Here's a small quirk of Gwyndolin's hallway that I don't think anyone's really explored: there's an event specifically to manage your bloodstain and dropped items when the hallway contracts. Most people don't really think about this, but it's possible that when you beat Gwyndolin, you've dropped an item (unlikely) or have an unclaimed bloodstain (not-so-unlikely). But since the "infinite" hallway is now permanently inaccessible, you wouldn't be able to get them back. So there's an event script whose sole purpose is to check if the fight is over, and if so, move all the dropped items and bloodstains into the small hallway. It does this using a special event script command -- used nowhere else in the game, as I recall -- to move any of these things that reside in a 1450 (length) x 11 (width) x 1 (height) region covering the "infinite" hallway to a 70 x 7 x 1 region covering the small hallway. I'm not really sure how the math works, maybe it just scales down the relative coordinates since that would be the easiest, maybe it does some weird modulo operation, who knows. Anyway, I find it interesting that they decided to put in custom script command for this instead of moving all the stuff to a single "recovery" point. They were really committed to maintaining the illusion that the hallway actually does grow and shrink rather than being a separate location.
@@Someone89a Good point; all they have to do is reuse the "unstable ground" thing that prevents your bloodstain and messages from showing up on elevators and the like. That's probably the case.
Thank you everyone for your patience, it's been far too long since my most recent upload. I plan to remedy that by making a crap-ton more content this coming fall and for the foreseeable future. I can't wait and hope you're looking forward to it too!
Nice to see you're back. Are you gonna continue the Compare-Through series of Demon's Souls? E: Nevermind, sorry. You answered it in the firrst three minutes.
@@silvy3047 Most games still do, computer graphics overall is a bunch of clever tricks and shortcuts devised to not "do the real thing". (That's why Ray tracing supposed to be such a big thing, as it allows devs to do away with some of those hacks and approximations in lighting and reflections).
You should see dragonball fighterz, one of the most impressive videogames with its trickery for cutscenes and cinematics. Definitely the most interesting game to see behind the scenes
A note about the underwater textures: The water in the original Dark Souls and Switch version was SIGNIFICANTLY more translucent than it is in DSR. While it is still not super easy to see those textures, it is certainly significantly more noticeable in the original version.
It’s mind-boggling to realize you were able to do all of this without Freecam up until this point. But hearing that you intend to do a fresh batch of content soon, I would like to put a viewer request onto the table! I don’t know how much there would actually be to talk about behind the scenes, but semi-online features like messages and bloodstains seem like they could be very interesting, and probably more complicated than they seem.
That reminds me of the blue ghost that you can put on messages in DS3. I would like to know what determines the equipment of those since it always seems to be an arbitrary point between the start and end of my playthrough. And sometimes even showing gear I never equipped!
I found out that the blue ghost didn’t save on my character that I didn’t rate any messages on, so when I put a message, swapped some gear, and replaced the message, the ghost changed to almost match my current gear. It even saved wether I was 2-handing my weapon or 1-handing. The shield was always that circle shield even though I equipped crest shields. I didn’t test greatshields. And the dark hand was replaced with a caestus. I didn’t change a lot of gear so this could use some further testing, and maybe some sort of list on what weapons and armor appear as what on messages. Likely the same applies to the other ghosts like bloodstains and recent players. So as long as you don’t rate (you can read) messages or place any messages, you can have your first message always be your current gear.
@@thaias9654 This is mind boggling how complex this game can be, even for how simple it can feel - it's so amazing to learn about a game that has a special place in my heart and such.
I always wondered what they actually looked like. At one point very early on I thought it was actually Nito, then I wondered if there was anything special about them.
man these videos always end up making me wish that fromsoft would make a director's cut or in a wilder scenario a full on remake with all the things they cut/couldn't implement properly or something like that, i can't believe that after all these years there's still so many secrets and cool hidden things being found
I would take that over a new game. If they had the time and resources to fully flesh out and integrate all the unused lore and areas in Ds1, 2, 3, bloodborne.
99% of all games are never ever fully complete. There are always things that are cut from the final product that is released then publicly. This isn’t even really a matter of time and resources, as you can have all of that and then some, but there will always be ideas that never make it in because you are always coming up with new ones throughout the process. That’s just how it is working on a creative project.
Developer1: we need to make an infinite hallway, I'm thinking about hidden teleport triggers and such. It's pretty difficult to pull off tho. Developer2: just make a 7 minutes long corridor. No one will walk it all the way while Fighting the boss. Developer1: heh, that could work too.
I have had similar discussions during web development XD (I'm usually the one coming up with the more (sometimes unnecessarily) robust and complicated solutions)
Kinda neat to consider though that maybe Gwendolyn himself came up with this trick, and was sure any opponent wouldn't follow him for that long and survive. Like some real life "magic" (trick). His illusions weren't perfect after all, like Gwynevere, which won't survive a bow shot.
Strong, reaching-into-the-broken-vending-machine energy from Manus there. Great job putting this together anyway. Always fascinating watching folks continue dissecting the game even after all these years.
These types of visual tricks are not that far removed from what good filmmakers will do in movies. Goes to show the level of creative problem solving needed for video game development and how you can accomplish a lot with very little.
I might have stolen the idea of using a small font in my video title from Limit Breakers. But what's an old man gonna do about it anyways??? No but in all seriousness, does that look okay on everyone's display?
FWIW, the full video title is just barely too long on my phone and ends with an ellipse. Maybe you could replace the and with an ampersand and possibly cut the parentheses, just an idea!
That Shot from the Kiln make it so the Original Size of the First Flame be FUCKING HUGE!!! It explains why at the end we "explode" and also explain why at the end of Dark Souls 3 the flame bearly pops due to how weak it is. Man, Myazaki should release the full thing for us to read
It's good to have Illusory Wall videos back, but damn this really makes me feel like they had no idea what to do with the Painted World when they first made it. It was basically a test map, but for the map designers and not for physics and that kind of stuff, and they found any way they could to keep it in.
weird to think that this strange world kinda awkwardly welded into DS1 ended up being the concept for the grand finale of the whole series and the end of the cycle of flame
What I found weird was thinking about how they probably didn’t want to have to go through losing finished content after having left the northern limit in demon’s souls unused after putting so much work into it
this series is just going through everything in the back of my brain edit: you’re a legend for timestamps in like every video. IllusoryWall you’re bringing together so many people together from all souls games, showing us all really great content like this in 2021 is helping to keep this game alive 👏
I spent all night like “I’m so tired, I’m gonna go right to sleep” and of course the moment I decide to, you upload. Couldn’t be more happy to lose sleep.
Videos like this are so insightful for game development. Also, I noticed the Sweet Home music at the end and had to give it a shoutout. The music in that game was such a mood despite the NES sound limitations.
It's funny to see how Manus' full model is used for him pulling you into the past. Since it didn't change while using the Enemy Randomiser mod I previously thought that his arm coming out of the portal is a separate character model. There's no doubt that what became the "Painted World of Ariamis" went through many changes during the development, since it was one of the first areas that From Software designed for Dark Souls and they still really wanted to include it in the final game somewhere, even if it wasn't possible to make it connect to the rest of the world in a normal way. I wonder if there's anything else interesting that you could discover involving the cutscene that plays when you first enter Lordran, since it does not have the tree that's normally located right next to the Firelink Shrine Bonfire, meaning it inexplicably appears right after the cutscene ends. Did the developers just move the tree away for the purposes of the cutscene?
Growing up with outdated PCs, I kinda grew to be interested in the ways different games and situations would load in, watching how and when stuff would pop in on my toaster oven. Now I guess I've got a weird soft spot for all the little simple tricks and stuff like this that pulls everything together, knowing how things works behind the scenes just makes a game more enjoyable imo since you're kinda thinking about the game itself as well as how the behind the scenes stuff is all coming together. As always, your vids slap and I'm always jazzed to see a new one!
How does that continuity error even slip by? Smough already had a death animation, or that cutscene was made before his in game animation, then it's weird they animated a different one for a cutscene that doesn't even match up with his in game one, Only to swap out the cutscene death animation with his in game one? That's just strange
Its quite strange, but I feel like it's less of a mistake and more of "shrug". Like they probably just liked how each pose looked, and agreed that most people probably wouldn't notice. And to their credit I think they were right!
@@illusorywall Also, what seems like a trivial matter of swapping the placement of a character model in a cutscene would in reality constitute at least a few hours of work. So when they decided to go with Smough being on his back instead of his front, they decided the other angle looked good enough for the shot they needed. And that it wasn't worth the effort and time it would take to correct something the player would never notice. Making a game _at all_ is a Herculean effort for everyone involved. Making it and keeping it on schedule and under budget even more so. Every production is, on some level, held together by paper clips and duct tape. We should be lucky that the scene worked well enough that we needed to hack the game to even notice the trick they pulled.
That rotting dragon is really depressing, but also kind of interesting how an upper half is lying on a clif, and in lost Izalith we find the lower half, what happened to these guys?
Woah. I was watching through this playlist again only to go to close it and realize I watched this less an hour after it was uploaded. Glad DS1 content is still being released in 2021.
It just occured to me that the building in the Kiln of the First Flame and Priscilla's tower are very alike. One conceals the secret of Lifehunt, the other safeguards the secret of the Prophecy.
So the Gwyndolin's hallway makes a lot of sense now, just recently i played through DS1 Remastered after a very long time in coop. And when we went in, me as the phantom also got the cutscene, and i got so confused because i don't remember seeing that before (i guess maybe i never did that boss in coop before) and i remember saying how that was very weird because it doesn't happen with any other boss. But since right when you go into the fog you are in the main hallway, they had to force the cutscene to teleport the phantoms to the second hallway aswell. Very interesting to be honest.
I know that in DS3, the world is colliding in on itself and thus physical locations are not where they were originally, so Irithyll wasn't literally part of Anor Londo until DS3, but I do find it really interesting that a snowy level like Irithyll became an adjacent area to Anor Londo when the original plan was for the Painted World to connect to it in some way. Perhaps they liked the aesthetic of Anor Londo being so close to a snowy area that it inspired Irithyll's creation.
What about the crows feathers? Have you ever looked into how many different variations of the cut scene there are when the crow takes you to fire link shrine? Vaati once pointed out how they are different each time. The placement of the falling feathers. I hope you understand what I mean lol
Ah so I've never looked at that specifically but that doesn't surprise me. It's not something they necessarily went out of their way to implement, I think it just means that they handled it as a certain kind of effect that isn't uncommon in their cutscenes. Take the dragon landing on the steps in Boletaria 1-1 in Demon's Souls. Rocks and dust get kicked up when it does this, but they get kicked up differently every time. This is because instead of animating it a specific way, they create an "explosion" effect that generates some thrown rocks as part of the effect. It's generating in real-time and has some RNG to it, so it kind of does its own thing "on top" of the cutscene, in a way, if that makes any sense. So there are 0 extra variations of the same cutscene made for the feathers, it's always the same cutscene file being loaded, but there's also hypothetically infinite variations possible if you're accounting for how the effect processes.
Wow surprisingly clever! The developers could have been so much lazier but they actually put plenty of thought and effort into each of these tricks. Nice!
omg welcome back, i've been rewatching all the other dissected videos religiously lately to sate my craving for your content and today that craving is well sated
the cutscene @23:30 looks almost what I'd like to imagine as the 'you lose' screen. Your character is sitting defeated at firelink shrine, about to go from crestfallen to hollow. The crow sees this, and departs to get yet another undead to fulfill the "prophesy"
About the teleport from painting to firelink, iirc Priscilla was originally going to be our maiden in black so they probably just used the crow cutscene to transport you from the painted world which would have been the equivalent to the nexus. Very interesting stuff either way!
Awesome! Another video finally! I have been waiting for these for quite a while. Would love another one on DS2 Dissected as that is my most favorite one of the series in terms of lore!
Your videos are always the ones I'm most excited to see. You're like an archeologist of interactive artwork. and the souls games are my favorite work of art.
Great video as always. I loved the free cam views of the kiln area. I was hoping though that you would have shown the ceiling from where you fight Gwyn at. There's a mural of a sun directly above. I feel that it represents the literal sun of the world being the light of the first Flame and giving yourself to the flame ignites the Sun. Also if you think about solaire's quest to find his own sun, if he links the fire in his world, even though his body Burns, he finally finds and becomes the sun.
Very cool, it’ll be interesting to see what new things are discovered in the next few years. Thanks for the video man, am looking forward to the next one.
I really feel like the NPC that was curled up in a Crow ball had to be Oscar of Astora. He was supposed to follow the Chosen Undead basically everywhere, it would just make sense. Idk who else it could be, given where the crow goes.
My question is what happens at the *end* of the fight? The ending cutscene always moves the player to the same position, so if you push Gywndolin to the end of the hallway how does the game handle moving the player smoothly?
I might be wrong but iirc there's a few frames in the ending cutscene after the wall retracts where the environment is entirely obscured by a flash of light. My guess is that in the first frame of the cutscene, you get teleported to the start of the long hallway, the wall retracts, then in the flash you get teleported to the short hallway
I'd like to think that the cutscene of watching the crow fly away looks like an opening cutscene, like this was how the game would have started. It makes YOU look like the crestfallen knight, rather than that being a separate NPC, and you just decided to get your shit together
This isn't an out-of-bounds thing or on par with any of the other information in the video, but during the cutscene where the crow drops the player off at Firelink, the large tree near the bonfire is missing
I feel like the Painting world perhaps was meant to be a dream at some point. The player gets dragged in, falls unconscious. A version of them does the level, the crow carries them away after the boss is defeated and the player inexplicably wakes up in Fire Link with the crow watching over them from a different perch than normal, almost like it wanted to make sure they were okay. I assume this idea was both scrapped for being too out of place, as there is no proof of alternative ways the player would enter that world for that leaving to make sense, and also because being brought to Fire Link Shrine may have been too tedious for the player who would likely want to just run back to Anor Londo to finish other things
