Summary
- A FromSoftware modder has discovered that Dark Souls’ infamous Blighttown was built using just ten different pieces of wood.
- Dark Souls modder Grimrukh revealed the scaled copy-pasted wood pieces on Twitter earlier today, which they claim were used to build the entire Blighttown area.
FromSoftware has been known for a long time as one of the masters of asset reuse, taking things from its previous games, altering them slightly, and using them in future games to shorten development times. It’s a big factor as to how the studio managed to release Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls 3 within the span of just two years.
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It seems as though FromSoftware’s knack for asset reuse went even further back than that, and can even be seen in the original Dark Souls. We all know about the copy-pasted Taurus and Capra Demons in the back half of the game, but FromSoftware was apparently a lot more clever when it came to asset reuse in the first-half, and in Blighttown specifically.
That name alone will bring back horrible memories for Dark Souls fans, as the rickety bridges and ramshackle walkways are the stuff of nightmares for first-timers, but the area also serves as a masterclass in asset reuse. On Twitter earlier today (thanks GamesRadar), a Dark Souls modder called Grimrukh noticed that the entirety of Blighttown is made of just 10 different pieces of wood.
Dark Souls Fan Discovers Blighttown Was Built With Just Ten Bits Of Wood
Grimrukh shares the bits of wood in question, which they were able to find thanks to their word on a large-scale Dark Souls mod project called Nightfall. Instead of making loads of pieces of wood and fixing them together, Grimukh says that FromSoftware simply copy-pasted and scaled these pieces up and down, using them to build the entirety of Blighttown.
With how complicated that whole area is, that’s absolutely extraordinary, especially given how most of them are just literal sticks. It must have taken a tremendous effort to piece everything together properly, but probably less than handcrafted loads of bits of wood just for one area. In fact, it’s this kind of asset reuse that makes the upcoming Elden Ring: Nightreign entirely possible in the first place, so I say keep it up FromSoft, you’re doing amazing work.
- Released
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September 22, 2011
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Violence
- Developer(s)
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From Software
- Publisher(s)
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Namco Bandai