Dark Souls is often praised for its interconnected world design and how it shows distant areas that you can travel to. What sets Dark Souls apart is that it's a lot more "Metroidvania" in its map design. The world layout is much more of a compact maze than traditional open-world games. Making the relationships between areas sometimes surprising or confusing. But the purpose of this video isn't to praise the interconnectivity; That's already a widely appreciated aspect of the game. What I intend to do is help bring clarity and perspective to the world layout. If you've ever wondered exactly what you're looking at or how accurate a particular skybox is then you've come to the right place. Join me as we demystify Lordran in another episode of Dark Souls Dissected. Now I should quickly get out of the way that back in 2015 I made a blog post that explored this very subject. I didn't have the resources at the time to capture and edit decent footage so this is essentially a recreation of that. However, even if you've already read it, I think certain things will come across more clearly in video and I'll also be including more examples. So with that being said, let's get started. Let's break down the relationship between the Great Hollow and Blighttown with the Firelink Shrine. From the Firelink Shrine we can see this large tree in the distance. This is, of course, meant to be the Great Hollow. From the Firelink Shrine it's not fully rendered and it's simply put in as a 2d texture. If we look down below we can see Blighttown. There's not much detail to see but you can see all those large pillars that are found throughout the area. Now if the orientation between Blighttown and Firelink is a little confusing, remember that the Great Hollow's entrance is at one far end of the Blighttown swamp... ...While the entrance to Quelaag's Domain is essentially on the other end. This means that from Firelink Shrine, if we're on the opposite end from the Great Hollow, we're basically above
the entrance to Quelaag's Domain. Though we can't see this in-game. Here's a view using Kayin's 3D Map Explorer, which shows how Quelaag's Domain is tucked under the graveyard in Firelink. This relationship between the areas is also reflected in reverse. Though there aren't many vantage points from Blighttown where you can get a good look back at the Firelink Shrine. Here's one perspective from
up by the Eagle Shield. And here's another from down in the swamp near Mildred's spawn location. Firelink is represented with an incredibly simplified version, both in texture and construction. It hasn't been fully replaced with a cardboard cutout, like the Great Hollow was from Firelink, as it's still 3D... But it's kind of oddly smooshed together and looks pretty terrible up close. There's what looks like a bridge extending directly from the bonfire area... [editor's note, more info about this bridge in Episode 10] I interpret this as the further aqueduct tunnel sort of being brought forward. Making it more 2d-like, in a way, while still being 3d if that makes sense. Because if you consider the intended vantage point, you wouldn't really be able to tell if that was intended to be further back or not. But there's also some evidence of other unused paths in the area so there's also some speculation on this low-quality Firelink possibly reflecting an earlier layout for it. As low quality as it is, it's not totally without detail. Here we can see the winding path up to the crow's nest. And here we have the elevator shaft to the Undead Parish. Having varying levels of complexity to how something looks is referred to as "LOD", which stands for Level of Detail. When rendering something from a distance it makes sense to not put as many resources into displaying it fully. When you get closer more details may pop into view as the level of detail switches. But what I find interesting about the low-poly sky boxes of Dark Souls is that because it's more "Metroidvania" than truly open-world... ...the lack of immediate connections between areas means they sometimes implement these in a way where they're not directly drawn off of their source. What I mean by this is that what we see from down here isn't truly Firelink Shrine. From down here the game doesn't have anything from Firelink Shrine loaded so it's not just a matter of rendering Firelink Shrine more-simply from the distance. Instead they have to consider the relationship between the areas and basically reinsert a low-quality recreation of the Firelink Shrine into the Blighttown map. Taking another look down from Firelink, how accurate is this view? A trick we can use is to drop our bloodstain by a particular landmark. Bloodstains will always be drawn to show at their exact XYZ coordinates, regardless of distance. It doesn't matter if you've lost a bloodstain in another level. You can always see a bloodstain from far away... ...as long as the environment itself isn't obscuring it from view. So if we drop our bloodstain by Mildred's spawn location we can take a look to see if we can see it from Firelink Shrine. It's where it should be, showing that the relationship between the areas is being represented fairly accurately. Additionally, if we load the actual Blighttown map and position ourselves back up where Firelink Shrine should be... ...we can see the real version
of Blighttown and how it's supposed to look. We can see that the view from Firelink is basically right. The biggest detail missing are the various branches below. One last thing to mention here is that The Depths would be situated somewhere behind this curved wall. We can see the Gaping Dragon's arena when we switch to the Map Explorer. One of the few cases of distant scenery that can't be traveled to is the town seen from the graveyard area of Firelink Shrine. Let's take a closer look. There's not much to see down there. It's a town that rearranges some elements of the Undead Burg, with some additional simple architecture that's unique to this area. I like to call it the "Other Burg". But I've seen people ask about what this place is supposed to be. What's the lore behind it? My interpretation is pretty simple: It's meant to be a nondescript town, positioned amongst the outer walls. It's one of many unseen towns in Lordran that surround Anor Londo, as depicted in the opening cutscene. This image here from the introduction is almost entirely unrecognizable... Asides from having a large city high up that looks like Anor Londo, with large outer walls and towns surrounding it. We can assume this is earlier concept art of Lordran, which wasn't used as a literal blueprint for the world's design. In-game the outer walls are arranged much more erratically and not in one large circle. But because the general idea is the same, we can interpret the "Other Burg" as the developers' attempt at showing something kind of similar to the concept art. The main takeaway is that there are towns in the walled off areas below Anor Londo... ...certainly a lot more than just the Undead Burg we travel through. This "Other Burg" could be any random collection of buildings that we see from the cutscene. It doesn't really matter. It's not meant to be anywhere specific. If you go out even further you can find a couple more lower-rez towns in different sections behind this one. I've heard speculation on more than one occasion that this was Oolacile... But we're not in the right part of the map and there's nothing that hints at a connection here. I'll talk more about how that fits into the map later. So let's take a look at a few more vantage points from the Undead Burg. We can actually see the Darkroot Garden from here. Though at first glance it may be unrecognizable due to being very low quality... ...and also from the fact that we're not used to seeing it with daytime lighting. This darker thing in the middle represents the zigzagging path that takes you down into the Darkroot Basin. This brighter green area up top is supposed to represent the Darkroot Forest. It would be the area with all the Demonic Foliage. If the relationship between these areas seems a little confusing... ...remember that the forest area of the Darkroot Garden has an unintended, survivable fall down onto those paths in the Darkroot Basin. However the overall placement and angle of this is a bit off from the game's true geography. If we use the same bloodstain trick to mark the drop down location... Looking back at it from here we can't see it at all. Disabling the map helps reveal that the actual location for this should be a bit higher up and significantly further to the left than what the skybox shows us. Comparing this view to what we see in the Map Explorer helps clarify how it's been adjusted. Something else we can see from here. If you pan the camera down from this angle you can see even further below into the Valley of Drakes. One important landmark we can see is the bridge that enters New Londo Ruins. If we go down there we can see the low-quality representation of this bridge. We can also see that a segment of the cliffside walkway in the Valley of Drakes is also included down here. A detail that we would never actually be able to see up from the Undead Burg. To gauge the overall accurateness of this view... ...leaving a bloodstain on the middle of the bridge shows us that the distant view is only a little bit off, this time. While we're still in the Undead Burg let's take a look at a few more distant views. Looking back from near the bonfire room, we can see another low-poly rendition of Firelink Shrine. This time it's stripped down even more than the version we see from Blighttown. But we can see a familiar landmark when we get close enough, which is one of the developer messages. This is now displaying in this skybox of Firelink Shrine because the map is actually close enough to be loaded for real this time. The biggest problem with this perspective is that it once again uses that weird altered bridge or aqueduct path that extends from the bonfire area... ...instead of being where it's supposed
to be. What this means is that, when looking back from the Undead Burg, the real aqueduct has completely disappeared. Though we should be able to see it from here. An exterior, backside to the tunnel was never created for us to see. Let's also take a look at the Lower Undead Burg. It runs below and through the center of the Undead Burg... ...and there's a handful of unintended shortcuts that the player can take to get down there. So it's no surprise that we can see it from above. Though I think it's worth mentioning that we can see into the Capra Demon's room early on. The stairs in the boss room make for a pretty clear landmark and looking down to the left we can see the curved walkway that leads towards The Depths. Now one of the cooler set pieces here is the Duke's Archives, which we can first see all the way back from the Hellkite Bridge. I like how the game telegraphs the Duke's Archives from early on. It can be seen from a variety of vantage points throughout the game. And to have this ominous tower that looms above, waiting for you, reminds me a lot of Dracula's tower in the original Castlevania. In Castlevania, Dracula's tower was shown from a variety of perspectives which was impressive for an early NES game with very limited tile-sets. Demon Souls telegraphed its final boss in a kind of similar way where King Allant's Tower can be seen from the very first level. The impact might be lessened a little bit for the Duke's Archives given that it's not the final bosses area... But it makes for a cool visual nonetheless. Taking a closer look we can see that it's not a fully to scale model but I'll talk more about the scale in a moment. To see how accurate its location is we can't use the same bloodstain trick because the game won't allow us to leave a bloodstain floating in mid-air. So instead I will compare the same set of XYZ coordinates twice. Here we are standing above the spire near the front of the building, as seen from the Undead Parish. Then if we load up Anor Londo to get the closest model of the Duke's Archives exterior... Going back to the same coordinates puts us... here. So you'll notice that the actual building is set further back and a bit lower down. If we consider the vantage point from the Undead Parish-- If it were lower and further back we probably wouldn't be able to see much of it. So its placement in the Undead Burg is adjusted a little bit so that we're given the opportunity to se it in advance. But it's not a major adjustment, the Duke's Archives is still in that general direction. Though a more major shortcut they did take is that they didn't bother rendering it from earlier than the Hellkite Bridge... When we should be able to see it from the Taurus Demon's arena as well. Here's a demonstration of what it would look like if it was rendering from this angle. Now on the subject of scale, even the closer version that we see from Anor Londo is similarly shrunken. It has more details and better textures, but they weren't just trying to trick us for the Undead Parish perspective. It's a consistent trick regardless of where you're seeing the area from. The purpose of this was to make it look a little further away than it actually is. It's not a huge difference but comparing the in-game view to the Map Explorer, we can see how the actual level is a bit closer to Anor Londo. To really get a sense of the shrunken scale to exaggerate distance... ...here we are running around the domed tower that represents the prison area of the Duke's Archives. Now here's what that actually looks like when we're in the Duke's Archives for real. Looking back down at Anor Londo, we can see that the distance is exaggerated from this perspective as well. If we check the true coordinates for the top of the steps here... We can see that those are actually found all the way up here compared to the skybox. That's pretty far. We can get the real level to pop back into view and it again shows us how the Dukes Archives are pushed back from Anor Londo's perspective. Here's a quick tour of the low-poly Anor Londo, it's kinda fun to look at. While we're talking about Anor Londo we might as well cover a few more things that can be seen from there. If we go back to the very beginning of the level the walls are too high to see back down into Lordran clearly... ...but peeking through the embrasure we can see something that is down there. And swinging the camera around the corner allows us to see the Bell of Awakening in the Undead Parish. We'll take a closer look at that sky box in a moment... But if it feels weird that we seem aligned more-closely with the Undead Parish than Sen's Fortress... ...when a set of Batwing Demons carried us up here from Sen's Fortress? Allow me to clarify how things get reoriented. The Batwing Demons, we have to assume, don't lift you straight up and over the wall. They drop you off further down to the right. This blocked-off corridor from Sen's Fortress? It actually aligns perfectly with that main outdoor walkway in Anor Londo. It's lower than the Anor Londo walkway so you'd have to add some stairs, or whatever, to wind up there. But the implication is that this path would take you directly to the center of Anor Londo. It really is a straight line forward from here to Ornstein and Smough's boss room. So let's take another look at the skybox when we're moved back to being above the Iron Golem. We can see that Sen's Fortress isn't rendered at all from this view, despite being the nearest landmark. Though this makes sense given that we could never get high up enough to see it. We can see a limited view of the Undead Parish, some of the outer walls of the Undead Burg and more of the ringed walls further off in Lordran. Looking at this doorway along the outer wall, we can see that this is the same doorway or path that leads to the Hellkite bridge. Though the bridge itself isn't included. Here we can see the Old Church where Andre is. These two lower walls that sort of curve in opposite directions from each other are the ones that contain Blighttown. So even though these outer walls look kind of randomly placed there is still some consideration for the game's geography. Despite none of the details of Blighttown being included, like the Great Hollow tree... This one wall on the interior does have a sort of muddier or darker haze to it. Something that the other walls down here don't have. This shows some consideration that this is, in fact, the Blighttown wall. We can also see a low-quality texture underneath the walls which provides an aerial view of a bunch of random buildings. This is once again conveying that Anor Londo is surrounded by a bunch of other towns we don't get to see, like the "Other Burg". Of course back in Anor Londo, there's a bunch of other buildings and structures we can never get to.
There's not much to see but here's a quick look. One of the coolest views to be discovered in Dark Souls is this view of the Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith from the Tomb of the Giants. With the maze-like nature of Dark Souls it's not at all expected by the time you get here. But if you wanted some clarification as to what exactly we're looking at, let's break this down. All the stuff you see up top are areas of the Demon Ruins that you can never get to. I like to refer to it as the "Upper Shelf" of the Demon Ruins. You can see it while you're down there if you just look up. So this means that the familiar terrain of the 'skybox' is all found at the bottom. You can see the curving path that descends into the lava... You can see the giant dome that houses Lost Izalith... You can see the path that leads to Ceaseless Discharge... And we can also see the cliff that he falls off when you go for his easy kill method. If we take a close look at the path to Ceaseless Discharge we can even see the part of his arena where it forks (and where you can hide from him). We can do the bloodstain test once again to gauge accuracy. Leaving a bloodstain at this fork doesn't align it perfectly with the skybox, but once again the basic idea of the skybox is correct. The distance and angle are manipulated a little bit but you really would be seeing this part of the Demon Ruins. As much as I like this view from the Tomb of the Giants... ...it does make two fairly big mistakes that would ideally be addressed in a more-involved remaster or remake. The first is that when you drain the lava after defeating Ceaseless Discharge, the lava still remains in the skybox. But the bigger issue, in my opinion, is the weird one-way-mirror-thing going on with the skybox. We have this great view of the Demon Ruins but it wasn't implemented the other way around at all. Looking back up towards this vantage point it's just solid wall when there should be a pretty considerable opening. Comparing this view to the Map Explorer's view, we can see how the window into the Tomb of the Giants should be somewhere above and to the left of the 2nd Bell of Awakening... ...when looking back from the fork where we placed our bloodstain. Let's talk a little bit more about the Lost Izalith dome. As I mentioned in the previous segment that dome is, in fact, Lost Izalith. The Map Explorer removes any doubt but I would also like to point out how this is revealed to us in-game. When we first enter Lost Izalith that branch you're walking on is passing through a crack at the base of the dome. You can see the curvature of the wall, especially when looking up from the inside. This level design fits neatly with the lore, given how the Witch of Izalith tried to recreate the first flame but failed miserably and gave rise to demons. A dome-like structure encasing Izalith makes sense if it was designed to essentially be another version of The Kiln. Various other entrances seem to have been sealed off successfully but that crack in the dome makes for a pretty serious breach. I'd like to think that this is where a lot of the demons escaped from. Now unfortunately; Unlike the blocked off path in Sen's Fortress, which gives us a pretty clear indication of how it could have led into Anor Londo... ...this blocked-off path doesn't tell us much. There's nothing directly behind it. We do see other collapsed walkways and other parts of Izalith that are inaccessible... So I do think it's still fair to say that this was a former entrance to Izalith. It's just less direct about how it could have led inside. I like to think it conveys one of two possible things: The first, more obvious guess is that it was likely plugged up in an attempt to seal in the demons. But I also like to consider the possibility that Izalith wasn't originally constructed inside a dome. It was only made that way when the flames started fading and the decision was made to try to recreate the first flame. The sealed up entrance could simply be part of that conversion process to make it function as a kiln, and had nothing to do with the demons. So of course there's also the other 'skybox' in the Tomb of the Giants. It sits in opposition to the Demon Ruins skybox, providing a very different look into the underworld. Now this might be a little pedantic but while a lot of people refer to this as a view of Ash Lake... I would prefer to call it something like the "Ash Lake Expanse" instead. I say this because it's not a view of the actual level of Ash Lake, nor do I think it was intended to be. Note that you actually can't see the beach anywhere, and that would make sense given that it's not in this direction. This is meant to be a view of the primordial underworld that contains Ash Lake. To get the Ash Lake from here you'd have to fly forward a decent amount and then turn almost 90 degrees to the right before you're facing the right direction. This means that when you're in Ash Lake, if you were to look at the trees in the far distance beyond the Black Hydra... Those would hypothetically be the same ones that you can see
from the Tomb of the Giants [from a perpendicular angle]. So what exactly is Ash Lake and how does it relate to the rest of the world? We can see it's some kind of remnant of the Age of Ancients. We get there by descending the Great Hollow Arch Tree, but is it literally down there or did we effectively walk through a portal? How Ash Lake exists in time and space is open to interpretation. There's little debate that it draws some inspiration from Yggrasil of Norse mythology and also from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind... ...but there are still no clear answers here. But it would like to respond to a popular fan theory. There's the idea that every Arch Tree is a connection to another world. Perhaps a parallel universe or another world entirely. This has been likened to the tree-doors in The Nightmare Before Christmas. There are reasons to support the idea of parallel universes as a legitimate fact of the world of Dark Souls... ...but I don't think the Arch Trees themselves are mapped to them in this kind of way. Perhaps I'm taking the game's geography too literally but I do find this idea to be very incongruent with the world's design. This idea seems to largely stem from the fact that going up the Great Hollow tree takes you up to Lordran. So Lordran must be resting up top and it has a special connection to this particular Arch Tree, right? Uncut Gems - [I disagree. I disagree
Gary...] And that's where the idea just falls flat for me because there are too many visual elements that don't mesh well with this. Remembering the view from the Firelink Shrine; the Great Hollow is back there. What about when we can see other large branches burrowing their way through a rock that's behind us. Is that supposed to be the same tree? Going back down to Ash Lake then teleporting to the large branches in the Firelink Shrine puts us up here. We are now much closer to another tree in the skybox. And though I doubt these were placed with any specific consideration... ...I'm going to go ahead and say that it makes a lot more sense for this tree to be the one we see poking through Firelink Shrine. Speaking of the sky box; When we look up we can get a clear view of the ceiling of Ash Lake. It's a dense network of branches that extend as far as the eyes can see. The fact that many trees would fit under Lordran, that we see evidence of other trees poking through other than the Great Hollow... ...and how we can see that they all together form a dense canopy; I think this all supports a drastically different conclusion than the different trees being portals to different worlds. Lordran isn't just resting on top of the Great Hollow. It's resting on all of these. Well, we should consider again the skybox from the Tomb of the Giants because it might put into question the placement of the underworld. It is by far the largest violation of skybox accuracy in the game. We simply shouldn't be able to see this from here. If we take a look in the Map Explorer from near where Leeroy spawns, looking up and to the left a little bit puts a bridge into our view. It's that same bridge, once again, from the Valley of Drakes. This means that big massive window from the Tomb of the Giants should be somewhere behind the cavern wall in the valley. If there's supposed to be that big gap in the cavern wall, seeing through it should just let us see... the other side of the cavern? In other words, this should all be encased in earth here and we shouldn't have such an open view into this direction. But there's a couple ways of looking at this. Given how exaggerated some other skyboxes were, I think it's fair to assume that it should be implied that we are lower now. That, presumably, there is intended to be a bottom to that valley and that we're supposed to be beneath all of that now. Thinking of it in this way can support the idea that, yes, the primordial underworld is physically there at all times. It's a literal, geographical space and this is how I lean towards interpreting it. If the impossibility of this view based on the actual map data is too much to bear... ...then this could support others' notions of the Great Hollow providing some kind of portal to a previous time or alternate space. And what we see from the Tomb of the Giants is some kind of hazy, magical view... Like as if it's an aura of the Age of Ancients, permeating through the cracks of a world in decline. This idea is also ok with me as long as we're not saying the Great Hollow exclusively links up with Lordran. There is a reason to think that the land can be affected in a magical way after all, so the idea that the primordial world may be seeping through isn't necessarily a bad one. It probably won't be a surprise to most that the DLC of Dark Souls 1 is set in the past and is, for a chunk of it, the same space as the Darkroot Garden. Here are some comparisons to help make sense of it: The bridge entering the Royal Wood is the same bridge that leads to the Sif encounter. So you're entering the forest area of Darkroot Garden in reverse. This particular clearing is the same area where you fight the Giant Felines. The path towards Kalameet with a small stream becomes a substantial river and waterfall... ...and of course you have the long ladders that descend into Kalemeet's arena and the Darkroot Basin. Using the Map Explorer to help align an exact angle, we can even see that trees are placed in the exact same locations. So what are the differences? Well this means that this far out area with the tree-trimming guys is what's normally the entrance to the Forest Area of the Darkroot Garden. But looking behind us we can see that there's no staircase here to take us back into the rest of the Darkroot Garden. So the areas with the Moonlight Butterfly, the Frog-rays, the Black Knight, the Crystal Golems, etc; None of this is present in the DLC. The basin itself and the connective area to the Undead Burg, which presumably doesn't exist at all yet, is also missing in the past. If you remember the survivable fall into the basin from the forest, we can see how that's no longer a thing here. The fight with Kalameet takes place in the area where the Hydra winds up, but that ends with a cliff instead of the hill going upwards. Sif's arena is drastically different in the past, being the Sanctuary Garden. This means that the grave of Artorias was relocated to be up here at some point. And of course this area is a bit more mangled and has these 'abyss pits' creeping in. Dark Souls is a fantasy world that doesn't have to abide by any particular real-world physics or geology... ...and some of the differences make enough sense. The river fills in, the Abyss recedes and there doesn't need to be a physical explanation for these pits filling in. They're just magic and once the source of the problem goes away the earth fixes itself. I'm okay with that. We can also see how the Demonic Foliage are implied to be the Scarecrows who've gone feral without the control of Oolacile's magic. And Elizabeth is likely an ancestor to the mushroom people. But some of the other differences make a little less sense to me. The building that houses Alvina is... kind of the same thing? It gets a connecting bridge in the future... But there are enough differences to the layout and how the stonework looks that it doesn't really feel like ruins of the same building. It's more like someone liked the old building and tried to rebuild it. (And) now we're in the ruins of a reinterpretation, I guess? The connection between the Stone Guardians and the Giant Stone Knights is also lost on me. They look similar but they're not really the same. The armor is clearly different so if the Stone Knights aren't just deteriorated Stone Guardians, when did they show up? We should also consider how the area below Alvina's tower, which includes the area with Marvelous Chester, isn't present in the future at all. I like the implication that this area of the forest is all that remained. While all the remnants of the town of Oolacile, including the Colosseum where we fight Artorias, have been completely wiped out. Those were too close to ground zero and were lost. Though when the remaster was announced I do have to admit to wondering if the skybox was going to be adjusted to include some recognizable ruins. One other pretty cool alignment is that The Abyss where we fight Manus and The Abyss where we find the Four Kings are actually quite close to each other. The arenas overlap like a Venn Diagram, though they are on different planes of height. I like the idea that even after Manus was defeated that the abyss lingered and remained most-prominent in the same general area. And as the name itself implies; The darkness was rooted under Darkroot Garden. And if we needed to make up a lore justification for it we could say that this is the reason this area has fallen into a perpetual nighttime... ...sooner than the rest of the fading world. To give some context to the placement of New Londo Ruins... Remember how I showed how the entrance to Quelaag's Domain is essentially underneath the Firelink graveyard. If you were to pass somewhere through the earth in-between, you would wind up in New Londo Ruins. It's also snuggled up a little unrealistically close to the Tomb of The Giants. Looking off to the side here we should actually see the exit to Pinwheel's room, closer than the distant walls. Here's what another bloodstain comparison looks like. Once again the bloodstain isn't super far from the distant wall of rock so it's not hard to suspend our disbelief here. But if I could implement a tiny change to a hypothetical remake, I would simply add a bit of dripping water somewhere nearby in the Tomb of Giants and call it a day. The drop into the Four Kings fight also clips through the Tomb of the Giants map as well. Part of that fall would have you falling somewhere near this wall of rocks when you first start seeing the light. Here's another bloodstain comparison. But we could just pretend that the fall was meant to be like 30 feet in that direction, just on the other side of the rock wall. So this isn't much of an issue either. Let's also take a look at the skylight in New Londo Ruins. If we teleport to it, then run out into
the Valley of Drakes, turn around and look up... We can see that it should be somewhere in the Undead Parish, near where the Hellkite bridge leads. If we teleport to the exact coordinates of the skylight from the Undead Parish, we are now way too far below the ground to make sense of it... ...but we can still see the low-poly bridge of the Valley of Drakes nearby. And it's fairly accurate to how we would see that from New Londo Ruins. Teleporting to basically the same coordinates, just directly a lot
higher above it, puts us here. That's the Altar of Sunlight back over there. If we travel further into the Parish to get more of the map to load, we can get another perspective. This means that when you go up the stairs near the boar, that light shaft should be originated from somewhere below the trees straight ahead. There's nothing to really see out here... ...but if we want to be generous we can observe how the ground below is actually resting lower than some of the other sheets of ground nearby. So with earth being more sunken-in here, it makes it a bit more believable that perhaps its lowest point goes so low as to reach the ceiling of New Londo Ruins. But that would be another 50 coordinates (meters) lower than where we are currently. The Catacombs branches off from other maps in such a way that I thought I wasn't going to have anything to say about it. But I recently made a new observation when trying to figure out a hypothetical source for the waterfall. We can see it flowing out of some rocks up above. If we were to keep going a lot higher, directly above where we are now, we would wind up here in Sen's Fortress. Now given the solid ground below Sen's Fortress, it seems a little strange to have what appears to be open sky above the Catacombs. But Sen's Fortress is aligned more or less alongside a cliff. So if the Catacombs were to make any sense at all, it should be encased with a closed ceiling above... ...and the only light coming through should be coming from an opening on one of those cliffside walls. Well as it turns out, that's exactly what they did. I hadn't realized before that there isn't open sky above the Catacombs and that they did consider its position underground, beneath Sen's Fortress. This reveals a consideration for the world design that I wasn't previously familiar with. If we wanted to go deeper down this rabbit hole... ...an out-of-bounds area below and near the entrance of Sen's Fortress reveals a small stream that most players will never notice. It could just be a random detail but if we're trying to justify the waterfall in the Catacombs, we can say that, yeah... ...there was a source of running water put nearby above, in another level. The coffin ride to Nito's lair would have to be a very roundabout path. Assuming there is a secret tunnel directly behind the coffin that takes us straight there... ...we would perhaps tunnel under the entrance to Quelaag's domain to get there. But I'd prefer to think that spooky skeleton magic is getting us there instead. There is nothing to really say about the placement of areas like the Painted World, the Northern Undead Asylum and The Kiln. Being areas that you warp to, with no in-game indication of how they could relate to other areas, means there's not much to say about them. I could say more, perhaps, about a possible unused entrance to The Kiln, but I'll save that for a future video about weird stuff that can be found out of bounds. So one thing I'd like to quickly mention about The Kiln is something that can be a bit harder to make sense of in-game. The area where you fight Gwyn is almost like a scaled-up version of the Lordvessel. There's something like a stump or set of roots that supports a round structure on top, which carries the flame. So that just about wraps up my analysis of the layout of Lordran. The developers clearly put a lot of effort into considering the relationship between areas and went out of their way to make a tightly compacted world. Even though the game becomes a lot less interconnected after Anor Londo... Other late-game areas like New Londo Ruins and the Tomb of the Giants still carefully unfold with respect to other areas. The execution is not always 1:1 with the actual map data and some shortcuts are taken... ...but these instances of inaccuracy are usually subtle and not really knowable without doing a deep dive. This is in stark contrast Dark Souls 2 where some of the inaccuracies draw attention to themselves. I will of course link to Kayin's 3D Map Explorer in the video description below, but a newer tool which I didn't show earlier was the noclip website. You can load up the various maps of Dark Souls directly in your browser and take a look at them that way. I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope it was informative. If you have any questions about something I might've overlooked or even if there's something else entirely you wanted to know more about, please let me know in the comments. Thanks again for watching.
