You ever just look at one of the massive corpse piles littered about the game and just think to yourself that there aren't enough houses in the entire game to fit just the number of people in this pile? I think that often.
I’ve always just viewed the map of Elden Ring like you’re supposes to view the map of any Elder Scrolls game, where the size of the game area is only a fraction of a percent of the actual size of the map, according to the lore Skyrim is only like 10 sq miles, but its supposed to be like the size of Germany
@@brandonjensen586 I don't think you need to do that for Elden Ring though. I believe, the game tries to strongly communicate that there have been a lot of earthquakes (Just look at the jagged long rock formations in Liurnia and everywhere else) and a lot of land has been lost, presumably because of Marika shattering the Ring.
The Academy is terribly designed. You gotta get through the zombie graveyard and a waterwheel with no safety measures to get to class, and if you miss your stop you get dropped to the bottom and next thing you know you're in the funhouse of the headmistress' weird son. And then there is the Haligtree with no accessibility or railings whatsoever, and full of ladders. Idk how Miquella thought the Albinaurics could get around if they made it there.
As the biggest explorer of the ENTIRE Weeping Peninsula you have NO IDEA how much the second half of Castle Morne annoyed the hell out of me. Not only that rump. But the entirety of the torture cells have no doors. Or stairs. Or nothing connecting to the main castle and not only that!! There is no way back into the main castle. Not even a poorly placed elevator or something once you jump the wall to the second bon-grace-fire you are stuck there... Fuck it
But ya gotta admit castle morne and the buildup are pretty sweet bits of exploration in the early game. The misbegotten are pretty creepy the first time you see them
This is also a fantasy world with waygates that magically take you to places. They could have easily set up a waygate in Elphael to Altus or Linurnia and then destroyed it (in case they lost or stalemated which they did).
@geordiejones5618 i imagined that, half of the Haligtree has fallen...and the access through Ordina leads to a branch, maybe the devs didnt gave importance to this hahahaha
@@anonisnoone6125it is even funnier in Bloodborne with the insane amount of gravestones on every earlier. They're definitely more aiming for the vibe of the an area, far from any practically. Which is endearing in its own way.
Shaman village not having more houses is such a missed oppurtunity. It would've been much more haunting and made you think about the scale of the massacres
@@c0n33r you could still add graves, a ghost that says something, a unique plant that says in its item description that it grows from the blood of shamans...
maybe they did not all live in the same village. maybe the shaman village is just one of many such villages and this particular one is where Marika is from. that would make a lot more sense since it's much easier to persecute disconnected small groups of people
It's actually the scale of the construction that always gets me. It's like "Here is a tower. We only have to raise it 300 m into the sky before we put a single room on top." All of these seem to be hundreds of years of construction projects, if even remotely possible. I also want to add that this is something I kinda have to take into consideration when I plan and design my D&D maps, because the players 100% walking past the obvious plot device, but will ponder for over an hour about the significance of a lit candle in a cave.
How about the tallest tower in Raya Lucaria being completely inaccessible to the people who live/work there, despite the description of Terra Magicka. What, did they go outside and through a cave system just to cast that shit?
I always feel like I'm missing something in that cave. Unless the little place where the sotcerer fires at you from a higher ledge can be reached and doesn't lead anywhere, i think the cave actually connects into the academy as well. most likely at the pit with the abductor
Echoes of Queen Marika, The Eternal: "Hear me, thou gracegiven. Thy requests for bathing rooms shall evermore go unheeded. What need of thee dost thou have defecation when thou dost subside on The Erdtree's light and sap? I care not of this 'Osha' thou invoke. I will slay it as I have slain all who oppose The Greater Will. I, Queen Marika The Eternal hath set an example, and doth not give a shit."
5:37 The candles could actually have an explanation, but it's a kinda long story. You see, there's this youtuber called Hawkshaw and he popularized the "color theory" in Elden Ring. Basically what the theory suggests is that things don't determine their colors, colors determine things. You don't get violent and angry and then turn red, you turn red and then become violent and angry, because you turned red. Color determines nature. The color of a candles stick is white, which is the palest of colors, which makes it kinda eternal, just like how the blackness of void is Also eternal. These candles sticks could in ER world's physics burn literally forever.
This is something that From Soft does all the time and it drives me insane. Places where, even when things didn't go to shit, it would've been impossible to walk from point A to point B. Here some examples I noticed: -Anor Londo's main path only leads to the city walls, without any way to reach the actual city. There is also a single bed and it's too little for anything other than a human. -Drangleic Castle requires the player to cross a bunch of rooms, none of which are livable spaces, then in the second half you have to go outside, on a narrow staircase without railings to reach the upper throne room (why does it even exist if the throne room is on the ground floor). - Cainhurst: To reach the throne room you need to cross the roof of a narrow tower, worst part is that they could have placed a door right on that small tower with the little bridge and it would've made sense. -Lothric castle: it's impossible to actually reach the city trough the main gate and the only way into the castle is through a ladder in a church. The castle itself is mostly empty; again, lots of fortifications but next to zero places where the royal family could live. -Sekiro: Most of the roads lead to nowhere. It would be impossible to move around the place without a grapling hook. - Elden Ring: to reach the actual class room you need to cross a graveyard and then an extremely dangerous water elevator. Now, maybe the broken staircase lead to the bridge next to the elevator, but there is still the problem that, despite how big the place is, there are only 2, maybe three classrooms. THere is simply no way to reach the rest of the school. The Volcano Manor has a similar problem where there are no bedrooms or livinq quarters of the sort. My headcanon is that the large area with multiple broken wooden floors (the one with hanging cages) was the main body of the villa, that got demolished by Tanith to make more room for cages. This also makes sense as the place is the only way to link the upper part to the Throne Room. Carian Manor: again, the only functional room is the chapel. The few rooms that exist are far too spread out to be used as an actual house. Leyndell: in theory for the normal way reach the Erdtree you'd need to pass trough the arena where you fight fake Godfrey , down the elevator, pass the Crucible Knight and then... nothing because there is no path that connects that road to the rest of the city.
Maybe you could transition to a content style similar to RoflWaffle with Gran Turismo or something. I watch a lot of that kinda thing and clearly plenty of others do!
The entrance to the leonine boss arena is a triumphal arch which are made to celebrate victories in battle that leads to a graveyard with the people who where killed. There is a sword shrine next to castle Mourne that indicates a battle happened here and it is secluded because its a graveyard with dead people at the lowest point in the lands between
Every time I go by the windmills on altus plateau, I wonder to myself: What exactly are they *milling*? Seriously, there's little to no evidence of wheat cultivation, or indeed *any* significant agriculture *anywhere* in this game.
Also, where are the bathrooms, Lyndell has sewers, but where's the bathrooms to actually get stuff into the sewers. Apparently, people no longer defecate in Elden Ring because the entire land would be filled with shit
It always bothered me that none of these shambling corpses, or the people who were once alive, have anywhere to live! The lands should be lousy with abandoned homes. There should be thousands of empty houses everywhere. Where did all these people live before the zombie apocalypse?
There are tons of ruins everywhere, and we're going through the lands between in its most dilapitated state after a giant war. Also scale in video games is inherently flawed, and absolutely no one would enjoy the game if it were in the least "sensible" when it comes to population and housing. Nor should anyone really ask developers to design a fantasy city adhering to that philosophy.
To be fair to the builders of the big Castle Morne water's edge fortification, doors are actually structural and defensive weakpoints -please ignored the windows- so it's actually a fantastic building! But for real though, I think the gatehouse on the water there is actually protecting the tiny peninsula, where the Leonine Misbegotten is, from the outside world - it seems to have some significance, given the large tree, the grave markers, the sword monument outside Castle Morne, and also that it's the location of the treasured sword of the castle. It probably has a lot of hidden significance too, when you realize that the entire Weeping Peninsula is a microcosm of the whole Lands Between. And come on Lost, candles and lamps are very important spiritual and religious tools. Of course they would be used by the pious servants and worshippers of the dragons in a dragon altar. Their fire keeper (a real job btw) would surely tend to the flames dutifully. If you actually want a pretty bizarre location, I'd point to that one corridor around the garden outside the Fortified Manor. Not the entire path, just that one part that deadends and has literally no use other than looking pretty. It sure does make the garden look very pretty though.
The gatehouse at the bottom of castle Morne could also have a symbolic meaning, think Arc de Triomphe. Either it's actually a gatehouse and the area where the boss is was part of a much alrger landmass that actually deserved a gatehouse, or it's more a symbolic thing that was added as an entrance to a place that has some sort of meaning to the builders. The small island the boss is on definitely feels like it could have held some importance.
Funny that you should say that, because in my first playthrough Leyndell was the only Legacy Dungeon I didn't like because the first half felt too much like a real livable city.
yeah there are wayy too little housing spaces in elden ring. Like, except for leyndell and maybe volcano manor there arent any big places that you can imagine are used for living
I view Elden Ring in a similar way as the older pokemon games. In Elden Ring, we never see anything that could be considered a city. Even Leyendell is crazy small and would barely fit any people. It's there as a representation of a village/city/etc. Same as the NPCs. We meet like 20 people on the entire continent. But they talk as if there is still life, still "normal" people out there, not as if it's an undead wasteland. I think they represent the people of the Lands Between. Still, it's funny how weird this game is if you take it at face value. 4-5 houses? That's a village!
This isn't just elden ring, this is basically every video game ever made. The exception would be in games where large swathes of the map are unreachable background paintings, where sometimes they bring out the true scale of human communities, but I can't thing of a single game that really let's you actually explore a city sized settlement other than maybe like GTA
I like to think the architects just have the "git gud" attitude about what theyre building. Oh you cant get into your wittle castle??? How about you git gud scrub. Simply scale the wall or destory this impenetrable layer of bricks.
This reminds me of that architecture video for Elden Ring, where the 3 walls of lyndell are stupidly huge enough to be a bit larger than dams. Maybe the architects would have been able to build more houses and stairs if they didn't waste all those materials on 3 walls
Some of these weird design choices aren't really continuity errors but legitimately are just how some castles are built; with dead ends, separate buildings disguised to look as one, choke points, and places where there is seemingly no access where inhabitants would put ladders when not under attack. It was actually kind of a mindset of Medieval architects to not make their fortresses look impenetrable because then attackers would just lay siege/step up their game so they basically booby trapped them with design "flaws"
About Marika's village, I would say it is because of scale problem. In reality, Lands Between would've been much bigger, but it isn't in game due to limited technologies.
Bloodborne is also completely nonsensical from the urbanistic point of view. Ladders being the only way to access entire neighbourhoods (do you imagine one second having to take a 40 foot ladder every single morning to go to work, and back up in the evening ?), streets that go nowhere, roads breaking suddendly into flight of stairs despite being clearly made for carriages, barriers placed direcly against doorways, buildings with the interior window layout different from outside (in fact I don't think a single building, bare a few exceptions, in Bb is coherent in rhat regard) closed streets full of carriages... that couldn’t possibly have ended up where they are since there is no road leading there, and so on... The general atmosphere is so perfectly immersive that you easily miss this, but when you start looking closer it is extremely jarring. Diehard fans will excuse these as us, the hunter, dreaming, but I think the explanation is more pragmatic: Fromsoft design doesn’t try to convey a logical world, that could be lived in, it tries to convey a general idea, a mood, of what such a world might look like, without spending unnecessary time on the logical side of thing.
When Miquella was a young deity, they were fawned over incessantly. As they were moved throughout the kingdom, as was customary for newborn deities, Miquella planted fogwalls to make their most favorite rooms more private for reading and rumination.
I think the bottomless pits underneath the lower floors of elevators, other than being a From Soft screw you, are so the elevator can’t come down on top of you.
I'm pretty sure it's a thing where if you can use something then other people can use it to like sites of grace or Spirit Springs. The random wall is just before the cherished sword of Castle Morne, so it's likely a celebrational arch. Worth noting of that cave, is that it belongs to the Dragon Communion, so their representatives going in and out like the Ancient Dragon Man likely put the candles there. As for the rooftops pathways, the Carian family of Raya Lucaria keep a lot of secrets from their people as a measure against foes and rebellious individuals. They worked with sorcerers of Sellia to develop Night sorcery of assassination, and Carian Retaliation is literally a kept secret, but Thops would make a sorcery of his own much like it before his mysterious death, which just so happens to be a desk overlooked by a secret ledge. In turn, there is truth in Sellen as the Graven Witch, but there was always surveillance at the ready in wait.
5:14 he got kicked off because he forgot about leyndell and how its just full of blocked off doors with messages saying "you don't have the right O, you don't have the right"
Game worlds are often smaller than what they're meant to be. Look at Pokemon, where towns in game can consist of 2 houses, while the anime shows them as more proper cities. My favourite example is how Hoenn's pacifilog town in game is comprised of wooden houses on floating platforms with their "roads" comprised of logs floating in the water, but its a city in the anime. For ER, I like to imagine things like Marikas village is as small as it is for gameplay purposes. Not only is it more memory used if populated with a ton of houses, but it also fills the area with unneeded areas that players will waste time looking around.
This kind of stuff is actually all over FromSoft games if you start looking for it. In Bloodborne, the little cathedral you go through on the way to Old Yharnam has a massive stained glass window on the outside, above the door. But on the inside, that same wall has a single tiny window and is otherwise completely solid There's also the Witch of Hemwick's house, which appears to be a huge, multi-story building on the outside, but on the inside is a single tiny room with a staircase leading down into a huge basement.
Great message. Having small mistakes like that doesn't take away from greatness, it makes it even more special. To get immersed in worlds to the point where you barely notice them. Art is made by humans and humans are inherently flawed beings. Just like how everything, no matter how good it is, will be flawed in some way.
I live for this kinda of niche, like we all know the devs didn't care about 1-1 accurate livable fantasy city, but actually looking at what is their and deciphering how people even existed is such a unique kind of entertaining.
Day 322 of asking lost to do a playthrough of elden ring slowly so that he can show us all the cool architecture and ask all the weird questions that pop into his mind. Dude has a voice made for unintentional ASMR and I'd fall asleep to that on the daily. Like a nature documentary!
In defence of castle morne: -The gate is most likely a folly. a structure built for no purpose other than showing off that you can afford to build it. -that building does not necessarily need a permanent entrance from sea level. It presumably serves as another point from which to defend against naval attacks. The ladder is likely there to access the graveyard. We need to ask which came first: the graveyard or the tower?
The first building not having a door gave me flashbacks to Drake and Josh building a treehouse from the inside and forgetting the door, trapping them. Maybe there's some poor worker's corpses in there who didn't come to the realization until the last brick was laid.
Random bad red man explains to me how absurd it is that the elevator is a giant stone slab rising from a pretty much bottomless hole and I agree before he proceeds with shanking me in the throat. 10/10 video.
The abundant use of ladders in Fromsoft games is really immersion breaking, especially when the main path is a ladder where there should be a more normal entrance like stairs.
3:15 that one's easy. They just never figured out another solution to what happens if you stand under a lowering elevator. The normal options are 1. it bounces back, with or without crushing damage, 2. it instagibs the player, 3. it phases through the player as if they weren't there. All were apparently unacceptable to Fromsoftware, so bottomless shafts to nowhere it is!
finally someone is talking about this, why has nobody been speaking about the buildings with seemingly no entrance or in the most strange place possible, in every Soulslike games ?
Pay closer attention to the tower at Castle Morne. It always seemed sunken into the earth to me. That's why there's no door. Also looks like the top was taken off, and castles are often built with false areas for defensive reasons anyway.
So actually the Marais gate makes sense because it's a castle for imprisonment and execution run by the steward family. It would need to be big enough to accommodate all enemies and allies
Hey Lost! Love this type of content from you! You are such a relatable person and you always make me laugh. Love your relationship with Thumpy, it reminds me of Pinky and the Brain! Keep up the amazing work and thanks for all you do!
"Drake... where's the door hole?" "It goes right there see, I drew it with the finger remedy." "You were supposed to open it up with the brick hammer..." "Dude I'm gonna!" "Oh really?" "Yes." "So go get the brick hammer" "Ok I will." *The thunking sound of someone walking into medival era concrete.* "... I see the problem." "OH DO YA?!"
The black keep is one it bothered me aswell like imagine you are a messmer soldier and you need to talk to your boss, do you have to parkour through fossilized specimens and elevators to get talk to him?
One of the hero graves just has a pit at the start, just a bit to the side. and i remember jumping into it thinking it was some secret, because theres no way anybody would be dumb enough to jump into it otherwise. Spoiler alert, it wasnt a secret and I was dumb enough to jump into it
This kind of stuff always kinda bothered me, and it has been a thing since demons' souls, all the way up to sekiro. Even other soulslikes are chock full of stuff like this, think of lies of P and the layout of the roads that doesn't make any sense, especially when carriages are just dropped around there (same exact case for bloodborne but that's set in a nightmare, isn't it?). You could make a 3 hours long video about every single game on this topic
Yeah, here's pretty much my main issue with lore hunters deriving huge convoluted timeline theories almost entirely from scrutinizing minor texture details. When the architechtural coherency of their buildings is this nonsensical, I don't think you can confidently claim that there have been x variations of Great/Erd/whatever-trees based on fairly minor variations in tree iconography in carvings and tapestries. I do not believe the artists have _that_ much of an attention to detail when they also fail to make their buildings make sense when they could have done so by merely adding a few unopenable doors for implied coherency.
Why is the entirety of Liurnia sunk? How did that happen the way it did? Did they build their roads underwater or did they just end up underwater? How are they still in a good enough shape to have a small army guarding the Academy when there's literally not a single livable house in the entire region?
One thing that has never made sense to me is Esgar the Blood Priest because he is sealed in a Catacombs Boss room with his dogs but like I imagine he'd be considered Blasphemous by the Golden Order and is sealed inside of a sacred room where Erdtree Burial takes place.
he's not really sealed. he's just there. we have to remember catacombs bosses are just there at the end to guard what is at the end Esgar is in the catacombs located in the shunning grounds where Mohg first communed with the formless mother. perhaps he's tracing the origin. peehaps Mohg ordered him to keep watch over the place. also we've seen followers of Mohg have the ability to move around using blood puddles
Oh, man. I'm only at 2:05, but IMMEDIATELY on seeing the first place, I knew you were gonna point out there are no doors in some places, and the first thing to mind? IMMUREMENT. So... I gotta wonder... who got immured?
People who play games just gotta deal with the fact that, like, Whiterun, one of the major, central capital cities in all of Skyrim, has about 70 people.
How about the Shadow Realm's area right after you fight Gaius, you know the area with his shack and the large stone bowl on the cliff that leads to the Scadutree? What is that incredibly massive black gate that seems to have some windows starting at the 3rd story of the building? It's clearly a gate of some kind but you can just walk around the sides to get to the same area on the other side...so what's its point?
Interesting, I haven’t seen a video yet that breaks down the illogical parts of the locations in Elden Ring (and evere souls game)- and there are really a lot of them, especially the elevators. I’m planning to try this game, but my PC isn’t quite up to it. It looks like it’s available on Boosteroid, but I haven’t seen it on other cloud services. It would be helpful if you could show how it runs there - that would definitely help me decide on a subscription. Thanks!
It does really irk me that for a game that cares so much about its coherent storytelling through item descriptions, that the same level of care just isn't taken with the environment. There aren't even any farms to feed the millions of people I must assume lived in the lands between. I want to pretend that I am exploring a civilization but I am ripped away to discover I am riding an on-the-rails hardcore Disneyland ride that was made for my fat, camera-toting ass.
lets be real, most areas in fromsoft games dont make any sense....its cool as a level in a video game but in real life no one would design places like that
erm achkshually ... :) wouldn't it be misbegotten building the doorless building and not albinaurics? i know why you chose that - there is no misbegotten helmet, so would be difficult to cosplay as something impossible. just saying :) and i'm happy to be wrong. i don't think i've seen any albinaurics there. subbed, btw. :)
You ever just look at one of the massive corpse piles littered about the game and just think to yourself that there aren't enough houses in the entire game to fit just the number of people in this pile? I think that often.
I’ve always just viewed the map of Elden Ring like you’re supposes to view the map of any Elder Scrolls game, where the size of the game area is only a fraction of a percent of the actual size of the map, according to the lore
Skyrim is only like 10 sq miles, but its supposed to be like the size of Germany
@@brandonjensen586 I don't think you need to do that for Elden Ring though. I believe, the game tries to strongly communicate that there have been a lot of earthquakes (Just look at the jagged long rock formations in Liurnia and everywhere else) and a lot of land has been lost, presumably because of Marika shattering the Ring.
Maybe their houses got smushed?
"Sirs, we art at capacity. Into the pile, if you would."
@@brandonjensen586 it's actually Poland but yeah, the size in-game isn't the real one
The Academy is terribly designed. You gotta get through the zombie graveyard and a waterwheel with no safety measures to get to class, and if you miss your stop you get dropped to the bottom and next thing you know you're in the funhouse of the headmistress' weird son.
And then there is the Haligtree with no accessibility or railings whatsoever, and full of ladders. Idk how Miquella thought the Albinaurics could get around if they made it there.
OSHA would be contacting very soon
And even if (when?) everything was working, you would have to take the world's longest flight of stairs
The academy wasn't always in that condition
American school
As the biggest explorer of the ENTIRE Weeping Peninsula you have NO IDEA how much the second half of Castle Morne annoyed the hell out of me. Not only that rump. But the entirety of the torture cells have no doors. Or stairs. Or nothing connecting to the main castle and not only that!! There is no way back into the main castle. Not even a poorly placed elevator or something once you jump the wall to the second bon-grace-fire you are stuck there... Fuck it
But ya gotta admit castle morne and the buildup are pretty sweet bits of exploration in the early game. The misbegotten are pretty creepy the first time you see them
Remember Haligtree? Malenia lead an army to Caelid...to acess/leave it, there's only a ladder hahahahahah
This is also a fantasy world with waygates that magically take you to places. They could have easily set up a waygate in Elphael to Altus or Linurnia and then destroyed it (in case they lost or stalemated which they did).
@geordiejones5618 i imagined that, half of the Haligtree has fallen...and the access through Ordina leads to a branch, maybe the devs didnt gave importance to this hahahaha
As much as I love FS's creativity, I wish they would at least try to add logic to their structures in connection to the lore.
@@anonisnoone6125it is even funnier in Bloodborne with the insane amount of gravestones on every earlier. They're definitely more aiming for the vibe of the an area, far from any practically. Which is endearing in its own way.
Ships
Shaman village not having more houses is such a missed oppurtunity. It would've been much more haunting and made you think about the scale of the massacres
Maybe those are the only surviving structures and the rest of the village was destroyed?
@fionaflorissax Then add evidence of the destruction...
@@habo249 It was a very long time ago remember. The initial survivors and later, Marika cleaned it up. Add weather to that mix and a lot washed away.
@@c0n33r you could still add graves, a ghost that says something, a unique plant that says in its item description that it grows from the blood of shamans...
maybe they did not all live in the same village. maybe the shaman village is just one of many such villages and this particular one is where Marika is from.
that would make a lot more sense since it's much easier to persecute disconnected small groups of people
It's actually the scale of the construction that always gets me. It's like "Here is a tower. We only have to raise it 300 m into the sky before we put a single room on top."
All of these seem to be hundreds of years of construction projects, if even remotely possible.
I also want to add that this is something I kinda have to take into consideration when I plan and design my D&D maps, because the players 100% walking past the obvious plot device, but will ponder for over an hour about the significance of a lit candle in a cave.
How about the tallest tower in Raya Lucaria being completely inaccessible to the people who live/work there, despite the description of Terra Magicka.
What, did they go outside and through a cave system just to cast that shit?
I always feel like I'm missing something in that cave. Unless the little place where the sotcerer fires at you from a higher ledge can be reached and doesn't lead anywhere, i think the cave actually connects into the academy as well. most likely at the pit with the abductor
Echoes of Queen Marika, The Eternal: "Hear me, thou gracegiven. Thy requests for bathing rooms shall evermore go unheeded. What need of thee dost thou have defecation when thou dost subside on The Erdtree's light and sap? I care not of this 'Osha' thou invoke. I will slay it as I have slain all who oppose The Greater Will. I, Queen Marika The Eternal hath set an example, and doth not give a shit."
5:37 The candles could actually have an explanation, but it's a kinda long story.
You see, there's this youtuber called Hawkshaw and he popularized the "color theory" in Elden Ring. Basically what the theory suggests is that things don't determine their colors, colors determine things. You don't get violent and angry and then turn red, you turn red and then become violent and angry, because you turned red. Color determines nature.
The color of a candles stick is white, which is the palest of colors, which makes it kinda eternal, just like how the blackness of void is Also eternal. These candles sticks could in ER world's physics burn literally forever.
This is something that From Soft does all the time and it drives me insane. Places where, even when things didn't go to shit, it would've been impossible to walk from point A to point B. Here some examples I noticed:
-Anor Londo's main path only leads to the city walls, without any way to reach the actual city. There is also a single bed and it's too little for anything other than a human.
-Drangleic Castle requires the player to cross a bunch of rooms, none of which are livable spaces, then in the second half you have to go outside, on a narrow staircase without railings to reach the upper throne room (why does it even exist if the throne room is on the ground floor).
- Cainhurst: To reach the throne room you need to cross the roof of a narrow tower, worst part is that they could have placed a door right on that small tower with the little bridge and it would've made sense.
-Lothric castle: it's impossible to actually reach the city trough the main gate and the only way into the castle is through a ladder in a church. The castle itself is mostly empty; again, lots of fortifications but next to zero places where the royal family could live.
-Sekiro: Most of the roads lead to nowhere. It would be impossible to move around the place without a grapling hook.
- Elden Ring: to reach the actual class room you need to cross a graveyard and then an extremely dangerous water elevator. Now, maybe the broken staircase lead to the bridge next to the elevator, but there is still the problem that, despite how big the place is, there are only 2, maybe three classrooms. THere is simply no way to reach the rest of the school.
The Volcano Manor has a similar problem where there are no bedrooms or livinq quarters of the sort. My headcanon is that the large area with multiple broken wooden floors (the one with hanging cages) was the main body of the villa, that got demolished by Tanith to make more room for cages. This also makes sense as the place is the only way to link the upper part to the Throne Room.
Carian Manor: again, the only functional room is the chapel. The few rooms that exist are far too spread out to be used as an actual house.
Leyndell: in theory for the normal way reach the Erdtree you'd need to pass trough the arena where you fight fake Godfrey , down the elevator, pass the Crucible Knight and then... nothing because there is no path that connects that road to the rest of the city.
I found some kitchens with no way to deliver the food in a logical way.
3:52 The guy who ordered the construction of that gate is clearly an Age of Empires 2 player.
Damn... I shouldnt have used that Albunaric slur at 1:53
Maybe you could transition to a content style similar to RoflWaffle with Gran Turismo or something. I watch a lot of that kinda thing and clearly plenty of others do!
What slur?
The entrance to the leonine boss arena is a triumphal arch which are made to celebrate victories in battle that leads to a graveyard with the people who where killed. There is a sword shrine next to castle Mourne that indicates a battle happened here and it is secluded because its a graveyard with dead people at the lowest point in the lands between
@@smite5372 that video from Hawkshawk, about that damn Arc on Lands of Shadow, its a nice explanation to this too
Every time I go by the windmills on altus plateau, I wonder to myself: What exactly are they *milling*? Seriously, there's little to no evidence of wheat cultivation, or indeed *any* significant agriculture *anywhere* in this game.
Also, where are the bathrooms, Lyndell has sewers, but where's the bathrooms to actually get stuff into the sewers. Apparently, people no longer defecate in Elden Ring because the entire land would be filled with shit
It always bothered me that none of these shambling corpses, or the people who were once alive, have anywhere to live! The lands should be lousy with abandoned homes. There should be thousands of empty houses everywhere. Where did all these people live before the zombie apocalypse?
They aren't zombies, they're basically cursed with eternal life as they live in the grace of the erdtree. Like a living mummification almost
@ Have you ever heard the phrase “a difference without distinction”?
There are tons of ruins everywhere, and we're going through the lands between in its most dilapitated state after a giant war.
Also scale in video games is inherently flawed, and absolutely no one would enjoy the game if it were in the least "sensible" when it comes to population and housing. Nor should anyone really ask developers to design a fantasy city adhering to that philosophy.
To be fair to the builders of the big Castle Morne water's edge fortification, doors are actually structural and defensive weakpoints -please ignored the windows- so it's actually a fantastic building!
But for real though, I think the gatehouse on the water there is actually protecting the tiny peninsula, where the Leonine Misbegotten is, from the outside world - it seems to have some significance, given the large tree, the grave markers, the sword monument outside Castle Morne, and also that it's the location of the treasured sword of the castle. It probably has a lot of hidden significance too, when you realize that the entire Weeping Peninsula is a microcosm of the whole Lands Between.
And come on Lost, candles and lamps are very important spiritual and religious tools. Of course they would be used by the pious servants and worshippers of the dragons in a dragon altar. Their fire keeper (a real job btw) would surely tend to the flames dutifully.
If you actually want a pretty bizarre location, I'd point to that one corridor around the garden outside the Fortified Manor. Not the entire path, just that one part that deadends and has literally no use other than looking pretty. It sure does make the garden look very pretty though.
The gatehouse at the bottom of castle Morne could also have a symbolic meaning, think Arc de Triomphe. Either it's actually a gatehouse and the area where the boss is was part of a much alrger landmass that actually deserved a gatehouse, or it's more a symbolic thing that was added as an entrance to a place that has some sort of meaning to the builders. The small island the boss is on definitely feels like it could have held some importance.
I love this kinda stuff. Thank you marika for constructing leyndell like a videogame level for me to navigate and not an actual city
Funny that you should say that, because in my first playthrough Leyndell was the only Legacy Dungeon I didn't like because the first half felt too much like a real livable city.
yeah there are wayy too little housing spaces in elden ring. Like, except for leyndell and maybe volcano manor there arent any big places that you can imagine are used for living
Elden Ring is a nightmare for any home buyer
I view Elden Ring in a similar way as the older pokemon games. In Elden Ring, we never see anything that could be considered a city. Even Leyendell is crazy small and would barely fit any people. It's there as a representation of a village/city/etc.
Same as the NPCs. We meet like 20 people on the entire continent. But they talk as if there is still life, still "normal" people out there, not as if it's an undead wasteland. I think they represent the people of the Lands Between.
Still, it's funny how weird this game is if you take it at face value.
4-5 houses? That's a village!
This isn't just elden ring, this is basically every video game ever made.
The exception would be in games where large swathes of the map are unreachable background paintings, where sometimes they bring out the true scale of human communities, but I can't thing of a single game that really let's you actually explore a city sized settlement other than maybe like GTA
I like to think the architects just have the "git gud" attitude about what theyre building. Oh you cant get into your wittle castle??? How about you git gud scrub. Simply scale the wall or destory this impenetrable layer of bricks.
This reminds me of that architecture video for Elden Ring, where the 3 walls of lyndell are stupidly huge enough to be a bit larger than dams. Maybe the architects would have been able to build more houses and stairs if they didn't waste all those materials on 3 walls
"why I have to pull a lever to get it down?" - coz the lever is magic too. Duh.
Some of these weird design choices aren't really continuity errors but legitimately are just how some castles are built; with dead ends, separate buildings disguised to look as one, choke points, and places where there is seemingly no access where inhabitants would put ladders when not under attack. It was actually kind of a mindset of Medieval architects to not make their fortresses look impenetrable because then attackers would just lay siege/step up their game so they basically booby trapped them with design "flaws"
About Marika's village, I would say it is because of scale problem. In reality, Lands Between would've been much bigger, but it isn't in game due to limited technologies.
You have to remember that most of the buildings were constructed a long time ago. Things change, erode, people demolish, rebuild, modify stuff.
And some things just disappear
Bloodborne is also completely nonsensical from the urbanistic point of view.
Ladders being the only way to access entire neighbourhoods (do you imagine one second having to take a 40 foot ladder every single morning to go to work, and back up in the evening ?), streets that go nowhere, roads breaking suddendly into flight of stairs despite being clearly made for carriages, barriers placed direcly against doorways, buildings with the interior window layout different from outside (in fact I don't think a single building, bare a few exceptions, in Bb is coherent in rhat regard) closed streets full of carriages... that couldn’t possibly have ended up where they are since there is no road leading there, and so on...
The general atmosphere is so perfectly immersive that you easily miss this, but when you start looking closer it is extremely jarring. Diehard fans will excuse these as us, the hunter, dreaming, but I think the explanation is more pragmatic: Fromsoft design doesn’t try to convey a logical world, that could be lived in, it tries to convey a general idea, a mood, of what such a world might look like, without spending unnecessary time on the logical side of thing.
Engagement.
Engagement. 2
@@powdahshuggah engagement. 3
The real question is how did hayata get to the 3 fingers when she's blind
It would honestly be hilarious if, due to being blind she just fell all the way down, and all you find of her is a corpse
I mean you literally give her a bunch of magical eyes that give her visions
One of the biggest missed potentials is having secret pathways underneath elevator shafts
That Transition in 2:31 was insanely good😂
When Miquella was a young deity, they were fawned over incessantly. As they were moved throughout the kingdom, as was customary for newborn deities, Miquella planted fogwalls to make their most favorite rooms more private for reading and rumination.
@@fredfry4756 "most favorite rooms" disturbed me a lot 😵💫
I think the bottomless pits underneath the lower floors of elevators, other than being a From Soft screw you, are so the elevator can’t come down on top of you.
I'm pretty sure it's a thing where if you can use something then other people can use it to like sites of grace or Spirit Springs. The random wall is just before the cherished sword of Castle Morne, so it's likely a celebrational arch. Worth noting of that cave, is that it belongs to the Dragon Communion, so their representatives going in and out like the Ancient Dragon Man likely put the candles there. As for the rooftops pathways, the Carian family of Raya Lucaria keep a lot of secrets from their people as a measure against foes and rebellious individuals. They worked with sorcerers of Sellia to develop Night sorcery of assassination, and Carian Retaliation is literally a kept secret, but Thops would make a sorcery of his own much like it before his mysterious death, which just so happens to be a desk overlooked by a secret ledge. In turn, there is truth in Sellen as the Graven Witch, but there was always surveillance at the ready in wait.
5:14 he got kicked off because he forgot about leyndell and how its just full of blocked off doors with messages saying "you don't have the right O, you don't have the right"
Game worlds are often smaller than what they're meant to be. Look at Pokemon, where towns in game can consist of 2 houses, while the anime shows them as more proper cities. My favourite example is how Hoenn's pacifilog town in game is comprised of wooden houses on floating platforms with their "roads" comprised of logs floating in the water, but its a city in the anime.
For ER, I like to imagine things like Marikas village is as small as it is for gameplay purposes. Not only is it more memory used if populated with a ton of houses, but it also fills the area with unneeded areas that players will waste time looking around.
I kinda love things like this, it's endearing in a way
For that first one, it can easily be assumed that was a defense design purpose.
This kind of stuff is actually all over FromSoft games if you start looking for it. In Bloodborne, the little cathedral you go through on the way to Old Yharnam has a massive stained glass window on the outside, above the door. But on the inside, that same wall has a single tiny window and is otherwise completely solid
There's also the Witch of Hemwick's house, which appears to be a huge, multi-story building on the outside, but on the inside is a single tiny room with a staircase leading down into a huge basement.
The answer to all of this is:
MAGIC
Great message. Having small mistakes like that doesn't take away from greatness, it makes it even more special. To get immersed in worlds to the point where you barely notice them. Art is made by humans and humans are inherently flawed beings. Just like how everything, no matter how good it is, will be flawed in some way.
I live for this kinda of niche, like we all know the devs didn't care about 1-1 accurate livable fantasy city, but actually looking at what is their and deciphering how people even existed is such a unique kind of entertaining.
The elevator that makes the most sense in these games is the elevator for Firelink to Undead Parish in DS1
Day 322 of asking lost to do a playthrough of elden ring slowly so that he can show us all the cool architecture and ask all the weird questions that pop into his mind. Dude has a voice made for unintentional ASMR and I'd fall asleep to that on the daily. Like a nature documentary!
In defence of castle morne:
-The gate is most likely a folly. a structure built for no purpose other than showing off that you can afford to build it.
-that building does not necessarily need a permanent entrance from sea level. It presumably serves as another point from which to defend against naval attacks.
The ladder is likely there to access the graveyard. We need to ask which came first: the graveyard or the tower?
The first building not having a door gave me flashbacks to Drake and Josh building a treehouse from the inside and forgetting the door, trapping them. Maybe there's some poor worker's corpses in there who didn't come to the realization until the last brick was laid.
Random bad red man explains to me how absurd it is that the elevator is a giant stone slab rising from a pretty much bottomless hole and I agree before he proceeds with shanking me in the throat.
10/10 video.
The abundant use of ladders in Fromsoft games is really immersion breaking, especially when the main path is a ladder where there should be a more normal entrance like stairs.
You could do a game show “lost in the sauce” where you have to find locations in game based off of submitted photos
Only Lost could make this kind of special video, and that's why Lost is great.
The stone elevators and shafts are oddly arousing
3:15 that one's easy. They just never figured out another solution to what happens if you stand under a lowering elevator. The normal options are 1. it bounces back, with or without crushing damage, 2. it instagibs the player, 3. it phases through the player as if they weren't there. All were apparently unacceptable to Fromsoftware, so bottomless shafts to nowhere it is!
finally someone is talking about this, why has nobody been speaking about the buildings with seemingly no entrance or in the most strange place possible, in every Soulslike games ?
The Dragon Temple lift in Crumbling Farum Azula just floats.
No chains, no giant stone pillar, no magic.
Pay closer attention to the tower at Castle Morne. It always seemed sunken into the earth to me. That's why there's no door. Also looks like the top was taken off, and castles are often built with false areas for defensive reasons anyway.
So actually the Marais gate makes sense because it's a castle for imprisonment and execution run by the steward family. It would need to be big enough to accommodate all enemies and allies
Hey Lost! Love this type of content from you! You are such a relatable person and you always make me laugh. Love your relationship with Thumpy, it reminds me of Pinky and the Brain!
Keep up the amazing work and thanks for all you do!
"Drake... where's the door hole?"
"It goes right there see, I drew it with the finger remedy."
"You were supposed to open it up with the brick hammer..."
"Dude I'm gonna!"
"Oh really?"
"Yes."
"So go get the brick hammer"
"Ok I will."
*The thunking sound of someone walking into medival era concrete.*
"... I see the problem."
"OH DO YA?!"
P Diddy is the official candle supplier of the Lands Between
The entire weeping peninsula is sinking, so of course the castle is missing things
Shit that really doesn't make sense is how the only way to move across Lyndell is by doing parkour and jumping across the rooftops
i think about how bad the weather is since there are areas where it rains packs of wolves.
Raya lucaria rooftop world building showing WHERE the flying marinates were studied and made
The black keep is one it bothered me aswell like imagine you are a messmer soldier and you need to talk to your boss, do you have to parkour through fossilized specimens and elevators to get talk to him?
I'd call that a hostile work environment
One of the hero graves just has a pit at the start, just a bit to the side. and i remember jumping into it thinking it was some secret, because theres no way anybody would be dumb enough to jump into it otherwise. Spoiler alert, it wasnt a secret and I was dumb enough to jump into it
This kind of stuff always kinda bothered me, and it has been a thing since demons' souls, all the way up to sekiro. Even other soulslikes are chock full of stuff like this, think of lies of P and the layout of the roads that doesn't make any sense, especially when carriages are just dropped around there (same exact case for bloodborne but that's set in a nightmare, isn't it?).
You could make a 3 hours long video about every single game on this topic
Yeah, here's pretty much my main issue with lore hunters deriving huge convoluted timeline theories almost entirely from scrutinizing minor texture details. When the architechtural coherency of their buildings is this nonsensical, I don't think you can confidently claim that there have been x variations of Great/Erd/whatever-trees based on fairly minor variations in tree iconography in carvings and tapestries. I do not believe the artists have _that_ much of an attention to detail when they also fail to make their buildings make sense when they could have done so by merely adding a few unopenable doors for implied coherency.
Why is the entirety of Liurnia sunk? How did that happen the way it did? Did they build their roads underwater or did they just end up underwater? How are they still in a good enough shape to have a small army guarding the Academy when there's literally not a single livable house in the entire region?
Giant pillar elevators to be fair only make sense in elden ring over other souls games because of gravity magic
One thing that has never made sense to me is Esgar the Blood Priest because he is sealed in a Catacombs Boss room with his dogs but like I imagine he'd be considered Blasphemous by the Golden Order and is sealed inside of a sacred room where Erdtree Burial takes place.
he's not really sealed. he's just there. we have to remember catacombs bosses are just there at the end to guard what is at the end
Esgar is in the catacombs located in the shunning grounds where Mohg first communed with the formless mother. perhaps he's tracing the origin. peehaps Mohg ordered him to keep watch over the place.
also we've seen followers of Mohg have the ability to move around using blood puddles
@@paracame8162 I say sealed cause the door is locked shut outside of the lever to open it
Oh, man. I'm only at 2:05, but IMMEDIATELY on seeing the first place, I knew you were gonna point out there are no doors in some places, and the first thing to mind?
IMMUREMENT.
So... I gotta wonder... who got immured?
People who play games just gotta deal with the fact that, like, Whiterun, one of the major, central capital cities in all of Skyrim, has about 70 people.
Smooth video, cheers from Germany
Honestly I love to imagine hair brained reasons why it's totally legit lore wise
Maybe the misbegottens intentionally built Castle Morne poorly to fuck with the people who enslaved them.
The dragon man lights the candles
How about the Shadow Realm's area right after you fight Gaius, you know the area with his shack and the large stone bowl on the cliff that leads to the Scadutree?
What is that incredibly massive black gate that seems to have some windows starting at the 3rd story of the building? It's clearly a gate of some kind but you can just walk around the sides to get to the same area on the other side...so what's its point?
The water well near Shack of the Rotting near the first grace in Caelid... they didn't bother to make a hole there o_o
Interesting, I haven’t seen a video yet that breaks down the illogical parts of the locations in Elden Ring (and evere souls game)- and there are really a lot of them, especially the elevators. I’m planning to try this game, but my PC isn’t quite up to it. It looks like it’s available on Boosteroid, but I haven’t seen it on other cloud services. It would be helpful if you could show how it runs there - that would definitely help me decide on a subscription. Thanks!
It's a magic lever, that's why
Just because it is fantasy, doesn't mean it shouldn't make sense.
i think first case is not a mistake, and that thats was made on purpose to show that castle is old and was build when sea level was lower
This guy would have a field day with dark souls 2 😂😂😂😂
This gate could have only visual value since boss area is cementary
Imagine if this was a Bethesda game
It does really irk me that for a game that cares so much about its coherent storytelling through item descriptions, that the same level of care just isn't taken with the environment. There aren't even any farms to feed the millions of people I must assume lived in the lands between.
I want to pretend that I am exploring a civilization but I am ripped away to discover I am riding an on-the-rails hardcore Disneyland ride that was made for my fat, camera-toting ass.
The Lever of Leyndell
Makes one loses his sanity..
lets be real, most areas in fromsoft games dont make any sense....its cool as a level in a video game but in real life no one would design places like that
where do people in fromsoft games even take a dump? If there are kitchens, then surely there are toilets?
You’re right but I still love this game very much!
bout damn itme you coming back to this channel huh?
6:42 the candles may be religious
erm achkshually ... :) wouldn't it be misbegotten building the doorless building and not albinaurics? i know why you chose that - there is no misbegotten helmet, so would be difficult to cosplay as something impossible. just saying :) and i'm happy to be wrong. i don't think i've seen any albinaurics there. subbed, btw. :)
Maybe the door us under water and the building is sinking into nokron
Short answer: it's a FROMSOFTWARE GAME and not a UBISOFT GAME.
Only Lost would make a video about useless features in the game and make it alluring. 😂
Great effort and very well presented, though.
How about the structure past Gaius?
Have you ranked all the longest ladders in the world in Elder ring yet? Talk about lazy design.
Ah yes, good title. These makes no sense.
I haven't gone there in a few play through now
You don't show up in my subscription feed for some reason