Elden Ring - You're not supposed to see this
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- Опубліковано 13 жов 2024
- Jagged Peak is home to a bit of an enigma, with a mysterious crowd of NPCs inexplicably haunting the mountainside. Just what were they supposed to do and why are they here?
Song used: Subterranean Graveyard - King's Field IV OST
It feels likely this may have escaped the notice of the QA team because there's not much reason for players to go back through the summit path after Bayle is gone, or alternatively, it may have been noticed, but was deemed fairly low-priority for that same reason. Sometimes developers find glitches well before players ever have a chance to see them, but they still get shipped because the labor it would take to fix them is better spent elsewhere while they're working to get the project completed.
@@ZullietheWitch i got back there because i knew there was an Ancient Somber Dragonsmithingstone somewhere
Of all the “features” of the DLC, these guys were such a minor inconvenience that I’d do the same. There was plenty to fix on launch, without having to try and fix the 4 invisible dudes who 90% of players Torrent sprinted past
QA manager: “Keep it, only data nerds would come back to this place, and they will find it neat”
@@TrippyTimesTwo Problem is, the fans (that don't try to understand the underlying code and game mechanics) take everything in the game as intentional, to build the lore.
So if we didn't have code analysts, we would have videos trying to understand the lore implications of invisible NPCs that suddenly appear after Bayle is dead.
So it's a low-impact bug, but still something to fix when you can, imo.
Now makes me wonder how many more things are not lore-intended, and are just for convenience...
@@glitchypriest3462 I don't think intention matters that much as long as the story you have is good and makes sense. I think this would just be considered a bug more than anything, it's very obviously a mistake. There are happy accidents that happen sometimes though, like the friendly dog in Leyndell that was never intended.
Very dedicated stage helpers, standing there in the rain and wind on a god-forsaken mountain only to get continuously hit by lightning.
Not as dedicated as the Radahn stagehand, he willingly gets hit by a meteor!
Lightening Spirits, we call them
Their boss gets killed so now they get to partially phase back into existence to take a smoke break
Eh, it beats working retail.
The Igon Everywhere system was very innovative for it's time.
Everyone will rue this day!
Bayle-kun
It was entertaining at first but having to farm Igon just to fully unlock the Drake Style got boring so fast imo
EHEHEHEHEHE
BAYLE-CHAN!
[IGON, BROKEN DRAKE WARRIOR OF DRAGON COMMUNION]
"We can change the facedata of the NPC's to Igon"
CURSE YOU BAYLE! We hereby vow, that you will rue this day! Behold, a true drake warrior, and I, Igon, and I, Igon, and I, Igon, and I, Igon, and I, Igon, and I, Igon, and I, Igon!
Actually laughed out lout to this one.
Bayle be sweating.
So that's where the rain of harpoons comes from
Whats wrong with jagged peak? Bayle! Vile Bayle!
That, and also MY ARMS, MY LEGS!!! EACH LIES A BLOODY RUIN... ARRGHHHHHH
VILE
BAYLE
HOLY
GRAIL
What
2:23 Zullie gets demolished and fucking dies
Top 10 saddest deaths in anime
Zullie no! You're standing next to the Radahn Targeting NPC!
So sad that this the last Zullie video 😢
she got back up and pwned him
@@vatonage1599oh no, she's got her air pods in, she can't hear us 😱
I love those invisible yet important NPCs. Back in the days WoW used a lot of invisible imps and bunnies to broadcast flavor messages in the area (either zone wide or just local, depending on the specific story requirements) whenever the actual "speaker" was meant to be invisible to the player anyway. Like boss taunting you from the back of the cave, but the case is mostly unloaded and so the boss isn't loaded either, so a little invisible bunny near the mouth of the cave would instead be playing that sound file and broadcast the associated chat message.
Clever little system, and occasionally a new patch would make some of them visible until they fixed it again, and that was always fun.
They also occasionally forgot to set a few flags so here and there they could be interacted with, like for example pulling rogues or druids out of stealth, or making a hunter pet try and attack a spec of dust on the floor and just refusing to obey any other command.
Reminds me of Morrowind's method- have the player character, themselves, speak the lines if the actual speaker isn't really there
iirc onyxia had an attack that would target an invisible bunny npc that would sporadically run around the arena too
Reminds me of how Blizzard used invisible bunnies to give raid bosses targets for attacks and pathing.
this is very common practice in almost all games.
yup that was the first thing I thought of as well when it was said where these NPCs were, that they were just placeholders for some sort of script trigger
the only thing I’m confused about is why they don’t have a generic-type dummy.
@@oscaranderson5719 then that's just one extra set of data you set up.
Friendly reminder that there are 100 dummied out godskin apostles in the leyndell catacombs
@@KogasaTatara514 wait what
Wait what?
@@omerozel4716 search "a hundred godskin apostles boss fight" by sekiro dubi
The Gloam army, waiting for their Queen’s Return
This sounds like the fake void memes "There is a dead god beneath the US capital, he will escape the 27th of october 2031"
Gotta love these stage hand NPCs. A quick and simple solution to a problem, instead of trying to find the difficult way around it
They're burdening their designers with having to get about eight magic string variables correct in order to trigger a single particle effect (owner must be right, animation that triggers event must be right etc).
It's a pretty grim piece of tech debt caused by someone taking a shortcut a long time ago. It's wild how often it gets praised on this channel as a good solution.
@reggieisnotadog4841 why fix something that's not broken? If it works it works. And if you can save money doing it, that's even better because they can spend that money elsewhere
I really appreciate the stagehands comparison, keeping a touch of poetry. Your videos are truly a pleasure ngl.
This has the same energy as Morrowind making disembodied dialogue be technically spoken by the player character. Iirc, in daedric shrines the lips of the character move when the deadra speak
A major blast to the past, wow. I remember my friend taking his helmet off when Azura was speaking and we both theorized she was using the character as a vessel.
"Stop putting words in my mouth!"
That is a LOT of Igons. Bayle better look out.
Headcanon:
All of these invisible actor enemies are like truly divine Dancing Lion actors. The metaphysical troupe of the Greater Will and the Crucible.
The Divine Beast bosses are just the interns. That's why they're still visible. They haven't mastered the transcendental part.
What I'm hearing is Bayle hired a bunch of int/fth build dudes (invisibility + lightning) to make the road leading to him more Epic
Now I just have a mental image of an army of Igon endlessly screaming at the peak...
I remember posting about those NPCs a week or so ago and also thought they are tied to the lightning.
Thanks for confirming it Zullie.
The worst thing about Jagged Peaks is that Bayle is there.
Curse you Bayle indeed.
The spirits of those slain by bayle have been set free upon his death
1:02 all three Igons simultaneously:
CURSE YOU, BAAYLE
0:01 i love how your videos are both very informative and interesting but also have some of the most poetic descriptions ever
I choose to disregard this and believe they're the souls of all the people who tried to scale the peak and lost their lives.
Everything is wrong with the Jagged Peak
Not Igon
I disagree but ok
This always strikes me as curious but when the land of shadows was ripped from the lands between I wonder if like the volcanos and other natural phenomenon under the grounds surface were brought too or if that's the reason for the dormancy.
Bayle seemingly makes the volcano become active again in his second phase, though how much of that is the mountain's natural processes vs. Bayle's sheer power is unclear.
I am so glad that you covered this. I was confused when I came across these and couldn't find any information on them myself during my first playthrough and couldn't tell if they were a bug or some ultra cryptic puzzle/lore implication.
1:40 you shot the Invisible Swordsman!
Excuse me, are you the Singing Fulgurbloom?
Three Amigos reference?
I personally like to think that drakes/mortal dragons have evolved to hunt each other, due to the baby drakes in dragonbarrow not dropping dragon hearts, having smaller horns, and lacking fire breath, they're young and recently born.
Maybe when they reach a certain age they grow the longer, piercing horn to hunt their kin and extract trace amounts of gravel stone, developing fire breath, (and maybe extending their lifespan) possibly leading to them growing and becoming like greyoll and the nameless giant dragon in a final lifecycle stage to produce a litter (greyoll drops 5 hearts, so either its a freak mutation or they have killed)
Additionally the description for dragon communion flesh (which is crafted from sharp gravel stone, which mentions "ancient" dragons that consume their lesser kin) says that it is AN IMITATION OF DRAGONSCALE FLESH, which drops from jagged peak drakes and mentions "aged dragons", maybe ancient/aged really means older, drakes that have hunted more of their kin and thus gained far more gravel stone, one of the jagged peak drakes is even attacking another drake, perhaps in a form of hunting.
So baby drake --> adult with horn --> develop dragon heart & fire breath from killing drakes and getting gravel stone --> kill more --> become big from it and produce a huge amount of baby dragons
Or maybe im reading way too much into the horn on dragons, either way I personally believe that the jagged peak is a cesspool of cannibalism for the drakes to grow strong and mature
Well obviously this is the work of an Enemy Stand User.
Absolutely love your videos. You always have great explanations and apt comparisons.
Game Development is all about finding creative solutions to problems the engine can't properly handle otherwise.
Reminds me how in FFXIV (iirc) all spell area damage zones are actually just summoning a hidden dummy NPC at the center, repeatedly triggering the AoE until their timer runs out.
Similarly, Fallout 3's subway being an NPC dude wearing the subway car model as a hat and then running underneath the map along the path to make it look like there's a functioning subway in the game.
The problem is they're attaching the effects to something not abstract enough. I doubt its an engine limitation and more like an "understanding of the engine" limitation. It gives me strong non-programmer vibes and reminds me of my first VB project I did in high school thinking I needed to store variables in hidden UI boxes.
Anyone remember the invisible bunnies in World of Warcraft used for all sorts of scripting purposes? Pepperidge Farm remembers... as does the internet as it was trivially easy to find a bunch of articles on the subject in any search engine.
Anyone this is just to say that this is a developer technique that's been in use for a long time so anyone curious to know more about the subject has plenty to look up.
It's not even particularly deep as a research topic. Speaking from experience, most of the time it's simply a matter of convenience because manually typing coordinates is tedious and annoying.
Bayle: *Dies*
Hidden NPC’s: I fight for the users.
So THAT’S what my ADLS hit on my way up the peak. I was wondering why I saw hits but no bodies.
im honestly surprised this is the first im hearing of these invisible NPCs.
especially when i HAVE been back through that mountain twice on two different occasions.
I found those pretty soon-ish after the DLC launched and had even made a post about it on Elden Ring's subreddit, but while I got a lot of interesting theories, there ultimately never was someone with a definitive answer. So now, finally, actually knowing what the actual internal code aspect to those guys are is unbelievably liberating since, y'know. I don't have anywhere near the skills to pry open the game myself, only vague guesstimates on what things -could- be. I do recall them perhaps being essential lightning rods was one of the more convincing theories I've read, since it felt like all the places I could find them in felt like the places I remembered lightning falling down, but I never really verified it for sure and "I felt like it was the case" is as unconvincing of proof as there is.
There is an invisible npc/enemy in the Giant-Conquering Hero's Grave at the top of the steps leading to the boss, in vers 1.0. You can lock onto it, put it to sleep, set it afire, poison it, etc, and it comes back upon Grace rest. It even has sound files scripted for it. It sounds like a human being.
I forgot about that glitch until you uploaded this! That was just bizarre.
Damn, I often get distracted by Kingsfield music... it's such a banger. I need a modern Kingsfield from From.
This is the equivelant of exposing the Wizard of Oz
Thou art never alone. There exist countless NPCs beyond the 3 dimensions of thy perception. And they too, wish harm upon thee.
Almost feels like Echo Night ghosts. Faceless, textureless, usually invisible, but always there.
Zullie swooping in with some Sunday Elden Ring fun facts I love it
The Anime Protagonist isn't easy to spot.
The Anime Protagonist: 2:26
2:24 Damn, Rahdan has cake... No wonder his brother wanted him.
honestly this makes so much about dark souls coding in general make sense all at once
I've heard Bayle has dental, so it's no wonder he could get top notch invisible lightning summoners
Most mysterious debugging I've ever seen.
my first thought was that they were used as markers where the lightning strikes, there is always some weird and roundabout ways to get anything to work proficiently and this was probably the easiest and fastest way
So is the lightning around fields of fulgurbloom flowers being casted by invisible npc?
It's so funny how this game's code is essentially held together by duct tape.
most games have stuff like this if you dig deep enough.
people gave fallout 3 shit for the fact that the train you ride on once is actually just a weird hat being worn by an npc under the floor running along a path. But the truth is a lot of games do stuff like that, even the really high quality ones like this. the lesson to take from this is that programming a game within the limits of the game engine sometimes requires you to pull off some rube goldberg kind of shit.
So at 2:22 could you backstab the invisible NPC (like at 0:37) to get i-frames when Radahn's meteor attack lands?
No, they're properly set up to be intangible, the player can't interact with them.
Stage hands in a theatre? Something in me itches to have an Alex Bale style conspiracy built off this single detail... Oh, haha, get it Bale
For some reason this backing music just makes me picture some cartoonish blob character like Kirby or a Goomba or similar, just walk-cycling in place, almost matched to the beat. Like it should be playing in a shop in Super Mario RPG or something. Anyone else get that vibe?
I think most of their attack logic is based on aiming a target. Probably its their development puppet. And those lightnings are not only vfx, that lightning vfx are attacks that deal damage to a player like an incantation or a ash of war. And to make it work it needs its early development target. Which are those ibvisible npc's.
@ZullietheWitch unrelated but I had a lore thought only dataminers can figure out. The giant hole in the Hinterlands right next to the grace before the path to the Shaman village - could it be an original location for the Erdtree that was somehow uprooted when the Land of Shadow was split from the Lands Between? As it is now, the Erdtree isn't connected to any visible ground. Do the two diameters, of the hole and the Erdtree, match? The hole looks smaller, but that could also be because the Erdtree grew larger in the years after Marika split the Lands.
this feels similar on how bethesda used npc's to control the tram in fallout 3 broken steel
0:58
Behold ! I, Igon ! And I, Igon ! And I, Igon !
Fun fact; those stage hands dressed all in black are the origin of the "ninja outfit" we imagine today. Historical ninja just wore regular disguises, but during kabuki theatre you were meant to ignore the stand hands dressed in black, so in some performances one would suddenly jump into the story and kill someone, hence the image of the ninja dressed all in black.
On one hand it's pretty neat game design trivia! On the other hand, knowing there could be dozens upon dozens of invisible enemies all around you throughout the game that exist as intangible watchers is uh... A little disturbing. It's not even Bloodborne and I feel like I just got a point of insight.
League players know all too well the explanation of "everything is coded as a minion"
Ah, so the Riot Games special of coding everything as a minion is, in fact, a common practice.
Thank you, Lightning Ninjas!
Must be a lore explanation for this
That's pretty neat! I love little things like this.
I like the comparison to stagehands xD
*Carbot:* Wouldn't it be funny if all the elemental stuff were actually practical effects set up by hidden people?
*Fromsoftware:* 😨
I didn’t know the secret to the jagged peak was multiple invisible igons constantly getting struck by lightning
Absolutely fascinating! :)
I kinda wanna see a lets play with all the internal stuff made visible now
We gotta shake up the soundtrack Zullie
Using Invisible NPCs in such a makeshift way seems kinda funny since the Developer themselves use this method.
Huh. Another interesting video. Thanks Zullie!
Setting them all into Igon needs to become a mod.
Essentially, the game needs a target for certain commands.
Three Igons? That's one too many!
Those if-statements tho. Bruh. Ah well...
I know nothing about game dev but do a lot of C++ in other areas. Everytime I see one of these types of fromsoft videos I get pretty confused, like why do we even need NPC's with hitboxes for something like this?
@@LWmusikLikely because the engine is set up so that the lightning spell being cast need to be cast BY something. Like, I doubt the engine is built so a random rock object can be the spellcaster, and the script literally is calling a "ShootBullet()" method. That's probably inherent to their NPC/Player/Enemy classes, so it would need to be tied to SOMETHING instead of a random gameobject, and... well, rather than making an invisible goblin, or snake, or boar, it's probably simplest to just make it an NPC.
The video literally mentions that they don't even use a flag to make them invisible or anything, it literally defaults that way because they just don't have face data or a body model.
Game dev is pretty unique among programming branches in that you are CONSTANTLY doing random tricks and things like this to accomplish effects and events that you want. Would it be more complete to make a robust system that could handle these things in any situation? Sure. But when you're only doing it a couple times, it's not worth the creep to make that new system, potentially upending tons of things built on it, and require so much new testing. Better to just tie it to a dummied-out player model and be on with your day. This sort of thing happens ALL the time. These are just also some of the most datamined games out there, so we see a lot more of the intricate workings.
@@SkylerEvansAK Now that you said it, I realized I have actually done similar tricks in regular desktop UI's lol. Instead of doing some fairly intricate UI from scratch, I solved some problems by adding invisible pre-made components that were still interactive, and these components weren't really meant to be invisible
Love the kings field ost
WAKE UP WAKE UP, ZULLIE DROPPED ‼️‼️‼️‼️🗣️🗣️‼️‼️
I only found out about those guys because of a message that said "try target lock" and obviously after murdering an invisible man, I was kind of confused to say the least
Friend of mine and I caught this a few weeks ago. Was really confused.
I tried to point out how they were similar to stage hands.. but Zullie beat me to it.
huh I would have never found this because by the time I take down bayle on every run I've cleared the whole mountain of it's goodies. neat.
I really love the comparison to Stagehands in theatre though, I'm sure that would give any developer that was a kabuki enthusiast a chuckle
You're amazing, Zullie 👌
I remember randomly killing one of these guys while looking for The Stone Heart and wondering what was up with the invisible what I thought were wandering nobles up there.
World of Warcraft uses invisible bunnies and Guild Wars 2 uses invisible moas
The more I look at Bayle the more I wonder how tf Placidusax stood a chance.
Teleportation's a hell of a trick
Placi also used to have 150% more heads, which means 150% more firepower
You find Placidusax without 3 heads, with scars all over his body. He says:
“You should see the other guy”.
Bayle: wings ripped off exposing bones, without one leg and part of it’s tail, covered in open wounds.
@@gwyndolinds-en8yt And yet, the Bayle we fight would absolutely stomp the Placidusax we demolish
@@Mare_Man Bayle might be juicing on Scadutree Fragments, whereas Placidusax is trying to find his runaway spouse so often that he's apparently not sleeping or using any of the sleep his servants send him, as his eyes are open in his cutscene. Also, considering that (ancient) Dragonclaw, is one of the earliest Dragon Communion incantations, the drake hunter plan might have partially backfired.
I wondered what those things were. I figured they had to be player models based on how long it took to get the runes.
Fells like they could have accomplished the same thing by making a dummy ball entity, like 1 pixel big or something. I don't know if it does, but the way it is now I assume it eats a bit of RAM for no reason
Bayle's peak already has so much stuff happening that like 5 invisible NPCs that dont do anything really is a drop in the ocean.
Idk about Elden Ring's engine but a lot of 3D engines do just have completely empty objects that only store coordinates. You'd usually use those in a situation like this, but it's entirely possible NPCs had to be used for whatever reason. Maybe the lightning is considered an attack and therefore wouldn't work without an NPC to target, and it'd be too much work to recode the lightning to work without a target, or something. Idk. Shit like that happens with game dev.
It seems that these dudes are better at being target than ourselves.😺
This is genuinely interesting
I haven't seen a video of this done yet so I am wondering if you are able to do a compilation of all the neat stuff we wouldn't see normally? Like out of bounds stuff/invisible stuff. Some examples are the Shaded Castle underneath. I fell through the map in a modded play through and it looks like there is a fully made castle but just sunken which makes sense given the lore.
Volcano Manor rafters. I spent so long on my first play through trying to discover if there is a way up there. It just seems like you are able to walk around the castle like Stormveil so maybe at one point in development this was intended?
I swear at one point the ravine frozen waterfall in the Snowfield that goes into the consecrated snowfield (Magma Wyrm spot) used to be a place for graves so we could go down with torrent. I've looked at other wall grave spots and I swear it looks like they built it the same but later changed it.
Wow I never this but its interesting how that works I wonder if there was any other way they could've done it? But weird that left that in I mean I guess the DLC seemed kinda rushed.
How is it I never saw these invisible dudes? Oh, wait... 😂
Nah man they’re just spooky ghosts
As a reminder if your players will never see something it doesn't matter what it looks like. Don't waste time on assets the player will never see.
"that minion unit in League of Legends"😂
Interesting as always, Zullie
Reminds me of those invisible hollows in ds2
Seem so slapped together haha, but probably a good solution