Elden Ring Dissected #3 - Hidden Map Changes

artistic license doesn’t apply to maps - they’re factual representations of a landscape that requires as much accuracy as possible. artistic license doesn’t apply at all. pure hand waving

Tbh it made me sad to come back to the game and see some of this changes to the map. I liked the "mistakes" and believed them to be intentional, as in it's a real map that can have some errors, miscalculations or some parts that reflect paths that maybe were there in the past in universe, but oh well...

With mt gelmir it feels like they kinda just went “meh” and didn’t even try. There’s entire cliff faces that aren’t mapped, but show ledges hundreds of feet below.

I KNEW I WASNT TRIPPING WHEN THE CARIAN MANOR PATH DIDNT LEAD UP. THAT PERPLEXED THE SHIT OUT OF ME

It’s interesting coming back to this and thinking about the whole Jarburg map situation. At the time, a lot of people seemed to take the eventual change as proof that it was a mistake, not an intended mechanic. I don’t think those two are mutually exclusive, however. All this time later, it seems inarguable that leaving the map that way was intentional. It was such a stark difference compared to the other discrepancies they opted to change, I can’t really see it any other way.

With the advantage of hindsight, I think the best theory we could form is that it was an experiment by the developers, one they ultimately deemed a failure. It seems clear that they kept the map strange there on purpose, I’d guess to create some intrigue about the secret area. Given the number of bloodstains at that cliff (including my own), most players’ first assumption was the existence of secret path and that they had to make a leap of faith. This is, of course, very funny, but not exactly in line with the Souls approach.

When the Souls devs finish pranking the player, the player typically knows what to do next time. In the case of Jarburg however, most people I know left the cliff behind with a somewhat defeated “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do…” attitude. My best guess is the devs saw the mass confusion and the (admittedly hilarious) pile of horses at the cliff base, decided their intent wasn’t communicated to their standards, and scrapped the idea.

I had a strange thing happen to me a while back, i was doing the 3 invasions for varre on a newish character to get to the rune farm spot and was doing near/far invade. I was in Liurnia next to varre and i invaded someone that was about to fight gold ghost Godfrey, they killed me before i was able to leave (im not great at pvp, there was 3 of them, and i didnt want to disrupt their boss fighting) but when i went back to get my runes they were in the wall that has the fog wall (to the right of the door from the outside looking into the boss room) lost like 20k. No idea why they were there as i never even went close to that wall.

After watching this it make me kinda wish the map was more wrong. To that one mansion there were two paths but one was removed but remnants were still there. We even see destroyed bridges on the map as well. So why not have a perfect map no broken bridges, all path shown, some houses missing. Let it be a map before things start to turn to shit. Big places will stay the same but you could be going down a path see the bridge down thus need to find an alternative or find a house and mark it for later.

I played unpatched and got mad at that caria mansion road

Happy birthday elden ring🎉

Personally i don't like the hills in elden ring. I wish the slopes and cliffs were more readable, currently the water placement and cliff structure always feels very "video gamey" in liurnia and altus

how do ppl take these floating shots of the game?

Even after patch 1.08.1
I found some inaccuracies, and straight up lies of the map. Just yesterday I entered The mountaintops of the giants, and found a mountain near that giant archer after you cross that thin high rocky road. Map shows as if the mountain is climbable in spirally way, when in reality there's just a high ledge that you can't even jump on.

The map is still the worst part of Elden Ring, at least for me. It isn't entirely useless, but there are SO many times where it basically lies to you and makes you waste time trying to figure out how to reach a part of land that doesn't exist.

Somethings that’s not really error, but rather an interesting design choice, in being that before you discover the many tunnels in the game, they are shown in the map with a sort of burning hole in the ground. Not sure why this was chosen to indicate them, as the similar style dungeons in the catacombs and caves, don’t have anything on the map indicating that they’re there (Ex: War-Dead Catacombs), and other structures are depicted fairly accurate on the map, such as regular buildings/houses and the windmills

There was a lack of icons when you spoke to someone. So you would have to use the marker to remember.

In the update it auto added icons to keep track of npcs.

I remember being very confused by that haligtree map as those circular pillars don't exist, I wondered if it was just loads of divine towers were going to be there

and I had to mark where that shack was myself

I always kept trying to go up that road and it never existed lol