Dark Souls Dissected #20 - Invasion Cooldown Timers
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- Опубликовано: 3 июн 2024
- Today's episode of Dark Souls Dissected reviews the cooldown timers that block instant invasions from happening repeatedly. Some brand new discoveries relating to its Limit Level system, as well as Vagrant cooldowns, are explained as well.
/ illusorywall
0:00 Introduction
0:49 Invasion Cooldowns
3:19 Clearing the Cooldown Timers
5:54 Limit Levels
9:22 Invasion Frequency Balancing
14:15 Dark Souls 2
15:19 Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring
17:43 Gravelord Cooldowns
18:59 Why Were Limit Levels Removed?
19:44 Vagrant Cooldowns
24:06 Closing Words
Special thanks to Metal Crow, Europa, FenotheFox, Karl Germ, Algi, Ariane, and HotPocketRemix for various assistance (coding / testing / multiplayer help).
Artist of Dank Furtive Pygmy sadly unknown! Original upload here:
/ oc_was_high_with_my_gf... 
Игры
Answering a few questions here!
1) From @piatansfair - "Does the timer continues running if I am being summoned to another world? Let's say I was invaded and died. So now my timer of 900s is on (ds1). If someones summons me, while I'm on their world, is my timer running as well? Or it only counts when I'm on my world? Also does it count when I'm hollowed as well?"
The timer is persistent regardless of whose game you're in. If I get invaded, have the cooldown timer start, then get summoned for co-op to help someone else, the timer will be unphased by all of this and continue counting down without pausing through loading screens and while you're a phantom. It also keeps counting just fine while you're hollow.
2) Another from @piatansfair - "So in Dark Souls 1, summoning has no effect whatsoever in the invader timer?"
Correct! The 15 minutes (or higher w/ limit levels) is locked in if you don't do any of the specific things mentioned to clear it. Unlike DS3 / Elden Ring, summoning help in DS1 doesn't immediately open you to invasions and the timer is free to do its own thing. As much as these later titles tried to protect hosts from invasions more overall, this is somewhat counterproductive in that the experience in something like Elden Ring meant that summoning help (especially when the game was brand new), meant being open to practically constant invasions. DS1 doesn't do this, you can summon help without clearing the timer, so that's actually one way that DS1 manages to be a little more forgiving.
This means that for anyone just trying to play with friends in DS1 and is frustrated that they just got killed by an invader, DO NOT WAIT. Go grab your friend's summon sign again ASAP to take advantage of that cooldown.
3) From @RosiYYAP - "Do the vagrant timers affect your ability to send out vagrants, either by dropping items and reloading or dying with 5 humanity? Also does the inverse apply? Does starting a vagrant affect the timers either negatively or positively?"
I mentioned in the video how any Vagrants created while the cooldown is running get held onto in your "outbox", and the game will wait to send it out when then cooldown clears. So Vagrants you create while you can't send any out aren't wasted, they're just "frozen" for a bit. They won't be sent out immediately when the cooldown clears, but when you do the needed action after it clears (dying / reloading / warping / quitting, etc). However, I didn't cover what happens if you receive a Vagrant while the cooldown is running!
If you receive one while the cooldown is running, you do still receive it into your inbox, but you won't actually be able to see or get it. How you normally receive Vagrants is that they wind up in your inbox before they're actually in your game. Once received, you have 5 minutes to reload the game to actually get the Vagrant out of your inbox and into your game, otherwise it just gets sent back out to another player if those 5 minutes run out. This is why you can't go AFK by a Vagrant spawn location all day long and expect to see Vagrants start showing up. You'd want to reload the area every ~4 minutes and 50 seconds to optimize your chances of getting one and not just unwittingly sending one straight back out to another player- something that happens to us behind the scenes all the time without having any idea.
The cooldown just prevents reloading from being able to pull the Vagrant out of your inbox into your game. It stays stuck in your inbox, and the 5 minute "inbox timer" will just continue otherwise as it normally does and you'll pass the Vagrant back out to someone else. None of the actions affect the Vagrant cooldown timer either, it'll just keep counting down and doing its thing.
“I think most players will feel that it was underutilized and didn’t go far enough.” Man, ain’t that just the story for so many of this game’s online details.
For many of FromSoft games' details in general.
This is so true. There are so many different and interesting things they could do with the multiplayer, but don't bother to explore. One example would be an invasion mechanic that involves anything other than killing the host. I also feel like it would add a lot of incentive to PvP if you got a random piece of a defeated opponent's equipment, including things like spells or items on their hotbar.
I'm not saying these should become primarily multiplayer games with singleplayer as an afterthought, I'm just saying they can do more with the multiplayer.
@@Greywander87 No. Stealing other players items/equipment is always a bad idea and has a long multi decade history of destroying games that have it with extremely rare exceptions.
Btw they did expereiment with rewards with DS2's Bell Keepers. Bell Keepers made the pvp reward rare/late game upgrade materials for both invader and host but this design never returned in future games.
@@Warcrafter4 I don't think they're suggesting equipment stealing, just giving the victorious player a copy of a random piece of their opponent's equipment.
From's online gameplay design in a nutshell. Even ER is at fault for that, the fact they didn't bother add a covenant system, even tho the game literally already set up multiple invading factions, tells me they realldy don't care about this anymore.
2:04 For the sake of transparency, this wasn't actually part of the exact hatemail exchange I was referencing, but it was the most appropriate message I could dig up from my older PSN chats. It appears that PSN has automatically deleted a lot of the more hateful messages, so the actual hatemail I received is lost to time sadly. However, this was ANOTHER message from someone else I also kept invading repeatedly because of constant disconnects, around the same period of time. This one had a much friendlier ending, where they asked if I could stop because they were on their last humanity and wanted to play with their friend. IIRC, I dropped him a bunch of humanity and black crystal'd out, as the last message he sent me was thanking me, so I must've cooperated and helped in some way (and I vaguely recall doing that).
Just wanted to point this out in the VERY rare chance that the person who messaged me that sees this and is like "wtf, illusory thought that was hatemail???". They weren't actually cussing me out like the other message I was hoping to find and share here.
Polite boi
Important lore
Hate Mail Dissected
PSN hate mail is hilarious, either you get somebody who's angry, but open to reason, or you get called every name in the book by some goober who keeps rejoining a lobby you're trying to make friends only when it's set to public by default.
Wholesome hatemail
These investigations ignite that sense of curiosity I associate with childhood, when I was finding flattened boss arenas hidden at the edge of maps and getting confused by Sims glitches.
Reminds me of the rumor that Mew was underneath the pickup truck by the S.S.Anne in Pokemon Red and Blue!
Nintendo Power even had a "rumors cop" section of the magazine where you could write in with questions about rumors and secrets you heard and the writers responded in character.
Someone asked about Mew under the truck and the official Nintendo power response was there was just a small oil slick under the truck and the rumor cop had the truck ticketed and towed for being illegally parked. Still remember it over 20 years later!
@@TheCrewExpendable I'm really showing my age here but roughly 40 years ago on the ZX Spectrum there was a game called Lunar Jetman by Ultimate (who later became Rare) and there was a rumour that if you played the game for long enough you could find a trailer to hitch up to the moon buggy you drove around in, someone even faked a photo of it and sent it into Crash magazine! Whole thing never existed though!
Fury3 is the game in particular I was referencing. It's a Windows 95 flight sim shooter using the same game engine as Terminal Velocity.
The last level of each planet has a boss called a guardian that is usually in an enclosed arena at the end of a tunnel, a structure separate from the overworld map. These enclosed arenas are mapped to obscure areas of the overworld where the tunnels leading from the finished boss fights can still be accessed without having defeated them. This allows for a lot of sequence breaking.
I like the juxtaposition of you saying you were introduced to pvp in a relaxed way, while being killed on screen by an invader with the Scraping Spear.
haha, I suppose I really am more patient for this sort of thing than the average player. Of course the footage was a mockup, but it WAS a scraping spear invader when it happened to me. It's how I learned about it. 😅
Purple Mad Phantom summons in Dark Souls 3 is my favourite go to, the uncertainty of helping, hindering, or memeing always being a fun time, likewise it's fun to watch Hodrick fight crabs.
My biggest wish for the Mound Makers was that they should've been able to help with boss fights. I know it'd be too extreme for one to turn on a host during a boss fight when the boss is almost dead, but they could've made it so that friendly fire was disabled after entering the fog gate. This way, while you're on your way to the boss, the weight of "is this guy actually going to help me" would be more impactful, because their help might actually go "all the way". Really great concept but I just wanted to see it tweaked a little more.
@@illusorywall There was a glitch in ds3 a while back that worked like that; essentially you would trick the game into thinking the player you invaded summoned you. This meant that, if you were not a moundmaker, you were forcing them to co-op(though they could use the black separation crystal to get rid of you), while moundmakers could attack the host or help them out.
@@illusorywallmy biggest gripe is that they made seed of a giant tree drops invisible to other players. I already engaged in a lot of involuntary co-op by placing warmths and disabling the crystal sage, the candle scholars, and the sorceress from the gank trio in the archives with vow of silence, I just wish I could have helped them with the final staircase to the princes as a random passerby too.
@@TheRenegade191 They did the seeds dirty. Capping their effect time to 45 seconds, I think? C'mon, it should either last several full minutes, or honestly until the invader is gone.
I haven't even played this game in 10 years but listening to obscure mechanics I never knew about is water for my parched soul.
You are my hero.
Sounds like it's time for another playthrough!
@@TrueYankeeFan you could not be more correct
In Super Smash Bros Melee, an intended game mechanic relevant to competitive play was discovered 14 years after the game released. The community calls it V-canceling. If you're in the air (not in hitstun or an attack animation) and hit the shield button 1 or 2 frames before getting hit, your knockback will be reduced by 5%. The intention was likely to give some consolation to players who try to airdodge just a frame or two late. It's a small difference, but also crazy that it took so long to discover given how thoroughly dissected Melee is.
Nice. If that's truly an intended mechanic and not a glitch that's exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about (and also still cool in its own way if it was a glitch). It's cool when stuff like this sneaks by and the developers just leave the community on their own to figure it out.
@@illusorywall To me it seems like an unfinished game mechanic, perhaps even forgotten about during Melee's rushed development. The knockback reduction is almost negligible, and it's weird how you're allowed to V-cancel during special fall state (when you cannot airdodge). Almost certainly not a glitch though.
@@illusorywall I think Melee and DS1 have some similarities in terms of half-baked / unfinished stuff being left in the game, rather than cut, as long as the effect was more-or-less unnoticeable. After all, removing stuff takes at least some time, which the devs didn't have. And if you're squashing bugs in spaghetti code, and a game-breaking bug stops happening for unclear reasons, you count your blessings and stop changing anything at all. (This is based on speculation I've heard/read from people who know a lot more about coding/game development than I do.)
I think the way invasion timers progressed between games also altered player behaviour within and around invasions altogether.
I remember in DS1 being scared of invaders at first, and then progressing to having my weird kind of "ethics" around it, seeing invaders do strange things, and occasionally getting up to shenanigans that had nothing to do with the basic act of PvP.
DS2 was similar, but I started hearing complaints around ganking more often, and in turn seeing invaders more frequently be of the optimized and "ruthless" kind, rather than the casual player who just felt like doing some PvP that day with their normal character.
In DS3, invasions felt less like weirdos meeting weirdos in the weirdo game, and more like typical League tryhards grinding rank or whatever. The magic was gone.
You're lucky, DS1 had plenty of black flame havels and dark bead spam in undead burg.
@@Ozerasaredumb It did, I believe a black flame Havel was my very first invasion, quickly followed by a naked lady with the Dark Hand who tried to steal my nonexistent humanity then crystaled out.
Not that I had any concept of what any of that was back then.
But you just had to make it past the parish, and invaders became mostly normal people with the occasional sweat lord or jokester mixed in. Now it's just the sweat lords, and very rare jokesters who can't get the joke in edgewise before getting annihilated on reflex.
There used to be reddit arguments about BOWING.
Yeah it’s really sad to see the Dark Souls pvp go the way that like Pokémon pvp has, where there’s this really harsh division between the people who like the core game and the people who want to participate in pvp.
I remember old Extra Credits videos talking about how well Dark Souls and 2 integrated pvp with the core pve gameplay so that everything felt like a single contiguous experience. Now it definitely feels like two different games, one built within another.
Honestly, if there's one thing I absolutely despised about the Remastered, it was the removal of Darkmoon Blades invading downward. (As I understand it, the Remastered matched the Darkmoon range with Darkwraiths). It is a travesty.
They did constrict the range and made it not aim downwards, it was a really bad change for sure. I briefly mention the original range in this video but I'll have more to say about the changed ranges and matchmaking in general in a future video. I was actually scripting a video about matchmaking first, but realized I hadn't talked about the cooldowns yet and wanted to get this done first! :)
@@illusorywall For me personally, the constricted range on Remastered Darkmoons was especially vindicating after DS3. I didn't like the Darkmoon Blades being reduced to pushover bodyguards instead of the terror-inducing retributionists.
I very fondly remember the days when Darkmoon invasions were cause for sh*tting a brick.
To be fair, that's mainly just venting salt on my end, but... good getting it off my chest.
For me it was the bonfires being changed to look more like actual fire (though the old bonfire appearance was kept on loading screens). I liked the old appearance because it made the fire and the first flame seem more supernatural, "religious," and metaphorical. Like it shares some aspects of regular fire and the characters call it fire because its the closest thing thats similar, but its something more mysterious than regular flames.
@TheCrewExpendable for some reason the switch version of remastered has the original bonfire design
@@Blandy8521 That's because the Switch never really got the true remaster. Dark Souls Remastered on the Switch was actually just a port of Prepare To Die Edition with some minor tweaks made.
Re: Invasions mostly being limited to groups, this also has a subtle side effect of making invaders far more threatening, and generally less pleasant for the invadee as well.
Back in the days of launch-era Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, invaders would NOT always be twinked-out min/max shit houses that would obliterate you. It wasn't totally uncommon to get some random person invading you - obviously a threat, but much more manageable.
Fast-forward to Elden Ring, and since invaders will almost always be up against 2+ enemies, all those casual invaders get weeded out - the invader needs a super optimized build to blow people up or they get ganged up on. There's no more room for just a casual build that the host actually has a chance of standing a fair shot against even if they themselves aren't optimized for PvP. Thus if you don't care for PvP, then when you DO get invaded it feels like you stand zero chance, because the invader HAS to have a build that can deal with 2-3 enemies at once.
Absolutely. It became an arms race of sorts for handling groups. I want more clueless invaders invading clueless hosts. 😅
And because of the open world, twink setups are easier to make than ever. I have done some coop with friends at early levels to teach them the game and bam antspur before stormveil and a guy with full black knife armour and a stormhawk axe the literal first time I summon my starting level friend.
Half the issue with Elden Ring is there’s way more tools available to make an unstoppable invader or gank squad than in previous games barring glitches. You give an invader dual cross naginatas with BHS and the host and their friend won’t ever be able to hit them before getting two shot by bleed. There’s also a lot more one shot builds and even just the regular tools are stronger with less counterplay. Like the moonveil is beyond obnoxious. So were the ringed knight paired greatswords that could land a one shot pseudocombo. Until people realized that the caestus can hard counter it with perseverance and our damage it. No such counterplay exists currently for certain weapons and setups besides just waiting for balance patches.
Older games had broken glitches like bow casting and tumble buffing, but Elden Ring also has tumble buffing and its own slew of glitches like hosts hiding out of bounds. The end result is PvP encounters are either completely one sided slaughters or it’s an invader looking to one or two shot the host and a gank squad looking to stunlock the invader from full to dead.
unfortunately that is the case for the souls games too. Most invaders have an optimized build to annoy you in DS 1-3.
@@Soapy-chan It's a bit of an emergent effect from the age of these games and the general proliferation of Fromsoft games and knowledge about them over the internet. Back when DS1 and DS2 first launched, you had an entire clueless playerbase to invade or be invaded by, nowadays most people still playing and actively participating in online know all there is to know, hence why everyone gravitates towards the meta. Not that people weren't able to figure things out or build absurd twinks early in the games' lifespans, but they were far outnumbered at the time.
the number of complicated but practically useless or unused mechanics in Dark Souls 1 is insane
Yeah it really feels like Demon's Souls was FromSoft experimenting to nail down the general formula for these games, which they did. And then Dark Souls was them applying a million little systems and quirks to see what stuck, what worked, what made the game better or worse, and so on. From then on we haven't seen them do this much, it's mostly been refinement.
@@inakilukac Hell a lot of times they remove it even if it worked.
Where is my sin system? Why remove blue invasion?
@@NisseDood yeah, and they've given up on systems that aaalmost worked. Like covenants and durability. Durability specifically, I know a lot of people don't like it. But IMO it turns weapons into resources rather than infinitely available tools. But they never got it right. It's either a non-issue like in DS3 or a nightmare like in DS2. If they went for a middle ground it could've worked. It also provides a recurrent reason to interact with blaskmiths beyond upgrades
@@inakilukac It wasnt really that bad in ds2 in itself.
Its mostly because repairing meant higher soul memory.
But since most souls games dont have soul memory it would become a none issue to have to repair.
@@inakilukacDS 2 came the closest to perfecting the durability system. Leaving out the 60 FPS durability glitch, some equipment had such low durability that you were actually at risk of having it break if you didnt repair it or the enemies were designed around breaking durability. Conversaly, durability both in 1 and 3 was a joke stat that might as well not exist. If DS 2 had limited consumables inbetween bonfire rests, and no repair spell, durability would have mattered a lot more.
I couldn’t tell you how unnoticed by the larger community of the game it was, but the ‘revenge value’ system from Kingdom Hearts 2 is my favorite obscure system that secretly makes the game way better.
Essentially, it’s a mechanic that determines when a boss can break out of a combo. Every hit of your combo adds a certain amount of revenge, and when that number hits the bosses revenge value, the boss breaks out and counterattacks. It happens at the same number every time, meaning an observant player can pick up on this, and adapt. Although it’s never explained or shown anywhere, which is why I categorize it as obscure.
Sounds like the ds stagger system
@@16m49x3it’s actually a counterbalance to prevent the game from playing like Dark Souls. In DS, you can stunlock any enemy that you can combo hard enough to repeatedly stagger, but Kingdom Hearts is a faster paced game with no stamina system - you are forced to dodge or block enemies (at the very least bosses) so that extremely aggressive play is more risk-reward.
It’s also SO intuitive that I think players generally learn the system without realizing it. It’s in every main title in the Kingdom Hearts series, and it’s a core part of the boss fight mechanics. It really lends to the anime style of the combat, where a seemingly outmatched opponent can shock you with a surprise ace in the hole and potentially put you in a tight spot out of nowhere. (Dark souls achieves a similar feeling by forcing stamina management and making damage so punishing, meaning that you need to alternate between defense and offense unless you have the stamina and strategy to kill an enemy outright)
Just one tangential consideration; I didn't mention it in the final video because it felt like too unnecessary of a tangent to have to explain further, but I hope my rose-tinted glasses for Demon's Souls invasions didn't send the wrong signal of "just do what Demon's Souls did again"! Definitely not, a big chunk of how that game pulled off an invasion pacing I found admirable was because of how it was artificially protected by having a much smaller playerbase. In addition to lacking covenants that could've incentivized repeated multiplayer loops. What I want is for them to pursue the sort of vibe it had, and pulling that off in a modern title of theirs means having to include systems that Demon's Souls DIDN'T have. So I hope I didn't make it sound like Demon's Souls was designed any better, because it wasn't. It just sort of worked out that way. No invasion cooldowns combined with solo invasions and the ability to easily get a permanent use invasion item (early in the game), in a modern title of theirs? lmao, that would be a fantastic train wreck
Funny you say that, because hearing your account of your first experience of an invasion in Demon's Souls, which had probably the most broken online system of all souls titles, reminds me of my own experiences at the time of launch, and just how much fun all of it was.
I honestly think the main problem is actually how bad some of these PVP systems age, specially as the titles get more popular. At the onset of the game's life cycle, there's a huge influx of players that (mostly) naturally spreads itself out according to their own pace. Casual players linger around earlier areas, while the more invested brave through later ones. I think it's during these times that PVP is at its most fun and somewhat balanced state, since people will be trying all different kinds of combinations and experimenting with varied mechanics, cracked-out twinks are either very rare or non-existent, and there's no meta figured out.
Come back a few weeks (hell, even DAYS for ER) later, and the landscape is completely changed. 90% of invasions in Dark Souls would be from twinks in Undeadburg, DS2 had people consciously targeting certain SL ranges, DS3 had everyone and their mother using overturned straight swords, etc. Now people's experience with the system isn't as much of struggling against an unexpected but fair challenge, and more of being steamrolled by a red guy that shows up whenever he pleases. Demon's was a bit of an exception, most likely due to its relative obscurity and being restricted to the PS3. It seemed like there were always new people trying the game out, with veterans ranging from extremely helpful to... complete sadists (ok, maybe I have to take off my rose-tinted glasses).
ER tried to solve this by... completely separating the online and offline experiences. I can understand the thought process, and I think they did some things right with it, like tuning equipment separately for PvP and PvE instead of just punching numbers in and hoping you don't break one mode in aid of the other, but ultimately I noticed I pretty much play the game solo every time. I remember I used to run builds in DS2 where I would run around shirtless punching people on Belfry Luna, using a character with a name like 'Buff McDonald'.
Good times. Some people would even do the same when they saw me and we would go on slugging matches while other invaders watched. Try that in ER and what you get is basically either a host with a gank squad or a PvP-oriented tryhard, as these are now the only two kinds of players that can survive online this late in the game lifecycle.
I deeply enjoyed Demon's Souls invasions (scraping spear, level stealing, baby's nail, and infinitely chomping grass were their own issues otherwise) thanks to how much they were a part of the world building and character choice. Being in Soul Form came as a huge hit to your character's health--yes, you could tie up a ring slot to mitigate a bit of this, but that also meant tying up a ring slot. Outside of the limited items, you could only become human through defeating bosses, helping others defeat bosses, or invading players. Character and World Tendencies would shift, too. I loved how that decision of helping or hurting someone had such an impact--not just on an actual other player, but also on these mechanical tendency systems. Incentivizing both invasions and co-op with the benefits of human form was cool! It also fit this larger theme of how people were predating each other at the end of the world for souls and all that.
Dark Souls tried to pull a similar thing with humanity and how the Dark Wraiths were all about invading people to steal it but, mechanically, when you could achieve the same thing by stabbing some mice for twenty minutes in a sewer? Eh, it just didn't work out the same way.
Honestly, I really miss how invasions felt even in Dark Souls, but especially how they factored into Demon's Souls. The changes to invading and the culture that's arisen around 'ganking invaders' have made it a largely joyless affair. What was a cornerstone experience of those earlier games just now feels forever gone. Ah well.
I actually do think that having early access to a permanent invasion item would be a good thing for PvP in a modern title. It would mean that new players would have access to (and better understand) the invasion mechanics. Locking the invasion covenant behind the esoteric requirement of returning to the 4 Kings arena to talk to Kaathe IMO sets the bar too high, and was one of the biggest mistakes that the first Dark Souls made. It basically makes it so that only skilled and knowledgeable players even know how to invade (let alone be capable of doing so). This only exacerbates the problem of invasions feeling unfair and obtuse to new or low-level players. Having earlier access to invasions and PvP would also give new players opportunity to play with the system earlier and potentially practice PvP early in the game, when the stakes are lower. N00bs would have a lot more PvP sessions with other n00bs, which would likely be less toxic and more fun. Having early access to a PvP arena in order to practice would also IMO be beneficial.
But I do agree that if early access to invasions was combined with a lack of any sort of cooldown (or other checks on invasion frequency), it would be a disaster.
Personally, I think that FromSoft should make the PvP character level ranges be supplemental and secondary to an actual match-making ladder system, in which PvP prioritizes matching players up against other players of similar skill levels first, and then secondarily look for a similarly-skilled player who is also within a given character level range. This would hopefully mean skilled players get more fair and competitive matches against other skilled players, while novice players are matched up against other evenly-matched novices.
I really loved doing cosplay invasions in DS1, slow walking and being generally less of a threat than the enemies of the level. Sometimes it was fun to invade just to drop rainbow stones to show hidden paths to newer players. I had a character dedicated to helping people int he catacombs in DS3 named Hamburger Helper. I never attacked a host unless they insisted on trying to kill me.
When Elden Ring dropped, I lost any and all reason to try and interact with the online community of the game. Every invasion went the same. New player being leashed by a NG+ phantom that sprinted to every item, half of the hosts had end game gear the phantom dropped for them at the start of their playthrough, hyper aggressive players that just wanted the invader out of the world and didn't care for unique interactions. It got boring really fast, and given the size of the game, trying to make a low level cosplay that requires a set that you get later on took literally dozens of hours just to run into the same issues.
I really resent FromSoft for changing PvP so much. Covenants stopped being important in DS3, and then PvP basically died in Elden Ring. I spent over 1000 hours in DS1 across Xbox and the PC release solely on invasions and interacting with other players. I hate that you can't have those interactions anymore. It's just "oh that's a red guy kill him, spam the art of war"
This isn't really what you were asking for, and is more of a developer oversight than anything, but I still find it amusing and it sort of fits the theme of 'undiscovered for years'.
In Final Fantasy XIV, there's a very minor mechanic where certain NPCs will have a small speech bubble pop up above their head when you walk past, purely for a little bit of worldbuilding. I assume it just waits for you to pass within a certain distance of the NPC and triggers the bubble.
In patch 5.3, a whole ~6ish years after the big re-release of 2.0, they added flying to the early areas, letting people reach previously unreachable spots on each map (you can see where this is going). Players quickly found a fisherman in a boat just off a pier that spoke exclusively in Japanese, as his trigger range was too small to reach the nearby pier. The playtesters (who couldn't fly) missed that his text hadn't been translated, and it went unnoticed until someone flew by years later and went "hey, wait a minute..."
Japanese fisherman was a minor tourist attraction until they patched him to be multilingual shortly after.
I think my favourite obscure mechanic from a game that went unnoticed applies to the original Pokemon games, and it's the fact that the move Body Slam can't paralyze normal-types, because that discovery massively shook up the PvP meta of a game that was 20 years old when it was found.
....I can't even say that makes sense from a coding perspective, since electric types weren't immune to paralysis until Gen 6.
That's just another piece of gen 1 jank to throw on the pile.
@@FizzieWebbIt's caused by the fact that moves are coded not to be able to status pokemon that are the same type as the move. Fire types aren't inherently immune to burn, it's just that every move that can cause burn in gen 1 is fire type, and they're coded to not be able to apply their status to fire types. Same thing, Thunderbolt is coded to not paralyze electric types, but since body slam is a normal move, it can paralyze electric types, but not normal types.
@@SmugLookingBarrel Gen 1 Pokemon is a goldmine of that kind of mechanical shortcut. I love it.
My favorite detail about this detail is that this property of Body Slam was known to the RBY speedrunning community for eons and eons before the RBY PvP scene realized it :')
Yeah I barely engaged in PvP in Elden Eing at all because of those changes. I wish there was a way to just occasionally get invaded randomly like the good old days and Taunter's Tongue just made it constant. From also lowering the player cap so if the host had 2 summons it was impossible for the invader to get any backup was bad too
Original Dark Souls 2 didn't have the automatic boss defeated burned human effigy effect. It was added in the 1.10 patch.
11:55
"They kicked my ass, and i loved it"
~illusory wall 2024
*it :)
With the scraping spear even... 🤣
Spoken like a true Dark Souls fan.
Masochist game director -> masochist playerbase
I feel you on missing solo invasions. Nothing gives me a rush like being invaded by surprise.
Low chance/long randomized cooldown on being solo invaded in Elden Ring being a toggle would add an imeasurable amount of replayability.
In the past I've referred to as a hypothetical "Taunter's Tongue lite" and I want it in the game so bad. I would like to be invaded sporadically as a solo host. I don't want to be CONSTANTLY open to invasions, nor even frequently enough for it to just become super common and expected.
@@illusorywall they had it figured out for 2.5 games, I don't know why they removed solo invasions for elden ring, kind of a baffling choice that makes everyone unhappy. Coop players feel like they get invaded too often, invaders constantly have to sweat against 3 man ganks full of magic and AoW spam, while the system entirely neglects onboarding new solo hosts into the whacky world of fromsoft multiplayer, locking it behind TWO multiplayer items (finger remedy & taunters tongue) without any in game explanation telling them they're needed. The whole thing is unintuitive and a headscratcher considering they did it relatively well in ds1 and 2, and most of the systems in 3.
I had a brain injury in December but I used to watch this series and seeing more content feels so great and nostalgic. It shouldnt be since I finished DKS1 last September but I have such a deep nostalgia for it
The games like a nice blanket. Its nice to just wrap yourself in
A brain injury?? Uh no, that's scary 😢
@@ShiningTitan it's scary how the people around you change after, actually
I was one of the people who baited invasions in Anor Londo.
Dressed up as Ornstein while a friend cosplayed Smough.
We did it for awhile without Dried Finger and I had the sense of it 'feeling longer' to catch later invasions, so it's nice to have that feeling validated.
When I looked up a solution online at the time, people just suggested the Dried Finger, so that's where I ended up.
The first time I was ever invaded was when I was struggling through Shrine of Storms as a complete beginner.
I sent the invader a message asking why he invaded and killed me and that the game was hard enough as is.
They wrote back to say that this was how they had decided to regain their humanity--it was nothing personal, this was just easier and more fun for them than co-op.
And that's something that really struck me with the rest of the Dark Souls franchise :
Being in your 'offline' mode didn't punish you like Soul Form did.
Invasion as a means of netting something valuable for a player at another player's expense is just infinitely more interesting than what we got in every game since.
But you can play through the rest of the entire franchise of FromSoft RPGs without ever needing to 'be online' or see a single invasion at little to no detriment to yourself.
So players could just opt out entirely of what was one was one of the most interesting aspects of Demon's Souls.
It was lame.
I loved Bloodborne.
Played hundreds of hours of it.
Never once was I invaded during any regular playthrough.
I knew invasions could happen, it's just that the whole system was opt-in.
And most players were only opting in to summon for a boss, in which case, well, they'd just walk into the boss room.
So I lingered for a very long time in the Nightmare Realm and I finally saw another player invade there.
We killed each other because nearly every attack would stagger one-another.
I've played Bloodborne a lot since and still haven't been invaded again.
It was lame.
The last invasion I ever did was on Dark Souls remastered.
I had cleared the game at SL1 and had given myself enough levels to cast Chameleon.
I wanted to provide some of the fun of invasions to players new to the game, so I bloated my level range to fit somewhat overleveled players in the Undead Parish.
I'd invade players and equip a fitting antagonistic gear set for themed invasions or
I'd invade and Chameleon and follow them like Looney Toons and even dress up like them secretly or
I'd dress like a knight and help 'guide' them and show them where secrets were while ensuring no one else could invade them.
There were a lot of people who would just immediately disconnect or there were people who were obviously not on their first playthrough.
But there were also gank squads and people who'd trap you on one side of the Parish gate / fog with no way to get to them but to stone out.
The worst of it was chasing a seemingly new player down the stairs in the Armored Boar area only for a group of two different gankers to descend from the rafters with +5 Chaos weapons and kill me in a single hit with plunging attacks and then watch the host pop Dried Finger to queue that sequence again.
I just didn't understand.
Where was the fun in that?
What was the point?
The hyper-vigilance around 'Invaders' had gotten so bad from DS3's trashfire that it'd poured into the Remaster's culture and, yeah, it sucked.
It was lame.
as much as i generally dont like invasions, i very much empathize with your "this is some more bullshit to deal with and,, actually i love it" reaction to your first demon's souls invasion; it's how i felt getting continuously ambushed by mobs in ds2.
City of Heroes has the concept of "ArcanaTime", named after the user Arcanaville who discovered it about 4 years after the original release of the game. In City of Heroes you attack with powers that have a listed cast time, such as 1 second. However, the server has to finish processing its current clock tick (about 0.132 seconds) before you're allowed to use another power, and then you also have to wait for the next tick for that power to actually start casting. So that 1 second cast time becomes 1.188 seconds in ArcanaTime, and this discovery ended up having a big effect on how players did calculations to find the most optimal attack chains.
reminds me of how you can minmax runescape prayer durations by flicking em on and off in sync to the server's "tick rate"
@@KickieB yeah, some might even say it's necessary if you intend on "stayin alive"
This entire series really encapsulates what makes DS1 such a special game to me, it feels like so many creative, unique and innovative ideas and mechanics for online play were thrown into this game during development that unfortunately were never explored or utilized much, if at all, in subsequent games. This one isn't one of the craziest mechanics DS1 implemented, but sounds like one that should definitely be brought back and fleshed out more for a future game, as much as I respect Fromsoft for trying to make invasions less frustrating, going into the complete other extreme and turning them into basically duels rather than invasions feels like the wrong choice.
I miss random invasions so much in ds3 and elden ring. you're right in that there's a certain magic in knowing you could be invaded at any moment (obviously not literally at any moment as this video articulated so well, but reality and perception of reality are not the same thing) that is missing in both the newer games.
I honestly feel like perhaps DS2 had nearly perfected invasions in that was little one could do to be "safe" from invasions so a much larger percentage of your playthrough was spent anticipating it as a possibility.
Completely agree on your ds2 take, and something that's often overlooked about ds2 is how the blue eye orb allowed you to invade someone in ANY area of the game, regardless of your current location. The pvp in that game was amazing.
@@tomm9056Weirdly i have no memory of ever being able to succesfully invade anyone with the blue eye orb in DS2.
I have two words for you: rat covenant
In Vampire Savior / Darkstalkers 3, defense revolves around the pushblock mechanic. One bizarre quirk of pushblocking, however, is that it is random. Literally. If you input the command for a pushblock correctly, then the game rolls an RNG check to decide if your character does the move or not. This caused the competitive community problems for decades and playing around it was an important part of the meta. Then, in the mid-2010s, it was discovered that one of the programmers snuck in a hidden alternate input for pushblocking that has no RNG roll. It just works every time. The game came out in 1997.
damn
oh god this is one of my least fav "mechanics" in a fighting game lol it was so strangely thought-out to begin with, I want to say it might've been even an issue with the game being rushed? That's why they had to do Vsav2/Vhun2 because they ran out of memory etc., they obviously had some issues with making pushblock not too powerful/easy to engage but also not too hard to engage it. Its just really strange if you really break down their decisions with that mechanic and why its so hard to trigger a pushblock (in the "regular" way), how it does the dice-roll rng thing, almost makes it out to be almost like a mechanic that they were thinking of working on further, but just didn't have the time to.
Ok wait there's an alternate input for pushblock at all? There are still guides from like only 3 years ago still telling you to slide your hand because it guarantees more inputs. What exactly is the alt method? Game is still strange on a mechanical level; turbo only being given to one player rewards people who lock into their character quickly and disincentivizes experimentation at a low level of play, very bad game mechanic. Sorry I just go off when Vsav is mentioned lmao. I don't hate it but its such a strangely-designed game in so many ways.
That increasing invasion timeout thing; Very common in networking code. It's referred to as progressive backup or exponential backoff depending on how aggressive it is. Try connecting to the server, fail, wait, try, wait twice as long, try, wait twice as long, etc. That's the exponential one. Means that with networking issues you don't spam the server making the issues worse. It often includes a bit of randomness in the backoff time too and has max/mins
My first invasion was in Dark Souls 2, it was in the very first area and he used corrosive urns to break all my equipment, forcing me to start the game over (I had no way to gather a fraction of the souls to repair everything that early and with that little knowledge of the series). It took a long time for me to come around to liking Souls PVP after that introduction.
i love how this perfectly articulates why i think i got more enjoyment from dark souls 1 pvp than the newer titles, even if they felt more unfair and arguably more jank lol
I hope they go back or find a middle point, I've seen few people happy about the changes they did for invasions in DS3 and Elden Ring.
PVP Invaders got annoyed they had to do 3v1s almost all the time and Co-Op folk got annoyed they were getting bombarded by invasions left and right.
All that's needed is more generous cool down timers and an upgraded system from the original DS where it levels up your time if you get too frequently invaded but doesn't downgrade you to level 1 asap, instead just knocks you down a peg.
They can still make it so the system slightly prioritize people who have 2 co-op partners , so solo people get target a bit less but i wouldn't make it an extreme difference, just a slight nudge to make co-op folk a lil' bit more exposed to being invaded.
hearing that PVP players are whining they have to actually do work and are subject to a challenge, in the game where you do work and are subject to challenge (and massive grinds), is funny
@@vaelophisnyx9873 It's not really a comparable experience. In pve yes you have to do work to win, but at least there's rewarding counterplay. In invasions with 3v1s or 2v1s, a lot of the time that isn't the case and the only counterplay you have is to run around and wait for minutes on end.
@artoriasstormblursed5888 or to run a generic meta build where you run up, one shot the host, then run away, which is a method of gameplay I dont find fun to fight against and dont find fun to do.
@@vaelophisnyx9873 Not even remotely comparable. You're being intentionally disingenuous at best.
They could also rework the covenant system to allow people to opt-in to the style of PvP they prefer. The people who want to gank spank can focus on that by joining one covenant, the people that want random 1v1s, 2v1s, and 2v2s can have a different covenant, duelists can have another one, etc.
As it stands people aren’t really choosing between much other than their phantom color, and I can still remember spamming the dragon covenant orb in DS1 in order to try and duel some people to try to learn PvP at my own pace. There were better options than battle royale by default
Not quite a completely unknown mechanic because it had a short shout-out in the official guide, but The Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion is intended to have a mechanic where you can start wars between the various in game Goblin tribes, but the methods to trigger them are so weird and specific that it was more or less impossible for anyone to find on their own, and whether the system actually exists in the game, was partially and messily cut, or was broken by a patch and worked originally, is really unclear and obtuse.
I don't know how long it took for Pokeblocks to be figured out in pokemon, but I remember watching a long video about that horribly convoluted mechanic.
I'm fully addicted to your videos. I literally downloaded half of them to listen to on plane journeys
Same! Illusory Wall is on my list of channels which I keep archived on my own hard drives. But I still rewatch these videos frequently on RUclips too.
I still think that Elden Ring should have had a gravelording equivalent. Imagine some Volcano Manor Boi invading you in a major legacy dungeon like Leyndell or Raya Lucaria, but they just add more enemies. Then when you invade them you see like 6 guys trying to kill a cackling black phantom which is insane and I want that
Seriously - I think that invasion timers and subtle matchmaking mechanics with systemic consequences are way more important than people think. Since DS3, we've so thoroughly catered invasions to the "Gank-spanking Twitch Streamer" model that it undermines what invasions used to be. Turning all invasions into ganks has been disastrous.
I definitely feel like Elden Ring totally removing invasions unless you specifically invite them (either literally or by co-oping) was a step back from an aspect that made this series very unique.
They could've 100% tweaked the frequency of how often you can be invaded to lower potential frustration, instead of stripping it out entirely.
@@Pyroniusburn As Illusory Wall noted though, this isn't unique to Elden Ring. DS3 was the origin of this problem. Otherwise I agree.
This is the trickiest part of games that mix PvP and PvE story experiences. If you give complete control to the host, it detriments the overall online experience and undermines the community. You make a ghost town, as most players go solo instead of summoning strangers and the only people hosting PvP online are password summon gankers who ensure the only people who can invade are sweaty twitch streamers.
At every level, it de-incentivizes participation. This kinda design undermines community.
@@monsieurdorgat6864 The biggest flaw is also that there is no way for matchmaking to tell a group of password summon gankers from a group of password summon co-op players.
I've been ranting for literal years at this point that I go around with a constant host + three phantom group, and if I never saw another invader in my game, that wouldn't change.
I remember a time in DS3 when we kept getting invaded by the same massively more capable player, and I can't imagine they were any happier to meet us idiots for the fifth time than we were to waste another half run of the level on this impassable brick wall of a fighter. We just concluded we wouldn't be playing Dark Souls 3 together that evening after all. Of the five players in that session including the invader, no fun was being had by anyone.
All this made worse by the fact that for a four player side-by-side coop run, you need to run each level four times with each player hosting in turn. Had we been on a platform that allows direct messaging, we would have just asked to pass.
@@Pyroniusburn I think it really hurts because I'd wager that on average people playing co-op are more casual so it's effectively pushing the least casual aspect of the game onto the most casual players
@@PyroniusburnI think invasions should be opt-in like in DS1 and 3 but otherwise I agree.
My worst experience was my first time playing DS2 (sotfs) where I kept getting invaded while hollow which made my soul memory higher for my level which lead to getting invaded by stronger people… one of the worst experiences I’ve had in gaming. I could have played in offline mode but I chose to play in uninstall mode instead. (I did come back and 100% DS2 later and I’m glad I did)
I encountered a white evil vagrant at the Parish church on my 1st ever playthrough. Had no idea what I was seeing, or why it didn't appear again. This was a magical experience that started me off down a path of obsession with ds1. Thousands of hours in, still playing.
I think one other aspect the group prioritization the later games focused that's had a negative effect on Invasions as a whole, especially for Elden Ring, is similar to the dark souls 1 problem. In which since co-op is the only way aside from inviting it with the dried finger equivalent, it narrows down who can be invaded to a much smaller pool. Causing frustration for the co-op groups who can tell they're getting invaded a lot just because of what they're doing, and invaders who do get sick of ganks.
It's understandable why a priority for groups rather than solo hosts was made, but trying to cut out solo hosts from the pool does more harm overall. Even if people don't realize the greater consequences since they think it's a plus not being invaded personally for being online.
24:06 i love this image so much, it says yeah you're hollow, but that's okay. now you can just relax
I'm 100% with you; though I'm no master of PvP it was always a thrill to get invaded, and likewise missed it in Elden ring. Luckily I was able to play with a few of my friends, so I often had a summoned companion or served in that role for others. A lot of times we would have a rule where if the host got invaded the summons were not allowed to fight, making it more fair. That worked out well enough, but it was an arrangement I had with friends and I wish the game had a way to make invasions happen like they did in DS1
I think Elden Ring in particular needed a Dark Souls 2-style invasion system. Because you can only invade co-op'rs and the presence of the sign stakes, there are only two types targets in the pool: players winding up to fight a boss (that will kick you out), and friends that are password-summoned and exploring together (meaning there is a high chance of twinking/OP summons). The number of people trying to invade far outweighed the number of people who both had friends and were co-op'ing, so the invasion pool was overflowing and trying to stuff invaders literally anywhere they could fit. Additionally, to my understanding, the invasion cooldown starts when the Red ARRIVES, not when they die, meaning that if you take too long to kill your invader you can get the next appearing moments after you killed them.
Imagine, then, that is was a hybrid of DS2 and DS1: everyone is valid for invasion, unless you were recently invaded or had recently felled a great enemy. There are hundreds of invaders... and hundreds of _thousands_ of targets. Invasions would become much slower, not only by the cooldown but because there are just more people to invade. It could prioritize co-op'rs too, when it rolls to see who it gets just count every phantom as a valid invasion target. Invasions would be so much more _special_ as the occur rarely. And, it would tone down the sweat of the invaders too, because they no longer need to gear to fight a regular host that should be there, and his Moonveil/RoB friends who are on NG+. Similarly, this might encourage co-op in the overworld, because you can get help for the potential invasion.
Frustrates the heck outta me.
wish this was how it worked
Seriously, as much as I love Fromsoft it's like they want multiplayer to wither and die
One side effect of invasions only existing for players actively engaging in coop is that, at least in my experience, it filtered out pretty much all casual invaders. Playing Dark Souls 1 and 2 back in the day it felt like you'd have a much greater chance to get invaded by a fellow PvE player just trying out PvP, and giving you something of a fair fight, while due to the extreme hostility towards the invader in dark souls 3 and elden ring, pretty much everyone who actually sticks with invading is someone who practices and builds specifically for it, meaning that if a more casual PvE player like me tries to get some solo invasions by toggling the taunters tongue on and off, you're pretty much guaranteed to get invaded by someone who's much, much better at the game at you with a build specifically optimized for pvp.
I want to shout out the chiptune themes for your intros. The Majula one is especially good.
Thank you so much!
Sitting down and watching a DS Dissected video with some good food is one of my favorite things ever
17:29
You know.. I was going to say that I like the idea that invasions are purely opt in, but after hearing your stance... I think maybe the other way around would be better.
an item that opts you out of invasions, so that by default, they are turned on. Have a guide character like Ranni or Melina appear after the first player invasion, win or lose, and give the character the opt out item.
Want a peaceful coop experience with a buddy? Whoever is host just has to use the item again after summoning, and boom, opted out.
It's not perfect, but at least that way that sense of "Okay, I've opted in, now it's a matter of when, not if." isn't a problem.
Some of these features may still be present in the Nintendo Switch port of the game because it isn't actually the "remastered version"
they changed the multiplayer mechanics so I doubt it
there are still some differences between the multiplayer for example the invaders spawn location pool is smaller on switch vs the pc remaster
unironically ive felt that the furlcalling finger remedy in elden ring should turn on invasions without being as aggressive as the taunters tongue is
i know a lotta people want it to be bound to rune arcs but i think binding it to the multiplayer opt in item makes more sense to me
i think it was a huge mistake to tie a statistical benefit to turning on multiplayer in ds3
the way elden ring handled it, by splitting the statistical benefit item and keeping it rare, while making the multiplayer item common, is the right idea. it just should have also turned on random invasions without forcing you to summon another player or disadvantaging yourself by using the taunters tongue
New illusory wall vid? Hell yeah
I think it is because I have no idea how I'd prefer these mechanics to actually work out that I appreciate that every new game there's a brand new system to how co-op and covenants work. Not only it gives each game its own personality, for better or for worse, it also keeps experienced players on their toes every time a new game comes out.
Still pretty neat to know I had a horrible time trying to co-op in vanilla DS1 and 2 for completely different reasons.
The first thing that popped into mind when you asked about games with other hidden mechanics was something that I discovered in the original Final Fantasy Tactics. This was largely before the internet, so everything I knew I learned on my own - and I knew a lot. I'd played the ever-loving crap out of the game and thought I knew everything. But I'll never forget when the game popped up with something I'd never seen before and it legit terrified me. It felt like the game had been hacked or something, because as stated - I thought I knew everything the game had to offer.
Your characters had two stats (amongst others) - Brave and Faith. Brave dictated the success chance of some physical abilities, and Faith affected the power of spells that character would cast, as well as the power of spells cast on that character. The way I'd strategized things was that most of my characters had really high Brave, which tended to not have downsides, and really low Faith, which tended to be quite strong. Because Faith was a double edged sword (more than Brave) it made sense to make characters that way - they weren't mages, so low faith made them almost universally tankier. High Brave, low Faith. Well, I was feeling like trying something new, so I decided to build a character that had high Faith. There were effects that would change your Brave and Faith during a battle, but they could also be changed very slowly between battles through a few means. It was quite a grind to change things, so I was mindlessly just grinding my characters.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a mechanic where a character whose Faith had gotten too high or Brave had gotten too low would have a chance to undergo a sort of moral crisis and possibly permanently leave your party - the flavor being that a person with very low Brave was a coward and didn't want to fight, and a person with very high Faith would be too pious to want to fight. This would only happen if their stat was permanently at that level. I'd had my characters in those thresholds during a battle before, but not between battles. After hours of grinding my Faith, I got this completely alien and unexpected popup after a fight, warning me of this - and it legitimately terrified me. My freshly teenage brain was so caught off guard by it. Obviously it didn't take long for me to realize it was just a mechanic in the game but the sensation felt to me as something completely alien. Imagine you're watching your favorite episode of your favorite TV show, and right in the middle of it the characters turn to face the camera and shatter the fourth wall. Hardly a terrifying experience, but certainly would give you some sort of whiplash.
I suppose this doesn't fully fit your criteria but it's what popped into my head when you mentioned that. Hope someone finds it amusing.
Thanks for making these Mr. Wall, I've been following these videos since you posted the sin one on the r/darksouls subreddit (or maybe someone else posted it?). Either way, COOL STUFF BRO!
MR WALL 😂 I love it
Pannenkoek just recently released a 4 hour window on how (dev unintended) invisible walls work in super Mario 64 and categorizing them all. I have no idea how long this info was known for, but definitely not for years after release
"You may think that for something to be an invisible wall, I'd say it needs to be a wall."
That video is already legendary!
Co op being the trigger for invasions does make sense, but for a middle ground having a more traditional invasion mechanic with cool downs only in side dungeons could be fun
Well that explains why it felt like during our last attempt to co-op Dark Souls 3, me and my gf felt like we couldn't go five minutes without being invaded. By virtue of co-oping, we were permanently open to invasions. That's a pretty shit system.
it's even worse in elden ring, where ONLY co-op is open to invasions, making co-opers feel like they're constantly getting invaded, and forcing poor reds into constant 3v1 ganks, while also neglecting solo hosts that could be introduced to this series whacky online mechanics in a more organic way. It's a system that manages to make everyone unhappy, when they had so much of it already figured out for 3 games prior...
There's some really dumb things in DS3 where in certain areas there are 2 slots for the invaders and only 1 for a co-op phantom, so if you're trying to co-op with 2 players at once, you can't all go through those areas together.
@@RLQFK It's really odd too because if they simply just upped the Cooldown timer for all non-area defender type invaders people would feel better about invasions. If in Elden Ring you could be invaded even while solo but after that invasion, regardless if you win, lost, or the invader DC'd, you got 30 minutes of being unable to be invaded people would feel much better about it. It allows invaders to sometimes get their 1 v1 invasions and also means Co-opers wouldn't be constantly invaded. Maybe make the invasion CD shorter if you were engaging in co-op from like 30 to 15 minutes.
@@Pyroniusburn But you can get your second phantom back via the dried finger :D ... and constantly being double invaded for your trouble...
And if you have three friends, that's the whole game actually, enjoy!
The idea is you’re fundamentally breaking the game by adding an extra player. The AI in these games is shit and doesn’t do well against multiples. So as a balancing mechanic, by making the game against the AI significantly easier you then open yourself up to invasions. Invasion priority was put in place to keep solo hosts from getting invaded all the time, especially because killing a boss gives you your embered form which could then force that interaction. Every single Souls game has had co-op and invasions intertwined this way. In DS1 you need to be human to summon, which also opens you up to invasions. In DS2, burning a human effigy disables invasions but it also disables summoning signs, in Bloodborne summoning automatically adds a bell ringing woman to your world that turns on invasions, in DS3 being embered lets you see summon signs and also enables you to be invaded, and in Elden Ring summoning directly opens you up to invasions. It’s a give and take. In every game you have the option of making the game easier and the trade off is you can be invaded.
DS3 especially is one of the easier games to host in. You have another phantom and you can hold up to 3 seeds of a giant tree to get the AI in the level to also attack the invader. The invader comes in with half their total flasks and is almost always going to be a lower level than you because that’s what the invasion range favours.
Babe wake up, New Dark Souls Dissected just dropped.
Another thing about the invasion CD is that not only does it take a lot of invasions, it takes a *long* time for it to ramp up. Hitting the 30 minute CD requires playing continously for, at bare minimum, three and a half hours. And that's assuming you get invaded the moment the CD ends *and* discounting the actual duration of the invasions! Playing for likely four hours with no major breaks just to reach that minor buff is wild.
I had a (civil) disagreement online with somebody recently after I said that I find Elden Ring fairly uninteresting compared to earlier soulsborne titles. Thank you for capturing, distilling and examining this stuff, because it’s precisely why they’re some of my favourite games of all time - they’re so holistic about creating a sense of mystery that even stuff like multiplayer functionality is bizarre and obscured. Few game worlds have been as immersive to me as lordran, because few others go beyond appearances when it comes to being a strange and alien land.
Dark souls 1 has so many weird mechanics like these that are seriously missing from Elden Ring or the other games. Not even souls-likes pick them up and they add so much to the atmosphere that made Dark Souls great.
The bells, kindling bonfires, gravelords, the different invaders, miracle resonance, messages, ghosts and obviously vagrants...
save for ghosts and messages, none of that is present in the other games...
"Spirit of v engeance"
2:53 in - I always thought this was funny. I'll have to dig up a text dump of the original game to see exactly what the issue was, but I remember wondering what the heck was up with that awkward spacing. Sure enough, the text dump revealed that it said something like "Spirit of v%eangance x was vanquished". It was just that one particular prompt that was scuffed too, as you can see, the invasion notification text doesn't have the same issue. It was a really simple typo (or something that manifested a typo) that could've been fixed, but it was never taken out of the original version of the game. The remaster did fix it though!
spirit of v-engine
@@illusorywall I know Elden Ring has a similar issue where (iirc) there's a needless letter-width space between "Bloody Finger"/"Recusant" and the player's name
@@UseZapCannon Haha oh damn, I completely missed that one. I'll have to keep an eye out, I wonder if it's still that way.
On the matter of hidden functions and mechanics that went undiscovered for a long time: there was actually a big one with fishing in FFXIV. There's a thriving community dedicated to discovering and testing the conditions, such as in-game time of day and weather, that impact the availability of certain fish. Until fairly recently, it was believed that all of these timers were set on hour intervals in the game's clock. A certain rare fish would only be available between 12am and 3am, for example. But there were some fish, mostly introduced during the vanilla version of the MMO (2013-2014), that actually had availability timers that ended at intervals of 15 in-game minutes past the hour. Because of the information available, people hadn't been testing the brief window of time after the supposed end of the fish's availability, and it was a small handful of hundreds and hundreds of fish.
Haven't played this game in years, but waiting for that notification to show up telling me you made a new video is something I'm always looking forward to.
Thank you for still making videos after so many years on this series! Dark Souls 1 is truly a masterpiece, even in today's generation.
The ultimate evidence of developer bias against invaders is the Blues in Elden Ring! Hosts can legit summon a nearly constant army it seems
Butters was the only invader who I felt added to the experience. Everyone else was just wasting my time or forcing me to play the game the way they wanted me to. But Butters? Dude single handedly made Irithyll Dungeon memorable in a good way. He played the role of a mischievous scamp who pointed out one mimic, only to try to convince me another was safe. He would attack now and then when the other enemies did, and back off when he realized I was on to his shenanigans. Sometimes he would follow along harrying me along the way, sometimes he would go away for about five minutes and suddenly jump back in. It was a playful sort of invasion, one in which he was obviously trying to kill me but wanted to make a game of it. It wasn't until the very end of the area when we reached the bridge to the Profaned Capital that we actually fought with any real intensity. My brother and I ended up victorious, and we moved on to the next area to murk the gimmick boss.
Unfortunately, now every time I go through Irithyll Dungeon it just isn't the same. It feels like a large part of the zone is missing, like it lost its soul. I wish Butters would invade me again, but no... it was a chance encounter, never to be had again. Now there are no invaders at all most of the time, and the few there are tend to be the usual riffraff who spam the same "OP" weapon art as everyone else. Thanks to this video I now know it's because I rarely summon anyone so I rarely open myself for invasions in the first place.
Yeah, deliberately opening yourself up for invasion in the latest installments is not really fun. When everyone was open to invasions the pool of potential invasion people was also bigger, so chance of being invaded wasn't as high (until player base dropped), so you never knew if you were gonna get invaded.
If I use Dried Finger (whatever is analogue in the later games) - I know I'm gonna get invaded. It just becomes a pvp match.
I think the optimal solution would be for there to be some place in the world where you can switch how the invasion system works. Like you have the invasions be opt in via summoning, but at a shrine you can pray and opt in constantly with a cooldown timer, so it isn't really constant. Maybe you get a drop rate increase for some items, or a bonus to souls gained while the shrine is on, to incentivise the use of it, and so that people don't just forget about it being a thing.
I totally get what you mean as far as the "infrequent surprise to keep you on your toes' thing. Closest I've had was playing as a blue phantom in Elden Ring. While the fight itself was never the same as something like DS1, the infrequent nature of being summoned to a PvP fight was perfect to mix up content while I did my own run through the game. Helping the occasional invader kill a rune farmer was always a fun one as well.
Makes me wish there was another system similar to blue phantoms but for the Mad Phantoms they had in DS3.
The rolling ball kill at 17:34 was amazing
One mechanic I know went undiscovered for a long time was that in the pokemon gen 1 games, you could not be afflicted with a status condition with a move of your same type.
It's weird because this was actually explicitly stated in Pokemon stadium but apparently nobody did the trainer school (myself included). This mechanic had big pvp implications because the 3 best pokemon were normal types and one of the most common moves was body slam, a normal type move that could paralyze the opponent, suddently the best 3 pokemon in the game got even better and everything else worse.
I think minor adjustments to the system could be interesting, but I'd hate to see it taken too far.
15/20/25/30 with a 10 minute chain timer for all tiers seems fine to me.
One invasion every 30 minutes at most for people who aren't going out of their way to reset the cooldown is perfectly fine as a cap.
Your videos are just so good. The day where everything will be known of DS1 will be a sad day.
I remember my own first encounter with an invader in Demon's Souls. At the time, I just wanted to check out the Shrine of Storms area since I hadn't visited it yet. After getting nearly killed by the skeletons, I got invaded in the impromptu PVP dueling area at the very start. It got my heart pounding, and I somehow ended up winning against the invader.
Then I made a filthy Thief's Ring/Cloak/+5 Fatal Estoc assassin build and never looked back.
I've been data mining old Java games for about ten years now, and sometimes I find detailed mechanics in games that take an hour to complete, and you don't even realize how much work went into them until you look at their code. For example, in the game Stalker (not to be confused with GSC's Stalker):
To deal damage, the game takes into account the armor state, the target's natural defenses, the attacker's Strength, and the target's Agility, armor type, and weapon type.
The interaction of armor types and weapons was written in the most detailed way, so that each type of weapon, and there are about 15 of them, had its own effect on each type of armor (there are 3 of them in the game): for example, against leather armor cutting weapons almost did not work, while blunt ones - inflicted additional damage.
Such a system can be expected from a game like Dark Souls, but in a mobile game weighing 180 kilobytes it would hardly be noticed by anyone, especially considering the fact that the game doesn't tell you how this system works, it just gives you bare numbers of armor (50) and weapon damage (20) for example.
That's great, I feel less like a psychopath for designing a similar system now XD
I have not implemented it yet, thought, at my level I only make jam-scope games.
@@Biouke Don't be afraid to add something unusual or challenging to your game. Consider the example of Demon Souls. The game was branded a failure at the development stage because it deviated from the norms and rules of game design. But that is exactly why it became popular - it became a breath of fresh air.
And because the feeling when someone finds out about an advanced but unobtrusive system in your game is indescribable. And it doesn't matter how many people know about it. The important thing is that for those who recognize it, this game will bring that pioneering feeling so rarely found in modern games.
Hollow knight kinda has stuff like that.. theres something called "overcharming" that the game never tells you about, but basically if you have 6 charm notches, you can can use up to 5 of them, and then, with a bit of repeated attempts, equip 1 extra charm, regardless of cost, at the expense of taking double damage. or charm combinations that add/change effects, like glowing womb and defenders crest giving you flying poops instead of flys. theres also an in-game quest to deliver a pale flower [that dies if you get hit] to a grave, and theres multiple in-world npcs you can randomly gift it to instead. including one that alters one of the endings. lots of tiny unimportant things hidden in that game.
Don't forget that after you deliver the flower, then return to complete the quest, new flowers will grow at the end point instead of the start point.
Over charming usually isn't worth it, unless you're trying to beat a boss on radiant mode, taking double damage doesn't matter if you'll get one hit either way!
@@cheese5081 i mean thats true, i was mostly just listing interesting "hidden" mechanics, not so much explicitly useful ones. its at least potentially useful early game since you can put on some strong combos and live against the weak stuff pretty easily
The ability to gift the white flower (and the ability to get new ones) was added with the Godseeker DLC. So it wasn’t “undiscovered” so much as it was “absent”.
@@gizoginjr The option to gift Elderbug (and only Elderbug) the Delicate Flower predates the Godmaster DLC.
I absolutely love the Dissected series, always nice to see hidden/obscure mechanics and details to the game. Keep it up!
it is a magical day when illusory wall has a new upload
The invasion system in DS1 was the best in my opinion. It added to the game a lot.
Oh man I always get so happy when I see a dark souls dissected pop up, over the course of many years now, it never gets old!
Thanks so much for the hard work that goes into making these
I actually do have multiple times where people were bothered about me invading them over and over but that was only because they were force quitting. And I did feel like the invasion did clear the timer so that was interesting to confirm it. I didn't realize the timer could increase on the original, that's very interesting. The dark souls II did feel short for the timers but I appreciate the burning human effigy when i just want to wait and put down my sign. I do agree I miss the elden ring invasions, there's no in between. I think there should be a toggleable feature for invasions when solo without using the taunter's tongue.
Perhaps a bit more mainstream than you are looking for, but in Pokemon Red and Blue there is a mechanic where Pokemon cannot be statused by moves if they are of the same type (so an electric type can be Paralyzed by Body Slam but not Thunderbolt, for example). This went completely unnoticed until 2014, 18 years after the game released.
It's somewhat debatable whether this was "intended" or not. It's not a bug in the code; the game was deliberately coded the way it was to save memory, but whether the developers knew it would have this effect is less clear.
I love these videos - please keep pumping out content about my favorite game series! Its fascinating learning such obscure mechanics and hidden gems!
my opinion on invasions is that solo invasions should have the seed of the giant tree effect on by default, but invading a group should have that effect turned off. Solo invaders just have such a leg up on a solo host in both preparedness and stage advantage.
This is the kind of brainstorming I like to hear!
@@illusorywall yeah, I mean I love invasions a lot, but I did my first proper full playthrough of ds1 recently, and not knowing its pvp rules and tech really sucked... any time i got invaded it felt like a no-win situation cause anyone invading me could easily have a meta twink build all prepared.
I enjoyed the invasions i got where the invader was seemingly just as fresh-faced as me, those duels can be a lot of fun. But I had to learn about toggle escaping after getting 3 hit combo'd to death by a zwei user (and even after learning that I never got a chance to try to use it before i beat the game).
invader advantage makes a lot of balancing sense against groups, but it feels like a rude punishment against solo players who aren't typically going to be prepared for that, since the invader can back himself into the PvE if he somehow isn't already built to win a duel.
I'm still playing DS1 regularly, even after all these years, and these videos are always so interesting! Hopefully you still have plenty to talk about
New Illusory Wall videos on my feed are an insta-click every single time.
100% agree. I'm a solo player and liked getting invaded every now and then and that just isn't a thing anymore.
I appreciate how deeply you dive into this game.
Another legendary video by the legendary Illusory Wall! Love this series! Rewatch it all the time! Keep it up!
As someone who is among people who did lots of PVP in prepare to die edition, and then the remaster on release, I don’t know if anyone knew about the change in the system, but the system was known about and a lot of people, myself included, felt like invasions happened more frequently when we were baiting invaders. But again as you said, it’s such a small difference that I don’t know of anyone that realized it was due to a change in that system.
Literally last night i had a dream i loaded up RUclips on my TV and you'd uploaded a new video, I wish I could remember what it was about
I always look forward to new Souls Remastered videos, and I've yet to be disappointed! thanks for the great content~
Was watching your vids and this came out as I just finished the DS2 vids, love your approach and editing to this genre of videos!
Its probably impossible to please everyone, but perhaps the fairest way of dealing with invasions would be a toggle in the options menu, something like a choice between constant, infrequent, rare and off. That way the player can fine tune their PvP experience to how they like it and players who don't like it at all can still play online and not have to worry about PVPers at all.
Always a good day when illusory wall posts!
cant say enough how much I love this channel
i get stoked every time i see you have a new upload
I love the feeling when something new is discovered in ds1. I knew it'd happen again and have full faith that it will a few more times in the future.
I know you've probably got tons of projects n stuff in the works... I might also be the only person to care... But I'd love to see the darksouls 2 location breakdown like you've done with 1, 3 and even demon souls. 🙏 I'll keep hoping ❤️
Dark Sous is the FromSoftware game I've played the most (20+ times), so every I could find in game I already discovered, but these videos make learn a lot more about it and is surprising how some aspects invisible for the player are related to the world of the game. Great video!
Awesome video as always! I'm off to watch the vagrant one again
Glad you brought up DS3 and ER. Not being able to invade solo players/not be invadable as a solo player is super lame...