*Latest Info as of Patch 1.05* 1.05 made three more changes to the map, including changing Jarburg. RIP to the idea of that being intentional, I suppose. Here's a twitter thread I made showing the before and afters: twitter.com/illusorywall/status/1536787952050835458 original stickied comment below: Just like being able to see the old land bridge in Caelid, It's been brought to my attention that the low-poly LOD model for Stormveil Castle is also outdated and matches some of what I showed from the Network Test's version of the map. Thank you "J" for pointing this out. Godrick's arena was mostly enclosed asides from that one spot on the left: i.imgur.com/HFO7EoE.jpg And Margit's arena is missing the fog gate walls: i.imgur.com/7L7mhNP.jpg But the Limgrave Tower bridge is just fine in the low-poly model, it does have the wider entrance and damaged section that the Network Test's map lacked. And there appears to be a little bit more to the Network Test's map! And it's a bit of a mystery, because the couple sources I found aren't perfectly matching some other examples I'm finding, like from the IGN 19 minute gameplay demo. So I'm not entirely certain what's been sourced from when, precisely, but there are at least a few more differences to be found between various pre-release builds. Credit to Owen MacDonald for bringing this to my attention in another comment here. Here's an alternate version of the Chapel of Anticipation: i.imgur.com/1wdiEwC.gif We can see that it used to appear much closer to Stormveil Castle, and it also looks pretty different in general. Based on the blue roofing, it looks like the starting building hopped islands. There's also no obvious arena space, but it appears a bit larger overall and they still could've fit a boss somewhere regardless. There's also some more ruins missing from the Limgrave map in this "other" network test: i.imgur.com/bcrFSTj.gif I've gotten a couple questions about the part at 4:03 where I talked about the updated icon having an error where some of it is duplicated and misaligned. If you didn't see what I was talking about, this should help; You shouldn't see that same chunk of the map twice: i.imgur.com/TPxwAfa.gif I'm also getting some comments saying the prototype Church of Vows is the default look for a Church of Marika. This seems like the most-likely candidate for what it was, but I think there's still some room for uncertainty here. I've aligned all 4 churches for comparison, with the prototype Church of Vows on the far right: i.imgur.com/ED6VJy9.png There isn't exactly a default look as they all vary a bit. But this could be in line with that as being a 5th version of the same kinda structure, perhaps.
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Given the changes to Jarburg after this long, i do believe the road being wrong on the map was supposed to be a tiny bit of lore of the jars protecting themselves from the poachers, but after constant complaints from the community, the devs just decided the lore was insignificant enough that they fixed it
I think the Jarburg road is made to confuse “poachers”. To stop them from getting there. I see it like the Jarburg people destroyed that path so nobody could get to them.
@@papercat5829 I mean, who says they didn’t? I mean the probably didn’t but imagine a group of cute little jars with an explorer hats and backpacks full of paper and maps and inks and quills.
I actually found it quite immersive when I was following a road on the map and then it stops at a crumbled cliffside or broken, it felt like the maps where made long ago and weren't accurate or upto date.
@@DevI-vl7gp how is it not? You're a new tarnish, and you unlock the map by finding pieces of it from other fallen tarnished. Are you expecting all those fallen tarnished to have the most updated or even the most detailed maps?
I had to look up where the boiled shack was to get the necklace. Then later on when I went back for the Dung Eater quest it was on the map. I thought I couldn't have missed it. Good to know that it was added in an update.
Same thing happened to me. I used the map to hunt down all the little islands to try and find points of interest and missed it. I got lucky and found it in a later revisit to the area, but still didn't realize it was missing from the map because the icon that appears on the map is large enough to cover the island itself, so I thought it was all my fault. Then once I realized it wasn't in the map at all until 1.04, I felt vindicated! lol
What makes it worse is that the shack doesn't render when using the bird's eye telescope nearby. Only when zoomed in all the way. Completely missed it, too. Also doesn't help that "down the road" is not a very helpful description from Rya. What exactly does that mean?
I went... EVERYWHERE...! 😂😂😂 I even assumed the "abandoned house just up the way" was exactly where it is!... and I couldnt find him! Now that I've found him, I'm just dumbfounded. I guess it's just the fog and... let's be honest, the place is a nightmare. 🤣🤣🤣
I think it would be fitting if the bridge that bypasses Stromveil Castle wasn't shown collapsed on the map, as when you get to the other side there's a caravan with its guards killed, implying that the collapse was very recent.
The bridge with the finger crone that can get you to Liurnia? To be fair, it was really cool looking at it on the map, wondering what it was and seeing what was going on for real. Climbing down that broken bridge and along that cliffside to arrive to Liurnia will never leave my memory. Pretty much found that before even figting Margit.
Did anyone else throw themselves into the abyss while trying to get to Jarburg because they thought there might be an invisible pathway? I thought I was a pretty smart cookie until I was accelerating downwards.
Yep. I didn't find it on my first playthrough because I wasn't really straying off the main path often. I started a second playthrough where I'm doing all bosses and collecting all items and I see there's a path so I assume because it's in Liurnia it's a magic hidden path.
Anyone remember the maps from the Thief games (not the new one, the old games)? Where they would be super roughly drawn and full of inaccuracies or straight up places that are just question marks because the person who drew the map never got to that place.
I think I have an answer for those water messages. something I noticed placing a message on the beach right around that area is that messages placed in water you can stand in rise to the surface of the water so they're visible. with the knowledge that people can clip down beneath that water, I bet the messages placed down there are getting zooped up to the top by the same mechanic!
This mans mapped travlled to the Lake of Rot, ascended to Faram Azula, and went into the forbidden Giant mountains. Radahn and Soldier of God, Rick aint got nothing on this man
to be honest, even though i noticed some map inconsistencies while i played i always chalked it up to being that 'oh, this is probably an in universe actual map that is probably a bit wrong now that some time has passed'
I thought the same thing with some of the roads. Like the one that looks like it leads south to jarburg, I just assumed the road had fallen off the cliff in a landslide at some point.
@@billbadson7598 yeah, when you talk to the little pot in jarburg he tells you long ago they destroyed the road to isalate the town to protect its habitants from the jar poachers
When I realised that the road from the lake to Caria was false, I assumed it was another "intentional mistake" on the map to get the player thinking about how else they could the area, same as Jarburg. Now that's it's been patched, it's hard to believe the the Jarburg road is intentional either.
@@Dingle.Donger imo it kind of makes sense for the map to be slightly inaccurate because it’s an in world object that was presumably charted by humans who could make mistakes. it could also be the devs intentionally trying to surprise you with secrets not seen on the map. not saying that would be good or bad design, but i don’t think it’s crazy to think that the maps could be wrong on purpose
@@Dingle.Donger Because they do intentionally play with the map a little, Caelid in particular large parts of the map are covered in some kind of grime, hiding a bunch of topography and ruins
The errors are actually so-called "Paper Towns" which are a copy protection cartographers used to include on their maps. Basically, they'd throw in fake towns that any actual map-maker would know aren't there, and if another map surfaced with the same fake town they'd know that it was a copy of theirs. Clearly whoever made the maps in Elden Ring didn't want some tarnished, boldened by the flames of ambition, to try and steal their hard work.
@@mezmerizer0266 no, I assume it would be put into a location that can’t have a town on it so it’s obvious it’s a fake town, or you would just write it down in your journal
Paper towns are a myth of the internet era, perpetrated by uninformed bloggers and a teen novel. There are no credible sources or proof that mistakes found in maps are ever done on purpose.
@@mezmerizer0266 I imagine they only do so in small amounts, like 2 or 3 fake towns in a whole country. Most people use maps to check where things they already want to know are, so it's unlikely someone would just wander of in the direction of a supposed fake town for no reason.
@@iurigrang Unless you're lost, in which case both a map and nearby town are required. Though the likelihood of both happening at once for a fake town is highly unlikely, historically, it *has* occurred at least a handful of times.
There is another map inaccuracy that still remains in Liurnia. In a place where there are steep cliffs in game behind the Eastern Minor Erdtree and the uld palace ruins leading to the frenzied flame village, it shows some very small paths leading up there when in reality you can only get there through precise unintended platforming or by coming from the dectus lift. The paths don't look complete but it is far cry from the steep cliffs that we actually find there.
The whole area south of the village, where the ancestral followers are, is just really inaccurate with its cliffs and roads, I was extremely confused my first time there constantly being blocked by cliffs and rocks that don't exist on the map.
I feel like the map in the whole Urd ruins area is a trap, trying to use it to navigate through those woods my first time there only had me going around in circles and hitting dead ends.
16:00 The Haligtree was the main one I noticed; that map confused the hell out of me when I went to the area for the first time, especially because placing map markers was bugged and never placed them where they should go
Same. I saw the Haligtree being near the coast at first and after 1.03 I was questioning myself like "was it always that far away from the coast or am I making that up?" (That said, never went to the Haligtree before its place was finalized on the map in 1.03) Wish they mentioned what areas of the map display were altered in patch notes.
I think it makes a lot of sense for From to remove the path leading to Caria Manor from the lake. Removing this basically forces you to approach the Manor from the ruins where Iji resides. This leads you to being introduced to a NPC who is integral to Ranni's questline in the Manor, and he can warn you about the Manor itself. Had you gone through the alternate path, you'd risk missing this interaction.
That is, unless Blaidd got pissy about you for no reason and you happen to stumble into the Caria manor where all the important NPCs have been despawned, because Blaidd didn't like something I did. Which is exactly what happened with me, lol. Took a friend to remind me to go get my absolution to fix it, but only after I had already gone through the entire place.
I've heard the messages floating on water where the land bridge to Radahn's arena used to be is a result of invasions; apparently if you invade a player in the area/near the area, you may spawn where the land bridge used to be, but as the invasion spawn automatically moves you down to stand on ground, it causes the invader to spawn underwater, below the killplane. If an invader writes down a message down there, the game will then move the message up to the surface, as all messages will automatically do (try putting down a message on a beach, it will float on the surface regardless of the depth of the water.) My guess is that when/if they removed the land bridge somewhere during production, they forgot to remove the invader spawn point that they'd placed with it. Ok I wrote this before the section about the floating messages was done and what I wrote here was indeed talked about, but I'm going to keep this comment as I did still add as to how this glitch was/is apparently done.
There is real-world lake in Palau which is full of jellyfish that were segregated by the changing land mass being cut off from the sea. As a result of there being no predators in the lake, the jellyfish evolved to lose their stinging. I like to think that Jarburg is based on this lake. It's a place that was segregated by the changing land. The inhabitants evolved, losing their intuition to fight, after the necessity to fend off interlopers was lost. This may also explain why there are many rare flora, as they have been able to grow rampant without being plucked.
I definitely felt like the Jarburg road is supposed to be evidence of the jars trying to hide their village from poachers. There may not be any signs of a bridge or anything but I think that's just what the jars want. Also, there's a lot of evidence in the game of severely changed geography, like roads that go through sheer cliffs. I think they intended it to all be evidence of massive geographical changes from some massive event, especially with some burying of the hidden cities like Nokron, and i felt like they wanted to have it evident in the map design, but have kind of rolled that back because it isn't conducive to a good gameplay experience. A lot of pillars still peek out of the ground in limgrave and on the east side of Liurnia so i don't think it's too much of a stretch.
Yeah! I remember the altus plateau map mentioned how messed up it is from the shattering, I've just assumed that's responsible for a lot of funky terrain in this game
10:54 maybe the reason why the minor erdtree doesn’t have leaves is because caelid was originally supposed to be a desert (shown by the leaked old map)
Something i never see people talk about is how the minor erdtrees leafs used to be green, you can see it with the way they're drawn on the map and you can also see it during the sgf trailer, as you can see some in the background with green leafs
But then Elden Ring got delayed and fall came. And Falling Leaves Tell a Story. The bosses' delayed-for-5-minutes attacks are a reference to ER being delayed.
A minor change that can’t be seen on the map I noticed was the addition of a wall at the top of one of the buildings in that poison castle in Altus Plateau. The building with the mage hollows and the one rapier dude previously had a broken(?) part of the wall you could snipe the clean rot knight from. A small part of the walls gap was missing a texture and could be looked though. You’d find messages acknowledging it. I went there on a new character and thought I was losing my mind because they added a whole new wall filling the entire gap. You might still find some notes there advising to snipe the knight or that there was a bugs. The weird part for me is that instead of adding the missing texture they instead added a whole entire wall.
Oh, I wasn't familiar with this one! And this will be relevant for my next video. I still have the game unpatched on PC (it's 1.02) so I'll take a look for it.
@@illusorywall Just to clarify, it’s after you climb the ladder from “Shaded Castle Inner Gate” grace. You enter the building and go up the ladder to the roof. The gap in the wall will have you face East. The missing texture will have you face South. You’ll know exactly which part of the wall it is. You get a clear view of the clean rot knight on the other end of the bridge from below.
Ah, I wonder if I'm too late. I have 1.02.3 on PC and I'm not finding a missing texture/ sniping spot there. Perhaps it was fixed between 1.02.1 and then, rather than being a 1.03 fix? Do you happen to know of any playthroughs/ streams that might show it? edit: I was linked one! ruclips.net/video/G8ZVf67Vxcw/видео.html
@@illusorywall That’s too bad. But for a tiny second you can see the missing texture if you slow the playback speed. I still wonder why they added more wall instead of adding the texture though.
Jarburg feels like it has to be intentional considering they went through the trouble of adding an entire NPC to the area in a patch, so it's not like they haven't been examining the area anyway.
I just watched Zullie’s video showing the model of Godwyn the Golden and couldn’t help noticing the giant fishfin on it. Maybe at some point his fishfin was suppose to be visible out in the ocean, protruding out from the land of Liurnia. Astel’s boss room is almost directly beneath the fishfin on the unpatched map. Maybe it originally was intended as the boss room for a cut boss fight with Godwyn the Golden (prince of death). Considering his connection with Ranni and the fact that her questline leads you to Astel makes me think it’s not just a coincidence.
In the quest where you need to find the albinauric woman, its mentioned that you need to start looking starting from the Laskir ruins. Which I never found. Somehow I always walked around it. I feel better now, knowing it really was a lot less pronounced on the map. Same for the shack. Though credit to the game, you are instructed to go north west by Rya. And just following the compass, you do basically hit the shack dead on. Still, I'm glad its marked on the map now.
I happened to find the Laskir ruins by following the trail of a Candelabra Ghost that you sometimes find while exploring (these ghosts have a nasty habit of leading you through dangerous groups of enemies tho instead of a safe logical route. watch out)
but how do they get the messages on the river? dyou mean they just place messages at the edge of the river and they somehow show up in between the two landmasses?
@@jstarrsounds nope. there is no collision on the river. the is (or at least used to be) a bug where an invader spawning near the radahn area would be placed under the water's deathplane and stand on the riverbed beneath. placing a message down there renders it atop the water. the push-up from the game is intentional, as it used to snap bloodstains and messages in the shallow water to the water's surface. this area of snapping applies for both sides of the river, so the devs just left it in the middle, as no message or bloodstain could be placed there intentionally, so it wouldn't be an issue. whoops.
This reminds me of how NomadColossus would compare different maps of the Forbidden Lands of Shadow of the Colossus to figure out where the cut colossi may have been located.
I’m guessing the artists have a script that renders a top down orthographic view of each region which they then use to manually trace over the image in Photoshop. Probably a huge .psd file with hundreds of layers for all the different castles, ruins, icons etc. And the map icons probably use a smart object linked to the master file that has to be manually updated as well.
It feels kinda creepy that there are some unknown objects in the older maps, but not in the game, what could have been in the place of the turtle church? So cool
14:20 That area might have been for Ancient Dragon Lansseax. her encounter is right there, but she moves to the capital walls. and she, or at least a variant, was also supposed to be in Dragonbarrow where the randomly placed mini dragons are.
A Cartagrapher NPC would have been a fun concept. Like the OG maps you find are incorrect because they were made during the previous age, and once you explore the area and find the local Cartagrapher, they could unlock their updated map of the land.
Totally baseless theory I want to believe: The DS2 director (ER co-director) fought to have a cartographer NPC in the game, but in the end they decided on simply having the player directly find map pieces to decrease the friction on a pretty important basic mechanic
@@aidanschroeder6322 It's a miracle Miyazaki didn't fire him. He created the biggest black mark on his record after all. Miyazaki is too good for this world.
If you think about it, this could have been a cool mechanic for the game, imagine finding an outdated map of the world an see it change every time you visit some locations.
at 7:09 the previous formation is a statue with a hero's grave dungeon beneath it, I just did one in Altus plateau last night and recognised the shape.
I wondered if it might've been a Hero's Grave entrance since it does looks like a slightly-less detailed one of those, and it seems perfectly reasonable with Auriza's Hero's Grave being not that far from there. In addition to the Sainted Hero's Grave.
I liked the inconsistencies with the map compared to the world. Really boosted immersion for me. Felt like I had acquired an old map that was no longer relevant. Loved seeing roads that the maped said we're there but we're actually unpassable.
When I found a few of the inconsistencies myself, I immediately figured they were intentional and were showing how the maps are outdated and the world had changed a little since they were drawn up.
One QOL change I'd have liked is if it made it clearer which side of a cliff was the higher one, and where tombstones/spiritsprings are present to go up/down.
Actually, if you look closely, the map usually does show which is the top of a cliff. A solid line traces the edge, and the lines going 'out' from it are towards down.
I do like that a lot of details were made to be more accurate, such as coastlines and building placement. But at the same time, I don't mind - even like - if some details look to be out of date, such as the road to Jarburg, or bridges and buildings looking intact on the map but are ruins today. It helps give a sense of history, and sparks curiosity if I know a map may not be 100%.
When I got to the Haligtree I tagged various landmarks along the coastline so I could see the tree's relation to them. Many were misaligned, making me wonder if it was a low poly stand in for the rest of the world.
7:10 the road leads to the map icon for more standard churches. It's likely they created a new map icon for the church of vows specifically given it's different architecture, or rather, expanded the church to make it fully unique
Wyndham ruins might have been another location to fight lansseax. In the gameplay trailer, lansseax has a scene where he first appears at the altus plateau, and then another in what i believe looks like dragonbarrow, so perhaps they had much more planned for him than how it ended up with just two locations.
going thru on day 1 build, i loved how the map was imperfect. reflected a sort of mysticism that you find when looking at old maps from the colonial era. the map reflects the general form of the area, contains imperfections etc. made the game map seem more real. as if a person or group of people from the world made the map that thet player uses.
Dude! I was waiting for a video from you for a long time! I find it curious that no RUclipsr has talked about how much the statues from Uhl Palace Ruins seem to be the "healthier" versions of the giants.
One thing still puzzles me, that wasn't in the video. The passage behind the Black Knife Catacombs, that seems to connect down to the vast beach area south of the Altus Plateau, one can't reach. I think I never even saw a spot where there wasn't thick fog covering this unaccessible dale.
Oh this explains everything I was so confused on my first playthrough as to why I couldnt utilize the roads on the map to get my destination. Definitely was quite annoying being lied to by Miyazaki himself. Its interesting to see how the game was kind of released unfinished and now they're subtly continuing to better the game. Hopefully there will be more improvements as we get closer to DLC.
4:47 I think the landmass extends further out to symbolize how high up this particular area is. That's the reason Mountaintop of Giants' map is only half its size ingame.
14:09 I am almost certain this could've been a spot where Lansseax might have been encountered. I don't know whether it would be the first or second, or even a third spot, but I have every reason to believe it since the whole area was originally suspiciously empty and arena-like, and also because Wyndham Catacombs and Ruins have lots of dragon/lightning related gear around it. Inside the ruins you can use a stonesword key to unlock a cellar. Inside there is a chest with the Pearldrake Talisman +1. And in the Catacombs you have both the Lightning-Scorpion Charm and a Dragon Apostle Cookbook. There is also a Leyndell Knight protecting the catacombs, the ones who are associated with the Dragon Cult. Edit: I just now remembered that the whole Wyndham Ruins is filled with pools of water, this further supports my idea that Lansseax could be encountered here. In this case however, her fight would be significantly harder, and more similar to Fortissax's fight.
When I was doing my first run I thought most of the inconsistencies regarding roads were on purpose, to make it seem like there was something there before, that with time dissapeared
I like the jarburg road not existing but being on the map. it creates a little puzzle for the player, them seeing the path, trying to take it only to find it drops down. So they can see that jarburg is there but they need to figure out how to reach it Edit: that's what I get for commenting early! you say basically the same thing. I do agree though, putting some road rubble down at the drop might have made things clearer
11:45 before all the patches I tried invading outside Radahn's arena, and I got teleported to a place I couldn't recognize in a ravine. It didn't dawn on me until after I went back to my world, but I think as an invader I spawned on the seabed. I assume other people had the same experience as me and tried placing messages, which then appeared on the surface. I don't know if it's been patched yet cause I never tried invading there again, but I regret not letting a message while I was there, it could've been one of my messages floating there.
A lot of these places that bear evidence of changes late in development, also have some kind of waygate associated with them. Some examples are the church of vows, Fort Gael, the consecrated snowfield area, Fort Redmane, and the Limgrave Divine Tower, all of which are mentioned in this video. Liurnia had the most map cleanup done, and also features the most incidental or even pointless waygates... (Some of the remaining waygates are associated with NPCs or NPC questlines, which also have been changed heavily in patch content, presumably due to being left until late in development.)
Waygate are totaly crutch so solve problem with content they failed to incorporate into the main game without any trick. You can see how game has very inconsisten quality levels. Caelid was defenetly last or second last area they finished. Entire zone host largest amount of reused assets and bosses. Maybe they designed how area would look but actual gameplay content was added way later.
F*ck I wish they had another year or 2 to finish the game. There's no way they're gonna add and polish everything that they had to rush through patches
I think the Jarburg map was left like this for "realism" purpose, perhaps when the map was first traced by the previous Owner, there was a road there, and with time the road collapsed and got dragged by the ocean... Or they for some reason forgot the most obvious part, which wouldn't be a surprise knowing Fromsoftware
I distinctly remember running into several of these issues on the day one patch and being confused as to why there were roads on the map that weren't actually there. Glad to see they've been fixing them over time.
You're 100% correct, because the telporter in Fort Gael takes you to Redmane Castle, but its facing the Minor Erdtree. If you rotate it 90% though it is facing the correct direction.
Something just crossed my mind,you could say that the player base updated the maps with additional details. Tarnished are noticing weird details and editing their maps or adding details because they’re missing. I know that’s not how they’re approaching it necessarily, but there is an in universe explanation for the maps being updated. So many Tarnished exploring could lead to them editing their maps and leaving copies at the stones.
are you planning on doing a video on how the map is put together? I’ve noticed a few interesting things that could warrant looking deeper into, most notably the Haligtree seems to be significantly offset in it’s actual placement compared to on the map and when you can see it from Altus, Sol, or Ordina, as well as Farum Azula not being visible from anywhere else on the map besides the Divine Towers while it should be visible from most of the eastern section of the map. (which also seems to confirm that the Divine Towers exist outside of time like Farum Azula)
I don't have a save anymore with all the divine towers unlocked but I can't see them from the divine towers I have at all. Are you talking about specific divine towers? You can't see farum azula from the east atlus tower or the limgrave tower at least.
@@DreamEatinDonuts yeah it’s mostly the isolated divine tower but the divine towers also share the sky coloration and independent weather/time of Farum Azula
~14:13 that area could've been the arena for the ancient dragon that randomly pops up and disappears not to far away and they just moved it over by the sainted hero's grave
I was ramming my head against that cliff in Liurnia for so long, trying to get up to Caria Manor.... I also spent a while trying to see the "fish tail" down on the ocean, wondering when I'd get to go there. Shame, it looked like such a striking piece of geography.
It’s interesting coming back to this and thinking about the whole Jarburg map situation. At the time, a lot of people seemed to take the eventual change as proof that it was a mistake, not an intended mechanic. I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive, however. All this time later, it seems inarguable that leaving the map that way was intentional. It was such a stark difference compared to the other discrepancies they opted to change, I can’t really see it any other way. With the advantage of hindsight, I think the best theory we could form is that it was an experiment by the developers, one they ultimately deemed a failure. It seems clear that they kept the map strange there on purpose, I’d guess to create some intrigue about the secret area. Given the number of bloodstains at that cliff (including my own), most players’ first assumption was the existence of secret path and that they had to make a leap of faith. This is, of course, very funny, but not exactly in line with the Souls approach. When the Souls devs finish pranking the player, the player typically knows what to do next time. In the case of Jarburg however, most people I know left the cliff behind with a somewhat defeated “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do…” attitude. My best guess is the devs saw the mass confusion and the (admittedly hilarious) pile of horses at the cliff base, decided their intent wasn’t communicated to their standards, and scrapped the idea.
All of your content is absolutely fantastic and I know the amount of work you put in must be considerable so I don't want to pressure you at all, but I am curious. Is there any chance we might get more of the Demon's Souls Compare-Through any time soon, perhaps once the Elden Ring craze dies down a bit ? I absolute adore what you've been doing with that series.
I felt like such an idiot when I realized I had missed so much stuff in the lake region in Liurnia. Now it makes a little more sense, the map was different then.
loving the elden ring stuff so far, I'm certain there's so much more already out there and to change too, the future dlc will probably have some of the same things like this as well you and zullie are both amazing at uncovering so many things and i love seeing especially how things change late into development and ideas are scrapped or things reused, on one hand i wish there wasn't things like that to happen and every idea was fully realized, but then the game would never fully come out
@@marishiten5944 the underground has map too, this is a standalone game so its fair to expect big dlc especially when it's the biggest project they've been working on this far, ds2 not only had good dlc IMO, with incredibly good bosses that leave a mark and were mostly well designed, but it had a sizeable amount of content even in comparison to the game, talking each one individually brume tower is probably the smallest area of them all but it's a well done and interesting idea of needing to descend and the vertical aspects of it were quite enjoyable, eleum loyce is definitely the largest in terms of basically everything, with a great mechanic of thawing ice and encouraging you to rediscover the area as well as having even more things, it has the snowfield as well which despite all its hate is quite nice, there's a lacking amount of items in there for the sheer size but then again it's a giant field of snow below a massive city shulva isn't bad either, it's the most visually appealing to me personally, has a great amount of loot like the others, feels small but is bigger if you actually take your time with the area instead of running past the fodder and such but that's with most areas in games, bosses are probably the worst out of the dlc but at least are unique this did turn into me ranting about my favorite game but either way its entirely fair to expect large dlc for elden ring and it being an isolated area doesn't matter because we have most of the map unlocked anyway, no it probably won't be the size of limgrave and caelid combined or whatever but it could definitely be at least the size of one of the main regions, which means there is possibility for some of these same map concerns to come up
Another detail that corroborates the moved Caelid Minor Erdtree is that despite the landmass being clearly visible, if you look towards Caelid from the Divine Tower where you restore Godrick's Great Rune, the tree is not there. Quite possibly this tree was moved very late in development, and some oversight led to it being absent in some low detail versions of the game world.
I remembered lots of inconsistencies with the map and me explaining to friends that "Yeah obviously, its FromSoft telling the player that the map was drawn in a previous time and should not be depended on 100% of the time, they are the kings of indirect storytelling". Now i feel stupid and pretentious. Thanks illusory wall.
I had assumed on my first playthrough that the map didn't match up 100% because of changes to the topography that happened between the Shattering and when we start our Journey. Knowing it was because of changes to the design shattered my illusion of it being tied to the lore.
Man I am so glad you pointed out all those changes in South Liurnia. I swear I missed so much there in my first playthrough cuz it really looked like there was way less than their actually was, but on my second playthrough I went through it all again was was surprised how much was actually shown on the map lol
The weird thing about the Haligtree is that you can see it from a couple of places (east of Shaded Castle, west of Castle Sol) and it looks to be really close to the landmass, but obviously the area itself is nowhere near. Neither version of the map remotely aligns with it when seen here so it’s really quite strange.
Yeah, and From really couldn't shake off all of their previous quirks with map design, as not all distance views still align properly. And I'm not talking like how LODs look like, but if you stand on the branches of Haligtree and look at the coastline and place markers, the distance views are way off. They are definitely forcing a perspective in both cases, seeing Haligtree from the continent and seeing the coastline from the Haligtree, they don't match. Basically, the coastline and land masses are pushed away and back from where they should be. I wouldn't be surprised of the Haligtree distance model you see is altogether too small to be the real thing, and is again just abusing forced perspective. Lastly, the thing that the earlier version of the Haligtree map made me think was that there could have originally been plans for you to be able to access the tree by walking, instead of just being teleported there by sending gate (which they also abuse heavily in many situations). It's also a really curious and obvious flaw in distance view that you can see some decently close and tall distance land masses in the Haligtree area, away from the coastline, but you see absolutely no trace of that while standing on the coastline. Basically, this is very reminiscent of how they previously handled distance views. One would have thought that becoming open world would have fixed that, lol.
dude I thought I was going insane I saw a map in a video and I was like dude the area hes going to does not exist on my map ,im so glad you mentioned this
16:01 The change in the Haligtree area's proximity to the mainland south of the region is a big help to know about. It was SO frustrating to me when I was looking up videos on how to find items in that region, or how to traverse it early on, and every video I watched had people explaining item locations on the earlier map, but my map showed the entire Haligtree area separated from the mainland to the south. It was kind of infuriating because I was getting my absolute poop pushed in when I first arrived, and when I went to look up some help I found that the maps in the videos weren't even showing the region as I saw it on my map!! I had no idea it was a different patch, and to add to the confusion, I knew "something changes" in relation to Leyndell, so I kept thinking "Maybe this is part of those changes?" Mystery solved, I guess! Damn, that's good to know!
thank you for this! Sometimes theres stuff on the map that just seem to gist for me as far as finding my way across it-the fact the map has been changing with updates is certainly interesting
I remember there being a bridge somewhere that was broken in the game but not in the map and it made me assume the map was just old, and the world post shattering was like inaccurate to the old map.
i like the idea of having a pre-crumbled map of elden ring where you find a map that was made long before you arrive and minor discrepancies are planned for secrets and stuff
i noticed some of these unconsciously. some maps have just 'felt different'. nice to see i'm not crazy. another interesting video. shout out fellow nerd
You know what would have been really cool? If you get only get a neatly drawn pre-shattering map when first picked up, where everything is in order, and as you explore the actual world you can see more and more roughly drawn changes added to the map, signifying the tarnished is changing the map better reflecting the actual environment, seeing missing roads/bridges, scarlet rot swamps and craters noted on the map.
Damn. For some reason I had so much trouble finding the Prawn Shack when I played at launch. It's hilarious to me that they did actually just add it to the map later on
8:40 or so when talking about the manor road. It might be intentional due to that road being hidden behind an illusory wall. So from a lore perspective of a "Hidden" manor. Or I could be wrong.... just a thought that came to mind
If you’re up in volcano manner and you look down over the lava waterfall to the spot the dragon spawns and where Alexander tries to repair his cracks, it looks different. When you’re actually down there it’s more rocky but from up there it shows a lot more lava. That makes me think it wasn’t always that way
I straight up intentionally jumped to my death on the path to Jarburg because it was so out of place that I thought that the entire road might just be invisible lol
Halig Tree's physical location had been infuriating me with it's discrepancy between how you see it from castle Sol vs marker locations when looking back from the tree. At least the map change shows I wasn't taking crazy pills.
*Latest Info as of Patch 1.05*
1.05 made three more changes to the map, including changing Jarburg. RIP to the idea of that being intentional, I suppose. Here's a twitter thread I made showing the before and afters:
twitter.com/illusorywall/status/1536787952050835458
original stickied comment below:
Just like being able to see the old land bridge in Caelid, It's been brought to my attention that the low-poly LOD model for Stormveil Castle is also outdated and matches some of what I showed from the Network Test's version of the map. Thank you "J" for pointing this out.
Godrick's arena was mostly enclosed asides from that one spot on the left:
i.imgur.com/HFO7EoE.jpg
And Margit's arena is missing the fog gate walls:
i.imgur.com/7L7mhNP.jpg
But the Limgrave Tower bridge is just fine in the low-poly model, it does have the wider entrance and damaged section that the Network Test's map lacked.
And there appears to be a little bit more to the Network Test's map! And it's a bit of a mystery, because the couple sources I found aren't perfectly matching some other examples I'm finding, like from the IGN 19 minute gameplay demo. So I'm not entirely certain what's been sourced from when, precisely, but there are at least a few more differences to be found between various pre-release builds. Credit to Owen MacDonald for bringing this to my attention in another comment here.
Here's an alternate version of the Chapel of Anticipation:
i.imgur.com/1wdiEwC.gif
We can see that it used to appear much closer to Stormveil Castle, and it also looks pretty different in general. Based on the blue roofing, it looks like the starting building hopped islands. There's also no obvious arena space, but it appears a bit larger overall and they still could've fit a boss somewhere regardless.
There's also some more ruins missing from the Limgrave map in this "other" network test:
i.imgur.com/bcrFSTj.gif
I've gotten a couple questions about the part at 4:03 where I talked about the updated icon having an error where some of it is duplicated and misaligned. If you didn't see what I was talking about, this should help; You shouldn't see that same chunk of the map twice:
i.imgur.com/TPxwAfa.gif
I'm also getting some comments saying the prototype Church of Vows is the default look for a Church of Marika. This seems like the most-likely candidate for what it was, but I think there's still some room for uncertainty here. I've aligned all 4 churches for comparison, with the prototype Church of Vows on the far right:
i.imgur.com/ED6VJy9.png
There isn't exactly a default look as they all vary a bit. But this could be in line with that as being a 5th version of the same kinda structure, perhaps.
comment isn't pinned on my end
@@drinkwater3453 Weird! I have issues with that happening sometimes, but I think it's fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!
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There's actually a lot more churches than the 4 churches of Marika lol. But they all have more or less the same design
Given the changes to Jarburg after this long, i do believe the road being wrong on the map was supposed to be a tiny bit of lore of the jars protecting themselves from the poachers, but after constant complaints from the community, the devs just decided the lore was insignificant enough that they fixed it
I think the Jarburg road is made to confuse “poachers”. To stop them from getting there. I see it like the Jarburg people destroyed that path so nobody could get to them.
yea i just figured the discrepancies i noticed on my first playthrough were there because it was an old map i found or something lore related.
now it makes more sense when you put it like that.
That's such a good in-lore explanation!
I was gonna say this would imply the jar people made the map of the game. But the map could be thought of as outdated so nvm
@@papercat5829 I mean, who says they didn’t? I mean the probably didn’t but imagine a group of cute little jars with an explorer hats and backpacks full of paper and maps and inks and quills.
I actually found it quite immersive when I was following a road on the map and then it stops at a crumbled cliffside or broken, it felt like the maps where made long ago and weren't accurate or upto date.
I don't know if immersive is the right word for that.
@@DevI-vl7gp how is it not? You're a new tarnish, and you unlock the map by finding pieces of it from other fallen tarnished. Are you expecting all those fallen tarnished to have the most updated or even the most detailed maps?
That sounds like a nice feeling... something in an adventure movie, where the characters are following a map only to find the road long ruined.
Exactly what I just commented... that the maps should exist in time, somewhat.
*were made
I had to look up where the boiled shack was to get the necklace. Then later on when I went back for the Dung Eater quest it was on the map. I thought I couldn't have missed it. Good to know that it was added in an update.
Same here! I missed em on the first playthrough!
Same thing happened to me. I used the map to hunt down all the little islands to try and find points of interest and missed it. I got lucky and found it in a later revisit to the area, but still didn't realize it was missing from the map because the icon that appears on the map is large enough to cover the island itself, so I thought it was all my fault. Then once I realized it wasn't in the map at all until 1.04, I felt vindicated! lol
What makes it worse is that the shack doesn't render when using the bird's eye telescope nearby. Only when zoomed in all the way. Completely missed it, too. Also doesn't help that "down the road" is not a very helpful description from Rya. What exactly does that mean?
I went... EVERYWHERE...! 😂😂😂 I even assumed the "abandoned house just up the way" was exactly where it is!... and I couldnt find him!
Now that I've found him, I'm just dumbfounded.
I guess it's just the fog and... let's be honest, the place is a nightmare. 🤣🤣🤣
A ton of these little changes I just chalked up to faulty memory.
Thanks for gaslighting me From!
I think it would be fitting if the bridge that bypasses Stromveil Castle wasn't shown collapsed on the map, as when you get to the other side there's a caravan with its guards killed, implying that the collapse was very recent.
Would make sense from a worldbuilding perspective but it would be very confusing in-game
The bridge with the finger crone that can get you to Liurnia? To be fair, it was really cool looking at it on the map, wondering what it was and seeing what was going on for real. Climbing down that broken bridge and along that cliffside to arrive to Liurnia will never leave my memory. Pretty much found that before even figting Margit.
Oh with the crappy tree spear, idk why people like that weapon so much, it feels so slow
@@plantman1093 Not everyone love those webb swords.
@@plantman1093 its amazing in pvp
Did anyone else throw themselves into the abyss while trying to get to Jarburg because they thought there might be an invisible pathway? I thought I was a pretty smart cookie until I was accelerating downwards.
Lmfao awesome
I did the same thing lmao
Yep. I didn't find it on my first playthrough because I wasn't really straying off the main path often. I started a second playthrough where I'm doing all bosses and collecting all items and I see there's a path so I assume because it's in Liurnia it's a magic hidden path.
Mood, instead of finding cute wholesome jar town I found gravity laughing it's ass off at me dying to it for the 70th time
Ah.. Now that explain why there alot of blood pool there.
There is some charm having the "hand-drawn-like" map in the game. As in the real world they can (and certainly will) be imprecise.
most of that charm is ruined by the fact it's completely blurry for no good reason
@@FreekinEkin2 Blurry? What? It's textured like ink in rough paper, do you call that blurry? People have some really shitty takes sometimes lmao
That map reminds me a bit of maps in...Gothic games.
@@FreekinEkin2 fix your display
Anyone remember the maps from the Thief games (not the new one, the old games)? Where they would be super roughly drawn and full of inaccuracies or straight up places that are just question marks because the person who drew the map never got to that place.
I think I have an answer for those water messages. something I noticed placing a message on the beach right around that area is that messages placed in water you can stand in rise to the surface of the water so they're visible. with the knowledge that people can clip down beneath that water, I bet the messages placed down there are getting zooped up to the top by the same mechanic!
i hope we get an underwater dlc man
its a bug where you invade during radahn.
This mans mapped travlled to the Lake of Rot, ascended to Faram Azula, and went into the forbidden Giant mountains.
Radahn and Soldier of God, Rick aint got nothing on this man
thank u mr grayfruit
I wouldve know it was you typing this comment just by the fact that you said zoop
It’s slowly changing for sure confirmed. Pretty sure Liurnia will get swapped for Loot Lake next update.
Then hopefully they vault Rivers of Blood
Rob isn't even that op, they need to vault spell spamming @@chaoticstarfish3401
Everything will slowly morph into a swamp over the course of 1000 updates
to be honest, even though i noticed some map inconsistencies while i played i always chalked it up to being that 'oh, this is probably an in universe actual map that is probably a bit wrong now that some time has passed'
Someone also told me that but map itself features things like ruins or broken things.
I think there should've been more inconsistencies. A hand drawn map is outdated as soon as its finished.
I thought the same thing with some of the roads. Like the one that looks like it leads south to jarburg, I just assumed the road had fallen off the cliff in a landslide at some point.
Yeah tbh this was my reasoning
@@billbadson7598 yeah, when you talk to the little pot in jarburg he tells you long ago they destroyed the road to isalate the town to protect its habitants from the jar poachers
I knew I wasn't crazy! Well I still might be, but not about this!
Crazy > Normal
I don't make the rules.
@@mr.bonezy1206 bro normal literally has more letters wdym 🙄
When I realised that the road from the lake to Caria was false, I assumed it was another "intentional mistake" on the map to get the player thinking about how else they could the area, same as Jarburg. Now that's it's been patched, it's hard to believe the the Jarburg road is intentional either.
Why would you think those map mistakes are intentional lmao
@@Dingle.Donger imo it kind of makes sense for the map to be slightly inaccurate because it’s an in world object that was presumably charted by humans who could make mistakes. it could also be the devs intentionally trying to surprise you with secrets not seen on the map. not saying that would be good or bad design, but i don’t think it’s crazy to think that the maps could be wrong on purpose
@@Dingle.Donger Because they do intentionally play with the map a little, Caelid in particular large parts of the map are covered in some kind of grime, hiding a bunch of topography and ruins
@@Dingle.Donger Because old maps are filled with inaccuracies
@@masone.9004 All those mental gymnastics when all it was in the end was incompetence
The errors are actually so-called "Paper Towns" which are a copy protection cartographers used to include on their maps. Basically, they'd throw in fake towns that any actual map-maker would know aren't there, and if another map surfaced with the same fake town they'd know that it was a copy of theirs. Clearly whoever made the maps in Elden Ring didn't want some tarnished, boldened by the flames of ambition, to try and steal their hard work.
But, wouldn't that make the map useless for the parson who needs the map? They'd think there's a town, and there's not.
@@mezmerizer0266 no, I assume it would be put into a location that can’t have a town on it so it’s obvious it’s a fake town, or you would just write it down in your journal
Paper towns are a myth of the internet era, perpetrated by uninformed bloggers and a teen novel. There are no credible sources or proof that mistakes found in maps are ever done on purpose.
@@mezmerizer0266 I imagine they only do so in small amounts, like 2 or 3 fake towns in a whole country. Most people use maps to check where things they already want to know are, so it's unlikely someone would just wander of in the direction of a supposed fake town for no reason.
@@iurigrang Unless you're lost, in which case both a map and nearby town are required. Though the likelihood of both happening at once for a fake town is highly unlikely, historically, it *has* occurred at least a handful of times.
There is another map inaccuracy that still remains in Liurnia.
In a place where there are steep cliffs in game behind the Eastern Minor Erdtree and the uld palace ruins leading to the frenzied flame village, it shows some very small paths leading up there when in reality you can only get there through precise unintended platforming or by coming from the dectus lift.
The paths don't look complete but it is far cry from the steep cliffs that we actually find there.
That annoyed me when I was dying repeatedly in the village and trying to find a likely spot on the map for a Grace.
The whole area south of the village, where the ancestral followers are, is just really inaccurate with its cliffs and roads, I was extremely confused my first time there constantly being blocked by cliffs and rocks that don't exist on the map.
I feel like the map in the whole Urd ruins area is a trap, trying to use it to navigate through those woods my first time there only had me going around in circles and hitting dead ends.
Upon replaying the game I found that area much easier, never realized it was because of the map lol
16:00 The Haligtree was the main one I noticed; that map confused the hell out of me when I went to the area for the first time, especially because placing map markers was bugged and never placed them where they should go
Same. I saw the Haligtree being near the coast at first and after 1.03 I was questioning myself like "was it always that far away from the coast or am I making that up?" (That said, never went to the Haligtree before its place was finalized on the map in 1.03)
Wish they mentioned what areas of the map display were altered in patch notes.
I think it makes a lot of sense for From to remove the path leading to Caria Manor from the lake. Removing this basically forces you to approach the Manor from the ruins where Iji resides.
This leads you to being introduced to a NPC who is integral to Ranni's questline in the Manor, and he can warn you about the Manor itself.
Had you gone through the alternate path, you'd risk missing this interaction.
That is, unless Blaidd got pissy about you for no reason and you happen to stumble into the Caria manor where all the important NPCs have been despawned, because Blaidd didn't like something I did.
Which is exactly what happened with me, lol.
Took a friend to remind me to go get my absolution to fix it, but only after I had already gone through the entire place.
you say this like elden ring isn't perfectly fine with you missing important npcs lol
I've heard the messages floating on water where the land bridge to Radahn's arena used to be is a result of invasions; apparently if you invade a player in the area/near the area, you may spawn where the land bridge used to be, but as the invasion spawn automatically moves you down to stand on ground, it causes the invader to spawn underwater, below the killplane. If an invader writes down a message down there, the game will then move the message up to the surface, as all messages will automatically do (try putting down a message on a beach, it will float on the surface regardless of the depth of the water.)
My guess is that when/if they removed the land bridge somewhere during production, they forgot to remove the invader spawn point that they'd placed with it.
Ok I wrote this before the section about the floating messages was done and what I wrote here was indeed talked about, but I'm going to keep this comment as I did still add as to how this glitch was/is apparently done.
There is real-world lake in Palau which is full of jellyfish that were segregated by the changing land mass being cut off from the sea. As a result of there being no predators in the lake, the jellyfish evolved to lose their stinging.
I like to think that Jarburg is based on this lake. It's a place that was segregated by the changing land. The inhabitants evolved, losing their intuition to fight, after the necessity to fend off interlopers was lost. This may also explain why there are many rare flora, as they have been able to grow rampant without being plucked.
I definitely felt like the Jarburg road is supposed to be evidence of the jars trying to hide their village from poachers. There may not be any signs of a bridge or anything but I think that's just what the jars want. Also, there's a lot of evidence in the game of severely changed geography, like roads that go through sheer cliffs. I think they intended it to all be evidence of massive geographical changes from some massive event, especially with some burying of the hidden cities like Nokron, and i felt like they wanted to have it evident in the map design, but have kind of rolled that back because it isn't conducive to a good gameplay experience. A lot of pillars still peek out of the ground in limgrave and on the east side of Liurnia so i don't think it's too much of a stretch.
Yeah! I remember the altus plateau map mentioned how messed up it is from the shattering, I've just assumed that's responsible for a lot of funky terrain in this game
Well this was my comment except way better said, I agree
Major geographical change would also explain why Liurnia and a couple of other locations are completely flooded
10:54 maybe the reason why the minor erdtree doesn’t have leaves is because caelid was originally supposed to be a desert (shown by the leaked old map)
Something i never see people talk about is how the minor erdtrees leafs used to be green, you can see it with the way they're drawn on the map and you can also see it during the sgf trailer, as you can see some in the background with green leafs
But then Elden Ring got delayed and fall came.
And Falling Leaves Tell a Story. The bosses' delayed-for-5-minutes attacks are a reference to ER being delayed.
The color change is likely due to the primordial crucible that existed before the erdtree.
A minor change that can’t be seen on the map I noticed was the addition of a wall at the top of one of the buildings in that poison castle in Altus Plateau.
The building with the mage hollows and the one rapier dude previously had a broken(?) part of the wall you could snipe the clean rot knight from.
A small part of the walls gap was missing a texture and could be looked though. You’d find messages acknowledging it.
I went there on a new character and thought I was losing my mind because they added a whole new wall filling the entire gap.
You might still find some notes there advising to snipe the knight or that there was a bugs. The weird part for me is that instead of adding the missing texture they instead added a whole entire wall.
Oh, I wasn't familiar with this one! And this will be relevant for my next video. I still have the game unpatched on PC (it's 1.02) so I'll take a look for it.
@@illusorywall Just to clarify, it’s after you climb the ladder from “Shaded Castle Inner Gate” grace. You enter the building and go up the ladder to the roof.
The gap in the wall will have you face East. The missing texture will have you face South.
You’ll know exactly which part of the wall it is. You get a clear view of the clean rot knight on the other end of the bridge from below.
Ah, I wonder if I'm too late. I have 1.02.3 on PC and I'm not finding a missing texture/ sniping spot there. Perhaps it was fixed between 1.02.1 and then, rather than being a 1.03 fix? Do you happen to know of any playthroughs/ streams that might show it? edit: I was linked one!
ruclips.net/video/G8ZVf67Vxcw/видео.html
@@illusorywall That’s too bad. But for a tiny second you can see the missing texture if you slow the playback speed.
I still wonder why they added more wall instead of adding the texture though.
Jarburg feels like it has to be intentional considering they went through the trouble of adding an entire NPC to the area in a patch, so it's not like they haven't been examining the area anyway.
I just watched Zullie’s video showing the model of Godwyn the Golden and couldn’t help noticing the giant fishfin on it. Maybe at some point his fishfin was suppose to be visible out in the ocean, protruding out from the land of Liurnia. Astel’s boss room is almost directly beneath the fishfin on the unpatched map. Maybe it originally was intended as the boss room for a cut boss fight with Godwyn the Golden (prince of death). Considering his connection with Ranni and the fact that her questline leads you to Astel makes me think it’s not just a coincidence.
In the quest where you need to find the albinauric woman, its mentioned that you need to start looking starting from the Laskir ruins. Which I never found. Somehow I always walked around it. I feel better now, knowing it really was a lot less pronounced on the map.
Same for the shack. Though credit to the game, you are instructed to go north west by Rya. And just following the compass, you do basically hit the shack dead on. Still, I'm glad its marked on the map now.
You've triggered my PTSD sir.
"Find the Albinauric woman."
@@ForeverLaxx I'm playing for 350 hours, and I'm still only at Haligtree, didn't even enter Farum Azula yet. 99% completion approaching 100% though.
I happened to find the Laskir ruins by following the trail of a Candelabra Ghost that you sometimes find while exploring
(these ghosts have a nasty habit of leading you through dangerous groups of enemies tho instead of a safe logical route. watch out)
12:12 Placing a message down in the river renders it atop the water. there is no collision on top of the river.
but how do they get the messages on the river? dyou mean they just place messages at the edge of the river and they somehow show up in between the two landmasses?
@@jstarrsounds nope. there is no collision on the river. the is (or at least used to be) a bug where an invader spawning near the radahn area would be placed under the water's deathplane and stand on the riverbed beneath. placing a message down there renders it atop the water. the push-up from the game is intentional, as it used to snap bloodstains and messages in the shallow water to the water's surface. this area of snapping applies for both sides of the river, so the devs just left it in the middle, as no message or bloodstain could be placed there intentionally, so it wouldn't be an issue. whoops.
@@TheRandomNat gotcha. thanks for the explanation! ive been wondering what the deal was with those messages
This reminds me of how NomadColossus would compare different maps of the Forbidden Lands of Shadow of the Colossus to figure out where the cut colossi may have been located.
I’m guessing the artists have a script that renders a top down orthographic view of each region which they then use to manually trace over the image in Photoshop. Probably a huge .psd file with hundreds of layers for all the different castles, ruins, icons etc. And the map icons probably use a smart object linked to the master file that has to be manually updated as well.
if anything, the weird overlay glitch on that one map icon is evidence to me that the map icons are composited manually
It feels kinda creepy that there are some unknown objects in the older maps, but not in the game, what could have been in the place of the turtle church? So cool
To me it looks like one of the regular Church models, but was given a unique model later on
There's no turtles only dogs.
@@bread7932 haha yes it’s still just as funny hearing it for the millionth time
It was never funny
@@themostdiabolicalhater5986 bro beefin with bread
@@bread7932 rated poor
14:20
That area might have been for Ancient Dragon Lansseax. her encounter is right there, but she moves to the capital walls. and she, or at least a variant, was also supposed to be in Dragonbarrow where the randomly placed mini dragons are.
A Cartagrapher NPC would have been a fun concept. Like the OG maps you find are incorrect because they were made during the previous age, and once you explore the area and find the local Cartagrapher, they could unlock their updated map of the land.
Totally baseless theory I want to believe: The DS2 director (ER co-director) fought to have a cartographer NPC in the game, but in the end they decided on simply having the player directly find map pieces to decrease the friction on a pretty important basic mechanic
@@Rezuaq The DS2 Director being co-director explains some of the absolute bullshit enemy encounter designs in this game
@@aidanschroeder6322, based.
@@aidanschroeder6322 It's a miracle Miyazaki didn't fire him. He created the biggest black mark on his record after all. Miyazaki is too good for this world.
Wake up babe, new Illusory Wall video just dropped
If you think about it, this could have been a cool mechanic for the game, imagine finding an outdated map of the world an see it change every time you visit some locations.
Sounds similar to Hollow Knight's map system.
at 7:09 the previous formation is a statue with a hero's grave dungeon beneath it, I just did one in Altus plateau last night and recognised the shape.
I wondered if it might've been a Hero's Grave entrance since it does looks like a slightly-less detailed one of those, and it seems perfectly reasonable with Auriza's Hero's Grave being not that far from there. In addition to the Sainted Hero's Grave.
I liked the inconsistencies with the map compared to the world. Really boosted immersion for me. Felt like I had acquired an old map that was no longer relevant. Loved seeing roads that the maped said we're there but we're actually unpassable.
When I found a few of the inconsistencies myself, I immediately figured they were intentional and were showing how the maps are outdated and the world had changed a little since they were drawn up.
One QOL change I'd have liked is if it made it clearer which side of a cliff was the higher one, and where tombstones/spiritsprings are present to go up/down.
If it's possible to replace textures, it'd be neat to have a mod that does that.
Actually, if you look closely, the map usually does show which is the top of a cliff. A solid line traces the edge, and the lines going 'out' from it are towards down.
it has proper map markings
I do like that a lot of details were made to be more accurate, such as coastlines and building placement. But at the same time, I don't mind - even like - if some details look to be out of date, such as the road to Jarburg, or bridges and buildings looking intact on the map but are ruins today. It helps give a sense of history, and sparks curiosity if I know a map may not be 100%.
When I got to the Haligtree I tagged various landmarks along the coastline so I could see the tree's relation to them. Many were misaligned, making me wonder if it was a low poly stand in for the rest of the world.
7:10 the road leads to the map icon for more standard churches. It's likely they created a new map icon for the church of vows specifically given it's different architecture, or rather, expanded the church to make it fully unique
Wyndham ruins might have been another location to fight lansseax. In the gameplay trailer, lansseax has a scene where he first appears at the altus plateau, and then another in what i believe looks like dragonbarrow, so perhaps they had much more planned for him than how it ended up with just two locations.
Pretty sure that Lansseax was female and had a thing for Vyke.
3:31 This is actually consistent with one of the low quality LODs of Godrick's arena, which you can see using various glitches e.g the pegasus glitch.
Awesome, thanks for bringing this to my attention. I'll add some screenshots to a stickied comment here.
going thru on day 1 build, i loved how the map was imperfect. reflected a sort of mysticism that you find when looking at old maps from the colonial era. the map reflects the general form of the area, contains imperfections etc. made the game map seem more real. as if a person or group of people from the world made the map that thet player uses.
Dude! I was waiting for a video from you for a long time!
I find it curious that no RUclipsr has talked about how much the statues from Uhl Palace Ruins seem to be the "healthier" versions of the giants.
Interesting. Thank You for the insight.
I just took the map as an outdated version from the time before the game starts, and is now being updated by tarnished sharing info.
One thing still puzzles me, that wasn't in the video.
The passage behind the Black Knife Catacombs, that seems to connect down to the vast beach area south of the Altus Plateau, one can't reach.
I think I never even saw a spot where there wasn't thick fog covering this unaccessible dale.
Oh this explains everything I was so confused on my first playthrough as to why I couldnt utilize the roads on the map to get my destination. Definitely was quite annoying being lied to by Miyazaki himself. Its interesting to see how the game was kind of released unfinished and now they're subtly continuing to better the game. Hopefully there will be more improvements as we get closer to DLC.
I remember running on those Giants with capes at Altus plateau and after the patch dropped they all lost their capes, weird.
4:47
I think the landmass extends further out to symbolize how high up this particular area is. That's the reason Mountaintop of Giants' map is only half its size ingame.
14:09 I am almost certain this could've been a spot where Lansseax might have been encountered.
I don't know whether it would be the first or second, or even a third spot, but I have every reason to believe it since the whole area was originally suspiciously empty and arena-like, and also because Wyndham Catacombs and Ruins have lots of dragon/lightning related gear around it.
Inside the ruins you can use a stonesword key to unlock a cellar. Inside there is a chest with the Pearldrake Talisman +1.
And in the Catacombs you have both the Lightning-Scorpion Charm and a Dragon Apostle Cookbook. There is also a Leyndell Knight protecting the catacombs, the ones who are associated with the Dragon Cult.
Edit: I just now remembered that the whole Wyndham Ruins is filled with pools of water, this further supports my idea that Lansseax could be encountered here. In this case however, her fight would be significantly harder, and more similar to Fortissax's fight.
When I was doing my first run I thought most of the inconsistencies regarding roads were on purpose, to make it seem like there was something there before, that with time dissapeared
I remember being a lot more confused in Liurnia on my first playthrough and now it all makes sense. Nice breakdown!
being a graphic designer seeing this video its refreshing to see some very "ooh shit" alterations in a game i hold really high in terms of quality.
I like the jarburg road not existing but being on the map. it creates a little puzzle for the player, them seeing the path, trying to take it only to find it drops down. So they can see that jarburg is there but they need to figure out how to reach it
Edit: that's what I get for commenting early! you say basically the same thing. I do agree though, putting some road rubble down at the drop might have made things clearer
11:45 before all the patches I tried invading outside Radahn's arena, and I got teleported to a place I couldn't recognize in a ravine. It didn't dawn on me until after I went back to my world, but I think as an invader I spawned on the seabed. I assume other people had the same experience as me and tried placing messages, which then appeared on the surface.
I don't know if it's been patched yet cause I never tried invading there again, but I regret not letting a message while I was there, it could've been one of my messages floating there.
smh it was explained not even 10 seconds later
@@BillyCrash100 i appreciate the effort 🫡
A lot of these places that bear evidence of changes late in development, also have some kind of waygate associated with them. Some examples are the church of vows, Fort Gael, the consecrated snowfield area, Fort Redmane, and the Limgrave Divine Tower, all of which are mentioned in this video. Liurnia had the most map cleanup done, and also features the most incidental or even pointless waygates...
(Some of the remaining waygates are associated with NPCs or NPC questlines, which also have been changed heavily in patch content, presumably due to being left until late in development.)
Waygate are totaly crutch so solve problem with content they failed to incorporate into the main game without any trick. You can see how game has very inconsisten quality levels. Caelid was defenetly last or second last area they finished. Entire zone host largest amount of reused assets and bosses.
Maybe they designed how area would look but actual gameplay content was added way later.
F*ck I wish they had another year or 2 to finish the game. There's no way they're gonna add and polish everything that they had to rush through patches
I think the Jarburg map was left like this for "realism" purpose, perhaps when the map was first traced by the previous Owner, there was a road there, and with time the road collapsed and got dragged by the ocean...
Or they for some reason forgot the most obvious part, which wouldn't be a surprise knowing Fromsoftware
Finally, someone with commentary I couldn't find anyone who did voice over these kinds of facts.
I distinctly remember running into several of these issues on the day one patch and being confused as to why there were roads on the map that weren't actually there. Glad to see they've been fixing them over time.
You're 100% correct, because the telporter in Fort Gael takes you to Redmane Castle, but its facing the Minor Erdtree. If you rotate it 90% though it is facing the correct direction.
I appreciate how much you switch back and forth between the patches to make it easier to compare. Also smart use of the marker feature on the map!
You know this is a good series when you actually look forward to every video
Something just crossed my mind,you could say that the player base updated the maps with additional details. Tarnished are noticing weird details and editing their maps or adding details because they’re missing.
I know that’s not how they’re approaching it necessarily, but there is an in universe explanation for the maps being updated. So many Tarnished exploring could lead to them editing their maps and leaving copies at the stones.
@@marishiten5944 how have you been on the internet this long and not figured out what role playing is?
The illusory wall sound effect is such a nostalgia trip for me
The Jarburg map being "wrong" was the only thing that made me found a altenate route.
are you planning on doing a video on how the map is put together? I’ve noticed a few interesting things that could warrant looking deeper into, most notably the Haligtree seems to be significantly offset in it’s actual placement compared to on the map and when you can see it from Altus, Sol, or Ordina, as well as Farum Azula not being visible from anywhere else on the map besides the Divine Towers while it should be visible from most of the eastern section of the map. (which also seems to confirm that the Divine Towers exist outside of time like Farum Azula)
I don't have a save anymore with all the divine towers unlocked but I can't see them from the divine towers I have at all. Are you talking about specific divine towers? You can't see farum azula from the east atlus tower or the limgrave tower at least.
@@DreamEatinDonuts from what I've seen the isolated divine tower(the one in the ocean) is the only tower I know you can see azula from
@@DreamEatinDonuts yeah it’s mostly the isolated divine tower but the divine towers also share the sky coloration and independent weather/time of Farum Azula
~14:13 that area could've been the arena for the ancient dragon that randomly pops up and disappears not to far away and they just moved it over by the sainted hero's grave
I was ramming my head against that cliff in Liurnia for so long, trying to get up to Caria Manor....
I also spent a while trying to see the "fish tail" down on the ocean, wondering when I'd get to go there. Shame, it looked like such a striking piece of geography.
It’s interesting coming back to this and thinking about the whole Jarburg map situation. At the time, a lot of people seemed to take the eventual change as proof that it was a mistake, not an intended mechanic. I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive, however. All this time later, it seems inarguable that leaving the map that way was intentional. It was such a stark difference compared to the other discrepancies they opted to change, I can’t really see it any other way.
With the advantage of hindsight, I think the best theory we could form is that it was an experiment by the developers, one they ultimately deemed a failure. It seems clear that they kept the map strange there on purpose, I’d guess to create some intrigue about the secret area. Given the number of bloodstains at that cliff (including my own), most players’ first assumption was the existence of secret path and that they had to make a leap of faith. This is, of course, very funny, but not exactly in line with the Souls approach.
When the Souls devs finish pranking the player, the player typically knows what to do next time. In the case of Jarburg however, most people I know left the cliff behind with a somewhat defeated “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do…” attitude. My best guess is the devs saw the mass confusion and the (admittedly hilarious) pile of horses at the cliff base, decided their intent wasn’t communicated to their standards, and scrapped the idea.
All of your content is absolutely fantastic and I know the amount of work you put in must be considerable so I don't want to pressure you at all, but I am curious. Is there any chance we might get more of the Demon's Souls Compare-Through any time soon, perhaps once the Elden Ring craze dies down a bit ? I absolute adore what you've been doing with that series.
Didn't expect map
I felt like such an idiot when I realized I had missed so much stuff in the lake region in Liurnia. Now it makes a little more sense, the map was different then.
loving the elden ring stuff so far, I'm certain there's so much more already out there and to change too, the future dlc will probably have some of the same things like this as well
you and zullie are both amazing at uncovering so many things and i love seeing especially how things change late into development and ideas are scrapped or things reused, on one hand i wish there wasn't things like that to happen and every idea was fully realized, but then the game would never fully come out
@@marishiten5944 the underground has map too, this is a standalone game so its fair to expect big dlc especially when it's the biggest project they've been working on this far, ds2 not only had good dlc IMO, with incredibly good bosses that leave a mark and were mostly well designed, but it had a sizeable amount of content even in comparison to the game, talking each one individually
brume tower is probably the smallest area of them all but it's a well done and interesting idea of needing to descend and the vertical aspects of it were quite enjoyable, eleum loyce is definitely the largest in terms of basically everything, with a great mechanic of thawing ice and encouraging you to rediscover the area as well as having even more things, it has the snowfield as well which despite all its hate is quite nice, there's a lacking amount of items in there for the sheer size but then again it's a giant field of snow below a massive city
shulva isn't bad either, it's the most visually appealing to me personally, has a great amount of loot like the others, feels small but is bigger if you actually take your time with the area instead of running past the fodder and such but that's with most areas in games, bosses are probably the worst out of the dlc but at least are unique
this did turn into me ranting about my favorite game but either way its entirely fair to expect large dlc for elden ring and it being an isolated area doesn't matter because we have most of the map unlocked anyway, no it probably won't be the size of limgrave and caelid combined or whatever but it could definitely be at least the size of one of the main regions, which means there is possibility for some of these same map concerns to come up
Another detail that corroborates the moved Caelid Minor Erdtree is that despite the landmass being clearly visible, if you look towards Caelid from the Divine Tower where you restore Godrick's Great Rune, the tree is not there.
Quite possibly this tree was moved very late in development, and some oversight led to it being absent in some low detail versions of the game world.
I figured jarburg was intentional, especially since the gap is (mostly) under the bridge, a mix of devs trolling and encouraging exploration
I like to believe that the tarnish collects these map chunks and realizes they are horribly wrong and just corrects it while resting at graces
I remembered lots of inconsistencies with the map and me explaining to friends that "Yeah obviously, its FromSoft telling the player that the map was drawn in a previous time and should not be depended on 100% of the time, they are the kings of indirect storytelling". Now i feel stupid and pretentious. Thanks illusory wall.
I had assumed on my first playthrough that the map didn't match up 100% because of changes to the topography that happened between the Shattering and when we start our Journey. Knowing it was because of changes to the design shattered my illusion of it being tied to the lore.
Man I am so glad you pointed out all those changes in South Liurnia. I swear I missed so much there in my first playthrough cuz it really looked like there was way less than their actually was, but on my second playthrough I went through it all again was was surprised how much was actually shown on the map lol
The weird thing about the Haligtree is that you can see it from a couple of places (east of Shaded Castle, west of Castle Sol) and it looks to be really close to the landmass, but obviously the area itself is nowhere near. Neither version of the map remotely aligns with it when seen here so it’s really quite strange.
Yeah, and From really couldn't shake off all of their previous quirks with map design, as not all distance views still align properly.
And I'm not talking like how LODs look like, but if you stand on the branches of Haligtree and look at the coastline and place markers, the distance views are way off. They are definitely forcing a perspective in both cases, seeing Haligtree from the continent and seeing the coastline from the Haligtree, they don't match.
Basically, the coastline and land masses are pushed away and back from where they should be. I wouldn't be surprised of the Haligtree distance model you see is altogether too small to be the real thing, and is again just abusing forced perspective.
Lastly, the thing that the earlier version of the Haligtree map made me think was that there could have originally been plans for you to be able to access the tree by walking, instead of just being teleported there by sending gate (which they also abuse heavily in many situations). It's also a really curious and obvious flaw in distance view that you can see some decently close and tall distance land masses in the Haligtree area, away from the coastline, but you see absolutely no trace of that while standing on the coastline.
Basically, this is very reminiscent of how they previously handled distance views. One would have thought that becoming open world would have fixed that, lol.
I see that teaser for your patch changes video, I knew those giants near the old Altus tunnel were changed! People thought I was mad but I knew.
dude I thought I was going insane I saw a map in a video and I was like dude the area hes going to does not exist on my map ,im so glad you mentioned this
ugh this just makes me want a poster of this map even more. great video!
16:01 The change in the Haligtree area's proximity to the mainland south of the region is a big help to know about. It was SO frustrating to me when I was looking up videos on how to find items in that region, or how to traverse it early on, and every video I watched had people explaining item locations on the earlier map, but my map showed the entire Haligtree area separated from the mainland to the south. It was kind of infuriating because I was getting my absolute poop pushed in when I first arrived, and when I went to look up some help I found that the maps in the videos weren't even showing the region as I saw it on my map!! I had no idea it was a different patch, and to add to the confusion, I knew "something changes" in relation to Leyndell, so I kept thinking "Maybe this is part of those changes?"
Mystery solved, I guess! Damn, that's good to know!
Anyone else think the earlier version of the Haligtree map was deliberately made to look like a hand? Maybe that was an earlier layout that was cut.
thank you for this! Sometimes theres stuff on the map that just seem to gist for me as far as finding my way across it-the fact the map has been changing with updates is certainly interesting
I feel like the map being unreliable could almost be a feature of the Souls-like narrative XD
I remember there being a bridge somewhere that was broken in the game but not in the map and it made me assume the map was just old, and the world post shattering was like inaccurate to the old map.
i like the idea of having a pre-crumbled map of elden ring where you find a map that was made long before you arrive and minor discrepancies are planned for secrets and stuff
i noticed some of these unconsciously. some maps have just 'felt different'. nice to see i'm not crazy. another interesting video. shout out fellow nerd
the fact that Jarburg road is left wrong is a hint that it's living jars that make the maps in the land inbetween! They're behind it all!
lol, I dig this interpretation
oh I love how they changed the scarlet rot area in caelid to look more like a butterfly, def purposeful
That's our tax runes at work.
You know what would have been really cool? If you get only get a neatly drawn pre-shattering map when first picked up, where everything is in order, and as you explore the actual world you can see more and more roughly drawn changes added to the map, signifying the tarnished is changing the map better reflecting the actual environment, seeing missing roads/bridges, scarlet rot swamps and craters noted on the map.
Damn. For some reason I had so much trouble finding the Prawn Shack when I played at launch. It's hilarious to me that they did actually just add it to the map later on
8:40 or so when talking about the manor road. It might be intentional due to that road being hidden behind an illusory wall. So from a lore perspective of a "Hidden" manor.
Or I could be wrong.... just a thought that came to mind
If you’re up in volcano manner and you look down over the lava waterfall to the spot the dragon spawns and where Alexander tries to repair his cracks, it looks different. When you’re actually down there it’s more rocky but from up there it shows a lot more lava. That makes me think it wasn’t always that way
"It's pretty subtle, and I don't know what that accomplishes" is the motto of people working in Japan
I straight up intentionally jumped to my death on the path to Jarburg because it was so out of place that I thought that the entire road might just be invisible lol
You're not alone! I've had a couple others tell me they've done the same! 😅
Halig Tree's physical location had been infuriating me with it's discrepancy between how you see it from castle Sol vs marker locations when looking back from the tree. At least the map change shows I wasn't taking crazy pills.