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   A few months ago I was working on a project entirely unrelated to Dark Souls, but my mind likes to forge peculiar connections. Those connections inspired me to look into what happened in the Dark Souls 3 DLC. I didn't have access to it when I first played through the game, and I am very bad at playing games a second time. Reading about the events in the DLC, I stumbled upon a revelation that completely changed how I see all of these games. I never completed that original project because of how much this new discovery has consumed me. It tells such a beautifully tragic story that lurks just beneath the surface of all these worlds that we thought were familiar, when all we've actually seen is their shadows.    We're going to do lore-focused playthrough of all three Dark Souls games, Bloodborne, and Sekiro, with a heavy emphasis on developer interviews, so that we may have eyes on the inside. This means there will be spoilers both throughout the play through and in the rest of this post. That said, I'm trying to keep this series accessible to someone with absolutely no knowledge of the series. But if you want a strictly chronological experience you should probably start elsewhere. "Five let’s plays at once? That's insane!"  In trying to write a Grand Unifying Theory of Soulsborne, I’ve run into a problem: no one, including myself, remembers the details of all five of these games. These games are actually composed of many different worlds that have had their flames linked. We are rarely ever told explicitly when we transition between timelines, so players tend to interpret them as one unified world that they seek to explain through a single, linear narrative. This process of mistranslation is likely intentional, mirroring Miyazaki's early experiences with English-language novels involved him filling in the blanks of the sections he couldn't understand. "GameInformer posted:Miyazaki's passion for reading is life-long, extending from his time poring over library books at a young age. Even though he couldn't read all the English stories of dark fantasy and horror, he created his own personal narratives to stitch together the excerpts he could understand. But another way to see these games is a single tragic narrative happening over and over again. They share the same core DNA, but each one also has its own unique mutations. We only see fragments of each story, but sometimes we can spot blood echoes, motifs present in two separate timelines. If we transpose our knowledge of the context of one motif into the other, sometimes that produces a resonance, signalling that we've stumbled upon a more complete understanding of the underlying narrative. "Miyazaki posted:I like to think that this way of creating – leaving spaces – is satisfying. So if there are incomplete aspects of Dark Souls III, please forgive us. When the player is inside the world of the game, there are various places where they feel they may be able to peek behind the curtain, pry open a window and see beyond. Looking at it this way, the Souls series becomes a sort of forensic puzzle. Once you start putting all the pieces together you start seeing the games in a completely different light. Maybe even a more complete understanding both of what they are, and also what they were supposed to be. "Miyazaki posted:Dark Souls is in some ways an incomplete game, and I like to think that it has been completed by players, by their discoveries, as they moved along. I’d love to say that the nature of this incompleteness was completely deliberate, but it is both deliberate and by accident, in different ways. My hope is that recording a play-through of all these games concurrently will create a visual record of these echoes for my reference purposes. It might also challenge me in several ways. I've already found that playing through even the most mundane challenges of these games while also formulating a detailed description is rather difficult. It will also force me to play through the games and sections I tend to avoid or burn out on. And finally, exposing my thoughts to the world might lead to people pointing out things I've gotten wrong or connections that I have missed.   But some of you might need a more concrete pitch, so here's the more detailed description of where things are headed.  The embering of this theory begins with the intro to the Painted World of Ariandel DLC of Dark Souls 3. Slave Knight Gael explains to us that the Forlorn are those "who have no place to call their own." If this applies to the denizens of the Painted World in Dark Souls 3, why not try applying it to the denizens of the Painted World in Dark Souls 1, particularly Priscilla. In the Design Works interview for Dark Souls 1, they call Priscilla someone who has "been chased away from her natural place," which echoes Gael's description of the Forlorn. Miyazaki then elaborates that "'natural place' means something slightly different in this case." This interview is curious in how quickly Miyazaki changes the topic away from Priscilla multiple times, as if there's something emotionally painful in talking about her that he wants to avoid. They also mention that his vision for her was so specific that they contracted an outside art studio to produce it. This is curious because it suggests they went to extra expenses to make a highly detailed art asset that they then lock off in an easily missed side area. It does not make sense. Elsewhere in the interview they talk about Dark Souls 1's Firelink Shrine. They reveal that it was the original location of Priscilla, and that she was originally the heroine of the story. In this abandoned narrative, Firelink Shrine was designed as a water temple, but that "as work on the game progressed, and the image of kindling and fire became more prominent, the water gradually dried up." And that's when it hit me: the maps in these games are always missing water. So my theory is that Dark Souls (or Demon's Souls, the flow of time in game development is convoluted) was originally going to be a water-focused game centered around Priscilla. This had to be abandoned when they couldn't produce decent looking water physics on the Playstation 3 without absolutely killing frame rates. Because of this hindrance, large amounts of dev work would have had to been scrapped, but Miyazaki came up with the pyromancy of merging it all into a singular waste land abandoned by its creator with an endless cycle of monarchs invading other worlds in a desperate attempt to stave off the extinction. But this ritual required the execution of the original denizens of these worlds. Hunting them down like beasts. Massacring the inhabitants of a hamlet and carving out their skulls in search of insight. But Miyazaki, or Havel, or Gehrman couldn't bear to kill one character, and so he hid her away to keep her safe. Except that surviving orphan eventually discovered what happened to her kin. 
Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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  pre:Video Essays/Scripted Summaries: [Prologue] Return From Whence Thou Cam'st: Linking the Painted Worlds of Dark Souls [Age One] Of Prisoners and Bells: The Slippery Symbolism of Dark Souls [Age Two] Mercy for the Poor, Wizened Child: the Origins of Blighttown [Age Two] An Association of Gluttony: Hunger in Dark Souls Prologue - Linking the Painted Worlds: video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite Age One -- Of Prisoners and Bells 01 - Infiltrating the Aqueduct(DS1-01): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 02 - Solaire and Siegmeyer(DS1-02): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 03 - Flushing the Ash(DS3-01): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 04 - The Lothric Prison Break(DS3-02): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 05 - The Lothric Civil War(DS3-03): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 06 - The Madman's Knowledge(BB-01): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 07 - db(BB-02): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 08 - Gascoigne's Music Box(BB-03): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 09 - Gargoyle Tail Axe(DS1-03): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite Age Two -- An Association of Gluttony Interlude - The Capra Demon's Wings (DS1-04) || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 10 - They're all chalice dungeons?(BB-04): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 11 - Are we left no other choice?(BB-05): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 12 - Consumed with the Desire to Eat(DS1-05): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 13 - Mercy for the Poor, Wizened Child(DS1-06): video Age Three -- ??? 14 - Where the accepted currency is souls(DS1-07): video || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 15 - The Riddle of the Inscrutable Lift(DS3-04): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 16 - The Transposing Kiln(DS3-05): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 17 - A crow in his cage(DS3-06): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 18 - It's just that, I wish to know the truth.(DS1-08): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 19 - Seek the old blood(BB-06): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 20 - Bone Marrow Ash(BB-07): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 21 - Rune Workshop Tool(BB-08): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite 22 - The Last Knight(DS1-09): || Text Summary: Thread Post // Offsite Complete Playlist Dark Souls 1 Only Dark Souls 3 Only Bloodborne Only Video Essays Only  Dark Souls 1 Design Works Interview Dark Souls 2 Design Works Interview Future Press Bloodborne Interview Guardian Interview on Déraciné References to an Edge Interview I haven’t been able to find as a primary source Dark Souls 2 Geographical “issues” Iron Keep: A Castle in the Clouds? Iron Keep: A Castle in the Right Spot Dark Souls 2: Early Dark Chasm Map Data and a Major Implication About the World Design The Paleblood Hunt The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade My writings so far: The Undeath of the Author My channel if you want to watch a recording live for some bizarre reason: https://www.twitch.tv/sibyld  Are you saying Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro are connected? Look, the flow of cosmology at FromSoft is convoluted. I suspect officially they are not and cannot be due to publisher agreements. However, on a thematic level they are absolutely connected by virtue of being written by the same person and surrounding team. This would be inevitable even if it weren’t intentional. But I suspect it’s very intentional. Each game has an incompletess, “both deliberate and by accident,” that can be filled in thematically by transposing in our understanding of resonant portions in the other games. Does this mean _____’s interpretation is wrong? I could start talking about Death of the Author vs Biographical Criticism, but let’s keep things nice and simple. Dark Souls is full of empty spaces, so you can treat it like either a Mad Lib or solving a murder mystery whose author never got to write the ending. Both processes are legitimate and the only real test is whether the resulting interpretation is interesting. How can you be sure of any of this? I am never sure of any particular detail. If I’m spot-on with 20% of the stuff I write then I’ve drastically exceeded my own expectations. This project is like an archaeological dig. You can get closer to understanding how the civilization worked, but that understanding will never be 100% complete or 100% accurate. That being said, I’m surprisingly confident that I’m onto something. The thought patterns that I’m reading are too pronounced to be accidental. Besides, it’s a lot easier to have a complete story and obfuscate it than it is to come up with a bunch of random nonsense that nevertheless feels coherent. What about Demon’s Souls? La la la, I can’t hear you. Demon’s Souls is likely incredibly important, but I don’t currently have access to a way to play it. Also, Dark Souls 2 is already more than enough of a test of my patience. But the bits I do know about I suspect are very relevant, like Maiden Astraea and Old Monk. So are ____ and ____ the same character? I don’t know. Run with the assumption and see where it takes you. More seriously, my current suspicion is that rhyming characters are thematic reincarnations (or mergings), similar to Michael Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” archetype. I’m not ruling out some kind of more direct character progression between Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 though, and you could almost certainly tell a pretty interesting story taking that route How can you be certain that Miyazaki has even read _____? I can’t, but I know from interviews he’s a prolific reader, so guessing at inspirations can be a helpful way of divining authorial intent. A lot of this is based on linguistic patterns. Moorcock’s Stormbringer vs Demon’s Souls Stormruler and Elric vs Aldrich for example. Take it a step further and “Chosen Undead” seems pretty similar to “Eternal Champion.” Or with “The Sacred and the Profane” it started with noticing an unusual word choice in The Profaned Capital, and just investigating it. Then when the text of the book included a whole bunch of resonant passages including the one at the beginning of this thread, I adopted it as an interesting lens to use for broader story interpretations. Of course I’m probably going to get some of these wrong, but, for example, it’s really not a stretch to guess that a prolific reader making a game that reinterprets Lovecraft would be reading recent fiction that also reinterprets Lovecraft. And second, so what? If it tells an interesting story, is it that big of a deal if it wasn’t the one intended? Now the Allan Corduner theory, that is one that leaves me so incredulous that I haven’t shared it with anyone. "Okay, I've read all of this and I still think you're insane." 
Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Dec 29, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:50
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Latest Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4_WKF-pg8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkVW4LVV2HY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uQSIqz8GBE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIYMuOmqfFg Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Sep 28, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:50
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The Prologue: Sister Friede and Priscilla Patches the Spider (Bloodborne) posted:What a joy it is, to behold the divine. My prologue begins unconventionally with the final boss in the series. An early warning that there will have to be spoilers, but in a way, it’s hard to spoil a game that you will never really understand your first time playing through it. This probably wasn’t the most viewer friendly way to begin an LP, but from my perspective the ritual was necessary. I was actually kinda paranoid I would accidentally beat her because that would complicate future plans. If you want to skip to the meat of the video: 20:50 Starting here was important because it’s the perfect area to illustrate three concepts that will be essential to uncovering the First Sin. First, whether or not these games are linked in terms of in-universe metaphysics, they’re linked in that they all came from the same creative project. Artists of all types have a tendency to repeat themes throughout their works, and in the case of Soulsborne games, these repetitions aren’t merely homage; they’re keys to the puzzle. With the repeated but identical portraits lining the walls, Friede’s room is incredibly interesting visually. But Dark Souls 3 never explains why, never even acknowledges the oddity. But Sekiro has a similar motif that does explain itself: the Sculptor.  quote:No matter what I do, any Buddha I carve is an incarnation of wrath. Thus is the fate of those who owe a deep karmic debt. You'll understand when you try carving one for yourself one day. The Sekiro Sculptor is stuck in a cycle of artistic eternal return that he cannot break out of; that he even passes on to the next generation in one of the endings. His creations cannot satisfy him because they are always angry, a sign of his inability to let go of a self-destructive emotional attachment. If we assume Ariandel is the painter of all the portraits, it’s likely he’s stuck in a similar cycle of eternal recurrence. That he cannot stop devoting his artistic efforts to this woman, even if those efforts repeatedly end in tragedy (the woman in the painting being on fire). This is a perfect example of thematic resonance. Second, we have another example of resonance: the structural parallels between Sister Friede and Priscilla from Dark Souls 1. Both are scythe-wielding overseers of their respective painted worlds, but the more convincing parallel is their dialogues: Priscilla (Dark Souls 1) posted:Who art thou? One of us, thou art not. Sister Friede (Dark Souls 3) posted:But Forlorn thou seemeth not. These parallels cannot be accidental. And when it comes to parallel phrasing, we have more supporting examples linking the two Painted Worlds. Before entering the Painted World of Ariandel, you can overhear Slave Knight Gael chanting, "Ahh, merciful goddess, mother of the Forlorn, who have no place to call their own…" This is extremely interesting phrasing because in the Dark Souls 1 Design Works interview, Priscilla is described as “someone who's being chased...from her natural place,” which would certainly be someone who has no place to call their own. And just to emphasize how long the obsession with this concept has lingered in FromSoft’s game development, in an interview talking about their 2018 title Déraciné, Miyazaki explains why they chose that title: quote:“Déraciné is French for uprooting,” says Miyazaki. “Or someone who’s been displaced from their natural environment. These patterns are not coincidental. They are absolutely a sign of creative obsession. And that provides us a mystery to solve. Finally, I showcase the thing missing from the Painted World of Ariandel: a river that has dried up (I called it a river of blood though I guess the precise source of the remaining diseased trickle is debatable).  This dried up water source repeats over and over again throughout Dark Souls 1 and Bloodborne, though the narratives of the game never try to draw our attention towards it. This is particularly interesting because in talking about Priscilla and Firelink Shrine, again in the Dark Souls 1 Design Works Interview, we are told that: Daisuke Satake posted:[Firelink Shrine] was originally designed as a water temple. But as work on the game progressed, and the image of kindling and fire became more prominent, the water gradually dried up. Haha.” Oh you beautifully devious bastards… Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:50
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Episode 01 (DS1-01): Infiltrating the AqueductThe Sacred and the Profane posted:This is as much as to say that, with the building of each fire altar, not only is the world remade but the year is built too; in other words, time is regenerated by being created anew. Corvian Settler (Dark Souls 3) posted:Ohh, ohh, finally, you've come! Video too long, and this stretch is kinda boring, but we have to start here because everything that follows is built on this foundation. Possibly literally. Dark Souls 1 is the most abstracted of these games, and a lot of what’s going on only becomes clear in the lens of the later games. For now we peer through a fog gate darkly. A couple interesting things though. The Northern Undead Asylum is the first example of mirroring in map design throughout the series. It’s a little spoilery, but we’ll be back here on a mirror journey to recover an object of obsession with a sincere hope to reclaim it, and our path back in will mirror our escape out. There’s also something inherently curious about the name “Undead Asylum” itself. The area appears to be a prison, and while the state of mental health care throughout human history has been...less than ideal, mental asylums aren’t technically prisons. We’ll eventually get to an area in Bloodborne that is much more explicitly a medical asylum, but the difference between seeing it as an asylum and seeing it as a prison is merely a matter of perspective. There’s also the alternative definition of asylum as “the protection granted by a nation to someone who has left their native country as a political refugee.” Something you might offer someone who has been “displaced from their natural environment.” This series is playing misleading word games constantly, and they particularly like to use names that can point in multiple directions. Each direction offers you a different way to interpret the world. The biggest highlight to this segment for me is how you enter Undead Burg. Repeatedly throughout the series we have to resort to breaking and entering when just simply using the front gate is denied to us. I believe there’s a very deliberate metaphor in that. But more importantly, we’re entering through yet another area that is missing water. This is going to be a running theme; get used to it.  The last thing I’ll comment on is that I’m really amazed at how I notice new details every time I replay these games. Trying to make a thumbnail, I had to rewatch the intro FMV a couple of times, and what stood out to me was Nito. In the Dark Souls 1 Design Works interview we’re told: quote:Waragai: He was originally on fire wasn't he? What ended up standing out to me is how much this cloth effect reminded me of Father Ariandel’s feathers shown in the previous video, which is leading me down some interesting rabbit holes that I’m not ready to reveal.   I also completely forgot about the woman at the end of the cutscene, who I’m inclined to believe is Anastacia. Her apparent grave tending in this video ties into the Dark Souls 3 lore contained in the Hidden Blessing item description: quote:Holy water blessed by the Queen of Lothric. And if this connection leads where it thinks it does, what she’s doing in the intro video becomes very interesting. But I don’t think I get to talk about that until Hemwick. 
Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:50
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Episode 02 (DS1-02): Solaire and SiegmeyerSolaire of Astora posted:But I cannot give up. I became Undead to pursue this! Siegmeyer of Catarina posted:I feel like I'm always thanking you… Ok, so here’s where things start getting fun. For me anyway. Let’s set up some history: Miyazaki posted:Demon’s Souls wasn’t doing well. The project had problems and the team had been unable to create a compelling prototype. But when I heard it was a fantasy-action role-playing game, I was excited. I figured if I could find a way to take control of the game, I could turn it into anything I wanted. Best of all, if my ideas failed, nobody would care – it was already a failure. While we don’t know the details, we do know that Demon’s Souls, FromSoft’s first game headed by Miyazaki, had a troubled development cycle. Despite helping fund it, Sony passed on publishing it outside of Japan, and the project must have been going completely off the rails for FromSoft to let a relative nobody within the company take over the creative direction. Dark Souls 2 had a similarly difficult birthing: quote:Firstly, I’d like to ask director Tanimura to give an overview of the Dark Souls 2 design process. This was your first role as director and you had some difficult shoes to fill in those of Mr Miyazaki, who was really the cornerstone of both the previous entry Dark Souls and its spiritual prequel Demon’s Souls. On top of that it was the first direct sequel in the series. Was it as difficult as it sounds? It wouldn’t be surprising for these challenging periods to influence the creative direction of these games, but I think it went well beyond influencing, with the epigenetic trauma of a hellish gamedev cycle baked directly into the narrative’s DNA. The first example we reach isn’t the most convincing on its own, but that’s the pitfalls of doing a linear playthrough, so if you’re skeptical, just give me the benefit of a doubt until we get to Majula. Anyway, Solaire and Siegmeyer are a dichotomy of failed managerial styles. Solaire follows the model of a classic grail quest that, spoiler alert for any Souls newbies, tends to end in tragedy due to hubris. He’s an extremely likeable character, always eager and willing to help you out, but his obsession with chasing after The Sun leads to his downfall. This is a metaphor for the over-eager attitude of a new project manager who hasn’t really internalized the concept of “scope creep.” quote:Miyazaki: When collaborating with the team I often come up with ideas, and I enjoy trying to fit them in as we develop the world. Of course I also have to be careful not to break anything. I think this method of continuous improvement can really help add to the atmosphere of an area, infact we also used this method on the last game I worked on "Demon's Souls", the problem is that there is a tendency to over produce things and before you know it the project can spiral out of control and work can slow down. I also suspect that Solaire marks the first major interest of Tarot symbology in the Soulsborne (minus Demon’s) series, which I’m probably going to butcher every time I bring it up. Upright the card represents something like optimism, vitality, confidence, success. All things that characterize Solaire quite well. But inverted The Sun becomes blocked happiness due to unrealistic expectations. A sentiment that I suspect was prevalent throughout the early development in this series. Siegmeyer is Solaire’s counterpart, a character who at every point in the game needs your help to progress past obstacles, eventually becoming ashamed at this dependency. There’s a lot more to be said about the character, but I think the first bit of it is best saved for Sen’s Fortress. Suffice to say he’s storyline is the polar opposite of Solaire’s. Never confident, always dependent. Like a timid manager who’s overwhelmed and reluctant to do what needs to be done. The other big thing for me in this stretch of play is a new discovery I had never noticed before this playthrough. The Taurus Demon boss from the last episode is fought on a stretch of rampart, and can sometimes backdash through a gap in the outer wall, falling to its death in a hilarious anti-climax. What I never noticed is that there are actually two gaps, and I have a theory for why that is. In the Design Works interview for DS1, Miyazaki sounds extremely proud of the area design of The Painted World of Ariamis: quote:Thank you. I'm very happy with the area overall. It was the important first map and I think I was able to incorporate the new ideas I had while not taking anything away from the original design of the area. When collaborating with the team I often come up with ideas, and I enjoy trying to fit them in as we develop the world. Conversely, he sounds rather indifferent about Undead Burg. quote:We never really spent much time working on the look of the area. It was the first map we created and the large bridge, the church and the other structures were already planned out by the 3d artist who was in charge of the area. As the lead artist on the project, he had already decided exactly how he wanted these things to look right down to the smallest detail, even the levers and statues. This is bizarre for a couple reasons. First, Undead Burg is the opening area of the game, the place where you’re trying to get the player hooked, so you would think it would receive a lot of attention and not sound so throwaway. Second, “the lead artist on the project,” sounds so distant for an interview that is otherwise very big on emphasizing the importance of “the team.” In comparison, there’s a real sense of ownership when he’s talking about the Painted World. And finally, how is it possible for both of these areas to be the “first map”? To answer all of these, I propose that the Painted World was the first map Miyazaki’s team created, and Undead Burg was an older map intended for a different project that was transposed into the world of Lordran. In fact, we're explicitly told that FromSoft did things like this in the making of Dark Souls 2: Dark Souls 2 director Yu Tanimura posted:It was at that point that I took on my current role, overseeing the entirety of the game including the art direction. To ensure we created the game both we and the fans wanted it was completely necessary, but it did of course create a problem. We had to decide what to do with the designs and maps that had been created up to that point. Ideally we’d start again from scratch but of course we were under time constraints so instead we had to figure out how to repurpose the designs in our newly reimagined game. This meant everything from deciding new roles for characters to finding ways to slot locations into the world map. This unusual development cycle faced us with an entirely different set of problems and looking back on the project as a whole it was at times, arduous. Although I’m confident that none of this will be felt by the players. So with that in mind, and jumping ahead a bit, the DS2 interview has an interesting description of that game’s equivalent to Undead Burg: Forest of the Fallen Giants. Dark Souls 2 concept artist Hiroaki Tomari[/quote posted:Much like the Undead Burg in the last game the Forest of Fallen Giants was an area primarily designed by the 3d artists. It was another map that was created extremely early on in development and it has a number of typical dark souls short cuts. It’s really a map where the map designers were able to fit in everything they wanted to. Just like Undead Burg, we have a map “created extremely early on in development” that was made by these unnamed “3d artists.” But it only gets more intriguing from there: quote:Concentrating purely on the aesthetics, you have the withered sleeping giants scattered throughout the area and evidence of the ancient conflict is all around you. And that’s when it hit me. The gaps in the wall at the Taurus Demon fight are spaced apart as though they were the handholds of a giant. It would have been a boss fight that would perhaps be similar to any number of bosses later on in the series, or even just the first giant encounter in DS3’s Cathedral of the Deep.  I recall reading a post somewhere about how researchers concluded that Rome couldn’t have fallen due to lead poisoning because testing skeletons showed that they only had the lead build up of an average adult in 1980. Think about that post a lot these days, actually. But the maps in these older games are kinda like corpses, where if you do enough forensic analysis you can determine the cause of death. Or as Daisuke Satake puts it: quote:The concept that it was a series of defenses made to fight against the giants never changed so most of the area actually survived the redesign untouched. I think it’s fun to look at the place and imagine what kind of battles were fought there. Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Jun 5, 2020 |
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May 29, 2020 21:15
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Episode 03 (DS3-01): Flushing the AshLudleth of Courland posted:Treat the Fire Keeper not with discourtesy. It’s time for our first game jump as we kick off DS3 with some embarrassing play in the Cemetery of Ash. I want to remind you that area names are incredibly important in the Souls series. Later in the game we go to an alternate reality version of this same area named the Untended Graves. If that makes this area the Tended Graves, who then is the gravetender and what does tending a grave entail? Anyway, many of the locations in Dark Souls 3 are a reincarnation of areas from previous games, particularly Dark Souls 1. In this case, the path up to Firelink Shrine is reminiscent of the outside area after the Northern Undead Asylum at the start of Dark Souls 1, complete with a Broken Straight Sword, which I believe is a reference to your starting weapon in Dark Souls 1, the Straight Sword Hilt. But the DS1->DS3 connection I want to focus on in this area I want to focus on is a bit more convoluted. Because this area used to have water flowing through it. The game rubs our nose in this when we approach the optional Crystal Lizard fight and the puddle in the passage gets just deep enough to slow our movement. So if there was water here, where did it come from and why is it gone? Well, there’s this castle right above us.  My belief is that Lothric Castle is being pushed up by seismic activity, explaining why this entire area is far above the surrounding mountain tops and why we will eventually need to exit it the way we do. And looking up at the castle from inside the Crystal Lizard's den we see this archway.  Building an archway so far above the ground here in a dead end corner of the castle doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless maybe the arch wasn’t designed to be over ground but rather over water. Port, moat, bridge over a river, take your pick. So hypothetically, at some point Lothric had water, which was drained, that process dumped a whole bunch of corpses that became the tended graves in the Cemetery of Ash. Ring any bells Dark Souls 1 veterans? Aside from that, we also have a now conspicuous puddle of water around our first boss fight. It’s rarely made too explicit, but Arthurian legend has a big influence on the Souls series. It’s intriguing that our first boss battle begins both with something akin to pulling a sword out of a stone and, if you’re willing to stretch the definitions of words a little, receiving a sword from a lady of the lake. That boss arena also provides us this view  This is the coffin from the intro FMV that was housing the Lords of Cinder. What’s more interesting is the dying tree seemingly growing on top of the coffin, almost as if it lost all of its water, and now its fertilizer has escaped. Meanwhile, there’s something else curious going on with the water in this area. Despite it all being in stagnant puddles, it appears to be flowing, trying to make a pilgrimage back to its home under Lothric Castle.  And to close things off, let’s take a look at the Firekeeper. The intro movie contains two interesting details about her that I never noticed before recording this. First, she appears to be choosing to blind herself, and if that’s the case, she is staring into a whirlpool.  And finally, the first time we see her in full she appears to be framed symbolically inside a crescent moon.  These are both tiny and seemingly insignificant details, but an obsessive attention to detail goes into the making of these video intros, and both of these details are suggestive of elements of the previous games that we’ll be getting back to eventually. Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Jun 11, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 04:05
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This seems like an interesting, if overwhelming, project. I doubt I can contribute anything except suggesting you announce your thread in the New LP thread.
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Jun 3, 2020 06:44
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While you said you know a few key bits from it, linking Bloodborne and Dark Souls without playing Demon's Souls seems like a challenge, considering the scrapped references to it in BB. It'll be interesting to see how you think DS2 fits in as well; I always thought its biggest strength was in how it intentionally lies about the previous game, when it's not dismissing it.
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Jun 3, 2020 15:09
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Mraagvpeine posted:This seems like an interesting, if overwhelming, project. I doubt I can contribute anything except suggesting you announce your thread in the New LP thread. Overwhelming is a good word for it! This may be silly, but I consider this bit early access and wanted to wait until at least the DS3 intro is up to try to attract any attention. I'm less happy with the DS1 videos. It's a hard game to talk about in isolation because it (understandably) contains a lot less detail in its world design. In an ideal world I wouldn't even start there, but one of the big themes of Dark Souls is that the world is never going to be ideal. RBA Starblade posted:While you said you know a few key bits from it, linking Bloodborne and Dark Souls without playing Demon's Souls seems like a challenge, considering the scrapped references to it in BB. It'll be interesting to see how you think DS2 fits in as well; I always thought its biggest strength was in how it intentionally lies about the previous game, when it's not dismissing it. Lacking Demon's Souls knowledge isn't too crippling. It's just like trying to solve a puzzle when you're missing a chunk of the pieces. Some sections will be unreadable, but you'll still be able to make out most of the overall picture. I do sometimes worry it's at the root of why I can't make interpretive progress on certain sections, like Irithyll Dungeon+Profaned Capital. As for DS2, that game is batshit. It's somehow, simultaneously, the part that I'm both most looking forward to and most dreading. No other game in this series makes me question my sanity the way 2 does...and that might have been what they were going for...
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Jun 3, 2020 21:37
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You are an insane person and this is a terrible idea. Rated 5, bookmarked.
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Jun 3, 2020 22:16
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Sorites posted:You are an insane person and this is a terrible idea. Oh-hoh! Very good, very good indeed! Take this, to celebrate our acquaintance.
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Jun 5, 2020 01:09
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Episode 04 (DS3-02): The Lothric Prison BreakOscar of Astora posted:Regrettably, I have failed in my mission... Socrates posted:So now, I replied, watch the process whereby the prisoners are set free from their chains and, along with that, cured of their lack of insight, and likewise consider what kind of lack of insight must be if the following were to happen to those who were chained. I love Dark Souls 3’s area design. From a strictly gameplay perspective I might prefer Bloodborne by a small amount, but Dark Souls 3 refines the way these games tell a sprawling historical epic through the most subtle and minute details. Our introduction to Lothric is a perfect place to examine how this is done. There are three tools I use when I’m trying to interpret the stories being told in these areas. 1. Everything you see is not chronologically concurrent. The flow of time and space are incredibly convoluted in the most wonderful ways. Often what you’re seeing as you move through an area is a societal progression. To complicate this further, I strongly suspect that sometimes this progression branches, and when these two roads diverge you as the player get to take both of them. 2. Everything you fight is not unified against you. The upcoming Mound-Maker covenant is a hint intended to suggest this. Within the area designs throughout the game you are a third party that is viewed as hostile by both sides. This is most explicit within the gameplay in front of the Abyss Watchers boss room, but it applies universally. 3. The stories we are searching for revolve around a question of succession. Civil wars, rebellions, insurrections, and usurpation of leadership roles within the hierarchy of society. With all that said, let’s break down this upper portion of the High Wall of Lothric. We have three major plot hooks that do not connect to each other in any obvious way. First, we have hollows who are turning into trees. Second, we have hollows who transform into the Pus of Man, an enemy that is similar to a smaller version of the second phase of Iudex Gundyr. And finally we have the Lothric Drakes, one dead and one very much living, with the live one invoking the fire breathing drake bridge motif we saw at the end of Undead Burg and which is also referenced in the other games of the series. We’re going to put a hold on the tree plotline until the next area and focus on the Pus of Man and Lothric Wyverns. And we’re going to have to have minor spoilers for an area we won’t be entering for quite a while. The wyverns we see seem to be native to Lothric itself. Later when we revisit this area we come across an area called the Dragon Barracks, which (for now) I’m taking as an implication that the drakes were integrated into Lothric’s military. Immediately after the Dragon Barracks we will fight the Dragonslayer Armor. This suggests that there’s a war going on where a major focus is whether the wyverns will be allowed to live. We start the High Wall of Lothric in a tower along the wall, and in both directions we go to towers that contain classic dragon-slaying weapons in the Souls series. In one direction is a Gold Pine Resin, an item that temporarily coats your weapon with lightning, a classical weakness of dragons that was showcased in the opening cinematic of Dark Souls 1. In the other direction we have a Longbow, the weapon many players used to sever the tail of the Hellkite Wyvern in Undead Burg to obtain the Drake Sword. It also recalls a major moment of dragon-slaying in Oolacile in Dark Souls. The most interesting bit is the third tower though. Here we find a mimic with a Deep Battle Axe, a weapon permanently infused with dark damage at the cost of scaling. This one is curious because dark has no association with dragon-slaying at any point in the series that I can recall. But it does have an obvious link with the Pus of Man enemies that inhabit this area. My theory is that the mimics we see throughout the games represent technological progress in warfare that ultimately doom the society that utilizes them. In this case the insurgents used the power of dark to wage their war, and then used that darkness to parasitically enslave the wyverns (or their corpses). This explains why later when we encounter two wyverns at the Dragon Barracks are symbiotically linked with their own Pus of Man. Another clue pointing towards an insurrection is the disparate equipment of the enemies in the area. On one hand we have a handful of knights along with lesser hollow soldiers wielding cheap weapons like spears, wooden shields, and crossbows. On the other hand, we have enemies like the large hollows wielding great axes and assassins skulking in the darkness. These are not conventional military troops, which suggests we are in the midst of a revolt. In support of this, the large hollows drop Raw Gems. These are worthless to highly leveled characters due to their lack of scaling, but they would be ideal for an insurrection hoping to overcome the well-equipped and highly trained Lothric Knights through sheer force of numbers. We also have a possible hint at one of the insurrection's goals. Most players never consider this, but early on in this area we travel through a jail cell.  Why is there a cell? Who did it hold and what was their crime? And where did they escape to? The cell as we see it wouldn’t be very secure, unless the ladder we climb was something thrown down by someone to help the prisoner escape, a motif reminiscent of how we are aided in escaping from our cell at the start of the original Dark Souls.  Another intriguing visual element of this area is how the bars on the upper level resemble Anastacia’s cell in Dark Souls 1’s Firelink Shrine.  Anyway, one possible avenue of escape for our prisoner is the very room where we entered the area. Behind us is what appears to be the coiled sword of a disabled bonfire, something someone might have used to escape before it was dismantled. The cobwebs around it are a curious inclusion that I never noticed before writing this.  Oh, and because what would one of these writeups be without some kind of water imagery, when you first enter this area and warp into this room directly below you is a clogged drain. 
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Jun 5, 2020 01:09
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I can't tell if this is the biggest brain take I've ever read or you're in the middle of a schizophrenic breakdown, but color me intrigued. Tell me more.
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Jun 5, 2020 04:57
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Personally, I would do two things here. One, do a "Let's Play Soulsborne [Reborn Reborn Edition]" and slow play this a lot more, spread out the posts and info over time. There's no real opportunity here for people like CJacobs who have a ton of lore knowledge to comment. Even being a huge soulsborne lore fan you make so many points so fast I can't retain much of it. Spread this out more or you will lost your audience and burn yourself out. Maybe put meta and speculative comments (e.g. unsupported by game literature or designer statements) in a separate post. Two, look into RPCS3 and see if you can play Demon Souls. Some of this is fascinating (like the Hellkite Dragon killing weapons in Lothric) but this is like analyzing Game of Thrones and not reading the first book or watching the first season of the series. Demon Souls is the foundation of all of these games. I'm not going to invest in this deep a run that's not informed by the first game unless you are going to LP it eventually. If you spread this out a bit you will have time to do this. I think this is very informative and your writing style is good. I'm eventually going to go through almost all of what you produce because you have some insights into level design that are really thoughtful. It's just a bit too much at once, this is about 2.5 gh (Grey Hunters) on the LP density scale.
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Jun 5, 2020 16:20
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Dense LP good LP, it means you get more insight from rereading it.
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Jun 5, 2020 18:19
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StrixNebulosa posted:Dense LP good LP, it means you get more insight from rereading it. That's not a good thing in this series!
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Jun 5, 2020 19:16
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Araganzar posted:One, do a "Let's Play Soulsborne [Reborn Reborn Edition]" and slow play this a lot more, spread out the posts and info over time. There's no real opportunity here for people like CJacobs who have a ton of lore knowledge to comment. Even being a huge soulsborne lore fan you make so many points so fast I can't retain much of it. Spread this out more or you will lost your audience and burn yourself out. Maybe put meta and speculative comments (e.g. unsupported by game literature or designer statements) in a separate post. This may seem either silly, but given conditions I'm worried about running out of time. If I wake up now I'll forget everything. The release speed will probably slow some in the future. I don't have as much access to acceptable recording time as I'd like. I do worry a lot about accessibility. I've been playing around with the idea of making cluster summaries that focus on what happened during ~3 video sections and the major details. It's easier to do what I've been doing and distill it into its essence than working in the other direction, if that makes any sense. quote:Two, look into RPCS3 and see if you can play Demon Souls. Some of this is fascinating (like the Hellkite Dragon killing weapons in Lothric) but this is like analyzing Game of Thrones and not reading the first book or watching the first season of the series. Demon Souls is the foundation of all of these games. I'm not going to invest in this deep a run that's not informed by the first game unless you are going to LP it eventually. If you spread this out a bit you will have time to do this. I might crack and play Demon's Souls regardless of how much I dread it. Regardless, I think you're vastly overestimating its..."essentialness." Game of Thrones is linear storytelling. We don't even think of it as linear storytelling because almost all human narratives are linear, and we forget there are even alternatives. Soulsborne is not linear. When I was first trying to fit all this into some kind linear narrative, I started trying to fit it all into shapes like this.  And maybe I haven't completely abandoned the chaos going on here, but it's absolutely not the best way to frame things to make progress in understanding what's going on. Soulsborne is better thought of like this  Each game is repeating the same structural myth with its own individual mutations. The same thing applies to the kingdoms within the games (the Bloodborne progression on the right is just an example and may not necessarily be an accurate order). It's like how various cultures all have their own flood myth, but with the details being uniquely influenced by local conditions. But to complicate things, Souls games have gaps in them.  So what we see looks more like this. We can use the echoes of one game to try and fill in the gaps of other games. Demon's Souls would certainly be helpful for this, but it's not really more foundational. If anything, it tends to be a lot easier to use the later games to explain the earlier ones, because honestly, FromSoft just now has the resources to include more detail in its worlds. So with that said, let's make things even crazier. This bit isn't super essential, and it's really nbd if it doesn't pan out, but I'm hopeful because it's so fun. If we were going to do something like this with repeating stories with holes in them, we might cut up the story progression into sections. In which case we'd have something like this.  But framing it like this is fun because it starts to look like this popular graphical depiction of the hero's journey/monomyth.  FromSoft/Miyazaki has certainly had monomyth on their mind based on the item description for Ricard's Rapier in Dark Souls 1. A rapier with intricate decorations. Chosen weapon of the famous Undead Prince Ricard. Ricard's exploits are told in a monomyth. He was born into royalty, but wandered the lands in a fateful ill-conceived journey. He became Undead and disappeared up North. But what people miss is that the monomyth isn't about you, the player; it's about a monarch, and presumably the fate of their kingdom. We're simply living their echoes. So if FromSoft has their own internal monomyth structure that repeats itself throughout all of these games, what if the design document has been sitting in front of (or behind) us the whole time?  Used to slaughter the Vilebloods in Cainhurst. Bathed in pools of their blood, and forever steeped in their ire.
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Jun 6, 2020 00:53
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Oh boy. I'm really glad you decided to ahead with this, loved it in the Sandcastle and I'm always down for theorycrafting and overinterpretation. Really looking forward to see where it goes. Also echoing the sentiment that this is a fuckton of content to start with.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:08
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This is all pretty wild stuff, interested to see if I'll agree, disagree or just think it's all insane.
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Jun 12, 2020 11:01
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ilmucche posted:This is all pretty wild stuff, interested to see if I'll agree, disagree or just think it's all insane. If I do my job right, the answer is going to be yes. Anyway, thank you everyone for the feedback. This is attempt #4 to turn this into something palatable for human consumption, and it's probably only going to end up slightly less of a failure than the others. Knowing where I'm going there's certain things I cannot cut, but I'm going to attempt something at the end up the first age that will hopefully help alleviate the overwhelming density. Also, going to try not timg'ing the next update since it's more visual and less text based than the others. We'll see how that goes.
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Jun 12, 2020 19:11
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Episode 05 (DS3-03): The Lothric Civil WarRed Tearstone Ring(DS2) posted:A ring set with a red tearstone. Blue Tearstone Ring(DS2) posted:A ring set with a blue tearstone. Time for the second half of the High Wall of Lothric, and as it turns out, cutting it in half is rather appropriate. One of the most intriguing things about this area is that the environmental narrative completely changes halfway through the level. As we talked about last time, the first half is dominated by three storylines: tree hollows, dead wyverns, and the Pus of Man. After we leave the bonfire and move on to the next section, we experience one short section featuring all three of these elements. Once we climb down the ladder, they never show up in this area again and are replaced by three entirely new narratives. Why this is the case is never made clear to us, but any theorists should keep in mind that time and space are convoluted. But before we get to these new narratives, there’s one bit of environmental storytelling that I love.  To enter the tower housing the halfway bonfire of the level, we have to get past the single Lothric Knight [red square] of this section. It’s one of the more challenging enemies of this stretch, but it’s also a skippable fight if you wait for it to patrol and sneak past it. Behind the knight is a dark tower full of Hollow Assassins [blue square]. We tend to assume everything we fight is allied with each other, but what if these assassins are sneaking into the tower just like we are? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  On the bottom floor we can exit into a different section that begins with a firebomb tossing hollow that has set up an explosive ambush. A peculiar thing for a traditional military to have sitting inside their own stronghold, but it's a much more logical improvised setup if they’re a member of an infiltration squad guarding the rear. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  After this we enter a room with another Hollow Assassin and a corpse with an item that is sitting against a peculiarly placed and unusable gate. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Jumping ahead a bit, once we leave this tower to move on to the next area, at the bottom of the ladder is a sort of mess hall patrolled by a second Lothric Knight. To the left here is a small room where several plain hollows are setting up an ambush. I like to think of them as the cooking staff. Behind them we arrive here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This room houses the only Hollow Assassin in the level not found inside the previous tower. It also happens to be the other side of the peculiar gate. The implicit story is that the Hollow Assassins are infiltrating the area to assassinate the Lothric Knights. This is hinted at by the Deserter Trousers they occasionally drop. Additionally, the item in front of the gate is a Mail Breaker: quote:A small sword made for thrusting attacks. Not only is it a weapon designed for dealing with heavily armored targets, it might also be what they used to pry open the gate that its holder is resting against. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So anyway, getting back to the three new narratives replacing the three old ones. One of them are these dudes:  But they come back in the next area, so along with Emma back there and Vordt, we’re going to talk about them later on when we have more pieces to their respective puzzles. For now, what I want to focus on is this:  There’s a civil war going on with red and blue armies. It’s interesting how the proportions of both types of corpses are significantly larger than the typical hollow, with the red knights here looking somewhat similar to the upcoming Abyss Watchers, and the blue Winged Knights shaped more like Smough from DS1 or the executioners from Bloodborne. Anyway, the area only has a single Winged Knight patrolling a courtyard, possibly implying an eventual blue win. In that courtyard we have a rather noteworthy statue.  There’s a lot of debate on the internet over who this is, but I’m not going to treat that as important right now. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the knights in red that surround the statue. My interpretation is that the red forces were rallying around this figure, and ultimately gave their lives in their defense. (Side note: it might be difficult to see, but the features of the statue that people argue over, specifically the sword and the bracelets, are a different color from the rest of the statue. This could be simply done for visual emphasis, or it could suggest that those embellishments were added later, a usurpation of the statue’s originally intended purpose. A religious figure reinterpreted as a conqueror.) Anyway, this isn’t the only noteworthy statue of the area. Exiting this courtyard we come across these headless statues:  And then shortly after we go through these complementary statues:  The path to the cathedral ahead might be suggesting that these statues are part of a repeating cycle.  What I really want to focus on is this statue in particular.  Because if you’ve played all of the recent FromSoft games, you’ve seen something very similar to this in a different context (that I’m personally going to draw the line on not spoiling). So suppose this beheading cycle is a ritual with a very similar result of that other self-decapitation, and that in Lothric “linking the fire” is a sort of euphemism for that ritual. That interpretation makes the item description for Soul Stream (a spell from a later portion of Lothric) pretty interesting: quote:The first of the Scholars doubted the linking of the fire, and was alleged to be a private mentor to the Royal Prince. So maybe that one really prominent statue has its head because they’re from a faction who doubted the linking of the fire, a choice the knights in red defended to the death. The mourners of the undeserving dead. Alternatively the red faction is the pro-decapitation side, and that’s why they all appear to be missing their heads. Cinders of a Lord posted:The Lothric bloodline was obsessed with creating a worthy heir, and when this proved impossible, resorted to unspeakable means. Suffice it to say, the path to linking the fire is a cursed one indeed.
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Jun 12, 2020 20:11
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Weird, I never noticed the knights were color-coded, although I'm not sure I buy the civil war hypothesis - couldn't the colors just indicate ranks in the army? I'm also not sure what is the link between self decapitation (and yeah, I know what it refers to in Sekiro) and "linking the fire" being an euphemism for it. anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Jun 13, 2020 |
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Jun 13, 2020 10:12
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I certainly can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a civil war. All we have are environmental clues and item descriptions, and nothing in there provides us a definitive answer. That being said, alternative interpretations would need to address why there are so many corpses strewn about that area. If they were fighting together, what were they fighting and why is there no sign of it? And if you buy my explanation that there are signs of infighting in the upper sections of the High Wall, why not extend that explanation to this courtyard? Part of the problem telling this story is that I think clues for what is going on are strewn all over. In this case not only in all of DS3 but in previous Dark Souls as well. And if this comes off as excessively dense now, you should try listening to me bounce between games. I'm trying to build a case slowly, and that entails bringing up my interpretation of an area plot when I come across it, and coming back to it later on when I've played through later stretches that provide more circumstantial evidence. That being said, here's a slightly more complete version for those who remember enough not to be overwhelmed. The blue Winged Knights have an armor set with this as a description: Armor of the Winged Knights, who swore themselves to the Angels. Worship of the divine messengers was viewed as heresy in Lothric and unrecognized by any of the Three Pillars of rule. This is believed to be why Gertrude, the Heavenly Daughter, was imprisoned in the lofty cell of the Grand Archives. "Heresy" and "unrecognized" further point to the idea of the chaos we see in Lothric as being a result of an Angelic Faith uprising. It also explains the assassination plot against the knights who make up one of the Three Pillars. I didn't draw too much attention to it, but next to the chapel where we get the Way of the Blue covenant from Emma is a red-eyed enemy that also happens to be the only Lothric Knight in blue. My theory is that red-eyed enemies are a representation of a major storyline actor who invaded or betrayed the denizens of the area you're currently in. This is a little more speculative, but if I had to guess the Red team is related to the secret fourth Pillar, which is the hunters and the Black Hand. This eventually leads to the Abyss Watchers. This divide is essentially DS3's World Tendency. Lothric being pulled in Red and Blue directions. Meanwhile, you have the Scholar pillar who doubts linking the flame, and possibly wishes to prevent both the Blue and Red paths from coming to fruition. "What do you want, truly? Light? Dark? Or something else entirely..." And what might be one of the sticking points to the divide? Well, it could be hinted at in DS1, but I think DS2 is more explicit about it if you think about the choice of bosses you have in the Heide's Tower of Flame... Don't trust the symbolic pattern though. DS2 is a mirror, and mirrors are often deceptive. As for "Linking the Flame," setting this up is a bit too heavy for me right now. I suspect each game might use "linking the flame" slightly differently, but I suspect they all share a relation to the myth of Cronus and leave it at that.
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Jun 13, 2020 19:08
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This LP is wild so far, I'm really loving it. It's very ambitious. The Souls games (uh, and beyond in this case) are tailor-made for weaving your own version of events. Every story told to the player has holes that can't easily be filled by the currently-living characters because the events happened so long ago and so far away. Many times they tell you directly what happened to someone or some place in item descriptions or character dialogue, but hardly ever do they connect on an extra-game level. DS2 specifically seems to go out of its way to squash these connections oftentimes. It's fun to see an attempt to tie it all together with the power of observational skill. I'm a fan!
CJacobs fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Jun 15, 2020 |
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Jun 15, 2020 01:16
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I'm glad to hear it! And if you think things are wild so far, stick around because this is positively tame compared to where we're going...Oh how I wish I could sequence break my own LP. Anyway, in more general news, I'm hoping the next stretch won't end up delayed. It's the start of Bloodborne, and recording PS4 stuff is a pain compared to everything else on the PC. Current plan is to do Central Yharnam as a 3-parter, and then finish off the section by ringing the first Bell of Awakening back in DS1. What I'm then going to attempt is to create a short summary video for everything up until that point that quickly runs through the important events. Ideally, this abridged version will allow people to follow along without having to deal with the full density, and then point them to any individual sections they might find particularly intriguing. Of course it might fail to accomplish any of that, but what would a Soulsborne LP be without some failures here and there?
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Jun 17, 2020 00:39
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:"Five let’s plays at once? That's insane!"  interested to see where you go with this!
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Jun 17, 2020 09:11
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Blaziken386 posted:interested to see where you go with this! Well, some teasers include the player character performing an orchiectomy, Aldia saying trans rights, and an in-game reference to a late 19th century author who definitely wasn't a closeted transwoman because such things obviously didn't exist back then. Sorry to assume what you might find intriguing, but I couldn't resist the opportunity to foreshadow a small fraction of the insanity that I can't wait to get to.
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Jun 17, 2020 20:40
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Sibyl Disobedience posted:Well, some teasers include the player character performing an orchiectomy, Aldia saying trans rights, and an in-game reference to a late 19th century author who definitely wasn't a closeted transwoman because such things obviously didn't exist back then. I wonder what it says about me that I instantly knew what this was referring to
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Jun 17, 2020 21:19
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RBA Starblade posted:I wonder what it says about me that I instantly knew what this was referring to If that includes the third teaser, that's really impressive. It took me quite a bit of work to dig up that one. Anyway...
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Jun 18, 2020 19:31
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Episode 06 (BB-01): It’s funny. I’m finding Bloodborne to be almost a breather between Dark Souls sections. I’m going to have the least to say about it, at least early on, but Darkroot Basin triggers Dark Souls 2, and we need to have been to Hunter’s Workshop and Hemwick Charnel Lane before that happens, so here we go. Let’s begin by laying out the framework I’m using. First, we awaken on the night of the Hunt, but it’s not a “night” in a traditional sense. As the note in the Hunter’s Dream tells us:  And let’s combine this knowledge with the note in the Operating Room that I totally skipped over despite it being one of the few things I actually scripted:  Things are going to get vaguely spoilery for a bit, but it’s unfortunately necessary to set up the cosmology I’ll be operating within. Bloodborne has 3 endings that I’m going to refer to as ending 1, 2, and 3 in increasing complexity of trigger conditions. People like to assume based on ending 1 that you’ve ended the night and brought day to Yharnam, but I disagree strongly with this interpretation. In ending two, you do not transcend the hunt and the night does carry on forever. This is because you did not halt the source of the spreading scourge of beasts. You also fail to halt the source in ending one, so the night is still going on. You personally have merely escaped to the waking world. I see the Night of the Hunt as an eternal purgatory, a punishment for its denizens for some long forgotten sin. As I put it in the video, it’s a Lovecraftian Groundhog Day. As a result of this, the game never contains a “real” Yharnam. It’s just layers of dreams upon dreams. Echoes of the histories of it’s imprisoned inhabitants. Everything therefore operates on a sort of dream logic, more of a Lynch-ian exploration into the subconscious of its subjects than a truthful replication of whatever once passed for “actual reality.” And because it is formed from subconscious memories, it will lie to us. With enough insight we can begin to see through these lies. Or maybe go mad. Por que no los dos? With that out of the way, let’s introduce something even crazier. I believe that Bloodborne repeatedly utilizes this iconic bit of dialogue from Aldia in Dark Souls 2. quote:Many monarchs have come and gone. This becomes more important later, but I suspect the introductory cutscene hints at this with the blood werewolf, the flame, and the messengers. You likely find this ridiculous, but if you stick around maybe I’ll be able to put together a convincing case for it. There’s a lot to be said about how Gehrman, the Doll, and the Messengers relate to each other, but I want to gather more evidence before I start speaking about that. For now I just want to observe that when the Doll says “you’ve found yourself a hunter,” she is almost certainly speaking to the messengers not the blood minister, as if they usurped his ritual. It’s also interesting that Gehrman pauses before giving you his name. Almost as if the name “Gehrman” is foreign to him. Anyway, the real meat of this section revolves around the Madman’s Knowledge. Most people will probably get their first insight stumbling upon the Cleric Beast, but we're starting off by going a bit out of our way because I feel the consumable insights tell a more interesting story right now. Like the Mail Breaker in my previous episode, The Lothric Civil War, I suspect the placement of certain items is done very deliberately to tell a story. Armor clumps is one likely example of this, though it’s admittedly one I haven’t made a lot of progress on. I suspect Flame Butterflies in DS2 is another that I suspect holds a secret. But Madman’s Knowledge is the one I’m feeling most confident about, and this stretch of Yharnam holds two of them.  The first is found here, formerly surrounded by rats in a non-descript dead-end. But when we turn around…  There are boats... This area used to have way more water flowing through it, and was possibly a port of some kind.  These devices had been perplexing me for a while when someone who was watching me play pointed out that they could be used for loading and unloading cargo. That leaves Madman’s Knowledge #2, and I admit, this one is a little too Crack-Ping for even me to feel fully confident in. There’s an interesting parallel where one Knowledge is “guarded” by rats and the other is guarded by crows (or ravens, but most game material calls them carrion crows, so I'll refer to them as that). And the crows are a curious enemy because of how bizarre they look when they attempt to fly.  People have floated the theory that this inability to fly is a result of the beast curse causing them to overeat until they were too bulky to maintain altitude. But what if they’re incapable of flying because the environment they've been evolving in was aquatic, until someone drained their habitat? This one's admittedly a longshot, and the only real supporting evidence I have for it is that the bulk that they have might not be from overeating but rather something they previously used to maintain aquatic buoyancy. Admittedly, that theory is way out there and is possibly an example of one of those theories I'll end up abandoning in a couple weeks. But while we're here, I'll just mention that the pebbles the crows often drop are definitely petrified eyeballs. So that's fun. Sibyl Disobedience fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 19:31
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Did Patches achieve CHIM? Very interested to see where this goes
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Jun 18, 2020 22:22
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I’m three videos in and annoyed that I’m hooked. I wish you edited your videos, or did post commentary, or anything at all to help you present the really interesting stuff you’re trying to tell us without stumbling over everything. Right now by trying to play and explain at the same time you’re compromising both. And there’s already been a couple of times where I’ve wished you tied some threads you’re holding to Demon’s Souls. Maybe when the remake drops you can do a coda of sorts. Again, I’ll really like what you’re doing and hope I’m not being too harsh. I just think a little more care in the execution will bring out more of what you’re really here to do.
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Jun 21, 2020 12:09
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Personally, I've never liked the thought line that we don't visit real Yharnam. It rings false, especially with the first section of the DLC being what it is. Instead I argue that what's real and what isn't is largely unimportant in the Bloodboren cosmology, it's all "real" it's just how much of it you can see/visit. In the case of the Yharnam most of the game takes place in, that's a physical location on the Bloodborne equivalent of Earth, it's just being invaded/stolen into the Dream of the Great Ones. The actual purgatorial area is also the DLC zone imo. However, it is entirely true that you fail to end the cycle in the Awakening ending, instead you merely end up like Eileen, or Djura. Another inhabitant of Yharnam slowly going mad, who remembers the Dream and the Doll but no longer can visit. Djura in particular I feel is proof that there's no groundhog's day loop actually going on, as his time in the Hunter's Dream appears to have been in relation to the burning of Old Yharnam. Instead consider it merely an endless struggle and enforced stagnation, Yharnam never advances or retreats, it merely shifts sideways, replacing old tragedies with new in an endless nightly hunt. It's very clear to me that time has passed for characters even though the Hunter's Dream continues to activate when needed. However you make an interesting argument, both on the lines of the Monarch thing (which I think I can almost start to see the shape of based on my knowledge of Bloodborne itself) and the water thing, which again might come up when we visit the DLC. I do agree with the intersecting layers of reality thing, I just don't necessarily agree that this requires Yharnam to be not the physical original Yharnam. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jun 21, 2020 |
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Jun 21, 2020 13:01
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The eternal recurrence of a cyclical fall-dark age-rebuilding-rise-golden age-stagnation (starting at whatever step you wish) is a storytelling device at least as old as the hero's journey and the cosmology of most if not all non-Judeo-Christian religions. Progressivism, or at least the modern form of it, is a product of the 19th century Industrial Revolution combined with centuries of Christian theology dominating philosophical thought and though WWI thoroughly destroyed most people's hopes for one particular kind of utopia, that didn't stop other naive idealists from trying to build other ones. "Your quest is meaningless and you're just repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again" might be a narrative that's depressing as gently caress to experience, but if done well it can still be cathartic. (On the other hand, the last game I'd played with this message--namely, Legend of Mana--was so effective that it's since killed any desire on my part to experience it again , so caveat emptor and all that.)
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Jun 22, 2020 01:37
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George posted:I’m three videos in and annoyed that I’m hooked. I wish you edited your videos, or did post commentary, or anything at all to help you present the really interesting stuff you’re trying to tell us without stumbling over everything. Right now by trying to play and explain at the same time you’re compromising both. Oh, believe me, I know. I hate these things and cannot relisten to them. But learning to let people see something before it's perfect is part of my penance in this ritual. In the long-term, more scripted stuff is the plan. I'm scripting out the first for after the ringing of the first bell, and the only hold up will be figuring out how to make Reaper and Premiere play nicely. But part of doing what I'm doing now is just getting footage. For instance, I could talk for 30+ minutes about Solaire and Siegmeyer, but to do it in video form I need at the very minimum footage of Lost Izalith, Irithyll, Profaned Capital, Cainhurst, and Dragon Shrine, and right now I just don't have the saves to capture all that. This project is a stepping stone, and honestly, going through it like this and doing the post video writeups have been helpful at both making new connections and organizing my thoughts. quote:And there’s already been a couple of times where I’ve wished you tied some threads you’re holding to Demon’s Souls. Maybe when the remake drops you can do a coda of sorts. Yeah, I'm suspecting something like this is inevitable. Valley of Defilement in particular is somewhere I know enough about to see hints of in a lot of different areas and narratives. Lord_Magmar posted:Personally, I've never liked the thought line that we don't visit real Yharnam. It rings false, especially with the first section of the DLC being what it is. Instead I argue that what's real and what isn't is largely unimportant in the Bloodboren cosmology, it's all "real" it's just how much of it you can see/visit. In the case of the Yharnam most of the game takes place in, that's a physical location on the Bloodborne equivalent of Earth, it's just being invaded/stolen into the Dream of the Great Ones. The actual purgatorial area is also the DLC zone imo. From my perspective, if you're seeing game Yharnam as somewhere "invaded/stolen into the Dream of the Great Ones," then that's already quite different than what most people think of as "real Yharnam." But yeah, I agree that there is a certain unimportance at this point what is and isn't real. Breaking it down into finer details, my "not realness" for game Yharnam has two important properties. First, all the areas you visit never existed in a single chronological moment. This is most blatant w/r/t the change in Hypogean Gaol, but I believe it extends beyond that. Second, the areas you visit would not have been physically connected in the way you experience them. Again, most blatant getting to Yahar'gul, but the connections between places like Cathedral District and Old Yharnam are more symbolism than a true depiction of physical reality. DS2 specifically uses this map design motif in ways where they go out of their way to draw attention to how physically impossible many of the zone transitions are. So in summary, time and space: convoluted. As for the looping, Djura and Eileen talk about having visited the Hunter's Dream, but there's no reason to assume that their iteration of the Dream was identical to yours. Maybe time flowed relatively normally until about the time you showed up. Maybe each generation has its own loop that it has to break out of. With that said, I really want to talk about looping and purgatory, and I've decided I do not want to wait a really long time to be able to do it, so I'm going to spoiler chat stuff that way ahead of where the playthrough currently is. It would actually be incredibly helpful to be able to talk about some of these things ahead of time to iron out bugs and communication failures. So anyway, Bloodborne and purgatory. The Hunter's Dream and the Painted World of Ariandel are a useful instance of resonance leading to thematic transmission. Both areas feature a trinity: Father Ariandel, Sister Friede, and Painting Woman for DS3 and Gehrman, Moon Presence, and The Doll for Bloodborne. We know explicitly that Friede has some kind of control over Ariandel. She won't allow him to burn the Painted World, and as a result he appears to be stuck in a loop of painting the same picture over and over. So let's map that onto Gehrman and Moon Presence. The narrative slice of Bloodborne you experience is infinite looping, implied by the replace Gehrman ending, and it is looping because Moon Presence demands to be fed. This process is first suggested in the motif of the Gaping Dragon in the Depths in Dark Souls 1. As they describe it in the Dark Souls 1 design works interview: Yes, it was completely consumed with the desire to eat, so much so that it began to adapt, and the parts of it's body it no used such as it's head, began to retrogress. It no longer eats with it's mouth but takes food directly into it's body, but it had to change in this way in order to survive. Aside from eating It's lost any faculties it may have once possessed and has to survive in this desolate, harsh environment by eating anything he can. It simply did what it had to, to continue to exist. The Depths also have the butchers whom I suspect are the ones feeding the Gaping Dragon using the various chutes and slides in the level (we'll see if that holds up when I play through it again). This motif of feeding an insatiable beast is repeated in the Nightmare of Mensis with the butcher look-alikes you encounter prior to Micolash. In the Hunter's Dream, Gerhman is playing this role. He wields a scythe because a scythe is primarily a farming tool for harvesting stuff like wheat. Gehrman's role is to harvest an endless supply of player-characters whose collective blood echoes keep the Moon Presence alive. This dynamic is also coded into DS1 through the relationship of Quelaag, The Fair Lady, and the Chaos Servants. If you feed her enough humanity, maybe some day she'll be whole again... With that all said, the differences between resonance echoes can be just as important as the similarities, and the Painted World of Ariandel has a fourth major inhabitant: Sir Vilhelm, who is essentially the Painted Woman's jailer. Does he have a Bloodborne parallel? Yep I've seen your kind, time and time again. Every fleeing man must be caught. Every secret must be unearthed. Such is the conceit of the self-proclaimed seeker of truth. But in the end, you lack the stomach. For the agony you'll bring upon yourself..." -Sir Vilhelm A corpse... should be left well alone. Oh, I know very well. How the secrets beckon so sweetly. Only an honest death will cure you now. Liberate you, from your wild curiosity." -Lady Maria (Incidentally, the cut content for Maria sounds a lot more like Friede's dialogue when she's trying to convince you to leave the Painted World) So yeah, the DLC is most definitely the core of Bloodborne's purgatory, but the consequences of that purgatory extend into the rest of the game. quote:and the water thing, which again might come up when we visit the DLC. Oh, it most certainly will... quote:Listen close... and you, too, will hear...
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Jun 22, 2020 04:42
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I see where you stand, personally I think that unlike DS2 (where the physical locations almost definitely cannot be linked the way they are, and the transitional areas are meant to be representitive of long forgotten journeys between the various lands), Bloodborne's Yharnam probably could be connected that way. The fact that many of the other zones are visible makes me think it's intended to be spatially accurate, you can see Old Yharnam and Cathedral Ward from Central Yharnam, so on and so forth. The only dream travel is the journey to Cainhurst, which is a solid bit of intertextuality (it's Castlevania as gently caress). As for the time shifting stuff, Yahar'gul when first visited has a great chanting in the background, almost as if they're performing a ritual, once you slay Rom the ritual can finally complete and thus it changes. Old Yharnam is probably a better example of the odd dreamlike time-state Yharnam appears to be in, due to it constantly burning even though the city has since been rebuilt atop the valley. Which is important, Yharnam is built around a pretty large Valley, and the original township (Old Yharnam/Yahar'gul) would've been running through the valley out to Hemwick and thus Cainhurst Castle, possibly also to the Forbidden Woods as well, and now that I think about it I bet the Yharnam Valley looks a lot like the Hunter's Mark from above, or another Caryll rune of a similar design. Anyway, the point I'm making here is that Yharnam Central and Cathedral Ward were both built long after the original township/city, on top of the valley with great bridges to traverse it. Part of why Yahar'gul and Hemwick are almost certainly quite close physically is that they share a rather interesting enemy feature, the Witches, and the Kidnappers are likely Pthumerians, not Yharnamites. As for the spoilered stuff I don't think the Moon Presence demands to be fed, although it likely is part of it. I see the endless grind of hunts and failure as a result of the deal Gehrman and Laurence made with the Moon Presence long ago. Laurence sought godhood through blood and maybe insight, this we know, and a side effect of that search is the beast plague because Great One blood is transformative. The healing properties are just it transforming an injured/sick person to a healthy person, and eventually they transform further into all manner of odd creatures and shapes based on some probably quite strange metrics. The mass research therefore creates a problem, greater and more numerous beasts and the possibility that the Healing Church's research and the truth of the Beast Plague will be discovered by the common people. So Laurence has an idea, have Gehrman make a contract with a Great One to effectively act as a cleanup crew for the Healing Church, whenever the Beast Plague looms large the Hunter's Dream takes a Hunter to empower. In the case of Laurence transforming into the first Cleric Beast, it chose Djura and thus he led the burning of Old Yharnam. Gehrman is the surrogate here, the Moon Presence's host/price, his deal is also specifically to have the Doll be alive (and thus Maria back in his life) but the Doll is not Maria so Gehrman comes to loathe it's presence. The Moon Presence, like all Great Ones, is attempting to be helpful in nature. It's just that it's inhuman and so it's ideas about helping are rotten and strange. As for the whole becoming Gehrman thing, I don't think that implies that there is a loop of the current night going on, I think it implies that the Moon Presence takes you as the new Helper/Host, and allows Gehrman to finally be at peace in death. Gehrman not remembering his own name very well is simply him being at least 50-100 years old. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 05:18
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Detective Buttfuck posted:Did Patches achieve CHIM? Very interested to see where this goes
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Jun 22, 2020 07:06
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Lord_Magmar posted:The fact that many of the other zones are visible makes me think it's intended to be spatially accurate, you can see Old Yharnam and Cathedral Ward from Central Yharnam, so on and so forth. Based on the patterns I'm seeing in all of these games, I will not be joining you on this assumption. Like, if we assume that Old Yharnam gets burnt down at some point early on in pre-Dream history, what would remain for there to be seen from Central Yharnam? It's frankly just as likely (if not "considerably more" given FromSoft's track record) that the geography is intended to metaphorically convey the idea of Central Yharnam being built on the ruins of Old Yharnam as it is to demonstrate accurate spatial relations. quote:The only dream travel is the journey to Cainhurst, which is a solid bit of intertextuality (it's Castlevania as gently caress). As for the time shifting stuff, Yahar'gul when first visited has a great chanting in the background, almost as if they're performing a ritual, once you slay Rom the ritual can finally complete and thus it changes. I'm going to throw this out as an unexplained future teaser: I believe that slaying Rom doesn't complete the ritual; it interrupts it. Rom and the Choir are maintaining a seal on Yahar'gul, and you break that seal. quote:Anyway, the point I'm making here is that Yharnam Central and Cathedral Ward were both built long after the original township/city, on top of the valley with great bridges to traverse it. Part of why Yahar'gul and Hemwick are almost certainly quite close physically is that they share a rather interesting enemy feature, the Witches, and the Kidnappers are likely Pthumerians, not Yharnamites. A quick list of things that this interpretation doesn't sufficiently answer. 1. Yahar'gul houses the Micolash storyline, and all signs point to Micolash being a sort of inheritor to the institutions found in the Cathedral Ward. What's the suggested timeline here? 2. This also puts the Powder Keg hunters of Old Yharnam as precursors to Gerhman, since he's tied to the Hunter's Workshop located inside Cathedral Ward. Is this what you're running with? 3. There's then also the question of why the main Cathedral in the Cathedral Ward has three different variants, including the two in the Hunter's Nightmare. What's the timeline for these iterations? What faction is in control in each iteration? Who are the Church Servants? 4. There's a distinct implication in second part of the Hunter's Nightmare that Cainhurst invaded a Yharnam at some point (Cainhurst Bloodsuckers throughout the city). Where does this fit into things? 5. When did the Fishing Hamlet happen in relation to all of this? Are the stories of characters like Simon and Brador precursors to Old Yharnam? Contemporaries? And separate from that, there's no reason why the presence of the Witches means that Yahar'gul and Hemwick are quite close physically. There are executioners in Central Yharnam, the path between Cathedral Ward and Yahar'gul, Hemwick, and the Forbidden Woods, and this certainly doesn't mean these areas are physically close. I certainly believe that specific enemy repetitions in this series are intended to convey something, but there's so many more plausible interpretations than "These areas are next to each other." quote:As for the spoilered stuff I don't think the Moon Presence demands to be fed, although it likely is part of it. I see the endless grind of hunts and failure as a result of the deal Gehrman and Laurence made with the Moon Presence long ago. Laurence sought godhood through blood and maybe insight, this we know, and a side effect of that search is the beast plague because Great One blood is transformative. The healing properties are just it transforming an injured/sick person to a healthy person, and eventually they transform further into all manner of odd creatures and shapes based on some probably quite strange metrics. The mass research therefore creates a problem, greater and more numerous beasts and the possibility that the Healing Church's research and the truth of the Beast Plague will be discovered by the common people. So Laurence has an idea, have Gehrman make a contract with a Great One to effectively act as a cleanup crew for the Healing Church, whenever the Beast Plague looms large the Hunter's Dream takes a Hunter to empower. In the case of Laurence transforming into the first Cleric Beast, it chose Djura and thus he led the burning of Old Yharnam. Gehrman is the surrogate here, the Moon Presence's host/price, his deal is also specifically to have the Doll be alive (and thus Maria back in his life) but the Doll is not Maria so Gehrman comes to loathe it's presence. Ok, so super ending Bloodborne stuff for people who do not want to see it yet. I get this is pretty in-line with the general consensus of Bloodborne interpretations, but it doesn't actually tell us all that much. What specifically was the deal that Gehrman and Laurence made with the Moon Presence? If the beast plague is a result of Great One blood why wouldn't obtaining that blood be the deal rather than some kind of cleanup crew contract? One of the first things we're told in the Hunter's Dream is that we need to "halt the source of the spreading scourge of beasts." If Moon Presence isn't the source than what is? And if Moon Presence is the source why would you make contract a contract with the Moon Presence to exterminate the beasts? Is the Moon Presence here a metaphor for the Military-Industrial Complex? What does it mean to seek godhood? What specifically motivated Laurence? You're not really offering him the same level of sympathy that you extend towards Moon Presence. And honestly, I get it. I find Friede to be one of the most sympathetic characters in all of the games, but I'm also inclined to believe that she's possibly the most villainous. Meanwhile, I just instinctually kind of loathe Gwyn, and I recognize that these biases influence which interpretations I'm likely to explore. But anyway, Laurence might have a more complicated story than what you're getting at, and understanding it might offer some insight into what any deal with the Great Ones might have entailed. Finally, if we can accept that Gehrman is a surrogate in his role, why rule out the possibility that there's been more than one Moon Presence? This series is rife with imposters and usurptions, and there's no shortage of Great Ones in Bloodborne that this interpretation doesn't bother accounting for. Kos, Oedon, Rom, Ebrietas, Amygdala, Mergo's Wet Nurse, the Forbidden Wood's snake infestation. These entities also had an effect on the world, and any Moon Presence theory has to account for them as well. Incidentally, I'm currently running with a theory that the Doll isn't based on Maria at all. And that Gehrman might not exactly loathe it's presence. I can also say that your read on the Moon Presence's motivations strongly resonates with some of the stuff I'm playing with at the moment.
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Jun 23, 2020 07:30
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Okay so timeline stuff, the oldest parts of the Yharnam Valley (outside the Pthumerian Ruins that Byrgenwerth was founded to study) are Castle Cainhurst, Hemwick and Old Yharnam. Then the scholars game and founded Byrgenwerth, from which exploration into the Chalice Dungeons occurs. These prove somewhat fruitful, they find the Bloodletting Beast (Japanese name Host of the Beast Blood) which has healing properties, and Queen Yharnam (Source it Forbidden Blood of Cainhurst). The Fishing Hamlet occurs around here, with the results leading to the next part of the overall timeline. Laurence eventually splits from Byrgenwerth, taking Gehrman and several students with him. Laurence rounds the healing church and potentially starts building the Cathedral award atop the valley to help facilitate the human experimentation he wishes to perform. Gerhman founds (or expands) the Hunter’s Workshop as a secret cleanup crew to slay any beasts that are created from the experimentation. It is here he takes on a number of apprentices, including potentially Ludwig. As the Hunters grow ever larger, and other tragedy of a personal nature strikes. Gehrman begins to consider the plan that would eventually lead to the formation of the Hunter’s Dream. Meanwhile the Oto/Powder Keg workshops as well as the Healing Church Workshop led by Ludwig are built to better combat the growing number and size of the beasts. Then Laurence transforms in the middle of Old Yharnam and so Ludwig and Djura condemn it to the flame. After which Central Yharnam is built across the valley from Cathedral award, the burning embers and stonework of Old Yharnam left to the beasts, and Djura. With their source of blood lost (the Pthumerian chalice needed to access the dungeons you gain from after the BSB, the Healing Church ends up fracturing. The Choir finding a different chalice and source of blood, whilst the School of Mensis attempts other methods, eventually gaining the attention of the true Pthumerians who proceed to infiltrate and take it over for their own means. Numbered answers to your specific questions. 1. Because Laurence transforms and access to the Pthumerian Dungeons is lost when Old Yharnam burns the Healing Church splits and the School of Mensis led by Micolash forms, building a hidden city in some of the ruins of Old Yharnam, or just using a part of the valley floor previously untouched, carving the stone into the walls etc. 2. Cathedral Ward and the Hunter’s Workshop were both built before Old Yharnam burned, perhaps I failed to accurately explain my original opinion so this is a clarification. The only “Hunter” Lineage with no influence from Gehrman is Logarius’ Executioners. 3. The Hunter’s Nightmare is basically built from distorted memories as a literal punishment for Gehrman, and Gehrman’s “children” (Hunter Lineages), as such it is not reflective of reality, the first chapel with the burning cleric beast is a distorted memory of the main cathedral, the one later on is also a memory but less distorted (as it’s from two powerful Hunter’s memories of the place). If we could investigate the one in real life more than we do we might find the now abandoned research hall, as you can definitely find the Astral Clocktower and Garden in Upper Cathedral Ward. As well as hear rain (which was in the base game too). 4. Cainhurst’s invasion of Yharnam if it happened would have been before the Burning of Old Yharnam, as the Church Hunters Garb is based on the Executioner’s shawl in thanks for them slaughtering the Cainhurst Vilebloods. I personally suspect that no invasion happened, mostly because the Bloodlickers seem to just show up where there is lots of blood to feast on. You can actually make them spawn in the Chalice Dungeons if you visceral an enemy and then leave the room for a bit. It’s more likely a specific torment for the boss of that area, who I suspect might have been an Executioner at some point. 5. Fishing Hamlet is before Laurence and Gehrman left Byrgenwerth. I don’t necessarily think Gehrman was a scholar himself, but he certainly worked with the institute (he’s in the trailer for the DLC). The DLC in general is chronologically in reverse. Each zone is further back in the timeline than the previous ones. Lord_Magmar fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 09:33
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