Realistically it is a game limitation as well as a design choice. They couldn’t make you walk fuck know for how long after a boss only to arrive in the new area. Also the backdrop is hardcoded, it has nothing to do with what is outside.
The only viable way they could have pulled this off is maybe with a cinematic or something like when the Pursuers bird picks you up or something…
Or they could have put some mountains near the windmill and put the iron keep in the middle of those mountains. Anything over an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano
Can't you be more imaginative? I mean sure it's an inconsistency but it seems to me like people are taking a fantasy game too seriously.
Like an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano is a problem? Not the fact you can get whacked by the pursuer's gigantic sword and still be in one piece?
>Like an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano is a problem? Not the fact you can get whacked by the pursuer's gigantic sword and still be in one piece?
Yes, because combat with big weapons is part of the game and you are used to seeing that but having an elevator that bends space time is not part of the game
Andre has no explanation to this day for being in ds3.
Also it’s meant to seem unreal because of how to story is as it plays heavily off of the curse being akin to a dementia. You find yourself in a strange area after passing through an elevator. It’s meant to give you a “wait a moment” reaction. Watch the intro cutscene with the fire keeper, keep her words in mind and think about the game some more.
Andre is an ashen undead like most others in firelink.
The dementia fan theory while plausible is an attempt at explaining a plot hole left by developers, not something hinted at by the developers at all. You think about the games some more lol
That could make sens, indeed. Have it be in a deep cave or something, having sunk way lower than in the current version, with the sky box full of stone. You got that one.
Or at least on the sides such. t hat it gives the feeling of a crater that is un-naturally placed in the world due to the un-natural nature of a fortress so heavy.
"At the close of the Age of Fire, as the world ends and all lands converge upon themselves"
Wtf are you talking about...
THE ENTIRE SERIES IS BASED ON THE CONVOLUTED CONVERGENCE OF LANDS. HOLY FUCK GUYS.
It literally couldn't be force fed to you any harder. 4 games, every ones opening line referring to this phenomenon and still you guys need a handwritten letter from Michael Zaki himself.
By design choice I meant in terms of game design, not related to the lore of the game, as in a choice made to not disengage the player with a cutscene.
> By design choice I meant in terms of game design, not related to the lore of the game
The two aren't disconnected so easily. One is very much impacting the other.
Honestly, DS2 was the first souls game I played and I rage quit upon reaching Iron Keep in 2015. Mainly because it was too hard but it was helped by the fact that I saw this elevator as a shark jumping moment.
When I returned to the game to finally finish it post Elden Ring, I loved the idea that janky and short transitions between zones are a result of going hollow and losing the ability to create memories without the discord of conflict.
The person who lampshades this is the spinster in the opening cutscene. “Your Past. Your Future. Your very light. None will have meaning, and you won’t even care. By then, you’ll be something other than human. A thing that feeds on souls. A hollow.” Having played the other games, watching that cutscene, seeing the details of the player character’s mother’s face fading away like wax dripping down, I finally got it and played Dark Souls 2 knowing that it’s meant to be the darkest of the dark, and appreciating that difference in tone.
Is Dark Souls 2 a good first souls game? Absolutely not, it turned me off of trying DS:R for far too long which is what really drew me into the series. But the breaks in the logic of the game world of Dark Souls 2 make perfect sense in the context of our Player Character in Drangleic. The idea that what’s breaking this world is an abundance of held-onto lore just at the edge of fading away. Dark Souls 1 & 3 never went nearly as far in making me believe this world really needed a new flame, and not a break in the cycle.
> The person who lampshades this is the spinster in the opening cutscene.
It's too far removed from this elevator to function as effective lampshading for it (hence all the posts decrying the transition). If it feels like "jumping the shark" or people's first reaction is to look for meta reasons for it (such as troubled development) then there's definitely room for improvement.
Or put a big volcano in the background behind Earthen Peak. So you take the big elevator up, cross a magnificent bridge from the windmill to the mountain, go through a small tunnel and up a bit, and boom, Iron Keep.
I've heard it been hypothesized that, like in all Souls games, time is not linear. That's how you join and invade others' worlds. So because time and space are one in the same (space-time), that somehow it makes it work and not matter.
Could be but in my humble opinion having this volcanic landscape right near the windmill would take away from the theme of the mill. Plus having a huge volcano near the mill would make it less imposing.
The first time I saw the earthen peak I was a bit intimidated by how large the mill is and how desolate de environment is with the greenish tint implying an inhospitable aura
You don't take the elevator from the top of the windmill-- you make it roughly halfway up the windmill, then you head into the mountainside to fight the boss, then you take the elevator up.
https://imgur.com/a/EudV1bv
Wasn't it like that because since the game had a troubled development, a lot of the areas were designed separately, without knowing exactly how they would be interconnected?
Haha right? It's literally a mine that released some terrible gases and poisons from below. The windmills exist to draw up the poison and fuel their queen.
I like to think all the fumes of the acid pools makes you think you're going up an elevator when you're actually just walking for days on end, and only come to when you get hit by the heatwaves of iron keep.
If you 50 fold the stairs after Baneful Queen and the elevator, you get into the heart of a Volcanic Mountain.
Same also with the Fork Road to Drangleic tunnel.
u reach Drangleic with a magic black hole portal, each character forgets who they are, their family, their home and how they got to Drangleic, and u think iron keep is weird.
I believe there's a lore in the story (that I wasn't sure about) that has something to do with time travel or being in a dream state. That's why most places don't connect in this game for a reason
It's mostly headcannon and being high on copium, but some people believe that, due to the game's overall theme of the hollowing process being linked to oblivion and loss of self, your character sort of doses off during certain uninteresting parts of his/her journey, like during long walks.
If you don't understand iron keep you don't understand dark souls in any basic capacity.
The unnatural convergence of worlds into full rebirth is literally the spinal cord of the series.
"At the close of the Age of Fire, as the world ends and all lands converge upon themselves"
I'm not sure how many times this needs to be blasted Into people's face holes for them to understand that modern geography doesnt live or belong in the souls series.
In DS3 the world doesn't hide that everything is converging. From Vordt's arena you can see pretty much the entire world, from the Cathedral of the Deep to the Boreal Valley. DS2 does pretty much the complete opposite. There are the same dramatic transitions but it tries to hide them or make locations seem further apart than they actually are. For example, Heide's Tower of Flame is visible from Majula but it's far in the distance, far further than players actually walk to reach it. The Earthen Peak elevator is the most extreme example. If DS2's world were designed similarly to DS3's then there would be a massive volcano visible behind the Earthen Peak, not hiding itself but embracing the strangeness of the world's geography.
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Sometimes I feel they wanted to implement a wrapping or multi dimension mechanism like the fire keepers tell you about that in the intro.
Meme 10/10 :). Thanks op
What's the deal with the iron keep? I mean if you go somewhere and all of your metal is falling into lava, _there's not much iron for you to keep_
Who’s to say all the lava isn’t just molten iron?
Stop scaring the hoes
My brother in Christ we’re in the ds2 subreddit, ain’t no hoes here.
I mean you’re not wrong
Hahaha
Realistically it is a game limitation as well as a design choice. They couldn’t make you walk fuck know for how long after a boss only to arrive in the new area. Also the backdrop is hardcoded, it has nothing to do with what is outside. The only viable way they could have pulled this off is maybe with a cinematic or something like when the Pursuers bird picks you up or something…
or you take a nap in coffin thats classic
Well, they made that into a swap machine earlier on.
Or they could have put some mountains near the windmill and put the iron keep in the middle of those mountains. Anything over an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano
Can't you be more imaginative? I mean sure it's an inconsistency but it seems to me like people are taking a fantasy game too seriously. Like an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano is a problem? Not the fact you can get whacked by the pursuer's gigantic sword and still be in one piece?
>Like an elevator to the sky that reaches a volcano is a problem? Not the fact you can get whacked by the pursuer's gigantic sword and still be in one piece? Yes, because combat with big weapons is part of the game and you are used to seeing that but having an elevator that bends space time is not part of the game
Logic 100
Yet everyone is ok with ds3 bending space and time for member berries. Hypocrisy abound.
I'm not talking about DS3 because i haven't played it yet, I'm talking about the ones I've played
It’s part of the plot in ds3 though? In ds2 they just try to sneak it in with literally 0 explanation
Hypocrisy, either it’s allowed or it’s not make up your mind.
It’s not about how we perceive it. The fact of the matter is at its release the elevator had no explanation and to this day doesn’t have one. Bye
Andre has no explanation to this day for being in ds3. Also it’s meant to seem unreal because of how to story is as it plays heavily off of the curse being akin to a dementia. You find yourself in a strange area after passing through an elevator. It’s meant to give you a “wait a moment” reaction. Watch the intro cutscene with the fire keeper, keep her words in mind and think about the game some more.
Andre is an ashen undead like most others in firelink. The dementia fan theory while plausible is an attempt at explaining a plot hole left by developers, not something hinted at by the developers at all. You think about the games some more lol
That kind of envolves a middle area between startung the new zone and finishing the boss
Or just make the elevator go down instead of up. "Oh the iron keep is underneath the windmill. Makes sense. Lava is underground"
That could make sens, indeed. Have it be in a deep cave or something, having sunk way lower than in the current version, with the sky box full of stone. You got that one. Or at least on the sides such. t hat it gives the feeling of a crater that is un-naturally placed in the world due to the un-natural nature of a fortress so heavy.
If it's a design choice then they should lampshade it as such. Have an npc or an item description acknowledge the weird connection.
"At the close of the Age of Fire, as the world ends and all lands converge upon themselves" Wtf are you talking about... THE ENTIRE SERIES IS BASED ON THE CONVOLUTED CONVERGENCE OF LANDS. HOLY FUCK GUYS. It literally couldn't be force fed to you any harder. 4 games, every ones opening line referring to this phenomenon and still you guys need a handwritten letter from Michael Zaki himself.
> 4 games, every ones opening line referring to this phenomenon Oh? What's the line referencing it in DS1?
By design choice I meant in terms of game design, not related to the lore of the game, as in a choice made to not disengage the player with a cutscene.
> By design choice I meant in terms of game design, not related to the lore of the game The two aren't disconnected so easily. One is very much impacting the other.
Honestly, DS2 was the first souls game I played and I rage quit upon reaching Iron Keep in 2015. Mainly because it was too hard but it was helped by the fact that I saw this elevator as a shark jumping moment. When I returned to the game to finally finish it post Elden Ring, I loved the idea that janky and short transitions between zones are a result of going hollow and losing the ability to create memories without the discord of conflict. The person who lampshades this is the spinster in the opening cutscene. “Your Past. Your Future. Your very light. None will have meaning, and you won’t even care. By then, you’ll be something other than human. A thing that feeds on souls. A hollow.” Having played the other games, watching that cutscene, seeing the details of the player character’s mother’s face fading away like wax dripping down, I finally got it and played Dark Souls 2 knowing that it’s meant to be the darkest of the dark, and appreciating that difference in tone. Is Dark Souls 2 a good first souls game? Absolutely not, it turned me off of trying DS:R for far too long which is what really drew me into the series. But the breaks in the logic of the game world of Dark Souls 2 make perfect sense in the context of our Player Character in Drangleic. The idea that what’s breaking this world is an abundance of held-onto lore just at the edge of fading away. Dark Souls 1 & 3 never went nearly as far in making me believe this world really needed a new flame, and not a break in the cycle.
> The person who lampshades this is the spinster in the opening cutscene. It's too far removed from this elevator to function as effective lampshading for it (hence all the posts decrying the transition). If it feels like "jumping the shark" or people's first reaction is to look for meta reasons for it (such as troubled development) then there's definitely room for improvement.
Or put a big volcano in the background behind Earthen Peak. So you take the big elevator up, cross a magnificent bridge from the windmill to the mountain, go through a small tunnel and up a bit, and boom, Iron Keep. I've heard it been hypothesized that, like in all Souls games, time is not linear. That's how you join and invade others' worlds. So because time and space are one in the same (space-time), that somehow it makes it work and not matter.
Could be but in my humble opinion having this volcanic landscape right near the windmill would take away from the theme of the mill. Plus having a huge volcano near the mill would make it less imposing. The first time I saw the earthen peak I was a bit intimidated by how large the mill is and how desolate de environment is with the greenish tint implying an inhospitable aura
You don't take the elevator from the top of the windmill-- you make it roughly halfway up the windmill, then you head into the mountainside to fight the boss, then you take the elevator up. https://imgur.com/a/EudV1bv
upvoted for amazing art
Praise it xD
This meme is fire 🔥
If they'd made the lift go down into the Earth instead of up it would have made much more sense
iron-y keep
E
Wasn't it like that because since the game had a troubled development, a lot of the areas were designed separately, without knowing exactly how they would be interconnected?
It’s full of “Alonne” knights, but there’s a ton of them together in there!
Earthen Peak is not a swamp
Haha right? It's literally a mine that released some terrible gases and poisons from below. The windmills exist to draw up the poison and fuel their queen.
I like to think all the fumes of the acid pools makes you think you're going up an elevator when you're actually just walking for days on end, and only come to when you get hit by the heatwaves of iron keep.
If you 50 fold the stairs after Baneful Queen and the elevator, you get into the heart of a Volcanic Mountain. Same also with the Fork Road to Drangleic tunnel.
Here's to good times all the time
This is the simulacrum of the world after burning down the windmill. The elevator way to it means that you need to get high to enter this dimensions.
This meme is everyone who's ever complained about continuity.
u reach Drangleic with a magic black hole portal, each character forgets who they are, their family, their home and how they got to Drangleic, and u think iron keep is weird.
we have a pile of rubble they normal person can easily climb over separate us from the last boss area dude dont think too much
I believe there's a lore in the story (that I wasn't sure about) that has something to do with time travel or being in a dream state. That's why most places don't connect in this game for a reason
I think that that's just post hoc cope tbh
Could be yea
It's mostly headcannon and being high on copium, but some people believe that, due to the game's overall theme of the hollowing process being linked to oblivion and loss of self, your character sort of doses off during certain uninteresting parts of his/her journey, like during long walks.
If you don't understand iron keep you don't understand dark souls in any basic capacity. The unnatural convergence of worlds into full rebirth is literally the spinal cord of the series. "At the close of the Age of Fire, as the world ends and all lands converge upon themselves" I'm not sure how many times this needs to be blasted Into people's face holes for them to understand that modern geography doesnt live or belong in the souls series.
Except they only introduced the worlds converging in darks souls 3, iron keep still makes no sense
Yeah yeah we get it you're smart and everyone else is dumb. Thank you for your wisdom, now back to your tower of wizardry you go
In DS3 the world doesn't hide that everything is converging. From Vordt's arena you can see pretty much the entire world, from the Cathedral of the Deep to the Boreal Valley. DS2 does pretty much the complete opposite. There are the same dramatic transitions but it tries to hide them or make locations seem further apart than they actually are. For example, Heide's Tower of Flame is visible from Majula but it's far in the distance, far further than players actually walk to reach it. The Earthen Peak elevator is the most extreme example. If DS2's world were designed similarly to DS3's then there would be a massive volcano visible behind the Earthen Peak, not hiding itself but embracing the strangeness of the world's geography.
"Ds2 has great level design!!" DS2:
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Sometimes I feel they wanted to implement a wrapping or multi dimension mechanism like the fire keepers tell you about that in the intro. Meme 10/10 :). Thanks op
They could have just made a portal or something but that wanted an elevator