Welcome back to another episode of Dark Souls Dissected! Today’s video is all about the hidden and invisible walls of Dark Souls 1. I explain the different kinds of environmental collisions and how they work, and also give a tour through every area to reveal and showcase the different invisible walls that I found hiding in the game’s data.
https://www.patreon.com/illusorywall
0:00 Introduction
1:26 Collisions Overview
3:14 Purposes of High Collisions
8:48 Northern Undead Asylum
14:12 Firelink Shrine
18:14 Undead Burg
27:44 Undead Parish
32:54 Lower Undead Burg
34:39 Depths
36:32 Blighttown
41:34 The Great Hollow & Ash Lake
47:06 Darkroot Garden
49:37 Sen’s Fortress
55:12 Anor Londo
1:01:57 The Painted World
1:08:37 The Catacombs
1:10:49 Tomb of the Giants
1:13:23 Duke’s Archives & Crystal Cave
1:17:16 New Londo Ruins
1:20:51 Demon Ruins & Lost Izalith
1:26:17 The DLC Areas
1:29:26 The Kiln
1:31:59 Outro
Soulstruct for Blender
https://github.com/Grimrukh/soulstruct-blender
https://www.youtube.com/@PhobiaSoft – Glitches you can do in Dark Souls PtDE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzchVrhP-4c
https://www.youtube.com/@samuelhdiamond42 – Secrets of the Sunlight Altar (alt Depths’ entrance)
https://www.youtube.com/@RegoleSlayer | https://www.twitch.tv/regole
https://www.youtube.com/@TheRealMcDan | https://www.twitch.tv/therealmcdan
https://clips.twitch.tv/CaringMoistCaterpillarKAPOW
50 Comments
Responding to various comments in one pinned comment here!
From @bronze81 – "You can actually clear the invis wall by the burg merchant, at least in ptde https://youtu.be/TI5_Ak8_iSk (~3:50 in this video)"
Oh my god, hahaha. I simply did not envision making it all the way up those objects without breaking any of them. Speed runners are scary.
From @victorpilgrim – "1:17:10 i cannot believe you didn't mention the invisible trees of in the duke's archives garden"
lol, I can't believe I missed this! So there's at least one invisible tree you can walk into: https://imgur.com/a/t6TTUsB
With a quick look I couldn't find any others, but so far I did find two more floating trees that are too high off the ground to walk into (another skinny vine-like one like the other, and another regular full-sized tree). Funny stuff! The floating door wasn't the only thing they had issues with here, apparently.
From @RucaBurankee – "41:29 "do you know any other place where this happens?" Does this count? https://youtu.be/qJ4uFUjhPz8?si=jD8WozfKik0rwQpS"
Lol, no because that's not a kill plane getting you! But in a way that's more fascinating to me because you must be tricking the game into causing fall damage by doing that. I can't think of any other explanation, at least. I didn't know you could do that.
I just finished Pannenkoek2012's video about Invisible Walls in SM64 yesterday. 😮
Also, any reason that "Dark Souls: Dissected" isn't in the title of the video, only the description?
Seems like the death cam out of bounds glitches could have been easily prevented if they just made the player die upon the first flat collision (z movement stopped) after initiating death cam mode.
Channel name related 😅
They’re calling Illusory Wall the Pannenkoek2012 of the Dark Souls world
Lot of fire dropped today.
Not lost on me the (probably unintentional) coincidence of two very beloved games getting long, extended breakdowns on their invisible walls — not at ALL complaining, this is a cool way to spend the night watching. Thanks iw <3
And so, Dark Souls's greatest secret is revealed:
It's all handicap-accessible 😀
@1:30:42
Does that lead anywhere into the boss arena?!
WHERE DOES IT GO?!?!😢
just a comment to help a poor wall
Now this is the obtuse wall content i subscribed for
this video is really good
makes me wanna watch some ds1 playthroughs while waiting for the elden ring dlc
Invisible wall lore has transcended from Mario to Souls!
props for the detailed flashing imagery warning, it is very appreciated
10:36 is one way collision possible in game design, that’d be interesting.
12:13 so it will let you jump to your death here then?
Illusory Wall talking about invisible walls
14:48 do NOCs have their own collision type that shows up in dark green?
48:20 was that Zullie?
15:53 oh, I’ve tried jumping there. I figured there might be goodies back there, and accidentally discovered goodies below when I fell.
16:18 guess they just copy pasted the closest flat wall?
man, its such an honor to have my name in one of these videos! this series inspired me to start modding DS1, and despite how much experience i have with it, every one of your videos teaches me loads of new stuff. i do have a few things to add, though!
for the bridge to sen's, it is actually possible to miss the kill plane and fall out of bounds if you jump over the left railing from the stairs leading out of the undead parish bonfire. the out of bounds area is pretty weird and its easy to fall into the void from there.
for the iron golem, its not that the falling animation is allowed to bypass the enemy wall, but rather, the enemy wall is simply disabled through the event that handles him staggering.
for ceaseless discharge, the reason why they were confident enough in his pathing to leave out invisible walls is because his pathing is completely unique and only goes between set regions. most events in the game world are controlled by event scripts, written in a proprietary language made by from software called EMEVD, while specific enemy pathing like this is usually handled through ai scripts, which are written in the lua programming language. ceaseless uses the obscure lua events system, a holdover from demon's souls. in that game it handled all world events, but in DS1 it only handles things like ladders, bonfire warps, some network related stuff, etc. ceaseless is the only enemy to directly interact with this system in the entire game. the reason why his desperate jump always happens even when controlling ceaseless is because there's a region that will force the jump animation if he steps inside it, regardless of whether or not his arm is out. the reason why he just spams the fire blast when his arm isnt ripped out is because the region that ceaseless paths to in order to get to the area that forces the jump animation is simply excluded from the list of potential points he can navigate to when his arm is still in. so he never has the chance to navigate there and thus, he never does the jump. a prime example of the extremely janky, unpolished, last minute hacks you would expect of a rushed area like the demon ruins.
Crystal Teardrops fits so well
19:35 it’s funny that the kill plane gap just so happens to line up with the one spot where you can get over the invisible walls
20:05 so the walls, despite being flat have a bit of collision you can stand on top of?
21:08 what are these ones trying to stop? Are t you supposed to be able to get down there with the ladder?
Hey, I didnt know you could control the Enemies, Do you think it would be possible to make a Mod where there is 1 Main Player and other people try to defeat him using enemies including the boss?
1:30:45 where does that branch thingy go?
I'm so gonna try to kill the giant with the arrow trap now 55:07
Music list?
I wonder if From noticed that red kill plane in Blighttown and thought of the cursed pots in DS2? Haha
Oddly, I'm realizing these invisible walls positively contribute to the unique feel of DS1 for me, where you often have this odd combination of seeing wide open spaces but feeling highly constrained spatially. I'd say "open" spaces in DS2, DS3 and ER feel much more actually open, which significantly alters the vibe somehow
Ooh boy! Another long indepth video about invisible walls! I shall enjoy rewatching this until I can repeat it by rote.
"Babe! Babe! Wake up!!! Call the neighbors!!! Hour long Illusory Wall video!!!! Get the popcorn!!!!"
Seriously though, thank you so much for all the work you put into these, I love details like this and it makes me so happy anytime one of your videos pops up.
This video automatically gets a like from me for using Crystal Teardrops as background music when talking about the catacombs
Nice SotN music homie
What I'm most curious about isn't an invisible wall, but rather that one crystal in the crystal cave I always seem to slip off on near the end. It's one of the one's with the golden golem on it. I assume the collision just gets a bit too steep there
The verticality of Sen's is probably why I loved invading there so much
Great video, honestly expected a lot more cut content leftovers to be shown by collision, guess FromSoft was pretty good with culling stuff
20:02 here’s everyone’s homework
24:27
33:21
YES MORE DARK SOULS DISSECTED!!!!! IM SO EXCITED!!!!
14:56 lmfao
47:28 Someone once used this against me in pvp. I successfully made the jump and followed them, but when I got top of the area that leads out of the basin and back into the garden the guy used wrath of the gods and knocked me off lmao.
41:23 the only instance of this happening off the top of my head that I can think of is in Dark Souls 2, near the first bonfire in Brume Tower you can get stuck in a certain spot and die after a little while and your camera gets flung into space.
It's really fun to watch and quite well known, I would like to know what's happening there especially with the camera jank.
New video from IW 😍
The "Invisible cutscene collision" is a very common designers trick for getting around limitations of their engine. For instance, to this day Bethesda has hidden chests out of bounds which act as storage for shopkeeper inventories, and there doesn't seem to be any way for them to avoid the need for them. It became a problem soon after the launch of Starfield, players found easy ways to break into the scenery and steal the shopkeepers entire inventory. In a later update, they mooved all the chests in the main city to an undisclosed location out of players reach (apparently they just put them high in the sky). But it's hilarious that, for some reason, they still need to be…physically present in the game space. That's essentially what Dark Souls is doing here, storing scene data in physical locations on the map.
When is a door not a door?
29:12
14:36 Casually runs around and picks up an item that I, with 900+ hours, 100 runs, and 3 item-randomizer runs, have never seen/found the entire time.
Even though I stopped playing it for a while now, I love that I still learn something new every now and then.
I love this series… good work IW… keep em coming…
1:21:00 lol nice music stinger.
33:40 retroactively makes me really happy that when I first played this game I jumped into the well in firelink shrine and died. I was initially disappointed it didn't take me to a secret area or act as a shortcut, but now I know that it's still special because they even bothered to let you go down there at all. They could have just faked it like this well. But no. They either built firelink shrine and saw how you could make it on top by jumping and thought, "oh yeah, players are definitely going to want to try and jump in this well, we should let them." OR they specifically designed firelink shrine's well to be enticing to jump into so it can kill you.
Man I remember doing an especially cruel trick to an invader, as I was invaded in the Darkroot Garden, so I had an epiphany to not just go down to the Darkroot Basin, but to also go to that rocky area next to Havel and jump over the rocks, allowing me to get out of bounds. The invader (naturally) couldn't find me, and iirc I think I had to force quit out of the game cause they wouldn't leave.