those guys transform into those flame butterfly things once you reach lothric castle. I don’t think they are “trees”. I kind of assumed that they were related to the consumed king’s dragon experiments but I’m not very sure tbh
I just thought these were the pilgrims in their final form. In one of the descriptions of the Dragonslayer Armor it call these flying things “pilgrim butterflies”. So maybe they go all the way to Lothric Castle (until it became impossible and settled in Undead Settlement, all the tree persons there are sitting looking at the castle), then once in the walls the grow roots and grow to become butterflies and reach the top. Why that’s the end of the pilgrimage, no idea.
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Seath is a dragon who was born (or formed?) with physical abnormalities. That’s my take, anyway.
Within Dark’s cosmos, I think “god” is just a reverential or fearful title and not indicative of anything inherent to the subject given the title. My interpretation of dragons is that they started out as something half-vegetative (maybe even partly geologic), as seen in the start of Dark’s prologue, but that they always possessed a consciousness which would be alien to human minds (e.g., the stone dragon’s stoicism if you cut its tail off). I guess what gets confusing here is what happened between then and Gwyn & co.'s assault on the dragons to make the dragons appear to be a threat by the lord soul beings. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the dragons actually never did pose a threat, and they were massacred simply as an excited expression of newfound power partly informed by a tribalistic mindset.
They look incredibly similar to the Bed of Chaos’ form. That may be a coincidence, though, because their appearance is also comparable to a winged animal’s bared nervous system.
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To me, DS3 makes the Path of the Dragon seem like some sort of attempt to achieve nirvana by becoming dragons, so perhaps the Everlasting Dragons are beings who became One with the Universe. Or maybe existed in that form all along, unaffected by time.
Mm. So force of nature-ish. I guess that makes the experimentation with/of them more understandable, given that humans saw them as something akin to animals but animals that were part of the natural world rather than independent from it.
I agree with that interpretation of “god” in the Souls series but that also makes me question what purpose religion served since generally religion tends to also focus on explaining things more unassailable. Sort of brings up the question of, “well, if god is a term of reverence, was there something theoretically above them?” Just the fact that the game has clear religions is pretty interesting to begin with, all the little things added or chipped away by the games just make them all the more so.
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fyi that was the 666th post
anyway if I’m not mistaken the “way of sunlight” people from carim all worship gwyn, and most of the overtly religious stuff comes from them. the cult of the dragon thing seems to be limited to lothric. aldia was obsessed with dragons and eventually created one to be a deity, but you get the impression that by the time he did that drangleic had already fallen to ruin.
pretty much the first world building thing that dark souls 3 throws at you is dragon worship. but I am confused as to what the relationship between lothric and the archdragon peak because that seems to be a cult that’s separate from lothric. I remember picking up somewhere that the nameless king is exiled and possibly the first born of gwyn. if you reach the extreme end of archdragon peak you see what I assume is the corpse of the last dragon resting on a mountaintop. to me this confirmed that dark souls 3 is a world where all the dragons are completely dead. the ones you encounter in game are all fabrications. but I guess I could be wrong… I’m not totally sure what the first boss of archdragon peak is supposed to be other than a way of the dragon devotee who finally “made it”. but I haven’t spent too much time looking at those item descriptions so there’s probably something obvious I’m missing.
Why do you think that? Aren’t wyverns different from dragons too?
well, that’s probably the first obvious thing I’m missing
were there any other wyverns in dark souls until now?
also holy god that video
???
My favourite PVP experience recently was when I invaded in the Kiln and the host was hiding somewhere. I couldn’t find him despite him constantly spamming the ‘Call over’ gesture and using the wood carvings. He eventually came out to lead me to his hiding spot, which turned out to be on top of some rocks that you can only get on top of if you roll in a certain way.
So I turned into a dragon and sat up there doing the meditation gesture, and he made a line of prism stones leading to me and eventually we had the full quota of players in there worshipping the dragon on the cliff and fighting duels with each other, then everyone started committing suicide and some guy knocked me off the cliff with one charged up 2H greatsword attack and it was all over.
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well, that clears things up!
you’d think people would be a little more precise wrt this terminology given how central dragons are to dark souls lore but idk
I think maybe there is supposed to be a difference between ‘dragons’ and ‘Everlasting Dragons’, the latter being the ones from before the age of fire that are worshipped by the dragon covenant, and the former being a catch-all term for all the lesser dragons, including drakes.
Seems at least by DS3 history has gotten murky enough that maybe everyone gave up trying to remember which was which, so they just lump them all under t he ‘dragons’ banner. At least the translators probably felt that way.
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I gotta say the translation overall feels sloppier than usual
not really related but I really really like the voice acting in this game. all the npcs have really well defined personalities, even the minor ones that don’t serve a plot purpose
I think I agree with that, I just wish they all had more to say. All the merchants in Firelink seem to have the same few lines for the entire game, the old lady merchant still says the thing about ‘what fine ash’ when you give her umbral ash covered in feces, for example.
I also find it weird how all the characters who are locked in prisons will simply teleport out once you free them, like they could have just done that the whole time
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i actually think the teleporting npcs must be significant somehow. the way npcs worked in the other games - being like “see you at firelink!” and then standing around until you bonfired out later - was fine and it would have been easy to just stick with that, unless there’s a reason not to. the teleporting does enforce that your firelink is somehow separate from the rest of the world - i mean, they literally couldn’t walk there. maybe your invitation, somehow, allows them to leave? i don’t know.
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It’s just a usability polish change more than a worldbuilding one. The visible teleporting clarifies that you will be able find them at Firelink.
The old way was pretty confusing. They’re just standing there, so logically if you want to see them again you would go back where you found them, right? I imagine that came up in some playtests.
(We all know they were teleporting all along anyway, they were just sneakier about it and waited until you couldn’t see them do it.)
yeah I reckon maybe they are using homebones
I’m kind of entertaining this idea that firelink is in a different era or something than the main game because when you find the location in lothric as “untended graves” it’s dark and abandoned. there’s some weird dialogue the shrine handmaiden gives you in lit firelink after you visit her in dark that kind of suggests that? but I guess a few characters loke greirat reference hearing the same bell that wakes you up in the lit firelink area. I’m really confused about what the implications of dark firelink are, especially because there’s ANOTHER dark firelink in the kiln of the first flame except it’s also in ruins. this part of the game is still a total mystery to me. maybe there’s some connection between that and the consumed king
Yeah I’m not going to pretend like I even have a hypothesis about what’s going on between the three shrines but I still liked going through the untended graves for the sort of emotional effect it had. Whatever space or time it exists in, it seems like you’re being given a glimpse of a world where the age of fire has actually ended.
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Near as I can understand, the “Firelink Shrine” is basically a universe unto itself that unifies the rest of the world (in DS3 this is way more straightforward than the others), thus why you can have stuff from Anor Londo and Lothric and Drangleic all in the same contiguous space. All the other shrines that you encounter are the result of you basically “invading” another universe, which you need to do in order to link the flame and delay the age of dark because there’s no reasonable way to link the flame otherwise (after all, the lords are in places that are explicitly very far away from one another, without something to shrink that space, the quest would never end). Which also gives all the games a rather dream-like existence (that you can’t actually escape from as long as you play the game). The “dream” as a metaphor for a cycle of repeating events is most explicit in Bloodborne though; in the Souls series proper it’s considerably less clear.
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I read some interpretation the dark firelink exists as a “warning” as to what that would be like.
maybe the exact meaning was never meant to be clear, but visiting dark firelink was an incredible experience
I feel like there’s got to be something to extract from comparing iudex gundyr and champion gundyr. in one vaati’s videos he speculates that iudex gundyr is the champion of ash who gets to firelink too late to link the flame, as mentioned in the firekeeper soul description. if that was the case it might explain his presence in dark firelink because as it’s portrayed it’s exactly that. so I guess it’s more like dark firelink is in the distant past, and somehow passing through the consumed king’s garden shunts you into that timeline. but it felt more to me like dark firelink is the “true” firelink that exists contiguous with lothric, and the lit firelink is far in the past, back before the flame extinguished. time travel played a big role in ds1 and 2 so I guess it can’t be ruled out
maybe the DLC will shed some light on this. I’m very interested in the DLC because it seems like there many interesting loose ends it could focus on.
tbh I’m not sold on the “souls universe is a creature of chaos” explanation for how places like anor londo and izalith can be “moved” to new places to link the fire. it seems like the entire society of irythill is based upon reverence and obsession with old anor londo and what it stood for, even if that devotion was corrupted. and then it seems like that huge crossbow contraption in izalith is lothric technology? you can view part of irythill (I think that’s what it is) from the crevice in the smouldering lake. what exactly is the relationship between irythill and lothric? why are all of the gaurdian boss fights in lothric from the boreal valley??