A suggestion, if possible: Where our Tarnished starts. It's not pre-rendered, since we can have different gear there, but it visually doesn't seem to line up with anywhere I know of on the map.
That's an interesting one, I'll try and check if i that's a different map or just a reused one from the game. It could be somewhere we know but slightly edited and hidden by fog in the cutscene.
I tried to get so many lore youtubers to cover this and none did. Im glad you are. That warp only works once for some reason until you leave and come back. And no one questions why there is a stone platform inside a tree. They definitly had other plans for this area at one point.
Fromsoft loves being 100% accurate to concept art, the zoom out of the stone platform looks exactly the same as the art of marika shattering the elden ring, its even slightly crooked in the same way
With the teleporter my guess is at one point Fromsoft planed on the player walking directly into the Erdtree and climbing up some flight of stairs to the Radagon arena, but since they hadn't made the stairs yet they added the teleport as a placeholder for testing. Then when they changed their minds and decided to have the player just teleport directly to the arena from the entrance they never removed the placeholder. This would also explain why the 'ash' only covers half the area, since the player would only be able to approach the stone platform from one direction they would only see it from one side
"Stone platform" is definitely giving anvil, it's reminding me of the opening cutscene where Marika shatters the Elden Ring and Radagon tries to repair it. It's the same stone.
The unused geometry around Mohgwyn Palace and the half-completed nature of the cliffs points to some of that area being altered or scaled back, and I expect that the interior of the Burned Erdtree wasn't always just going to change the Impenetrable Thorns into a fog wall. I expect that the interior may have initially been planned as a bit more of a traditional final dungeon area rather than just a cutscene entrance, so the warp there was just a placeholder intended to return you after the boss fight that was never removed when that was changed. Related: I finally got around to loading up my 1.0 save again the other day, and I forgot just how different the game feels. Oddly, even the geometry that allows you to drop down on top of the cliffs from the Mogwyn Midpoint are ever-so-slightly different. You can still get down onto that basically out-of-bounds area, but only via a different path. You've definitely got me interested in poking around more closely at some of the more out-of-the-way spots of the game, so thanks as always for another neat spotlight!!
The teleporter makes me imagine a much more bombastic boss fight. Where you’d have to, or maybe just could, jump on or off the platform via spiritspring. Although this would result in something similar to the Lost Izalith scenario where, while in a fall animation you could be hit with some bullshit. A bigger Radagon fight does still sound cool to me
Some of the cinematics are pre rendered cutscenes but all of the ones featuring the player are carefully curated views of in game graphics and animations
Massive trees in the elden beast arena can also represent of how many worlds/planets the golden order has took over, so we are just another one in its chest of things to rule on
An apt observation, though it's worth distinguishing that the Golden Order was only the ruling doctrine in The Lands Between, decided by Marika and her ilk ('Let's get rid of that Rune of Death real quick, and anything accepting of the Crucible.'). The Erdtree is a different concept and can exist without the imposed Order. 🙂What we loosely know as the Elden Ring is an amalgam of cosmic laws, which Shards can be swapped and arranged to shift the rules of a pocket realm, so to speak. All that said - It's going to be interesting where or when Elden Ring 2 is going to take place, with Fromsoft having all these possibilities.
They look more like the stone pillars underground rather than "erdtrees". I'd imagine if it was some kinda Greater Will flex those pillars would look like trees. They pretty much have no tree aspect and when we see them compared to the erdtree they are significantly thinner. The Elden Beast arena makes me think more of the underground sea west and east of the Siofra/Nokron play area. To put it poeticly, we are battling the incarnation of the world's order amidst the pillars that hold up the world.
@@blizzardgaming7070 Interestingly, some of these same trees in the Mohgwyn Palace actually have unpetrified cores and new sprouts are growing from them.
Very interesting about the back half of the arena, i always thought it looked odd from above. Another oob investigator found that there is geometry between the internal hallway that lines up with the ashen arena below, not the stone arena above. I wonder if that teleporter was less a "heres a way to get back up just in case" and was initially how you started the radagon fight like touching the golden door. It makes sense considering that the stone platform is so much higher up and the return warp deactivates after the first time you use it. Thanks for another interesting dive into the inner workings of the game Kami! Cant wait to see where you go next!
“Stone platform” seems to be the place where the game starts for the tarnished. We literally see the golden fog wall - from the inside this time. Later when we burn the erdtree and enter the fog wall, we don’t enter it like we do with every other fog wall in the game; here it plays the exact same animation as the beginning of the game - a blinding white light, and then we get teleported inside. Maybe that’s a hint as to why the tarnished starts from the stone platform.
I interpreted Erdtree Pillars as a suggestion that there are many other worlds or planets with their own trees and the world of Elden Ring is much bigger and more complex than what we see in the game. Very interesting video, from game development and in-game lore perspective.
The pillars are what hold the world up, clearly. I like that they included a way to get back to the fight if you somehow got down there with an HP left before the collision barriers were put up...wonder if Radagon would've chased you down there when that was still theoretically possible.
Technically he could, but while currently there isn't a killbox around the Arena it's still a more than 20m tall jump which is automatically lethal, to get down there you'd have to be in a situation where you avoided dying to that as well so it's very rare.
I wonder if originally entering the Erdtree wouldn't have teleported you directly to the stone platform but lower, in the ash. The dungeon teleporter is probably a placeholder
Great video! I liked the trick with the Elden Beast cutscene to mask the transition. I also love how its legs are so thin and and gangly when you can see them unmasked from the water.
the tall pillars could be a nod to ds1 intro trailer where it had archtrees in it. love your vids. also i was wondering does the tree sentinel have a face under his helm??
@@Kami.Sensei didn't find anything, but i found the answer to pillars. apparently, its a recurrent theme called it the Ash Lake ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-BxZBXB-yZsE.html
Watching the Elden Beast spawn animation made me think if we can see the other bosses animation. It would be very intriguing. Great video btw, I love your content.
very nice detail that the inside of the tree is designed to actually look like a tree, the idea of climbing to reach radagon is a bit like the final boss of p5 royal that awaits you at the top of the tree of eden
The pillars in Elden Beast arena are probably representations of other dimensions. I know some speculate that these represent worlds, but after DLC i think ee can say that those are different microcosms.
God, the teleporter made me think, can you imagine if we got an Inside the Erdtree legacy dungeon? Like a reverse Ocarina of Time where the first dungeon is an evil castle and the last dungeon is a giant tree.
since the greater will is an entity that extends its power into the cosmos it is very likely that the other trees of light in the beast's arena are all the worlds that it has colonized and subjected to its power by marking them with trees, in the pocket dimension where the beast exists it is possible that a fragment of the will resides that is connected to all the worlds it controls/influences
Thanks for this thorough look at these iconic boss arenas! Regarding the lower, ash-like floor at 1:57, was anything made invisible, or is half of the floor simply never visible? Also, at 3:28, there seems to be a second ash-like floor beneath the first one. Is there a drop from one ashen floor to another? There are curious views at 3:36 and 3:40 too, where it looks like the Elden Beast's ocean is loading through a bark gap but much higher than the arena itself. What's going on there? I'm also interested in the enormous sphere outlined in the map data at 3:50. What is this object? Is that the asset for the Dark Moon tied to the Age of Stars ending? If so, it's intriguing that the asset appears to be due north, like the 3D moon unique to the Moonlight Altar, since the Dark Moon manifests to the southeast in Ranni's ending. Similarly, is the light source directly to the south in the Elden Beast's arena a 3D object, or just part of the skybox? I'm curious if there are any other details like this hidden in these arenas. I recall people mentioning that there are four other Elden Beast models hidden as well, apparently meant for an unused attack. Does the black, inky substance that emanates from Radagon starting at 4:58 ever expand to cover the entire Stone Platform? The camera never seemed to go high enough again in the Elden Beast cutscene to confirm if the ink stops at a certain point or envelops the floor. If it covers the floor, does it stick to the Stone Platform, or reach beyond the limits of the platform? Also, when the modded camera cuts to the Elden Beast's arena at 5:44, is that bringing the player there while the Elden Beast remains at the Stone Platform? If so, why is the Stone Platform's floor seemingly duplicated with the Erdtree roots? It's strange how the modded camera has a sudden darkness that temporarily obscures the Elden Beast and purple star field at 6:02 as well. Thanks again for this nuanced investigation of these areas! I'd enjoy seeing videos on Rykard, the Ancestor Spirits, and Fell Twins' arenas too. I also wonder if sniping the Leyndell soldier on the bridge before the Fell Twins fight triggers, or luring him away then killing him, might affect his presence in the boss fight and/or the item he drops. I think it'd likewise be fun to check the exact point where the normal sun stops being visible at Enir-Ilim, and if the moon is ever visible in Farum Azula.
This. Is. Bloody. Amazing. Now I wonder if Isolated Divine Tower is really isolated. It's visible from Bestial Sanctum but you can get there physically only by interacting with waygate at the Divine Bridge, to which you get through trap chest in Tower of Return or through the Fortified Manor in Leyndell. Would love if you explore it :)
6:38 this is probably a commonly accepted theory by now, but I'm convinced the pillar-like Erdtrees are meant for two things: 1. Letting the Tarnished know that The Golden Order and The Greater Will are spread across far more than we realize (whether that be across other continents or on other planets), that they are a greater force than we can even possibly comprehend. It's telling us that just slaying The Elden Beast or destroying The Erdtree will do nothing to the Greater Will. 2. Letting us, the players, know that there are more Erdtrees in the Elden Ring Universe, that the one in The Lands Between is not just some one-off. This could be possibly Miyazaki hinting to us the possibility of Elden Ring becoming a numerical franchise later down the line in the same vein as the Dark Souls series.
Can you remove the fog when standing in the tallest tower in the academy of raya lucaria? And can you show the top of the forsaken depth well? That grace before mohgs illusion boss fight. You can literally look up 200 meters. I wonder where the top leads you.
I wonder if the white stuff at the base of the stone platform is dried out putrescence. It does, after all, appear to be the substance that oozed from Godwyn, of the Golden Lineage, which if so would connect it to Marika and thus to the Elden Ring, Erdtree etc. It's a stretch to say all that at the moment, but the resemblance is thete
I guess the end-of-dungeon-teleporter is there to handle moving the player from the erdtree entrance to the stone platform. Would explain why it can only be used once.
Oddly, I found that same end of dungeon exit, it is visible from the arena in certain spots. It's real odd and I'm curious what it's used for, maybe viewing the map in an editor will explain more about it.
Unless you’ve already done this and I just haven’t seen it yet, could you measure up the land of shadows with the lands between I really want to know things like size comparison and how it could possibly fit in physically with the lands between, maybe use the Erdtree/Scadutree as a sort of reference point by putting them in the same location?
@@Kami.Sensei Would clipping around the fog gate in Ashen Leyndell allow for a view of the crucified Marika, or does she truly only appear for the cutscene? Also, is there an animation for when she lands and hits the ground in that cutscene? I've wondered if her post-battle state might actually be the result of her landing after the rune arc breaks to let Radagon fight.
Is there anything in the files or coding or anything that implies Godfrey and Hoarah would've been fought at different locations? Seems odd to place a boss with earth-rending moves onto a wooden platform
Still a bummer to me that both the erdtree and the dlc tree didn't get used as final explorable areas on the inside. I really wanted the final fight to be at the very top of the tree(s) after climbing them
I absolutely agree, I think the Scadutree should’ve been its own Legacy Dungeon. Climbing a glowing tree and fighting a boss at the top would be so sick.
I heard about the random teleporter down there before including some claims about its purpose. Is there a chance for you to check if they are using the same event of that teleporter to move you from the fog gate in the first place?
I personally was a little disappointed when there wasn't a final dungeon inside the Erdtree. The dungeon teleporter and the big area below the arena seems to suggest there were at least some thoughts about making something - it's too bad nothing ever came of it, even if it's more likely it was just a big grandiose path to the final boss like in the Dark Souls games than an actual dungeon.
It wasn't made for any dungeon, it most likely was a test to check if upon entering the area your character will be moved on the main platform where bossfight takes place.
