You ever just look at one of the massive corpse piles littered about the game and just think to yourself that there aren't enough houses in the entire game to fit just the number of people in this pile? I think that often.
I’ve always just viewed the map of Elden Ring like you’re supposes to view the map of any Elder Scrolls game, where the size of the game area is only a fraction of a percent of the actual size of the map, according to the lore Skyrim is only like 10 sq miles, but its supposed to be like the size of Germany
@@brandonjensen586 I don't think you need to do that for Elden Ring though. I believe, the game tries to strongly communicate that there have been a lot of earthquakes (Just look at the jagged long rock formations in Liurnia and everywhere else) and a lot of land has been lost, presumably because of Marika shattering the Ring.
The Academy is terribly designed. You gotta get through the zombie graveyard and a waterwheel with no safety measures to get to class, and if you miss your stop you get dropped to the bottom and next thing you know you're in the funhouse of the headmistress' weird son. And then there is the Haligtree with no accessibility or railings whatsoever, and full of ladders. Idk how Miquella thought the Albinaurics could get around if they made it there.
Shaman village not having more houses is such a missed oppurtunity. It would've been much more haunting and made you think about the scale of the massacres
@@c0n33r you could still add graves, a ghost that says something, a unique plant that says in its item description that it grows from the blood of shamans...
maybe they did not all live in the same village. maybe the shaman village is just one of many such villages and this particular one is where Marika is from. that would make a lot more sense since it's much easier to persecute disconnected small groups of people
This is also a fantasy world with waygates that magically take you to places. They could have easily set up a waygate in Elphael to Altus or Linurnia and then destroyed it (in case they lost or stalemated which they did).
@geordiejones5618 i imagined that, half of the Haligtree has fallen...and the access through Ordina leads to a branch, maybe the devs didnt gave importance to this hahahaha
@@anonisnoone6125it is even funnier in Bloodborne with the insane amount of gravestones on every earlier. They're definitely more aiming for the vibe of the an area, far from any practically. Which is endearing in its own way.
Echoes of Queen Marika, The Eternal: "Hear me, thou gracegiven. Thy requests for bathing rooms shall evermore go unheeded. What need of thee dost thou have defecation when thou dost subside on The Erdtree's light and sap? I care not of this 'Osha' thou invoke. I will slay it as I have slain all who oppose The Greater Will. I, Queen Marika The Eternal hath set an example, and doth not give a shit."
I think the most egregious error is that 90% of the caves have "natural" light coming in from the ceilings in multiple areas, but on the surface there are not any holes that would allow for the light to shine in.
This is something that From Soft does all the time and it drives me insane. Places where, even when things didn't go to shit, it would've been impossible to walk from point A to point B. Here some examples I noticed: -Anor Londo's main path only leads to the city walls, without any way to reach the actual city. There is also a single bed and it's too little for anything other than a human. -Drangleic Castle requires the player to cross a bunch of rooms, none of which are livable spaces, then in the second half you have to go outside, on a narrow staircase without railings to reach the upper throne room (why does it even exist if the throne room is on the ground floor). - Cainhurst: To reach the throne room you need to cross the roof of a narrow tower, worst part is that they could have placed a door right on that small tower with the little bridge and it would've made sense. -Lothric castle: it's impossible to actually reach the city trough the main gate and the only way into the castle is through a ladder in a church. The castle itself is mostly empty; again, lots of fortifications but next to zero places where the royal family could live. -Sekiro: Most of the roads lead to nowhere. It would be impossible to move around the place without a grapling hook. - Elden Ring: to reach the actual class room you need to cross a graveyard and then an extremely dangerous water elevator. Now, maybe the broken staircase lead to the bridge next to the elevator, but there is still the problem that, despite how big the place is, there are only 2, maybe three classrooms. THere is simply no way to reach the rest of the school. The Volcano Manor has a similar problem where there are no bedrooms or livinq quarters of the sort. My headcanon is that the large area with multiple broken wooden floors (the one with hanging cages) was the main body of the villa, that got demolished by Tanith to make more room for cages. This also makes sense as the place is the only way to link the upper part to the Throne Room. Carian Manor: again, the only functional room is the chapel. The few rooms that exist are far too spread out to be used as an actual house. Leyndell: in theory for the normal way reach the Erdtree you'd need to pass trough the arena where you fight fake Godfrey , down the elevator, pass the Crucible Knight and then... nothing because there is no path that connects that road to the rest of the city.
Well, entirety of Dark Souls hand-waives these points away with "The flow of time (and space) is convoluted in Lordran/Drangleic/Lothric" excuse. I mean, undead settlement literally migrated AWAY from the castle to make space for swamps of Farron
Leyndell is excusable because the Erdtree was only meant for the elites/royal family to have any access to. And they probably could just fly or teleport down to the masses, being literal demigods.
A few of these I think can be addressed in one way or another. -Anor Londo: The big central elevator perhaps has lower city access that we simply can't activate. -Cainhurst Castle: The central courtyard has partially collapsed into the Pthumerian Labyrinth. There was evidently a big staircase that led up to the keep with the throne room, you can see the broken top of it below the Logarius boss arena. The real weird thing is that Cainhurst's actual throne room keep revealed by the Crown of Illusions is a duplicate of the keep you are fighting on the rooftop of, and seemingly doesn't fit into the castle's floorplan at all. Shenanigans! It also bugs me that the tall narrow tower at the centre of the castle has no way to access, though the logical entrance would have been through a missing door on the right side of the entrance hall's upper landing (you get to the banquet hall by going through a door on the left side, but the right side is just blank wall) -Lothric Castle: I think the closed spiral staircases on either side of the Dancer's boss room are meant to be the normal means of accessing the upper castle. The ladder is a weird emergency route I guess? -Raya Lucaria: We take the back entrance through the Church of the Cuckoo and the graveyard. The front entrance is that suspended staircase with the summoned giant ball trap rolling down it. The stairway down seems to have been broken, however, but probably would have linked up to the Gate Town's upper walkways. But if we were to imagine ascending from that direction, we would arrive in that vestibule building from which it's possible to access the Grand Library via elevator, and the courtyard with the entrances to the Debate Parlour and presumably the Dormitories (of which we only really have access to the rooftops). Much more reasonably accessible layout in that circumstance. -Volcano Manor: We definitely don't have access to most of the the manor's rooms, going by the scale of the exterior structure. There are doors we can't open in the entrance hallway, which presumably lead into the rest of the building. The rest are indefensible, hah.
As the biggest explorer of the ENTIRE Weeping Peninsula you have NO IDEA how much the second half of Castle Morne annoyed the hell out of me. Not only that rump. But the entirety of the torture cells have no doors. Or stairs. Or nothing connecting to the main castle and not only that!! There is no way back into the main castle. Not even a poorly placed elevator or something once you jump the wall to the second bon-grace-fire you are stuck there... Fuck it
But ya gotta admit castle morne and the buildup are pretty sweet bits of exploration in the early game. The misbegotten are pretty creepy the first time you see them
Tell me about it. I missed the blind lady first and had to go back to the castle a second time. Couldn’t believe I had to do it all again. Still the first time was pretty cool to explore
@dontblamepeopleblamethegov559 No. You would have to beat the Leonine Misbegotten to escape, since I'm like 80% sure there's an entrance teleporter in his room. I could be wrong though. Given the amount of effort I have seen put into getting into getting softlocked, it probably isn't as easy as just sprint to Morne
The entire Carian Manor is like this. There's literally four rooms (the first one on the right, the Sword of Night & Flame room, the chapel of Pidia, and the Upper Level grace), and the rest is walls/bridges. The most pointless manor that nobody could ever live in.
It's actually the scale of the construction that always gets me. It's like "Here is a tower. We only have to raise it 300 m into the sky before we put a single room on top." All of these seem to be hundreds of years of construction projects, if even remotely possible. I also want to add that this is something I kinda have to take into consideration when I plan and design my D&D maps, because the players 100% walking past the obvious plot device, but will ponder for over an hour about the significance of a lit candle in a cave.
Ah that's still nothing compared to the catacombs, especially in the DLC. Sometimes you don't even see where is the actual bottom you just see the architecture disappear into the abyss when you are already like 200m underground. Like why are they so freaking huge and deep LOL
A fun thing is From is actually very meticulous about consistent scale in their games. There is a standard From human character mannequin they use to measure the environments. They used the same one in Elden Ring and Armored Core 6. The inhuman scale of the architecture in their games is definitely on purpose; one is supposed to feel it's impossible at first glance. But the fact it's constructed of recognizable materials makes it more unsettling. As if the structures were manifested by a supernatural force rather than truly built by laborers. And with the influence of Lovecraft's Dreamlangs on From's fantasy games... all of it might be even more intentional.
I think for elden ring from soft took in consideration the fact that there's magic and shit in the game like why wouldn't layendells walls be 10 times the width of the great wall of china . It's made with magic after all.
@@zezomorsy3165 I think if they wanted to be known that something is made by magic, then they would have let us know. The most likely answer is that they simply used the "Rule of Cool"
Funny that you should say that, because in my first playthrough Leyndell was the only Legacy Dungeon I didn't like because the first half felt too much like a real livable city.
It's from a classic real time strategy game. You can place a stone/fortified gate within bottle-necked parts of the land that are surrounded by water to deny the enemy any ground entry and it looks exactly like that.
Some of these weird design choices aren't really continuity errors but legitimately are just how some castles are built; with dead ends, separate buildings disguised to look as one, choke points, and places where there is seemingly no access where inhabitants would put ladders when not under attack. It was actually kind of a mindset of Medieval architects to not make their fortresses look impenetrable because then attackers would just lay siege/step up their game so they basically booby trapped them with design "flaws"
How about the tallest tower in Raya Lucaria being completely inaccessible to the people who live/work there, despite the description of Terra Magicka. What, did they go outside and through a cave system just to cast that shit?
I always feel like I'm missing something in that cave. Unless the little place where the sotcerer fires at you from a higher ledge can be reached and doesn't lead anywhere, i think the cave actually connects into the academy as well. most likely at the pit with the abductor
@@paracame8162 There's an illusory segment of cave wall before you enter the "House" with the chest that allows you to get up to that sniper and another chest. Sadly, no footpath to the academy proper up there, that guy was just an ass camping out specifically to plink people in the back of the head.
I thought it being hard to reach was the point, like students had to go down through the caves, find the entrance, go up to the top and then cast the spell up there as a rite of passage. I could be wrong/misremembering but I could've sworn that was the case.
The black keep is one it bothered me aswell like imagine you are a messmer soldier and you need to talk to your boss, do you have to parkour through fossilized specimens and elevators to get talk to him?
Maybe you could transition to a content style similar to RoflWaffle with Gran Turismo or something. I watch a lot of that kinda thing and clearly plenty of others do!
Bloodborne is also completely nonsensical from the urbanistic point of view. Ladders being the only way to access entire neighbourhoods (do you imagine one second having to take a 40 foot ladder every single morning to go to work, and back up in the evening ?), streets that go nowhere, roads breaking suddendly into flight of stairs despite being clearly made for carriages, barriers placed direcly against doorways, buildings with the interior window layout different from outside (in fact I don't think a single building, bare a few exceptions, in Bb is coherent in rhat regard) closed streets full of carriages... that couldn’t possibly have ended up where they are since there is no road leading there, and so on... The general atmosphere is so perfectly immersive that you easily miss this, but when you start looking closer it is extremely jarring. Diehard fans will excuse these as us, the hunter, dreaming, but I think the explanation is more pragmatic: Fromsoft design doesn’t try to convey a logical world, that could be lived in, it tries to convey a general idea, a mood, of what such a world might look like, without spending unnecessary time on the logical side of thing.
The best example is in the cathedral ward, where to get around the closed gate, you must kill a beast so that a door magically opens, take a magic elevator with a random door way halfway through that you must jump to quickly with no safe way to get back down besides breaking your ankles. Making all the way up the elevator, you meet a tower where you must parkour down broken planks lest you splat yourself with a random door halfway that leads to the workshop. Once you finally make it to the bottom you go through a back alley where the residents can't leave because there is another elevator that takes you around the gates but is on an evaluated platform that you can't get on again once you drop off
That last part is true, but it's also just game design. Someone pointed out the series of elevators and mannequins you parkour over in shadow keep to get to Messmer: It's unfeasible if his general's need to get to him. But it's obviously just game and level design.
5:37 The candles could actually have an explanation, but it's a kinda long story. You see, there's this youtuber called Hawkshaw and he popularized the "color theory" in Elden Ring. Basically what the theory suggests is that things don't determine their colors, colors determine things. You don't get violent and angry and then turn red, you turn red and then become violent and angry, because you turned red. Color determines nature. The color of a candles stick is white, which is the palest of colors, which makes it kinda eternal, just like how the blackness of void is Also eternal. These candles sticks could in ER world's physics burn literally forever.
I like to think the architects just have the "git gud" attitude about what theyre building. Oh you cant get into your wittle castle??? How about you git gud scrub. Simply scale the wall or destory this impenetrable layer of bricks.
This reminds me of that architecture video for Elden Ring, where the 3 walls of lyndell are stupidly huge enough to be a bit larger than dams. Maybe the architects would have been able to build more houses and stairs if they didn't waste all those materials on 3 walls
yeah there are wayy too little housing spaces in elden ring. Like, except for leyndell and maybe volcano manor there arent any big places that you can imagine are used for living
@@YEY0806I've been playing through the DLC recently and had the same thought! Have you seen Midra's Manse???? That's such a nice property, but the owner is absolutely RUINING its value. What, with all of the burnt books littered around the place, the whole ass procession of cultists, the rats and ghosts, it's utterly in shambles! The owner is such a dick, too. I went down through the sewers, down a river, through a catacomb and past a HAUNTED FOREST to get there, and how does he greet me? He tells me to fuck off, and hides behind an invisible wall. And when I get there? The dude just rips out his own spine! That whole property is abysmal, he'll be lucky to get a penny out of it I tell you!
Defensive buildings don't always have a door as its a big weakness. Is there a hatch on top, Martello towers on Britain's coast dont have doors, You enter with a retractable ladder through a small window.
@Pigga-k8k which is a good thing for a defensive building. Ladders out a window or an underground tunnel could be a way of getting in. It's Eldenring anyway with invisible walls and flying creatures and stuff. I don't see it as a mistake as it makes a lot of sense for a defensive building.
@@iain-duncanI always took that like she senses the direction of the three fingers and not getting actual vision. Still quite the jumping puzzle to do when you don't see what's around you.
Every time I go by the windmills on altus plateau, I wonder to myself: What exactly are they *milling*? Seriously, there's little to no evidence of wheat cultivation, or indeed *any* significant agriculture *anywhere* in this game.
Also, where are the bathrooms, Lyndell has sewers, but where's the bathrooms to actually get stuff into the sewers. Apparently, people no longer defecate in Elden Ring because the entire land would be filled with shit
Why would there be agriculture in the afterlife? Would they worry about starving? They can't properly die and wander around as zombies, and the Golden Order resets most things anyway.
To be fair to the builders of the big Castle Morne water's edge fortification, doors are actually structural and defensive weakpoints -please ignored the windows- so it's actually a fantastic building! But for real though, I think the gatehouse on the water there is actually protecting the tiny peninsula, where the Leonine Misbegotten is, from the outside world - it seems to have some significance, given the large tree, the grave markers, the sword monument outside Castle Morne, and also that it's the location of the treasured sword of the castle. It probably has a lot of hidden significance too, when you realize that the entire Weeping Peninsula is a microcosm of the whole Lands Between. And come on Lost, candles and lamps are very important spiritual and religious tools. Of course they would be used by the pious servants and worshippers of the dragons in a dragon altar. Their fire keeper (a real job btw) would surely tend to the flames dutifully. If you actually want a pretty bizarre location, I'd point to that one corridor around the garden outside the Fortified Manor. Not the entire path, just that one part that deadends and has literally no use other than looking pretty. It sure does make the garden look very pretty though.
The gatehouse at the bottom of castle Morne could also have a symbolic meaning, think Arc de Triomphe. Either it's actually a gatehouse and the area where the boss is was part of a much alrger landmass that actually deserved a gatehouse, or it's more a symbolic thing that was added as an entrance to a place that has some sort of meaning to the builders. The small island the boss is on definitely feels like it could have held some importance.
I view Elden Ring in a similar way as the older pokemon games. In Elden Ring, we never see anything that could be considered a city. Even Leyendell is crazy small and would barely fit any people. It's there as a representation of a village/city/etc. Same as the NPCs. We meet like 20 people on the entire continent. But they talk as if there is still life, still "normal" people out there, not as if it's an undead wasteland. I think they represent the people of the Lands Between. Still, it's funny how weird this game is if you take it at face value. 4-5 houses? That's a village!
This isn't just elden ring, this is basically every video game ever made. The exception would be in games where large swathes of the map are unreachable background paintings, where sometimes they bring out the true scale of human communities, but I can't thing of a single game that really let's you actually explore a city sized settlement other than maybe like GTA
@@iain-duncan Novigrad in Witcher 3 also comes to mind. It's a bit smaller than it would be in real life, but it still feels pretty legit, especially with the amount of NPCs walking around.
@iain-duncan cyberpunk is one of the only games where I can actually believe millions of people live in that city. Even gta cities would only be able to house a couple hundred thousand people at most
Except the map is disproportionately huge and really empty and devoid of meaningful interactions. It's an overworked littered with tiny copy paste dungeons and a few "legacy dungeons". If they would have gone with quality over quantity. It would be such a problem
The entrance to the leonine boss arena is a triumphal arch which are made to celebrate victories in battle that leads to a graveyard with the people who where killed. There is a sword shrine next to castle Mourne that indicates a battle happened here and it is secluded because its a graveyard with dead people at the lowest point in the lands between
It always bothered me that none of these shambling corpses, or the people who were once alive, have anywhere to live! The lands should be lousy with abandoned homes. There should be thousands of empty houses everywhere. Where did all these people live before the zombie apocalypse?
There are tons of ruins everywhere, and we're going through the lands between in its most dilapitated state after a giant war. Also scale in video games is inherently flawed, and absolutely no one would enjoy the game if it were in the least "sensible" when it comes to population and housing. Nor should anyone really ask developers to design a fantasy city adhering to that philosophy.
I see The Lands Between like most open world games where it’s just a much smaller scale version of the actual place in the lore, like Los Santos compared to California
This kind of stuff is actually all over FromSoft games if you start looking for it. In Bloodborne, the little cathedral you go through on the way to Old Yharnam has a massive stained glass window on the outside, above the door. But on the inside, that same wall has a single tiny window and is otherwise completely solid There's also the Witch of Hemwick's house, which appears to be a huge, multi-story building on the outside, but on the inside is a single tiny room with a staircase leading down into a huge basement.
Every single Rise tower. The giant elevator in the middle of the tower leaves very little space to put the chairs there. Imagine trying to study only to be constantly moved up and down as people try to travel.
I actually really like that one catacomb in the DLC that's almost completely dark, because that's pretty much what they'd all realistically be like. At first I threw glow rocks everywhere and lit up all the sections, but in later playthroughs I keep it dark go through it with just the lantern. It makes it feel more like really exploring an ancient tomb where people aren't supposed to go.
It’s been mentioned on other videos, but I personally find a number of caves and catacombs with light sources that don’t correspond at all with the overworld. Using the tracker, you can place the blue beams to go directly through these openings, and find the corresponding location above ground, where invariably, there is no opening that would allow the light through. The first time I noticed this was in Murkwater Cave. I also noticed in the boss chamber of Murkwater Catacombs, there are a set of ‘windows’ on the upper left side as you enter, but there’s only solid earth on the outside. You can find similar issues in Dragonbarrow Cave. Even the tutorial area has this ‘phenomenon’. Also, there’s a short lift in Leyndell, and if you throw a rainbow stone into the shaft, it will land without shattering, (indicating you could safely jump down), but if you do jump into the shaft, you get the instant death screen. (The rainbow stone lied!!)
You.... don't think that some of those "Roads that lead nowhere" aren't roads that lead.... exactly to where they end? Remember, the Lands Between have been at war since the Shattering, however long ago that was. Those buttresses you had to climb up and down and jump around for in Raya Lucario? A defensive position your enemy can't easily reach that you can fire glimstone shards down from. Winding, uncontrolled easily blocked paths in Castle Morn? Well, it's a bastion against invasion, of course it's going to be set up to confuse outsiders. That building with no discernable entrance also in Castle Morn? Well, it's right next to the... ahem, 'Kennels.' It's probably where they put the dying Beastmen or those who are too weak. It's why there's so many "Jellyfish" around them. When you realize those floating sky "Jellyfish" in the Lands between are the ghosts of Children, it makes it a LOT easier to understand, "No, that was the building they threw the 'unwanteds.' It has no entrance, because they want there to be no EXIT. The walls have windows that are just high enough for a person with a ladder to shove small deformed infants through, to let them fall either to their death or to shrivel up and die there. That big honking door with no building that leads to the boss fight? Did you not also notice the Tree surrounded by Graves? Some of these tells you the mental state of the creator. For example Miquella's Haligtree is corse, gnarled, dying, and is horrendously bad to navigate. How could any supplicants follow him there for his 'Benevolence." it shows for all his "Kindness" he never truly wanted people to reach him. The Carian family focused on traps and trickery to defeat their enemies both times they were invaded, so of course it's going to be convoluted to get around to their actual residences because their creators want to screw with you. In fact, everywhere you find those "Jellyfish" is a place you can assume children were mass murdered. "There aren't enough houses to fit the supposed population." Well, in Marika's Village, her people were being prosecuted by the Omen- I mean, Hornsent. They probably needed less and less houses as the Hornsent took more and More to stuff into pots, and that's if the Hornsent even let them Keep those houses in the first place. they may have broken them down for timber for their own use and said "Screw you, 20 of you to a house. That way you're used to it when we stuff 20 to a Jar."
Endless elevator shafts and the longest treads that you need to climb for half an hour, there is something deeply impractical and dreamlike here. That's because everything in the worlds of souls is filled with abstractions torn from real life and adapted to the game, fantasy and vision of the author, as well as to the rules by which the game designer operates. On the contrary, I like this scale and impracticality, the fantasticism of architecture and the intricacy of the moves, everything looks as if you are pushing things from the real world to the limit, absurdizing things from the real world, from which there is a certain sense of anxiety from surrealism caught by our subconscious
People who play games just gotta deal with the fact that, like, Whiterun, one of the major, central capital cities in all of Skyrim, has about 70 people.
This is one of the things I've loved about Fromsoft games since the very start: they're not afraid to just be games. The levels are video game levels, the npcs are video game npcs and the plot is minimal because the focus is the gameplay. They don't need to be a real world, or a cinematic experience. They have the same level of attention to detail in the levels, environments and npcs that old snes rpgs had, and there's something deeply comforting about that to me. Of course, I can understand why some people might think it's all a bit silly.
You may want to study some real castles. A lot of them have towers and rooms that seemingly go nowhere. Quite often the towers are grain silos. Most if not all castles have one main, obvious entrance because they are fortifications, they are designed to be defended from one direction because that is advantageous to the defenders. A lot of the time, goods were hoisted over the walls to where they were required and anything that was unwanted was similarly thrown over the walls. It's a question of modern understanding of architecture vs ancient architecture.
Starting with Bloodborne, From really leaned into a dreamlike style of world building. Structures aren't supposed to quite make sense. Architecture to nowhere, and a sense of a world manifested already in a state of decay that was never whole. (Very literal in Dark Souls 3.) It is very influenced by Lovecraft's Dreamlands. Read up on lore from the Dreamlands like the Lost City of Sarnath to see just how intense the influence is on FromSoft's fantasy games.
The shaman village is just the one place Marika managed to keep in more or less one piece. Other places were destroyed - there are occasionally ruins of similar size all over the lands of shadows.
Size will never make sense in not only Elden Ring, but in open world games in general. The map must be varied enough with multiple biomes and settlements, yet somehow fit on your hard drive. The Lands Between are less than 5 kilometers across with a pretty big hole in the middle, and while that can realistically fit a small town or maybe a few villages, it couldn't possibly sustain five civilizations at the same time (at least!). And that's fine because I wouldn't want to run through kilometers of wheat fields that the Altus Plateau would have to be covered in to feed the entire Leyndell realistically.
I live for this kinda of niche, like we all know the devs didn't care about 1-1 accurate livable fantasy city, but actually looking at what is their and deciphering how people even existed is such a unique kind of entertaining.
5:14 he got kicked off because he forgot about leyndell and how its just full of blocked off doors with messages saying "you don't have the right O, you don't have the right"
About Marika's village, I would say it is because of scale problem. In reality, Lands Between would've been much bigger, but it isn't in game due to limited technologies.
The first building not having a door gave me flashbacks to Drake and Josh building a treehouse from the inside and forgetting the door, trapping them. Maybe there's some poor worker's corpses in there who didn't come to the realization until the last brick was laid.
Not gonna lie this kind of designs have there since the Demon's Souls days. Fromsoft sacrifices logic for level design. I remember going through Anor Londo and thinking "How was this ever a functioning city?" The rooms and architecture doesn't make any sense and most of them are just huge empty rooms. Leyndell is an improvement because there are tons of actual houses even if you can't enter most of them. These things don't bother me that much but it's obvious that they can't really create a world that believably worked sometime in the past. At least not yet. But they even admitted to this years ago. The reason they always go for post apocalyptic worlds is becase the team is not confident in creating a living breathing civilization like the Witcher, Dragon's Dogma, Assassin's Creed etc.
Novigrad is really well done. The old AC cities work because the major landmarks are in approximately the right place so they can design the rest for parkour and it still feels okay
When Miquella was a young deity, they were fawned over incessantly. As they were moved throughout the kingdom, as was customary for newborn deities, Miquella planted fogwalls to make their most favorite rooms more private for reading and rumination.
I'm pretty sure it's a thing where if you can use something then other people can use it to like sites of grace or Spirit Springs. The random wall is just before the cherished sword of Castle Morne, so it's likely a celebrational arch. Worth noting of that cave, is that it belongs to the Dragon Communion, so their representatives going in and out like the Ancient Dragon Man likely put the candles there. As for the rooftops pathways, the Carian family of Raya Lucaria keep a lot of secrets from their people as a measure against foes and rebellious individuals. They worked with sorcerers of Sellia to develop Night sorcery of assassination, and Carian Retaliation is literally a kept secret, but Thops would make a sorcery of his own much like it before his mysterious death, which just so happens to be a desk overlooked by a secret ledge. In turn, there is truth in Sellen as the Graven Witch, but there was always surveillance at the ready in wait.
Random bad red man explains to me how absurd it is that the elevator is a giant stone slab rising from a pretty much bottomless hole and I agree before he proceeds with shanking me in the throat. 10/10 video.
In the trailer for Elden Ring and I guess shadow of the erdtree it shows massive armies and lore describes large battles and wars fought, but like how? Are we supposed to have suspension of disbelief like how in Skyrim the bandit population is way larger than townfolk of a dozen people? Are the lands between supposed to be much larger than what we are exploring? Is it like death stranding where the actual map size isn’t actually the full distance of America? This is why I like dark souls and bloodborne more your only exploring a small section of a city going through back streets and alleyways so you have to think that the city is much larger so there must be more
Pay closer attention to the tower at Castle Morne. It always seemed sunken into the earth to me. That's why there's no door. Also looks like the top was taken off, and castles are often built with false areas for defensive reasons anyway.
Hey Lost! Love this type of content from you! You are such a relatable person and you always make me laugh. Love your relationship with Thumpy, it reminds me of Pinky and the Brain! Keep up the amazing work and thanks for all you do!
I remember seeing Castle Morne for the first time in the distance, probably in Early March in the first week or so of games release. It was so magical I will never forget it. I would pay upwards of $1000 to have my memory of Elden Ring erased so I can experience the game for the first time again. I stg.
my favourite is when you're at the bottom of some dark cave and then you turn a corner and see a ray of light coming from some crack in the ceiling, or some of the "windows" with outdoor light through them when in a catacombs boss room
I think the bottomless pits underneath the lower floors of elevators, other than being a From Soft screw you, are so the elevator can’t come down on top of you.
A easy solution for the candle question would be the candleshroom. A mushroom that grows in caves and slightly glows. When it grew enough the released biochems ignite themselves and burn steady at a low temperature. The mushroom in it's mature state with the candle light flame on top relies on it's attraction to insects to either spread seeds or changing the top cap around the flame to be more sticky and trapping those insects and dissolve them over time using them as an additional source of fertilizer. All of this is completely made up in about ten seconds and would explain lightet candles in every cave you just need a model for that
I particularly like the large fireplace in the Roundtable Hold. If you look upwards, you'll see the hearth itself doesn't connect to any flue. There's nowhere for the smoke to go. It just disappears into the structure of the wall. The fortified manor doesn't even have any chimneys on top either. They didn't have to do this btw. Stormveil's kitchen hearth connects to an actual smoking chimney above.
That tower within the first 2 minutes is clearly an exterior tower designed to provide extra archer coverage of the walls and the beachhead in case enemy vessels try to dock where the lion demihuman currently resides. It has no door or way up because there's a bridge to it so defenders can easily access it but invaders have no means of entrance at all. The weird wooden scaffolding and ladder were clearly added sometime later for whatever reason.
There are teliportation nodes all over The Lands Between, and they seem small enough to be portable. My guess is any space that appears otherwise inaccessible was at one time utilizing one of the portals to arrive at. In addition to that anyone touched with grace can teliport at sites of grace. And glintstone magic has the ability to teliport large rolling balls. There's plenty of teliportation mechanics present in Elden Ring.
I know you're just joking around and it's not that serious but the reason for the size is fromsoft especially is conscious of implied scale. If you see the pre-rendered cutscenes you'll notice entire armies sieging leyendell despite the in game size not being that massive and there being so few people. So when there are just piles and piles of corpses that's why. It's the only way in game they can show more of the true extent of the world. I got two undead skeleton dudes as my ash summons and I named one of them Greg lmao. Imagine your parents not loving you enough to not give you a generic placeholder name.
Game worlds are often smaller than what they're meant to be. Look at Pokemon, where towns in game can consist of 2 houses, while the anime shows them as more proper cities. My favourite example is how Hoenn's pacifilog town in game is comprised of wooden houses on floating platforms with their "roads" comprised of logs floating in the water, but its a city in the anime. For ER, I like to imagine things like Marikas village is as small as it is for gameplay purposes. Not only is it more memory used if populated with a ton of houses, but it also fills the area with unneeded areas that players will waste time looking around.
Day 322 of asking lost to do a playthrough of elden ring slowly so that he can show us all the cool architecture and ask all the weird questions that pop into his mind. Dude has a voice made for unintentional ASMR and I'd fall asleep to that on the daily. Like a nature documentary!
On the first building i always thought it was a sort of storage tower as such a door down there wasnt needed they just had a long stone bridge connecting to it and over the countless shattering wars it was completely destroyed with perhaps a lighthouse at the top the backside of castlemourne can be explained with the winged beastmen in mind - before their revolt they could have carried people and ressources from the various structures
There's a balcony by the debate parlour at Raya Lucaria that makes no sense. The only way to get there is to jump over a railing, drop 10 feet, and then climb a ladder to the balcony. The only way to get back is through the broken window on the upper floor of the parlour. Edit: I looked more and this path is the only way to actually get to the upper floor of the debate parlour, so it would be impossible to get to the upper floor if the window wasn't broken...
Great message. Having small mistakes like that doesn't take away from greatness, it makes it even more special. To get immersed in worlds to the point where you barely notice them. Art is made by humans and humans are inherently flawed beings. Just like how everything, no matter how good it is, will be flawed in some way.
Considering the sheer amount of detail they put in to the world, a building missing a door is actually quite surprising. Y'know the lore nerds will think "What are the implications of this?"
Who’s to say the building in the beginning doesn’t go further down into the ground? This would mean that the building WAS accessible through a normal door before, but that it had sunk due to it being in coastal terrain so close to the water.
I would imagine that that part has no door because we came to this place in low tide, sort of. I can imagine that if there was a tide system in the game, at high tide the waves would be half-way up the lower walls. Door would be a liability there.
The Starting chapel also makes no sense, it’s supposed to be the way into The Lands Between but you just kind of spawn in this chapel place. Thousands of feet in the air, the placement of your maiden and the fact that you seem to wake up in there implies y’all were using the chapel to hold up for the night but how did you get there. If you came off of a boat there’s no way to get there from the water and why would you bother to go up on this solitary cliff instead of just going on to the Lands Between.
About the Morne castle (and also Academy, cause one of the comments is talking about it), I personally think the reason the levels are so parkour-ey is because we're the tarnished - outsider that is not welcomed into the backdoors and corridors of these places. We forcibly break-in into closed facilities and madly run around killing people and looting someone's chests and belongings. The only place where we can actually walk around the halls and apartments properly is the Stormveil castle. In the other castles and cities we mostly wander on the streets, looking at the light in the windows and sealed doors Adding to the candle section 5:40 - not only it is wasteful, but also no alive person ever would be able to breathe there. The air underground is stiff and lacking enough, and it gets all burned out by the numberless candles, leaving the place full of carbon monoxide
There was a lot of really good examples in the chat so I made a short out them... you guys are great!
You ever just look at one of the massive corpse piles littered about the game and just think to yourself that there aren't enough houses in the entire game to fit just the number of people in this pile? I think that often.
I’ve always just viewed the map of Elden Ring like you’re supposes to view the map of any Elder Scrolls game, where the size of the game area is only a fraction of a percent of the actual size of the map, according to the lore
Skyrim is only like 10 sq miles, but its supposed to be like the size of Germany
@@brandonjensen586 I don't think you need to do that for Elden Ring though. I believe, the game tries to strongly communicate that there have been a lot of earthquakes (Just look at the jagged long rock formations in Liurnia and everywhere else) and a lot of land has been lost, presumably because of Marika shattering the Ring.
Maybe their houses got smushed?
"Sirs, we art at capacity. Into the pile, if you would."
@@brandonjensen586 it's actually Poland but yeah, the size in-game isn't the real one
The Academy is terribly designed. You gotta get through the zombie graveyard and a waterwheel with no safety measures to get to class, and if you miss your stop you get dropped to the bottom and next thing you know you're in the funhouse of the headmistress' weird son.
And then there is the Haligtree with no accessibility or railings whatsoever, and full of ladders. Idk how Miquella thought the Albinaurics could get around if they made it there.
OSHA would be contacting very soon
And even if (when?) everything was working, you would have to take the world's longest flight of stairs
The academy wasn't always in that condition
American school
"If you can't float like a normal person you're fucked out of luck"
Shaman village not having more houses is such a missed oppurtunity. It would've been much more haunting and made you think about the scale of the massacres
Maybe those are the only surviving structures and the rest of the village was destroyed?
@fionaflorissax Then add evidence of the destruction...
@@habo249 It was a very long time ago remember. The initial survivors and later, Marika cleaned it up. Add weather to that mix and a lot washed away.
@@c0n33r you could still add graves, a ghost that says something, a unique plant that says in its item description that it grows from the blood of shamans...
maybe they did not all live in the same village. maybe the shaman village is just one of many such villages and this particular one is where Marika is from.
that would make a lot more sense since it's much easier to persecute disconnected small groups of people
Remember Haligtree? Malenia lead an army to Caelid...to access/leave it, there's only a ladder hahahahahah
This is also a fantasy world with waygates that magically take you to places. They could have easily set up a waygate in Elphael to Altus or Linurnia and then destroyed it (in case they lost or stalemated which they did).
@geordiejones5618 i imagined that, half of the Haligtree has fallen...and the access through Ordina leads to a branch, maybe the devs didnt gave importance to this hahahaha
As much as I love FS's creativity, I wish they would at least try to add logic to their structures in connection to the lore.
@@anonisnoone6125it is even funnier in Bloodborne with the insane amount of gravestones on every earlier. They're definitely more aiming for the vibe of the an area, far from any practically. Which is endearing in its own way.
Ships
Echoes of Queen Marika, The Eternal: "Hear me, thou gracegiven. Thy requests for bathing rooms shall evermore go unheeded. What need of thee dost thou have defecation when thou dost subside on The Erdtree's light and sap? I care not of this 'Osha' thou invoke. I will slay it as I have slain all who oppose The Greater Will. I, Queen Marika The Eternal hath set an example, and doth not give a shit."
I think the most egregious error is that 90% of the caves have "natural" light coming in from the ceilings in multiple areas, but on the surface there are not any holes that would allow for the light to shine in.
This is something that From Soft does all the time and it drives me insane. Places where, even when things didn't go to shit, it would've been impossible to walk from point A to point B. Here some examples I noticed:
-Anor Londo's main path only leads to the city walls, without any way to reach the actual city. There is also a single bed and it's too little for anything other than a human.
-Drangleic Castle requires the player to cross a bunch of rooms, none of which are livable spaces, then in the second half you have to go outside, on a narrow staircase without railings to reach the upper throne room (why does it even exist if the throne room is on the ground floor).
- Cainhurst: To reach the throne room you need to cross the roof of a narrow tower, worst part is that they could have placed a door right on that small tower with the little bridge and it would've made sense.
-Lothric castle: it's impossible to actually reach the city trough the main gate and the only way into the castle is through a ladder in a church. The castle itself is mostly empty; again, lots of fortifications but next to zero places where the royal family could live.
-Sekiro: Most of the roads lead to nowhere. It would be impossible to move around the place without a grapling hook.
- Elden Ring: to reach the actual class room you need to cross a graveyard and then an extremely dangerous water elevator. Now, maybe the broken staircase lead to the bridge next to the elevator, but there is still the problem that, despite how big the place is, there are only 2, maybe three classrooms. THere is simply no way to reach the rest of the school.
The Volcano Manor has a similar problem where there are no bedrooms or livinq quarters of the sort. My headcanon is that the large area with multiple broken wooden floors (the one with hanging cages) was the main body of the villa, that got demolished by Tanith to make more room for cages. This also makes sense as the place is the only way to link the upper part to the Throne Room.
Carian Manor: again, the only functional room is the chapel. The few rooms that exist are far too spread out to be used as an actual house.
Leyndell: in theory for the normal way reach the Erdtree you'd need to pass trough the arena where you fight fake Godfrey , down the elevator, pass the Crucible Knight and then... nothing because there is no path that connects that road to the rest of the city.
I found some kitchens with no way to deliver the food in a logical way.
Well, entirety of Dark Souls hand-waives these points away with "The flow of time (and space) is convoluted in Lordran/Drangleic/Lothric" excuse. I mean, undead settlement literally migrated AWAY from the castle to make space for swamps of Farron
@@Rigel_6 Dark Souls better, as usual 😎
Leyndell is excusable because the Erdtree was only meant for the elites/royal family to have any access to. And they probably could just fly or teleport down to the masses, being literal demigods.
A few of these I think can be addressed in one way or another.
-Anor Londo: The big central elevator perhaps has lower city access that we simply can't activate.
-Cainhurst Castle: The central courtyard has partially collapsed into the Pthumerian Labyrinth. There was evidently a big staircase that led up to the keep with the throne room, you can see the broken top of it below the Logarius boss arena. The real weird thing is that Cainhurst's actual throne room keep revealed by the Crown of Illusions is a duplicate of the keep you are fighting on the rooftop of, and seemingly doesn't fit into the castle's floorplan at all. Shenanigans! It also bugs me that the tall narrow tower at the centre of the castle has no way to access, though the logical entrance would have been through a missing door on the right side of the entrance hall's upper landing (you get to the banquet hall by going through a door on the left side, but the right side is just blank wall)
-Lothric Castle: I think the closed spiral staircases on either side of the Dancer's boss room are meant to be the normal means of accessing the upper castle. The ladder is a weird emergency route I guess?
-Raya Lucaria: We take the back entrance through the Church of the Cuckoo and the graveyard. The front entrance is that suspended staircase with the summoned giant ball trap rolling down it. The stairway down seems to have been broken, however, but probably would have linked up to the Gate Town's upper walkways. But if we were to imagine ascending from that direction, we would arrive in that vestibule building from which it's possible to access the Grand Library via elevator, and the courtyard with the entrances to the Debate Parlour and presumably the Dormitories (of which we only really have access to the rooftops). Much more reasonably accessible layout in that circumstance.
-Volcano Manor: We definitely don't have access to most of the the manor's rooms, going by the scale of the exterior structure. There are doors we can't open in the entrance hallway, which presumably lead into the rest of the building.
The rest are indefensible, hah.
As the biggest explorer of the ENTIRE Weeping Peninsula you have NO IDEA how much the second half of Castle Morne annoyed the hell out of me. Not only that rump. But the entirety of the torture cells have no doors. Or stairs. Or nothing connecting to the main castle and not only that!! There is no way back into the main castle. Not even a poorly placed elevator or something once you jump the wall to the second bon-grace-fire you are stuck there... Fuck it
But ya gotta admit castle morne and the buildup are pretty sweet bits of exploration in the early game. The misbegotten are pretty creepy the first time you see them
Hmmm is it possible to deliberately screw up your game by picking only that bonfire and never touching any others?
Tell me about it. I missed the blind lady first and had to go back to the castle a second time. Couldn’t believe I had to do it all again. Still the first time was pretty cool to explore
@dontblamepeopleblamethegov559
No. You would have to beat the Leonine Misbegotten to escape, since I'm like 80% sure there's an entrance teleporter in his room. I could be wrong though. Given the amount of effort I have seen put into getting into getting softlocked, it probably isn't as easy as just sprint to Morne
The entire Carian Manor is like this. There's literally four rooms (the first one on the right, the Sword of Night & Flame room, the chapel of Pidia, and the Upper Level grace), and the rest is walls/bridges. The most pointless manor that nobody could ever live in.
It's actually the scale of the construction that always gets me. It's like "Here is a tower. We only have to raise it 300 m into the sky before we put a single room on top."
All of these seem to be hundreds of years of construction projects, if even remotely possible.
I also want to add that this is something I kinda have to take into consideration when I plan and design my D&D maps, because the players 100% walking past the obvious plot device, but will ponder for over an hour about the significance of a lit candle in a cave.
Ah that's still nothing compared to the catacombs, especially in the DLC. Sometimes you don't even see where is the actual bottom you just see the architecture disappear into the abyss when you are already like 200m underground. Like why are they so freaking huge and deep LOL
A fun thing is From is actually very meticulous about consistent scale in their games. There is a standard From human character mannequin they use to measure the environments. They used the same one in Elden Ring and Armored Core 6.
The inhuman scale of the architecture in their games is definitely on purpose; one is supposed to feel it's impossible at first glance. But the fact it's constructed of recognizable materials makes it more unsettling. As if the structures were manifested by a supernatural force rather than truly built by laborers. And with the influence of Lovecraft's Dreamlangs on From's fantasy games... all of it might be even more intentional.
In the lands between they probably invented gravitational elevator before they invented the wheel (because of starmagic)
I think for elden ring from soft took in consideration the fact that there's magic and shit in the game like why wouldn't layendells walls be 10 times the width of the great wall of china . It's made with magic after all.
@@zezomorsy3165 I think if they wanted to be known that something is made by magic, then they would have let us know.
The most likely answer is that they simply used the "Rule of Cool"
I love this kinda stuff. Thank you marika for constructing leyndell like a videogame level for me to navigate and not an actual city
Funny that you should say that, because in my first playthrough Leyndell was the only Legacy Dungeon I didn't like because the first half felt too much like a real livable city.
@vervetwrydavigy3006
I thought the opposite! I really liked it compared to, say, Anor Londo, because it felt like a plausible city.
3:52 The guy who ordered the construction of that gate is clearly an Age of Empires 2 player.
Please explain?
It's from a classic real time strategy game. You can place a stone/fortified gate within bottle-necked parts of the land that are surrounded by water to deny the enemy any ground entry and it looks exactly like that.
@@diezelfunk Thanks! It is truly Morne's gate strategy!
Some of these weird design choices aren't really continuity errors but legitimately are just how some castles are built; with dead ends, separate buildings disguised to look as one, choke points, and places where there is seemingly no access where inhabitants would put ladders when not under attack. It was actually kind of a mindset of Medieval architects to not make their fortresses look impenetrable because then attackers would just lay siege/step up their game so they basically booby trapped them with design "flaws"
How about the tallest tower in Raya Lucaria being completely inaccessible to the people who live/work there, despite the description of Terra Magicka.
What, did they go outside and through a cave system just to cast that shit?
I always feel like I'm missing something in that cave. Unless the little place where the sotcerer fires at you from a higher ledge can be reached and doesn't lead anywhere, i think the cave actually connects into the academy as well. most likely at the pit with the abductor
@@paracame8162go back and try to hit the wall next to the opening. its been a long time but i think theres a chest or bow or something there
@@paracame8162 There's an illusory segment of cave wall before you enter the "House" with the chest that allows you to get up to that sniper and another chest. Sadly, no footpath to the academy proper up there, that guy was just an ass camping out specifically to plink people in the back of the head.
I thought it being hard to reach was the point, like students had to go down through the caves, find the entrance, go up to the top and then cast the spell up there as a rite of passage. I could be wrong/misremembering but I could've sworn that was the case.
The black keep is one it bothered me aswell like imagine you are a messmer soldier and you need to talk to your boss, do you have to parkour through fossilized specimens and elevators to get talk to him?
I'd call that a hostile work environment
"Talk?" They're zombie-like. They don't talk or do anything. They're just stuck there. Messmer doesn't leave a room or do anything either.
@@realQuestionno, all soldiers are commanded by there leaders what are you on abt?
Damn... I shouldnt have used that Albunaric slur at 1:53
Maybe you could transition to a content style similar to RoflWaffle with Gran Turismo or something. I watch a lot of that kinda thing and clearly plenty of others do!
What slur?
@@GigachadCrusader Free enforced workforce.
Bloodborne is also completely nonsensical from the urbanistic point of view.
Ladders being the only way to access entire neighbourhoods (do you imagine one second having to take a 40 foot ladder every single morning to go to work, and back up in the evening ?), streets that go nowhere, roads breaking suddendly into flight of stairs despite being clearly made for carriages, barriers placed direcly against doorways, buildings with the interior window layout different from outside (in fact I don't think a single building, bare a few exceptions, in Bb is coherent in rhat regard) closed streets full of carriages... that couldn’t possibly have ended up where they are since there is no road leading there, and so on...
The general atmosphere is so perfectly immersive that you easily miss this, but when you start looking closer it is extremely jarring. Diehard fans will excuse these as us, the hunter, dreaming, but I think the explanation is more pragmatic: Fromsoft design doesn’t try to convey a logical world, that could be lived in, it tries to convey a general idea, a mood, of what such a world might look like, without spending unnecessary time on the logical side of thing.
The best example is in the cathedral ward, where to get around the closed gate, you must kill a beast so that a door magically opens, take a magic elevator with a random door way halfway through that you must jump to quickly with no safe way to get back down besides breaking your ankles. Making all the way up the elevator, you meet a tower where you must parkour down broken planks lest you splat yourself with a random door halfway that leads to the workshop. Once you finally make it to the bottom you go through a back alley where the residents can't leave because there is another elevator that takes you around the gates but is on an evaluated platform that you can't get on again once you drop off
That last part is true, but it's also just game design.
Someone pointed out the series of elevators and mannequins you parkour over in shadow keep to get to Messmer: It's unfeasible if his general's need to get to him.
But it's obviously just game and level design.
One of the biggest missed potentials is having secret pathways underneath elevator shafts
5:37 The candles could actually have an explanation, but it's a kinda long story.
You see, there's this youtuber called Hawkshaw and he popularized the "color theory" in Elden Ring. Basically what the theory suggests is that things don't determine their colors, colors determine things. You don't get violent and angry and then turn red, you turn red and then become violent and angry, because you turned red. Color determines nature.
The color of a candles stick is white, which is the palest of colors, which makes it kinda eternal, just like how the blackness of void is Also eternal. These candles sticks could in ER world's physics burn literally forever.
I like to think the architects just have the "git gud" attitude about what theyre building. Oh you cant get into your wittle castle??? How about you git gud scrub. Simply scale the wall or destory this impenetrable layer of bricks.
This reminds me of that architecture video for Elden Ring, where the 3 walls of lyndell are stupidly huge enough to be a bit larger than dams. Maybe the architects would have been able to build more houses and stairs if they didn't waste all those materials on 3 walls
@@YEY0806 To be fair, those walls were built to defend against dragons and giants, not just regular human armies
yeah there are wayy too little housing spaces in elden ring. Like, except for leyndell and maybe volcano manor there arent any big places that you can imagine are used for living
Elden Ring is a nightmare for any home buyer
Yes, well, places "for living" are not big priorities; the game is the afterlife; you wake up in a tomb; most people wander around as zombies
@@YEY0806I've been playing through the DLC recently and had the same thought! Have you seen Midra's Manse???? That's such a nice property, but the owner is absolutely RUINING its value. What, with all of the burnt books littered around the place, the whole ass procession of cultists, the rats and ghosts, it's utterly in shambles!
The owner is such a dick, too. I went down through the sewers, down a river, through a catacomb and past a HAUNTED FOREST to get there, and how does he greet me? He tells me to fuck off, and hides behind an invisible wall. And when I get there? The dude just rips out his own spine! That whole property is abysmal, he'll be lucky to get a penny out of it I tell you!
@zeelyweely1590 the worst part is that there's no kitchen or bathroom or even a bedroom. 0/10
Defensive buildings don't always have a door as its a big weakness. Is there a hatch on top, Martello towers on Britain's coast dont have doors, You enter with a retractable ladder through a small window.
I understand you, but there are literally no way to get up from the lower levels
@Pigga-k8k which is a good thing for a defensive building. Ladders out a window or an underground tunnel could be a way of getting in. It's Eldenring anyway with invisible walls and flying creatures and stuff. I don't see it as a mistake as it makes a lot of sense for a defensive building.
The real question is how did hayata get to the 3 fingers when she's blind
It would honestly be hilarious if, due to being blind she just fell all the way down, and all you find of her is a corpse
I mean you literally give her a bunch of magical eyes that give her visions
@@iain-duncanI always took that like she senses the direction of the three fingers and not getting actual vision. Still quite the jumping puzzle to do when you don't see what's around you.
Every time I go by the windmills on altus plateau, I wonder to myself: What exactly are they *milling*? Seriously, there's little to no evidence of wheat cultivation, or indeed *any* significant agriculture *anywhere* in this game.
Also, where are the bathrooms, Lyndell has sewers, but where's the bathrooms to actually get stuff into the sewers. Apparently, people no longer defecate in Elden Ring because the entire land would be filled with shit
@@YEY0806Same with Dark Souls 1, and Bloodbornep
@@YEY0806 My guess was always that they were shitting into the buckets and throwing the waste down their wells
@odix87 but what about the Carians? They don't even have a sewer or toilets, so do they just magic their shit?
Why would there be agriculture in the afterlife? Would they worry about starving? They can't properly die and wander around as zombies, and the Golden Order resets most things anyway.
"why I have to pull a lever to get it down?" - coz the lever is magic too. Duh.
you know... you got me
To be fair to the builders of the big Castle Morne water's edge fortification, doors are actually structural and defensive weakpoints -please ignored the windows- so it's actually a fantastic building!
But for real though, I think the gatehouse on the water there is actually protecting the tiny peninsula, where the Leonine Misbegotten is, from the outside world - it seems to have some significance, given the large tree, the grave markers, the sword monument outside Castle Morne, and also that it's the location of the treasured sword of the castle. It probably has a lot of hidden significance too, when you realize that the entire Weeping Peninsula is a microcosm of the whole Lands Between.
And come on Lost, candles and lamps are very important spiritual and religious tools. Of course they would be used by the pious servants and worshippers of the dragons in a dragon altar. Their fire keeper (a real job btw) would surely tend to the flames dutifully.
If you actually want a pretty bizarre location, I'd point to that one corridor around the garden outside the Fortified Manor. Not the entire path, just that one part that deadends and has literally no use other than looking pretty. It sure does make the garden look very pretty though.
The gatehouse at the bottom of castle Morne could also have a symbolic meaning, think Arc de Triomphe. Either it's actually a gatehouse and the area where the boss is was part of a much alrger landmass that actually deserved a gatehouse, or it's more a symbolic thing that was added as an entrance to a place that has some sort of meaning to the builders. The small island the boss is on definitely feels like it could have held some importance.
I view Elden Ring in a similar way as the older pokemon games. In Elden Ring, we never see anything that could be considered a city. Even Leyendell is crazy small and would barely fit any people. It's there as a representation of a village/city/etc.
Same as the NPCs. We meet like 20 people on the entire continent. But they talk as if there is still life, still "normal" people out there, not as if it's an undead wasteland. I think they represent the people of the Lands Between.
Still, it's funny how weird this game is if you take it at face value.
4-5 houses? That's a village!
This isn't just elden ring, this is basically every video game ever made.
The exception would be in games where large swathes of the map are unreachable background paintings, where sometimes they bring out the true scale of human communities, but I can't thing of a single game that really let's you actually explore a city sized settlement other than maybe like GTA
@@iain-duncan Novigrad in Witcher 3 also comes to mind. It's a bit smaller than it would be in real life, but it still feels pretty legit, especially with the amount of NPCs walking around.
@iain-duncan cyberpunk is one of the only games where I can actually believe millions of people live in that city. Even gta cities would only be able to house a couple hundred thousand people at most
@@iain-duncanWitcher 3 enters the chat
Except the map is disproportionately huge and really empty and devoid of meaningful interactions. It's an overworked littered with tiny copy paste dungeons and a few "legacy dungeons".
If they would have gone with quality over quantity. It would be such a problem
4:20 Dude never heard of the Arc De Triomphe
“You were supposed to cut out the door with the whirligig saw!” - Albinaurosh
The entrance to the leonine boss arena is a triumphal arch which are made to celebrate victories in battle that leads to a graveyard with the people who where killed. There is a sword shrine next to castle Mourne that indicates a battle happened here and it is secluded because its a graveyard with dead people at the lowest point in the lands between
@@smite5372 that video from Hawkshawk, about that damn Arc on Lands of Shadow, its a nice explanation to this too
@@Ronnie.rocket.333 yeah thats were i got the idea.
It always bothered me that none of these shambling corpses, or the people who were once alive, have anywhere to live! The lands should be lousy with abandoned homes. There should be thousands of empty houses everywhere. Where did all these people live before the zombie apocalypse?
They aren't zombies, they're basically cursed with eternal life as they live in the grace of the erdtree. Like a living mummification almost
@ Have you ever heard the phrase “a difference without distinction”?
There are tons of ruins everywhere, and we're going through the lands between in its most dilapitated state after a giant war.
Also scale in video games is inherently flawed, and absolutely no one would enjoy the game if it were in the least "sensible" when it comes to population and housing. Nor should anyone really ask developers to design a fantasy city adhering to that philosophy.
I see The Lands Between like most open world games where it’s just a much smaller scale version of the actual place in the lore, like Los Santos compared to California
This is an afterlife. They never "lived" anywhere in this realm in any normal sense. All that happened on the other side beyond the fog.
This kind of stuff is actually all over FromSoft games if you start looking for it. In Bloodborne, the little cathedral you go through on the way to Old Yharnam has a massive stained glass window on the outside, above the door. But on the inside, that same wall has a single tiny window and is otherwise completely solid
There's also the Witch of Hemwick's house, which appears to be a huge, multi-story building on the outside, but on the inside is a single tiny room with a staircase leading down into a huge basement.
Every single Rise tower. The giant elevator in the middle of the tower leaves very little space to put the chairs there. Imagine trying to study only to be constantly moved up and down as people try to travel.
I actually really like that one catacomb in the DLC that's almost completely dark, because that's pretty much what they'd all realistically be like. At first I threw glow rocks everywhere and lit up all the sections, but in later playthroughs I keep it dark go through it with just the lantern. It makes it feel more like really exploring an ancient tomb where people aren't supposed to go.
It’s been mentioned on other videos, but I personally find a number of caves and catacombs with light sources that don’t correspond at all with the overworld. Using the tracker, you can place the blue beams to go directly through these openings, and find the corresponding location above ground, where invariably, there is no opening that would allow the light through.
The first time I noticed this was in Murkwater Cave.
I also noticed in the boss chamber of Murkwater Catacombs, there are a set of ‘windows’ on the upper left side as you enter, but there’s only solid earth on the outside.
You can find similar issues in Dragonbarrow Cave. Even the tutorial area has this ‘phenomenon’.
Also, there’s a short lift in Leyndell, and if you throw a rainbow stone into the shaft, it will land without shattering, (indicating you could safely jump down), but if you do jump into the shaft, you get the instant death screen. (The rainbow stone lied!!)
You.... don't think that some of those "Roads that lead nowhere" aren't roads that lead.... exactly to where they end? Remember, the Lands Between have been at war since the Shattering, however long ago that was. Those buttresses you had to climb up and down and jump around for in Raya Lucario? A defensive position your enemy can't easily reach that you can fire glimstone shards down from. Winding, uncontrolled easily blocked paths in Castle Morn? Well, it's a bastion against invasion, of course it's going to be set up to confuse outsiders. That building with no discernable entrance also in Castle Morn? Well, it's right next to the... ahem, 'Kennels.' It's probably where they put the dying Beastmen or those who are too weak. It's why there's so many "Jellyfish" around them. When you realize those floating sky "Jellyfish" in the Lands between are the ghosts of Children, it makes it a LOT easier to understand, "No, that was the building they threw the 'unwanteds.' It has no entrance, because they want there to be no EXIT. The walls have windows that are just high enough for a person with a ladder to shove small deformed infants through, to let them fall either to their death or to shrivel up and die there. That big honking door with no building that leads to the boss fight? Did you not also notice the Tree surrounded by Graves?
Some of these tells you the mental state of the creator. For example Miquella's Haligtree is corse, gnarled, dying, and is horrendously bad to navigate. How could any supplicants follow him there for his 'Benevolence." it shows for all his "Kindness" he never truly wanted people to reach him. The Carian family focused on traps and trickery to defeat their enemies both times they were invaded, so of course it's going to be convoluted to get around to their actual residences because their creators want to screw with you.
In fact, everywhere you find those "Jellyfish" is a place you can assume children were mass murdered. "There aren't enough houses to fit the supposed population." Well, in Marika's Village, her people were being prosecuted by the Omen- I mean, Hornsent. They probably needed less and less houses as the Hornsent took more and More to stuff into pots, and that's if the Hornsent even let them Keep those houses in the first place. they may have broken them down for timber for their own use and said "Screw you, 20 of you to a house. That way you're used to it when we stuff 20 to a Jar."
Engagement.
Engagement. 2
@@powdahshuggah engagement. 3
That Transition in 2:31 was insanely good😂
thank you. that was 4 hours of work
Endless elevator shafts and the longest treads that you need to climb for half an hour, there is something deeply impractical and dreamlike here. That's because everything in the worlds of souls is filled with abstractions torn from real life and adapted to the game, fantasy and vision of the author, as well as to the rules by which the game designer operates. On the contrary, I like this scale and impracticality, the fantasticism of architecture and the intricacy of the moves, everything looks as if you are pushing things from the real world to the limit, absurdizing things from the real world, from which there is a certain sense of anxiety from surrealism caught by our subconscious
Yup. Seems to be a "literalist thinker vs abstract thinker" divide happening here.
Thanks, I hate having this knowledge of ER's level design now
"There's no door"
*Shows several shots of a bricked up archway that could easily have had a door at one point*
People who play games just gotta deal with the fact that, like, Whiterun, one of the major, central capital cities in all of Skyrim, has about 70 people.
This is one of the things I've loved about Fromsoft games since the very start: they're not afraid to just be games. The levels are video game levels, the npcs are video game npcs and the plot is minimal because the focus is the gameplay. They don't need to be a real world, or a cinematic experience. They have the same level of attention to detail in the levels, environments and npcs that old snes rpgs had, and there's something deeply comforting about that to me. Of course, I can understand why some people might think it's all a bit silly.
You may want to study some real castles.
A lot of them have towers and rooms that seemingly go nowhere.
Quite often the towers are grain silos.
Most if not all castles have one main, obvious entrance because they are fortifications, they are designed to be defended from one direction because that is advantageous to the defenders.
A lot of the time, goods were hoisted over the walls to where they were required and anything that was unwanted was similarly thrown over the walls.
It's a question of modern understanding of architecture vs ancient architecture.
Starting with Bloodborne, From really leaned into a dreamlike style of world building. Structures aren't supposed to quite make sense. Architecture to nowhere, and a sense of a world manifested already in a state of decay that was never whole. (Very literal in Dark Souls 3.) It is very influenced by Lovecraft's Dreamlands. Read up on lore from the Dreamlands like the Lost City of Sarnath to see just how intense the influence is on FromSoft's fantasy games.
The shaman village is just the one place Marika managed to keep in more or less one piece. Other places were destroyed - there are occasionally ruins of similar size all over the lands of shadows.
Size will never make sense in not only Elden Ring, but in open world games in general. The map must be varied enough with multiple biomes and settlements, yet somehow fit on your hard drive.
The Lands Between are less than 5 kilometers across with a pretty big hole in the middle, and while that can realistically fit a small town or maybe a few villages, it couldn't possibly sustain five civilizations at the same time (at least!).
And that's fine because I wouldn't want to run through kilometers of wheat fields that the Altus Plateau would have to be covered in to feed the entire Leyndell realistically.
I live for this kinda of niche, like we all know the devs didn't care about 1-1 accurate livable fantasy city, but actually looking at what is their and deciphering how people even existed is such a unique kind of entertaining.
Tell that to the people that consider this bad environmental design.
5:14 he got kicked off because he forgot about leyndell and how its just full of blocked off doors with messages saying "you don't have the right O, you don't have the right"
The mustard seeping from the doors is just unsettling
My immersion is screaming in agony right now.
7:44 the good stuff xD
About Marika's village, I would say it is because of scale problem. In reality, Lands Between would've been much bigger, but it isn't in game due to limited technologies.
0:42 Isn't that a filled in door right there next to the rocks?
Yeah I don't even want to waste my time if he misses something so obvious
Nope. I am looking at it right now in game and it is a mossy dark green stain on the rocks.
Love how you make these videos with a tarnished explaining. The sunbro suddenly appearing is also funny lol. You earned my sub
The first building not having a door gave me flashbacks to Drake and Josh building a treehouse from the inside and forgetting the door, trapping them. Maybe there's some poor worker's corpses in there who didn't come to the realization until the last brick was laid.
Next time my boss asks me to do something, my immediately reply will be "It's Greg's turn".
Not gonna lie this kind of designs have there since the Demon's Souls days. Fromsoft sacrifices logic for level design. I remember going through Anor Londo and thinking "How was this ever a functioning city?" The rooms and architecture doesn't make any sense and most of them are just huge empty rooms. Leyndell is an improvement because there are tons of actual houses even if you can't enter most of them.
These things don't bother me that much but it's obvious that they can't really create a world that believably worked sometime in the past. At least not yet. But they even admitted to this years ago. The reason they always go for post apocalyptic worlds is becase the team is not confident in creating a living breathing civilization like the Witcher, Dragon's Dogma, Assassin's Creed etc.
Novigrad is really well done. The old AC cities work because the major landmarks are in approximately the right place so they can design the rest for parkour and it still feels okay
When Miquella was a young deity, they were fawned over incessantly. As they were moved throughout the kingdom, as was customary for newborn deities, Miquella planted fogwalls to make their most favorite rooms more private for reading and rumination.
@@fredfry4756 "most favorite rooms" disturbed me a lot 😵💫
I'm pretty sure it's a thing where if you can use something then other people can use it to like sites of grace or Spirit Springs. The random wall is just before the cherished sword of Castle Morne, so it's likely a celebrational arch. Worth noting of that cave, is that it belongs to the Dragon Communion, so their representatives going in and out like the Ancient Dragon Man likely put the candles there. As for the rooftops pathways, the Carian family of Raya Lucaria keep a lot of secrets from their people as a measure against foes and rebellious individuals. They worked with sorcerers of Sellia to develop Night sorcery of assassination, and Carian Retaliation is literally a kept secret, but Thops would make a sorcery of his own much like it before his mysterious death, which just so happens to be a desk overlooked by a secret ledge. In turn, there is truth in Sellen as the Graven Witch, but there was always surveillance at the ready in wait.
I kinda love things like this, it's endearing in a way
For that first one, it can easily be assumed that was a defense design purpose.
Random bad red man explains to me how absurd it is that the elevator is a giant stone slab rising from a pretty much bottomless hole and I agree before he proceeds with shanking me in the throat.
10/10 video.
In the trailer for Elden Ring and I guess shadow of the erdtree it shows massive armies and lore describes large battles and wars fought, but like how? Are we supposed to have suspension of disbelief like how in Skyrim the bandit population is way larger than townfolk of a dozen people? Are the lands between supposed to be much larger than what we are exploring? Is it like death stranding where the actual map size isn’t actually the full distance of America?
This is why I like dark souls and bloodborne more your only exploring a small section of a city going through back streets and alleyways so you have to think that the city is much larger so there must be more
Pay closer attention to the tower at Castle Morne. It always seemed sunken into the earth to me. That's why there's no door. Also looks like the top was taken off, and castles are often built with false areas for defensive reasons anyway.
It’s the problem I have with Elden Ring, the world building is just not convincing😅
Hey Lost! Love this type of content from you! You are such a relatable person and you always make me laugh. Love your relationship with Thumpy, it reminds me of Pinky and the Brain!
Keep up the amazing work and thanks for all you do!
I remember seeing Castle Morne for the first time in the distance, probably in Early March in the first week or so of games release. It was so magical I will never forget it. I would pay upwards of $1000 to have my memory of Elden Ring erased so I can experience the game for the first time again. I stg.
my favourite is when you're at the bottom of some dark cave and then you turn a corner and see a ray of light coming from some crack in the ceiling, or some of the "windows" with outdoor light through them when in a catacombs boss room
what??? I just discovered my favourite deranged and half insane invader also does essays? Subbed
I think the bottomless pits underneath the lower floors of elevators, other than being a From Soft screw you, are so the elevator can’t come down on top of you.
6:42 the candles may be religious
This damn channel is hyper underappreciated dammit!
A easy solution for the candle question would be the candleshroom. A mushroom that grows in caves and slightly glows. When it grew enough the released biochems ignite themselves and burn steady at a low temperature. The mushroom in it's mature state with the candle light flame on top relies on it's attraction to insects to either spread seeds or changing the top cap around the flame to be more sticky and trapping those insects and dissolve them over time using them as an additional source of fertilizer. All of this is completely made up in about ten seconds and would explain lightet candles in every cave you just need a model for that
2:20 "I was drunk while recording." Made me laugh way harder than it shouldve
I particularly like the large fireplace in the Roundtable Hold. If you look upwards, you'll see the hearth itself doesn't connect to any flue. There's nowhere for the smoke to go. It just disappears into the structure of the wall. The fortified manor doesn't even have any chimneys on top either.
They didn't have to do this btw. Stormveil's kitchen hearth connects to an actual smoking chimney above.
amazing transitions my friend
i think about how bad the weather is since there are areas where it rains packs of wolves.
That tower within the first 2 minutes is clearly an exterior tower designed to provide extra archer coverage of the walls and the beachhead in case enemy vessels try to dock where the lion demihuman currently resides. It has no door or way up because there's a bridge to it so defenders can easily access it but invaders have no means of entrance at all. The weird wooden scaffolding and ladder were clearly added sometime later for whatever reason.
The entrance to the misbegotten boss fight ALWAYS stood out to me as weird! I noticed it immediately
There are teliportation nodes all over The Lands Between, and they seem small enough to be portable. My guess is any space that appears otherwise inaccessible was at one time utilizing one of the portals to arrive at. In addition to that anyone touched with grace can teliport at sites of grace. And glintstone magic has the ability to teliport large rolling balls. There's plenty of teliportation mechanics present in Elden Ring.
I know you're just joking around and it's not that serious but the reason for the size is fromsoft especially is conscious of implied scale. If you see the pre-rendered cutscenes you'll notice entire armies sieging leyendell despite the in game size not being that massive and there being so few people. So when there are just piles and piles of corpses that's why. It's the only way in game they can show more of the true extent of the world.
I got two undead skeleton dudes as my ash summons and I named one of them Greg lmao. Imagine your parents not loving you enough to not give you a generic placeholder name.
Only Lost could make this kind of special video, and that's why Lost is great.
Game worlds are often smaller than what they're meant to be. Look at Pokemon, where towns in game can consist of 2 houses, while the anime shows them as more proper cities. My favourite example is how Hoenn's pacifilog town in game is comprised of wooden houses on floating platforms with their "roads" comprised of logs floating in the water, but its a city in the anime.
For ER, I like to imagine things like Marikas village is as small as it is for gameplay purposes. Not only is it more memory used if populated with a ton of houses, but it also fills the area with unneeded areas that players will waste time looking around.
Day 322 of asking lost to do a playthrough of elden ring slowly so that he can show us all the cool architecture and ask all the weird questions that pop into his mind. Dude has a voice made for unintentional ASMR and I'd fall asleep to that on the daily. Like a nature documentary!
The elevator that makes the most sense in these games is the elevator for Firelink to Undead Parish in DS1
This reminds me of Doom, where you need security cards to locked doors, yet somehow monsters managed to populate the whole level.
Smooth video, cheers from Germany
On the first building i always thought it was a sort of storage tower as such a door down there wasnt needed they just had a long stone bridge connecting to it and over the countless shattering wars it was completely destroyed
with perhaps a lighthouse at the top
the backside of castlemourne can be explained with the winged beastmen in mind - before their revolt they could have carried people and ressources from the various structures
There's a balcony by the debate parlour at Raya Lucaria that makes no sense. The only way to get there is to jump over a railing, drop 10 feet, and then climb a ladder to the balcony. The only way to get back is through the broken window on the upper floor of the parlour. Edit: I looked more and this path is the only way to actually get to the upper floor of the debate parlour, so it would be impossible to get to the upper floor if the window wasn't broken...
That jelly fish is my spirit animal
The production in this is amaizing
Great message. Having small mistakes like that doesn't take away from greatness, it makes it even more special. To get immersed in worlds to the point where you barely notice them. Art is made by humans and humans are inherently flawed beings. Just like how everything, no matter how good it is, will be flawed in some way.
You could do a game show “lost in the sauce” where you have to find locations in game based off of submitted photos
The stone elevators and shafts are oddly arousing
Considering the sheer amount of detail they put in to the world, a building missing a door is actually quite surprising. Y'know the lore nerds will think "What are the implications of this?"
Who’s to say the building in the beginning doesn’t go further down into the ground? This would mean that the building WAS accessible through a normal door before, but that it had sunk due to it being in coastal terrain so close to the water.
Just look at any boss area in an old-school platformer. Surely the boss had to do a ton of tricky jumps just to get breakfast each morning.
I would imagine that that part has no door because we came to this place in low tide, sort of. I can imagine that if there was a tide system in the game, at high tide the waves would be half-way up the lower walls. Door would be a liability there.
The Starting chapel also makes no sense, it’s supposed to be the way into The Lands Between but you just kind of spawn in this chapel place. Thousands of feet in the air, the placement of your maiden and the fact that you seem to wake up in there implies y’all were using the chapel to hold up for the night but how did you get there. If you came off of a boat there’s no way to get there from the water and why would you bother to go up on this solitary cliff instead of just going on to the Lands Between.
I figured it was part of the rest of the castle, but a large part crumbled at some point leaving just the base.
About the Morne castle (and also Academy, cause one of the comments is talking about it), I personally think the reason the levels are so parkour-ey is because we're the tarnished - outsider that is not welcomed into the backdoors and corridors of these places. We forcibly break-in into closed facilities and madly run around killing people and looting someone's chests and belongings. The only place where we can actually walk around the halls and apartments properly is the Stormveil castle. In the other castles and cities we mostly wander on the streets, looking at the light in the windows and sealed doors
Adding to the candle section 5:40 - not only it is wasteful, but also no alive person ever would be able to breathe there. The air underground is stiff and lacking enough, and it gets all burned out by the numberless candles, leaving the place full of carbon monoxide