here, so we see. the garden behind and to the left of the church where we fight the boreal valley dancer and remember that this church is completely opposite 180 degrees from where we found vort, which is where we get that great view of most of the rest of the game, so this will be a rough walkthrough because not everything will be rendered from here, but to help solidify everyone's understanding of the design, let's start with this view from here using freecam, we'll go all the way around and head towards the dancer, then We'll turn left a little to end up in the Garden of the Consumed King, then we'll go through the building where we fight the bear bears, and then we'll turn right a little to end up at the Firelink Shrine at the back of Lothric Castle.

It's not depicted from this view, but you can see how it places almost everything else on the opposite side of the castle, so it makes sense that we can't see Firelink from anywhere else, but as you can see here, they did cut away. things are pretty close, it's not like we ended up completely on the opposite side, it's more like we went around the outer wall of lothric until we were out of sight, this means looking back from firelink just so we can look around a bit on the side I have more of these things on display.

This will look pretty noisy visually for a moment, but I loaded both maps at the same time in Dark Souls Map Studio. Here is the top of the tower and Firelink looking towards the castle. We will see how flying to the left takes us to the back of the broken bridge and now here we are approaching the entrance to the undead settlement, in other words the Firelink Shrine is a little out of sight around this curved wall here now. because of how close they cut it, things are a little iffy in places, looking back from the distant view of anor londo, the firelink shrine tower sticks out there, but from the perspective of the actual level of anor londo, that puts More of a hill blocking that view, so it's not totally gone.

Reminds me of how they blocked the box at Archdragon Peak. It's like they wanted the fire links to be out of sight, but they cut it too close, but it's not a drastic effect. differences in how the general environment is represented, which is another thing that maybe they could have tidied up a bit from Lothric's perspective, you get a lot of green looking terrain and even theview of a lake in the distance isn't until much further in the distance at which you get all those bigger white mountains from Firelink's perspective, we can't see any of that, it's just those mountains, so Firelink's hidden location from the rest of the game generally makes sense, but the sky tiles disagree a bit.

As for how the generic distant landscape is represented, I'd like to quickly mention 2236 Gaming on YouTube several years ago, they made an entire video dedicated to unraveling the location of the Firelink Shrine, although I did my own research and found the same thing. They didn't use any special tools like debugging or map study and managed to pretty much deduce the precise location of Firelink just by comparing landmarks and sketching out a few things. I'll link it if you want to see it. and it's a testament to how many of these landmarks roughly match up, as they should, well enough to tell you where Firelink really is.

Speaking of these sights, we might as well take down Lothar's castle while we're at it. What I would like to do is help analyze how lothric is transmitted and how accurate it is or sometimes not. We'll start with some of the distant views before analyzing their internal consistency. Looking back from the undead settlement, I can turn the navigation. it snaps back together to show that most of it is where it should be, we don't see anything immediately for the platform behind the fort but it lines up pretty well if you look just a little below the texture, then for the high wall area we can I see that the actual level space matches it very well, but what about the more distant structures that we can't see the navigation meshes?

We can see the building where we fought the twin princes and that is almost exactly where it should be. main walkway with prismatic stones and we can see that this view is slightly delayed from its actual location. I also align the circular roof area above the large cathedral and we can see that it is a little more misaligned, but it is still in the correct overall position. In the area, this view of lothric remains unchanged for all viewpoints since before the catacombs and, as expected, changes when we reach the irithyll. Surprisingly for the view from aerothyl, they moved it a little closer, we can see that the actual level is a little further back.

That may seem strange when the goal should be to exaggerate the distances from here, but they moved it much higher, this shows that for the developers the most important visual effect was to change how much it rises above us from down here, okay, so let's look closer. Inside Lothric Castle, of course, we can see several nearby areas inside the castle from the beginning, again we have the cathedral where we fight the dancer. We can see the building where we meet the oceros at the other end of the garden of the consumed king. We have the dragon barracks located above the dancers' cathedral. we have the bridge where we fight the dragon slayer's armor. the exterior of the large archives and the rounded roof.

It has at the top and the main walkway that leads to the Twin Prince Tower. We can also see that the platform behind Vort is very close to where we started the level. I'm already beating the dead horse with these prismatic stone comparisons, so I'm not going to compare every viewpoint, but just know that these upper areas are not 100 perfect with their location, but are mostly like the distant views of Lothric from the pre-catacomb areas, where they are pretty close to where they should be, but no. Always completely accurate. I think it's interesting to try to deconstruct the type of visual noise of the level.

If you're like me, it's easy to get lost in the landscape, for example, if you previously asked me to quickly identify the tower where we rescued. Greyrat, I would have no idea which one it is exactly. I found it helpful to turn on navigation meshes. It helps to distinguish the actual level from the parts that are purely visual and Grayrat's tower, of course, is the one with a descending staircase leading to it. the navamesh has helped reveal that most of the leveled space of the lothric high wall matches the images, but there are some places where it cheats the dungeon we descend into to reach the dark rafe, where is it exactly as it turns out? it's not depicted from its exterior at all and instead has unrelated things where it should be, the elevator shaft should be right here and the lower level with the dark specter should be right there, it looks like they built all of this without taking into account that actual location which is a reasonable concession, we can't expect everything to be perfect, but there is something here that I find interesting.

As you approach the tower leading to that area, you'll find a segment of wall that is taller than most of the other walls around here. I don't think this is a random choice at all. I think they put it here on purpose to help obstruct our view. If they didn't, we would more easily see a walkway there that doesn't make any sense. Now you can still see a little. A little bit if you go further back or if you go up, where the second bonfire is, but those angles make it less obvious than this particular place, so they made an effort to make it harder to understand that there is some spatial incongruity and believe.

It was worth it, I doubt practically anyone will notice this unless they look very carefully and notice a message in a strange place. Something we can do to demonstrate the difference is what happens when we first enter the tower before we have that patch. of illogical scenario, then the moment we enter, that scenario is disabled and the dark race dungeon is shown with free camera, we can see a kind of big gray box that contains everything. Things also get a little weird with the king's garden consumed, a first look. From the level it only includes the building for bears, the earliest we can see another element of it is when we first arrive at that second bonfire we can see the upper part of the building that houses the elevator shaft that descends to the garden but when enabling the navigation mesh shows that It's actually a little further back, usually when things get misaligned, it's to help exaggerate the distances, but in this case they brought it closer.

I wonder if they had this particular vantage point in mind that would allow us to see it better than if it were placed in its actual position. location or perhaps it was meant to give us a closer look when we first arrive in this area, but this is where the inconsistency is revealed. We should be able to look back in this area and see the staircase we are on, but when we get to the actual level entrance, the staircase is nowhere to be seen and instead there is a completely new wall here. It should have just been the back of this building, although we can see that the developers still made some efforts to hide this from us. the inclusion of trees from both perspectives helps to obscure our view and divert our eyes from it.

What's interesting to me is that a distant view reconciling both designs wasn't completely ignored from above by the dragon slayer's truss bridge; we can look down and see both. the wall and the staircase further back, but yes, this all means that if that wall was supposed to be in the middle, then we wouldn't have been able to see the consumed king's garden from that staircase, now the biggest spatial violation of all. of lothric is located in the transition leading to the dragon barracks, it does not include this set of towers and we can begin to see why when we look closer, looking down from the towers, we can see the entrance to the cathedral of the dancers , but it's actually not that far down, they're exaggerating the distances again.

Here, marking the path shows that it is significantly closer, which means that these towers jut out into the courtyard and not just a little bit, but to a quite extreme degree when we reach the top. In the ladder, the game starts to transition the maps in such a way that it hasn't gotten rid of the royal courtyard yet, but it has started showing those towers, so Freecam will make it very obvious how much the two maps overlap. Sloppy but it's another well-hidden transition in my opinion, climbing a ladder and climbing a few steps is disorienting enough without making it obvious, just like the small descent through the catacombs, it's easy to be fooled about the distance traveled vertically and Because you're misleading us about the distance here also means that other settings are also similarly misaligned and only a more distant view of Lothric to reconcile here.

I was curious to see how the back view of Firelink Shrine matches the game space. It's hard to compare the navigation meshes, as Firelink and Lothric generally don't load together, that is, until you start approaching from the Consumed King's Garden, but then things turn to night and we can't see very well, but if from the Firelink shrine we teleport to the cave that I Normally descend to enter the unattended tombs, I can force Lothric to charge while keeping the Firelink shrine in daylight, so what I wanted to deconstruct is what parts From this view from Firelink they are legitimate play spaces, as we can see here, there are some extra bits added.

I'm going on to make it look wider and more massive, but even though we can't see it from Firelink, they actually still kept a chunk here that represents the game space very accurately. If you're wondering what's real in this distant view, it's where the light shines. the architecture at the bottom stops and transitions to the rock where they added a whole new section that isn't visible from any other vantage point and really shouldn't be there, so the towers on the right aren't really walkable parts of the level. either, but they are properly considered out-of-bounds stages that you see when you're inside the actual level, just look to the right when you're on the high wall and you'll see them there on the other piece.

The actual level we see here is the back of the tower where we meet the twin princes. The path leading to it would be completely on the opposite side of this vantage point, from this direction we of course never climbed or traversed the back of the tower, so there really isn't any traversable map space here to compare, but I can still drop a blood stain in the middle of the room and see if it lines up with the view from Firelink and we find the blood stain practically in the center. I realize I said it was going to be the last distant view of Lothric, but I wanted to talk about an underlying concept for the game world.

You can also see Lothric and Anor Londo from the end of the DLC, but there's not much to say about that. its location again are areas you warp to, there's nothing really to say about the DLC locations and as far as the actual game space goes this distant view is so far removed from the actual location of Lothric that it doesn't make sense not even make a comparison. I just know it's not close to here and also in Orlando Lothric's relationship here now is also totally different, but in terms of lore, he emphasized that the lands are converging and while the pile of drugs shows us a very severe version of That, you get a Sense of It in the base game with Inerlane placed in such a way that the surrounding lands no longer look anything like Dark Souls 1, so the lanes are changing to converge on Lothric and it helps explain Anor Londo, but anything else conveys this well from the start.

The broken path to the end of the settlement is the game that tries to show us exactly this right after vort. If you've ever wondered what this platform was supposed to be before it collapsed, it's supposed to be the broken bridge under the item description for the little guy. The Lothric banner says that when the high wall appeared, the path to the undead settlement was blocked, that sounds a bit confusing. They are not saying that the high wall of Lothric, like the castle itself, suddenly appeared, but rather that the land beneath it rose up and created a high cliff wall below, that is what they mean when they talk about the high wall, we can see that some of those on the pilgrimage to lothric made it before things parted ways, while others were left behind, so with most of the distant sights and area relations covered there are a few more details we can discuss.

I wanted to look at the third location that the giant can shoot at, which is next to a particular tree at the fair and keep the exchange when we consider the angle of approach here, does it make any sense if we trace the origin of the arrow and find that It is generating existence right here and seems to arch from a lower angle as if someone is shooting at a steep angle from behind the great doors that lead towards the observers of the abyss,as we can I see that the actual item file for the giant is loaded again and is placed where his tower should actually be.

Looking down at the fair, we can see that they chose the least logical place in the swamp for him to be. shooting with this view completely obstructed if you wanted to strive for something a little more plausible, I suppose the tree and crab could have been moved closer to the entrance to Farron's keep where the giant would still have line of sight, this also helps reveal . Since this view from the entrance to the fair and the keep shows nothing of the undead settlement in the distance when it should or could have been included, perhaps it would have had a negative impact on performance, although the entrance to the catacombs has this well. of light coming in, but the free camera reveals how tall its top is in relation to the building where we fight the abyss watchers, so there should be a land mass behind it that is taller than it has taken into account from no other view, except considering how the catacombs are located. is where the largest spatial transition occurs, we can explain that, for the same reason, speaking of rays of light, there is also this light entering the room of the abyss observers and, uh, it seems that something moved and it is possible that They forgot to realign it.

We also have this. opening scene of the desecrated capital which direction is it pointing and we should be able to see it from anywhere else of course it's in a post catacombs area so we can't take the exact location too literally but loading on the other maps of the castle. shows us that it is pointing in this direction, in other words, if it were under this land mass somewhere, we would have to fly somewhere in this direction to be able to see it, so it actually makes sense that it is not represented in none of the distant views, so they didn't make any mistakes there, but wait, it was in this direction, which hypothetically should be in view from the Firelink Shrine again in the map viewer, we can see it's almost in view, but this sheet barely obscures it. here and the leaf in the game is a cloud layer, so yes of course nothing distant is depicted in the Firelink sky frame, but if you want to take the game space somewhat literally we still wouldn't be able to see it with the clouds once again just blocking things out, so this explains the kind of open, empty sky we see from the inside.

I was wondering if we should have been looking somewhere else, but this is fine, mostly fine if you ignore how much the lake is burning. it actually overlaps with the urethral dungeon and the unholy capital. We get this view of the entrance to the Irithyll dungeon from inside the steaming lake and it's cool that they're trying to give us a visual connection between two distant lake play areas that have nothing to do with each other. has to do with any of the other distant views, but this is a place where they didn't even try to put it in the right ballpark.

I think they just relied on us being underground long enough to disorient us, but it shows a pretty stark contrast to the effort put into the rest of the map orientations. I'll do another comparison of prismatic stones here lining the staircase to the Irithhill dungeon and we discover that it's not even facing the right direction. We have to turn around and look down at the smoke. lake towards the giant sandworm and then we found the actual entrance to the Irithyll dungeon nearby and out of bounds. I understand that the distant view wouldn't work well with this view of the smoking tree arches or whatever, but if I could modify the map layout, I would have completely covered this view where we have this opening here, I would have reduced the size of the opening and I would have looked down at the land there and if you still wanted a big open view of smoking arch trees I would have just tilted them more. towards the left side of the level and for the view from Irithyll it would have been nice to at least have a small view of the steaming lake from up here to be fair, although the distant view of the ash leak expands from the Tomb of the Giants in Dark Souls .

It didn't make any sense either. so maybe anything that involves arch shaped trees is where they are allowed to break up the space the most oh yeah i almost forgot, we got to this point of discussion, starting from the view from the desecrated capital, i said overall i was well with respect to other distant views, but we had to ignore the overlap of these two maps. This is perhaps best visualized by dropping a pile of prismatic stones next to that huge horde of skeletons near the collapsing bridge. Let's take another quick look at the drag pile we can try to hunt.

Sources of some of what we see here in the texture of the sky box, we can see the undead settlement at the bottom, as well as what appears to be the furnace of the first flame. We can also see some elements of Lothric such as the dragon slayer bridge in the playable environment we have this great moment where we fall through a window and land inside what appears to be the ruins of the great archives, which explains all the shelves. It appears to be a direct match to this piece, other than the fact that it was made. much higher for the drag pile.

I find it strange that the building grew taller, but something else that reinforces the connection between the two locations is that you will find an open corner here, this is where the staircase used to be anyway, finding some Lothric ruins. on the drag pile it feels a little dissonant seeing it relatively intact in the distance ahead, with more time they probably would have wanted this to look a lot more dilapidated so I got a few requests to compare the maps from the different games in the short version . is that there really isn't much to say about the world location of something like anor londo, we can't look back and find meaningful connections between where the fortress of sense used to be or where the archives of the dukes would have been, history itself tells makes it quite clear.

The lands are converging and so there's not much we can try to align because the surrounding landscape doesn't try to sync with Dark Souls 1. But that doesn't mean we can't consider some interesting aspects of how areas like In London, the original Firelink Shrine and the ground spike reappear in Dark Souls 3. But since that has less to do with the overall world design, I think I'll save it for its own discussion in the future, not to mention the prototype map content and some In the meantime, I highly recommend Check out Loki's story analysis of Irithyll if you want something else to discuss about what happens between Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 3.

Overall, I think Dark Souls 3 made a lot of really smart decisions with its World Design, though The inclusion of bonfire warping from the beginning of every game since Dark Souls 1 has likely influenced a less interconnected design in the sequels, they still made a lot of effort to consider their relationships between areas in a way that made it seem like they wanted to write. some of Dark Souls 2's mistakes and they definitely made it so that having your main focal point be this castle that looms over you and often stays in view as you explore nearby areas like towns and swamps.

It also has a design that would have been perfect for a 3D Castlevania, but I could go on and on about why the souls formula would be the best choice for a new Castlevania game, so that could also be a topic for a future discussion. As always, I hope you enjoyed this video. I must give one last shout out to Lee Moria, they also did a lot of examinations on world design and I feel like they made one of the first comprehensive efforts on the topic. Although I did my own research independently, I found myself watching their videos halfway through scripting this episode. and I was basically nodding in agreement with everything I saw, so those are a few more videos I recommend watching if you're into this kind of stuff.

Also a big thank you to all my followers on Patreon. Any amount of support goes a long way. making these videos sponsors on the Evil Fragrant level include alex the bear estranicus curtis ware gary marshall harry pham jamie shermer carl jerm nashwana zari pethras the duo majalis and zelther thank you very much, although I still have a bunch of specific episodes scheduled that I've had the intention of making the release and the release of the Demon Souls remake inspires me to investigate and cover some more topics of that game, so you can probably expect more demon souls

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in the near future until then, mbasa, I mean, praise be the sun you