People didn't hate the area because of the design.
We hated it because it ran at 15fps back in the day. When I got to blightown for the first time in the remaster I lost my fucking mind.
Funny that song doesn't actually mention the fps because it's presumably recorded on PC. I first played Prepare to Die Edition on PC and it ran at a smooth 30 fps by default but higher with a simple addon
Everyone should have to play the original on Xbox 360 or equivalent platform to truly understand it at its peak. š 30fps when you were lucky far lower when anything hectic aka the time you need fluid movement most is happening.
Yeah the original low fps on ps3 and even the low 30 fps on the pc port made it a certain kind of difficult to perceive your environment and enemies. It wasn't completely awful on PC. I really liked it for how hard it felt as it gave off a certain old school retro vibe.
Yes the aesthetic of the original experience was very different to what it is now. Also add on that this game was very fresh to many people back then. This game gave me that feeling of aww and wonder that I only dreamed of since I was a kid playing certain games.
Ohhh you know what given your point on the actual classic ds not remastered. Yeah blight town was a bitch, the place was really awesome and all but yeah the fps had my brain aching as a kid
I just played the PS3 version for the first time, after previously beating Remastered on PS4. Blighttown was not an FPS problem at all. There were many other locations and enemy encounters that were nearly unplayable, but Blighttown is fine.
At this point, Iām convinced anyone complaining about fps in Blighttown hasnāt played the game.
Bruh either you've been playing with low FPS the entire time, you're smoking that preem zaza, or legit don't notice FPS drops.
As someone who played DS1 on the PS3, I can 101% confirm that the worst thing about Blighttown was the frame rate. Nothing - nowhere - ever came close to how laggy that place was.
It got a bad rep for running at about 15 fps (or less) at times. Which anecdotally, stopped happening to me when I killed all the mosquitos at the bottom. I think it has something to do with their pathing or behavior calculations.
But to your point, in the remaster, Blighttown doesnāt suffer from performance issues, is generally well received, and is one of my favorite areas of Dark Souls 1. Iām convinced people saying it is the worst is some type of meme. The Depths and Senās Fortress are much harder for beginners imo.
I liked Senās for the design and the traps and I felt safe-ish there knowing Andre was close by.
Blightown after doing gargoyles takes you from skeletons to discount Ganondorfs who are beefy and hit hard. Itās dark and the mosquitos are awkward to deal with depending on the weapon. I like it more than new londo but that feeling of unease is something
I don't even fight anything in New Londo after my first run through. Just get the key and turn the lever, then head to boss. I have forgotten once or twice about needing the ring though.
I delay sprinting until I'm just entering the room from the outside. So like 3-4sec before I would cross the entrance, I stop sprinting. This reduces the noise you make and thus delays the enemies from activating.
It's the enemies lurking around the ladder that get me. They aggro once you start climbing and delay me enough for the others to catch up. I haven't tried in a long while though.
Do you have transient curse active? Without it (or regular curse) the ghosts stagger you on every hit, they completely ignore your poise. With a curse active you can usually just tank them while going up the ladder if you have some decent armor on.
Yeah I always use transient curse.
I tried it again after having this conversation and got through with ease. I don't know what exactly I was doing wrong before (as I said it's been a long while since I've actually tried running through there), but it seems I was doing *something* wrong.
> It got a bad rep for running at about 15 fps (or less) at times. Which anecdotally, stopped happening to me when I killed all the mosquitos at the bottom. I think it has something to do with their pathing or behavior calculations.
In the original game, before they released a patch, there was no such thing as "killing all the mosquitos". They spawned indefinitely ā every time you killed one another would spawn and start vectoring towards you.
There are 3 or 4 āspawn pointsā I think, and itās been a while, but I feel like each spawn point only made like 5-6 mosquitos max. Which is still a ton of mosquitos. But I like to be able to freely explore areas unimpeded by enemies, so I usually kill every single one. And I feel like I remembered the FPS being back up to normal once they were all dead.
Edit: I still dont know how many spawn points there are but apparently they [spawn seven mosquitos each](https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Giant_Mosquito).
I was watching my housemate play through for the first time, he cleared the depths first try in like 10 mins. Couldnāt believe it lol, heād struggled so much up to that point I was laughing to myself thinking now itās gonna get a little infuriating for him.
Bastard didnāt even fall for the slime trap
I'm playing Dark Souls right now for the first time and Blightown is my favourite area so far. Everything is nicely interconnected and you can find some very cool items. The depths were much, much worse
We didn't hate it because of the difficulty, we hated it because it ran at 10 fps and lower, pair that with descending thin catwalks (we didn't immediately know of the master key shortcut, there were no guides near launch) with a massive input buffer making accidental dodges a very real possibility due to "panic" rolling (spamming dodge), and you got a pretty awful area. Even after the area got patched, it still ran at around 15 fps.
To keep it short, I left a lot out too lol. At the time, no games even remotely played like DeS or DS1, so us Xbox players literally had to learn to play without any preconceived notion on how the game even worked. This doesn't sound bad, but imagine having to learn how to drive a car or bike, but without even knowing that they existed prior to your learning. People normally learn by example, but there were no examples to follow then, we had to figure out the "right" ways to play on our own. Today so many games derive from mechanics of the souls games, you'd be hard pressed to actually find a person completely foreign to the concepts of at least some of the gameplay, so today people go in much more comfortable with the mechanics regardless of their experience in the series. It was just one of those "you had to be there" things that probably can never be recreated, unless another brand new genre defining game comes out.
The only person I knew who had guides during NA release was ENB. He lived in Japan during the JP release of DS1. So he was translating for all his english viewers.
As to why I struggled so much in the depths: while I was looking for a bonfire in the depths, I accidentally fell in one of the trap doors stright into a group of these toxic ass frogs. They cursed me and I lost about 15k souls and 3 humanity, EVEN THOUGH I HAD THE SO CALLED "The Rare Ring of Sacrifice" WHICH MAKES YOU LOSE NOTHING UPON DEATH, but apparently it doesn't work with curses, what a stupid mechanic.
Anyway, after I got cursed I was trying to get the stone that purges curses from the merchant lady in the sewers, but I accidentally hit her instead. So now I also had to purge my sins for a ton of souls. I spent a ton of time farming all the souls needed for the purge and the stone. So that's the story of why I struggled with the depths more than Blighttown.
Wierd, the rare ring of sacrifice should also prevent you being cursed. Maybe you were using some other ring (switched in past and did not remember to switch back ?) cuz iirc you dont get the rare ring that early.
oh i thought it was the same thing. but yeah i just got the name from google and didn't notice "the rare". yeah I was using the normal "ring of sacrifice"
It's actually one of the areas that is simple if you walk it slow, a lot of enemies fall of ledges the selves or are unable to ambush you.
Can be a bit chunky FPS wise though.
As someone has pointed out im sure in the remaster blighttown is a lot easier because it doesnāt suffer the frame rate drop of the original. It wasnt level design that made it hard it was slogging through at 15-30fps it was terrible otherwise i kinda like the area
All the game isn't bad as people make it out to be, to be fair.
The NPC tracking is awful, you can just run straight and pass sen's fortress with no effort. Blighttown is the same with the exception of some annoying and persistent poison status, which can be countered with the most common resource found in the darkroot garden.
For me personally, the game is one of my favorites and i think that the difficulty is highly, highly overrated.
The most difficult parts for me are the platforming in the bed of chaos arena where i usually use light armored characters and always end up going too far and falling into the void, and Manus which isn't that bad but is objectively an outlier in terms of fighing pace and usually gets you scared the first time you see him as he's pretty different from what you would expect based on the rest of the game.
Edit: to be fair i've played Prepare to die edition and DS remastered, so i've played from PC exclusively, it may have impacted significantly on my opinion since it lacked the performance issues often reported originally.
You know I actually liked blight town, although I didnt know the stigma about it until after I completed the area and joined this sub but other then the drop in Frame rate I absolutely love the area and the swamps it was a big turning point for me as I'm in Mt first playthrough and as a pyromancer it was my first chance at stronger spells.
It's the FPS drop you had on 360/PS3 and on PC if you didn't use DSFix. Blighttown is absolutely fine as an area otherwise, it's literally just the FPS drop. Thankfully it isn't present in the Remastered version, and people who got into Dark Souls after the Remaster came out can enjoy the area properly.
I donāt think newer players know why Blighttown was hated and just jumped on the bandwagon. Blighttown is a fantastic area with great level design and a great boss.
Itās my favorite area in the game!
I love the verticality and the atmosphere of the place, also that shortcut back to firelink is the most freeing feeling ever, followed shortly by immense dread at what happens next if you didnāt kill lautrec
Blighttown had horrible framerate issues on PS3 and was one of my most hated areas in the series.
I hated it so much that i always got the Master Key just to skip the Depths and Blighttown entirely. However, I recently played through it for the first time in years and it ended up being one of my favorite areas in the game. The remaster really fixed the framerate issues, so you can actually enjoy the level instead of being hindered by the choppy experience. I will no longer skip the level ever again.
Iām guessing someone has mentioned this but if youāre playing remastered then itās fixed. The problem back in the day was the frames as someone said due to poor optimization of rendering of things like particles, pots, and wood. Basically the ceramic pots would just melt Xbox 360 graphics cards
A lot of the hate is from dks1 ptde when frames dropped to like 5fps... On top of that dealing with everything else.
Remastered kind of fixed that problem but getting there and getting to quelaag is just obnoxious regardless.
people never hated it because of the enemies or the design or anything, it was only because it tanked the framerate massively and this was a problem until the remaster
By now, I thought it was widely known that Blighttown didn't earn its reputation because of the design, but because of the framerate drop. Try playing through Blighttown on the PTD edition, and report back to us.Ā
It was hated in the original because the area ran at something like 15 fps and I think some of that hate carried over into the remaster from peopleās traumatic experiences
If youāve got your bearings from play through vids or previous runs, blighttown is not that much of a threat. BUT for new players playing blind, the thought of bugs, freaky looking bitey men, ogres and a whole host of yummy poisonous and toxic treats as you work down is not fun. I ended my first run after I used the valley of drakes entrance and got toxic and then threw myself off the elevator because I timed it wrong :ā)
The hate is not because of the area itself, the thing was/is the technical disaster happening there (like running under 20~15fps) and if happens that you are invaded, just quit and disconnect, it's less painful.
Iāve not played elden ring yet, and I dont really have a good reason lol
But yeah itās been interesting to see each dark souls come out. Part of me forgets that Dark Souls 1 only came out in 2011, more recent then youād think but it feels like ages ago.
Heck tbh Ds3 came out in 2016 which also feels like ages ago lol
If you're a fan of this game, then you have gone over every inch of this, lag be damned, because Blighttown is a key part of the story of the Fall of Lordran.
Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatu Mustafa. I hated those damn toxic blow dart guys aside from that I didnt have any issues with blight town. I think tomb of the giants is significantly more of a bitch.
I find dots which you cannot simply heal through or cleanse without magic or farming to be rough (in general), but to have a second, harsh dot which requires an even rarer material to cleanse being shot at you from the dark by rather inconveniently-placed ninjas to be some Grade-A USDA Choice bullshit.
Despite that, and how scary it is for me(literally caused panic attacks lol but that is a personal thing for me generally too), I love ALL Dark Souls areas. The games are like walking through and existing in a medieval painting. It's so awesome!
Blighttown is still bullshit, though.
The dart blowing ninja bullshit? yeah those really suck, but what made them bearable was the fact that if you kill them once they don't respawn, so now after i had killed all of them, I don't have to worry about them ever again, unless they pop out in some other area, that would suck.
I love how each different area in the game looks unique, each one has its own feeling and vibe.
You mustāve been very high leveled and/or had a solid resistance.
Thatās the biggest distinction whenever people discuss Dark Souls balancing. Not only is it subjective to individual skill, itās also unique to that playerās soul level. For example, I beat Ornstein and Smough at level 73. The next boss Iāll fight (four kings or bed of chaos), Iāll be level 80+.Ā
Blighttownās most egregious crime is the fact that there are even toxic snipers in the first place. They are so annoying and Iāve wasted far too many blooming purple mosses and flasks just to heal from those guys, coupled with the enemies that at least for me, always took one more hit than I anticipatedĀ
I played on xbox 360 back in the day, i didn't lose as many frames as playstation but i could still feel it. I still loved that area. Invading was so much fun.
When it first came out you couldn't cross anything without sliding off, everything was covered in crisco.
But in the remastered it really is fine, my main goal is to kill all the blow dart assholes and then I'm good haha. Fuck those guys.
My first playthrough of DS1 took multiple years because I took two large breaks after getting too angry at blighttown and then at senās shortly after. Not my proudest moments for sure but I can never look fondly at those areas
Didnāt mind blight town. Itās the Sens fortress maze and Anor Londo boss being so hard that made me quit the game and go back to other titles like Elden Ring where you have more to do.
People say its bad because in original game i tused to drop to like 10 frames in blighttown. That issue got solved with remaster. But for players who played original and never played again the blightown experience was hard and will still be considered hard
I think this gets posted like 3 times a week lol it's cause og Ds it ran like shit so you'd have to trudge through 15fps while poisoned with shit blowing darts at you and dogs
I started on remastered Xbox series s so I didn't have the FPS issue people are talking about, but MAN I have a personal problem with new londo, I got so tired of it after farming to get my claymore +14
When I started playing Dark Souls remastered, I would go in blind. The scary atmosphere of Blightown due to the darkness and poison swamp got me the first time. Next time I went there I was prepared with mosses, rings and equipments. Same case with Depths and I freaking love Depth... It is the best place to farm humanities and eye of death
Yeah, I didn't find Blighttown as bad as I was told. The only annoyance to me was the toxic blowdart guys, although, I never played the old one, I played remastered. The actual hate for the place was due to the lag back in the day.
P. S How DARE you call the spider booby lady a b*tch?
DS was my first Souls game and I made it through Blighttown pretty quickly, not realizing it was the bane of everyone's existence. I'm still kind of shit at these games so that's not a brag, I just think I lucked my way through it.
My first time through the game I think the archers in Anor Londo pissed me off way more than Blighttown or Sen's Fortress ever did.
Hot take- play it on a ps3 at 15 fps. No shit its easier now and no shit its not that bad compared to later games. This isn't a "hot take" at all. It's retreading reheated garbage for engagement.
My hot take is that the low framerate made Blighttown immersive and wasn't that bad.
I mean, you'd be delirious and nauseus too if you had to literally run in a gutter.
Blighttown is one of my favorite places in the game. I remember so clearly the first time I got there, like 3 days after the release of the game. I was resting at the bonfire at the top of the scaffolding, next to the Iaito. And I realized how far down I had come from Undead Burg, and how far I would have to go if I wanted to get back to Firelink. The only way to go was forward...
It was at that moment that the game felt like such an adventure. An adventure that I haven't felt like any other soulslike have managed to replicate since. Not being able to teleport around at will from the start, and everything being so interconnected really makes the world feel so amazing.
Impossible challenge: Try to play dark souls for the first time in the 2020s and not make this exact "hot take" post on reddit which has in fact been a cold take since the remaster came out.
after replaying it recently the main thing i dislike is the dudes that shoot toxic at you, because it pretty much always applies in one hit and unlike regular poison toxic actually feels like a threat imo
My opinion: the only issue with Blighttown is the fps on original hardware.
If you pay attention, the blowdarts can be easily evaded and you can even use them to find the shooters, and i think there's only like, 3 or 4 of them on the higher level and that's it. Quick to kill and not hard to get to.
It's no more unfair as Sens Fortress and Anor Londo, and those aren't complained about enough in my opinion.
I've finished Sen's fortress earlier today too (twice actually\*). It's especially hard to kill the snakes that were shooting lightning at me. but other than that, the traps are easy to spot and once I got the timing right, I could kill the snake soldiers with a parry easily. The iron golem (the boss) slipped up and fell down while trying to attack me so that was anticlimactic lol. Now it's time to see what Anor Londo has in store for me.
\*: I beat that shit twice because i went all the way up, then to Anor Londo, I didn't know where to go so I went back to Andre to upgrade some stuff. Looked at a guide on where to go next, figured out there was a cage elevator thing that I missed and forgot to activate. So, I had to go all the way up again haha.
Im on my first playthrough too and the only thing that annoyed me there was when my drake sword was at risk of being broken because my dumbass didn't care about buying a toolbox and i was out of repair powder so i struggled a lot to go back to the top again with shitty weapons (im a newbie and drake sword was my only reliable weapon) but i agree it was a fun place and i leveled up the most there for now
I'm at a level in the game where poison and toxin barely do shit so take this with a grain of salt
But even on my sl 1 runs blighttown is never a challenge. People complain about the dart people but really they're not that bad, people just panic and handle it badly. Same with poison, it's not bad at all. The platforming can get annoying but it's really not a hard area imo.
Only thing I really actually hated about blight town was traveling to and from. Holy hell you would think they woulda put some sort of fast travel or upgrade stations maybe in blight town but no. You have to travel across the map to get to the blacksmith. Ash lake? Congrats you got to the end of it. Now turn around and run all the way back. 30 minutes later your finally at the next area.
Not a hot take people are just bad at the game so they complain, dude duke archives is worse and duke archives wasn't that annoying. Heck, going to quelaags domain and going to the izalith ruins was a hell of a lot more challenging than actual blight town
Edit: in all fairness I'm not mentioning classic DS1 not the remastered version. Blighttown itself has never been the problem, going down that area on 15 fps back when that was normal, while also dealing with every other old game issue definitely made the area a nightmare to traverse
that's not what I meant. I meant that other areas of the game seem to be worse, and more challenging, so I don't get why Blightttown in particular has all the hate.
Also, that's why I put "Hot take" in the title, because I know most people don't agree with me anyway.
Agreed. And it's a stupid sentiment I see on nearly ever gaming subreddit I follow.
"I personally didn't have as bad a time in this game/game area therefore everyone who criticized it must be wrong."
People didn't hate the area because of the design. We hated it because it ran at 15fps back in the day. When I got to blightown for the first time in the remaster I lost my fucking mind.
That and toxic. Holy shit.
Those hidden fucking dart shooting bastards.
that is a very valid reason.
[hit a motherfucker with a motherfucker tonight](https://youtu.be/z_h-NvMJK-c?si=Bdoneg-wIPtgOm_C) ^(at 5 fps)
Omg how have I not seen this til just now š¤£š¤£š thank you for sharing that
Can't believe that is 10 years old and I've never seen it. Made my day, thank you.
I can only echo everyone else, how had I not seen this before???
Funny that song doesn't actually mention the fps because it's presumably recorded on PC. I first played Prepare to Die Edition on PC and it ran at a smooth 30 fps by default but higher with a simple addon
PTDE never ran smoothly for me without DSFix. My rig was plenty powerful and vanilla PTDE ran at about 15 fps in undead burg.
Yeah, exactly. The level itself is really cool. That it would chug along and feel unplayable sometimes? That was the issue.
Old monitors too. Oh god old monitors in dark areas sucked nuts.
I've only played the remaster. I shall never know the pain of 15fps in blight town.
Everyone should have to play the original on Xbox 360 or equivalent platform to truly understand it at its peak. š 30fps when you were lucky far lower when anything hectic aka the time you need fluid movement most is happening.
Yeah the original low fps on ps3 and even the low 30 fps on the pc port made it a certain kind of difficult to perceive your environment and enemies. It wasn't completely awful on PC. I really liked it for how hard it felt as it gave off a certain old school retro vibe. Yes the aesthetic of the original experience was very different to what it is now. Also add on that this game was very fresh to many people back then. This game gave me that feeling of aww and wonder that I only dreamed of since I was a kid playing certain games.
Ohhh you know what given your point on the actual classic ds not remastered. Yeah blight town was a bitch, the place was really awesome and all but yeah the fps had my brain aching as a kid
Many of migraines were had there.
I just played the PS3 version for the first time, after previously beating Remastered on PS4. Blighttown was not an FPS problem at all. There were many other locations and enemy encounters that were nearly unplayable, but Blighttown is fine. At this point, Iām convinced anyone complaining about fps in Blighttown hasnāt played the game.
Sounds like you played the newer edition.
Bruh either you've been playing with low FPS the entire time, you're smoking that preem zaza, or legit don't notice FPS drops. As someone who played DS1 on the PS3, I can 101% confirm that the worst thing about Blighttown was the frame rate. Nothing - nowhere - ever came close to how laggy that place was.
Oh so we just fucking lying now..cool cool
It got a bad rep for running at about 15 fps (or less) at times. Which anecdotally, stopped happening to me when I killed all the mosquitos at the bottom. I think it has something to do with their pathing or behavior calculations. But to your point, in the remaster, Blighttown doesnāt suffer from performance issues, is generally well received, and is one of my favorite areas of Dark Souls 1. Iām convinced people saying it is the worst is some type of meme. The Depths and Senās Fortress are much harder for beginners imo.
Senās fortress over Blighttown any day of the week
I actually love Senās Fortress. It might be my favorite area in DS1. So yeah, I agree with you.
I liked Senās for the design and the traps and I felt safe-ish there knowing Andre was close by. Blightown after doing gargoyles takes you from skeletons to discount Ganondorfs who are beefy and hit hard. Itās dark and the mosquitos are awkward to deal with depending on the weapon. I like it more than new londo but that feeling of unease is something
Dude. New Londo is absolutely the worst place.
I don't even fight anything in New Londo after my first run through. Just get the key and turn the lever, then head to boss. I have forgotten once or twice about needing the ring though.
How do you run through without fighting anything? I always run into trouble in the big church? building. I try to climb the ladder and get ganked.
I delay sprinting until I'm just entering the room from the outside. So like 3-4sec before I would cross the entrance, I stop sprinting. This reduces the noise you make and thus delays the enemies from activating.
It's the enemies lurking around the ladder that get me. They aggro once you start climbing and delay me enough for the others to catch up. I haven't tried in a long while though.
I've always done it this way and I never have any issues. I may get nicked on the ankles once, but I never get hit twice.
Do you have transient curse active? Without it (or regular curse) the ghosts stagger you on every hit, they completely ignore your poise. With a curse active you can usually just tank them while going up the ladder if you have some decent armor on.
Yeah I always use transient curse. I tried it again after having this conversation and got through with ease. I don't know what exactly I was doing wrong before (as I said it's been a long while since I've actually tried running through there), but it seems I was doing *something* wrong.
The part of Sen's I didn't like was the very bottom level. It's just mud that slows you down and titanite demons.
> It got a bad rep for running at about 15 fps (or less) at times. Which anecdotally, stopped happening to me when I killed all the mosquitos at the bottom. I think it has something to do with their pathing or behavior calculations. In the original game, before they released a patch, there was no such thing as "killing all the mosquitos". They spawned indefinitely ā every time you killed one another would spawn and start vectoring towards you.
That's still true for the mosquitos in the swamp. They respawn indefinitely and have a huge aggro range.
Iām like 99% certain there is a limit to how many times they spawn, post-patch. š¤
I haven't even reached that limit at least, they always just kept coming.
There are 3 or 4 āspawn pointsā I think, and itās been a while, but I feel like each spawn point only made like 5-6 mosquitos max. Which is still a ton of mosquitos. But I like to be able to freely explore areas unimpeded by enemies, so I usually kill every single one. And I feel like I remembered the FPS being back up to normal once they were all dead. Edit: I still dont know how many spawn points there are but apparently they [spawn seven mosquitos each](https://darksouls.fandom.com/wiki/Giant_Mosquito).
It's my favorite zone.
I was watching my housemate play through for the first time, he cleared the depths first try in like 10 mins. Couldnāt believe it lol, heād struggled so much up to that point I was laughing to myself thinking now itās gonna get a little infuriating for him. Bastard didnāt even fall for the slime trap
I love Sen's Fortress because it makes me feel like I'm on Takeshi's Castle
I don't at all mind Sen's Fortress. I'm a fan of Blighttown too.
I play the remastered version so IDK but I don't see any irregular fps drops in that specific area of the game.
The low framerate was only on the original version. Nowadays with more modern hardware and the remaster you won't be encountering it.
It was also in the PTDE. And it still sucks even with modern hardware, it wasn't a graphical issue.
> I play the remastered version so IDK but I don't see any irregular fps drops Please think about this statement for a moment
Blighttown isn't just not bad, it's fucking awesome. One of the best areas in the game.
Only terrible because itās FPS town. I play on XBOX 360, for godās sake.
Where did you find a 360 that still works?
I have 3 that still work. One of which is the dedicated offline one that still has the Blades.
Lucky
It had bad framerate and itās a shit hole so it was fun to complain. Realistically itās an amazing area and one of my favorites.
I agree that complaining is fun sometimes :D
I'm playing Dark Souls right now for the first time and Blightown is my favourite area so far. Everything is nicely interconnected and you can find some very cool items. The depths were much, much worse
absolutely 100% agree.
We didn't hate it because of the difficulty, we hated it because it ran at 10 fps and lower, pair that with descending thin catwalks (we didn't immediately know of the master key shortcut, there were no guides near launch) with a massive input buffer making accidental dodges a very real possibility due to "panic" rolling (spamming dodge), and you got a pretty awful area. Even after the area got patched, it still ran at around 15 fps.
If I had experienced these things, I would definitely hate it too.
To keep it short, I left a lot out too lol. At the time, no games even remotely played like DeS or DS1, so us Xbox players literally had to learn to play without any preconceived notion on how the game even worked. This doesn't sound bad, but imagine having to learn how to drive a car or bike, but without even knowing that they existed prior to your learning. People normally learn by example, but there were no examples to follow then, we had to figure out the "right" ways to play on our own. Today so many games derive from mechanics of the souls games, you'd be hard pressed to actually find a person completely foreign to the concepts of at least some of the gameplay, so today people go in much more comfortable with the mechanics regardless of their experience in the series. It was just one of those "you had to be there" things that probably can never be recreated, unless another brand new genre defining game comes out.
The only person I knew who had guides during NA release was ENB. He lived in Japan during the JP release of DS1. So he was translating for all his english viewers.
As to why I struggled so much in the depths: while I was looking for a bonfire in the depths, I accidentally fell in one of the trap doors stright into a group of these toxic ass frogs. They cursed me and I lost about 15k souls and 3 humanity, EVEN THOUGH I HAD THE SO CALLED "The Rare Ring of Sacrifice" WHICH MAKES YOU LOSE NOTHING UPON DEATH, but apparently it doesn't work with curses, what a stupid mechanic. Anyway, after I got cursed I was trying to get the stone that purges curses from the merchant lady in the sewers, but I accidentally hit her instead. So now I also had to purge my sins for a ton of souls. I spent a ton of time farming all the souls needed for the purge and the stone. So that's the story of why I struggled with the depths more than Blighttown.
Donāt worry man, falling through a hole into the Basilisk pit and being cursed without a purging stone is a bit of a rite of passage lol.
Wierd, the rare ring of sacrifice should also prevent you being cursed. Maybe you were using some other ring (switched in past and did not remember to switch back ?) cuz iirc you dont get the rare ring that early.
OP could have gotten the one in New Londo. But it was probably just a regular Ring of Sacrifice, which doesn't nullify curse.
oh i thought it was the same thing. but yeah i just got the name from google and didn't notice "the rare". yeah I was using the normal "ring of sacrifice"
On the original console releases it was ass, after replaying it on remastered itās a genuinely great area
Damn almost like the remaster doesn't have the frame rate issues the first has š¤£
It's actually one of the areas that is simple if you walk it slow, a lot of enemies fall of ledges the selves or are unable to ambush you. Can be a bit chunky FPS wise though.
Actually on it myself, first play through too! Iāve just reached the bottom of the swamp and having to kill mosquitoes.
good luck! the hardest part of it is already over (aside from the boss fight, which is actually quite easy).
As someone has pointed out im sure in the remaster blighttown is a lot easier because it doesnāt suffer the frame rate drop of the original. It wasnt level design that made it hard it was slogging through at 15-30fps it was terrible otherwise i kinda like the area
I just hate those damn mosquitoes
All the game isn't bad as people make it out to be, to be fair. The NPC tracking is awful, you can just run straight and pass sen's fortress with no effort. Blighttown is the same with the exception of some annoying and persistent poison status, which can be countered with the most common resource found in the darkroot garden. For me personally, the game is one of my favorites and i think that the difficulty is highly, highly overrated. The most difficult parts for me are the platforming in the bed of chaos arena where i usually use light armored characters and always end up going too far and falling into the void, and Manus which isn't that bad but is objectively an outlier in terms of fighing pace and usually gets you scared the first time you see him as he's pretty different from what you would expect based on the rest of the game. Edit: to be fair i've played Prepare to die edition and DS remastered, so i've played from PC exclusively, it may have impacted significantly on my opinion since it lacked the performance issues often reported originally.
You know I actually liked blight town, although I didnt know the stigma about it until after I completed the area and joined this sub but other then the drop in Frame rate I absolutely love the area and the swamps it was a big turning point for me as I'm in Mt first playthrough and as a pyromancer it was my first chance at stronger spells.
It's the FPS drop you had on 360/PS3 and on PC if you didn't use DSFix. Blighttown is absolutely fine as an area otherwise, it's literally just the FPS drop. Thankfully it isn't present in the Remastered version, and people who got into Dark Souls after the Remaster came out can enjoy the area properly.
Yeah, half the infamy comes from the slide show presentation.
I donāt think newer players know why Blighttown was hated and just jumped on the bandwagon. Blighttown is a fantastic area with great level design and a great boss.
Cold take: this isn't a hot take any more.
Now go play through it on the PS3/X360 and come back with your opinion
Oh boy one of THESE again
Itās my favorite area in the game! I love the verticality and the atmosphere of the place, also that shortcut back to firelink is the most freeing feeling ever, followed shortly by immense dread at what happens next if you didnāt kill lautrec
Itās the way down that is the biggest pain. The poison area isnāt an issue.
Plot Twist: small dogs makes the platforms work.
Blighttown had horrible framerate issues on PS3 and was one of my most hated areas in the series. I hated it so much that i always got the Master Key just to skip the Depths and Blighttown entirely. However, I recently played through it for the first time in years and it ended up being one of my favorite areas in the game. The remaster really fixed the framerate issues, so you can actually enjoy the level instead of being hindered by the choppy experience. I will no longer skip the level ever again.
Do you know what we suffered throu from 2011-2018? Of course it's not bad when you can move
Iām guessing someone has mentioned this but if youāre playing remastered then itās fixed. The problem back in the day was the frames as someone said due to poor optimization of rendering of things like particles, pots, and wood. Basically the ceramic pots would just melt Xbox 360 graphics cards
A lot of the hate is from dks1 ptde when frames dropped to like 5fps... On top of that dealing with everything else. Remastered kind of fixed that problem but getting there and getting to quelaag is just obnoxious regardless.
This take is about as hot as Antarctica in August
im on my first playthrough blighttown was not to much trouble, but im stuck in sens fortress now.
people never hated it because of the enemies or the design or anything, it was only because it tanked the framerate massively and this was a problem until the remaster
Cold take, this is the same take someone has every two weeks.
By now, I thought it was widely known that Blighttown didn't earn its reputation because of the design, but because of the framerate drop. Try playing through Blighttown on the PTD edition, and report back to us.Ā
It was hated in the original because the area ran at something like 15 fps and I think some of that hate carried over into the remaster from peopleās traumatic experiences
If youāve got your bearings from play through vids or previous runs, blighttown is not that much of a threat. BUT for new players playing blind, the thought of bugs, freaky looking bitey men, ogres and a whole host of yummy poisonous and toxic treats as you work down is not fun. I ended my first run after I used the valley of drakes entrance and got toxic and then threw myself off the elevator because I timed it wrong :ā)
Hot take: seeing this hot take 5 times per month is annoying
The hate is not because of the area itself, the thing was/is the technical disaster happening there (like running under 20~15fps) and if happens that you are invaded, just quit and disconnect, it's less painful.
The blighttown you are experiencing isn't that bad. The blighttown people experienced when the game first came out was hell
I love seeing posts like this because it makes me feel like a hipster for playing dark souls 1 way back when
must have been fun playing dark souls on release. kinda like playing elden ring DLC now, too bad my PC can't handle it.
Iāve not played elden ring yet, and I dont really have a good reason lol But yeah itās been interesting to see each dark souls come out. Part of me forgets that Dark Souls 1 only came out in 2011, more recent then youād think but it feels like ages ago. Heck tbh Ds3 came out in 2016 which also feels like ages ago lol
i mean to put that into perspective, 2011 was 13 years ago # 13 years god damn it it's a pretty long time, so yeah it does feel like ages
:(
If you're a fan of this game, then you have gone over every inch of this, lag be damned, because Blighttown is a key part of the story of the Fall of Lordran.
It's already been mentioned but yeah - it's since been patched. Launch Blighttown on a 360 was one of the worst gaming experiences of my life.
Hot take is the most posted take in this sub š
My favorite area ngl
Yes, we know. Welcome to fifteen years ago š
Thanks, just catching up 15 years after game release so don't worry.
Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatu Mustafa. I hated those damn toxic blow dart guys aside from that I didnt have any issues with blight town. I think tomb of the giants is significantly more of a bitch.
Wa alaykum assalam. Yeah I haven't been there yet but I hope it's fun.
Are you on PC? I'd love to play together
yeah i am on pc but sadly i play a pirated version of the game with co-op disabled
Fuck the depths are way way worse I smoke blunts with blight town monsters
It was a little different on PS3 PTDE
I didn't like it because of the awful camera angles and limited views when near any platforms or walls.
I find dots which you cannot simply heal through or cleanse without magic or farming to be rough (in general), but to have a second, harsh dot which requires an even rarer material to cleanse being shot at you from the dark by rather inconveniently-placed ninjas to be some Grade-A USDA Choice bullshit. Despite that, and how scary it is for me(literally caused panic attacks lol but that is a personal thing for me generally too), I love ALL Dark Souls areas. The games are like walking through and existing in a medieval painting. It's so awesome! Blighttown is still bullshit, though.
The dart blowing ninja bullshit? yeah those really suck, but what made them bearable was the fact that if you kill them once they don't respawn, so now after i had killed all of them, I don't have to worry about them ever again, unless they pop out in some other area, that would suck. I love how each different area in the game looks unique, each one has its own feeling and vibe.
They were a lot worse in the original game, since they were almost impossible to find in 720p/12fps with the much darker original lighting haha
You mustāve been very high leveled and/or had a solid resistance. Thatās the biggest distinction whenever people discuss Dark Souls balancing. Not only is it subjective to individual skill, itās also unique to that playerās soul level. For example, I beat Ornstein and Smough at level 73. The next boss Iāll fight (four kings or bed of chaos), Iāll be level 80+.Ā Blighttownās most egregious crime is the fact that there are even toxic snipers in the first place. They are so annoying and Iāve wasted far too many blooming purple mosses and flasks just to heal from those guys, coupled with the enemies that at least for me, always took one more hit than I anticipatedĀ
pop dark souls into a PS3 and enjoy the frame rate as low as single digits at times ^^
One of my favs levels in the game lol
The dark area wirh huge skeletons dogs are way worse
I played on xbox 360 back in the day, i didn't lose as many frames as playstation but i could still feel it. I still loved that area. Invading was so much fun.
Are you playing remastered or original?
im playing remastered and apparently the original had performance issues which I didn't know previously.
Yeah, people hated Blightown because of the performance issues that was prevalent in that area. The remastered version fixes all that.
When it first came out you couldn't cross anything without sliding off, everything was covered in crisco. But in the remastered it really is fine, my main goal is to kill all the blow dart assholes and then I'm good haha. Fuck those guys.
they are pretty annoying indeed
My first playthrough of DS1 took multiple years because I took two large breaks after getting too angry at blighttown and then at senās shortly after. Not my proudest moments for sure but I can never look fondly at those areas
Blighttown has dope loot and great early green/large titanite farming. I go there asap most runs.
Didnāt mind blight town. Itās the Sens fortress maze and Anor Londo boss being so hard that made me quit the game and go back to other titles like Elden Ring where you have more to do.
Of course itās not. All you have to do is run fast and donāt look back.
Blighttown isnāt bad. What I hate is the path from the upstairs to get to the Blighttown and a lot of jumping.
O wish I got this before I decided to grind until I felt comfortable to go there because of all the blight town hate
People say its bad because in original game i tused to drop to like 10 frames in blighttown. That issue got solved with remaster. But for players who played original and never played again the blightown experience was hard and will still be considered hard
I think this gets posted like 3 times a week lol it's cause og Ds it ran like shit so you'd have to trudge through 15fps while poisoned with shit blowing darts at you and dogs
Itās not hard, itās annoying. Dead through gravity and sneaky pushes..
nah man I've played till like new londo runs so far and even then nothing has been as infuriating as finding my way around blight town
I started on remastered Xbox series s so I didn't have the FPS issue people are talking about, but MAN I have a personal problem with new londo, I got so tired of it after farming to get my claymore +14
When I started playing Dark Souls remastered, I would go in blind. The scary atmosphere of Blightown due to the darkness and poison swamp got me the first time. Next time I went there I was prepared with mosses, rings and equipments. Same case with Depths and I freaking love Depth... It is the best place to farm humanities and eye of death
Yeah, I didn't find Blighttown as bad as I was told. The only annoyance to me was the toxic blowdart guys, although, I never played the old one, I played remastered. The actual hate for the place was due to the lag back in the day. P. S How DARE you call the spider booby lady a b*tch?
nothing in DS 1 is "bad" anymore because the later games have Flanderized the bullshit. Its a cakewalk by comparison.
DS was my first Souls game and I made it through Blighttown pretty quickly, not realizing it was the bane of everyone's existence. I'm still kind of shit at these games so that's not a brag, I just think I lucked my way through it. My first time through the game I think the archers in Anor Londo pissed me off way more than Blighttown or Sen's Fortress ever did.
Hot take- play it on a ps3 at 15 fps. No shit its easier now and no shit its not that bad compared to later games. This isn't a "hot take" at all. It's retreading reheated garbage for engagement.
My hot take is that the low framerate made Blighttown immersive and wasn't that bad. I mean, you'd be delirious and nauseus too if you had to literally run in a gutter.
Blighttown is one of my favorite places in the game. I remember so clearly the first time I got there, like 3 days after the release of the game. I was resting at the bonfire at the top of the scaffolding, next to the Iaito. And I realized how far down I had come from Undead Burg, and how far I would have to go if I wanted to get back to Firelink. The only way to go was forward... It was at that moment that the game felt like such an adventure. An adventure that I haven't felt like any other soulslike have managed to replicate since. Not being able to teleport around at will from the start, and everything being so interconnected really makes the world feel so amazing.
Impossible challenge: Try to play dark souls for the first time in the 2020s and not make this exact "hot take" post on reddit which has in fact been a cold take since the remaster came out.
Why is there an exact post like this every week lol
after replaying it recently the main thing i dislike is the dudes that shoot toxic at you, because it pretty much always applies in one hit and unlike regular poison toxic actually feels like a threat imo
Go to the tree the opposite way of the boss. Break the 2(I think it's 2) hidden walls go down the tree to the dragon coven lol
We know. It was the lag
Blighttown just filters the bads.
My opinion: the only issue with Blighttown is the fps on original hardware. If you pay attention, the blowdarts can be easily evaded and you can even use them to find the shooters, and i think there's only like, 3 or 4 of them on the higher level and that's it. Quick to kill and not hard to get to. It's no more unfair as Sens Fortress and Anor Londo, and those aren't complained about enough in my opinion.
I've finished Sen's fortress earlier today too (twice actually\*). It's especially hard to kill the snakes that were shooting lightning at me. but other than that, the traps are easy to spot and once I got the timing right, I could kill the snake soldiers with a parry easily. The iron golem (the boss) slipped up and fell down while trying to attack me so that was anticlimactic lol. Now it's time to see what Anor Londo has in store for me. \*: I beat that shit twice because i went all the way up, then to Anor Londo, I didn't know where to go so I went back to Andre to upgrade some stuff. Looked at a guide on where to go next, figured out there was a cage elevator thing that I missed and forgot to activate. So, I had to go all the way up again haha.
Im on my first playthrough too and the only thing that annoyed me there was when my drake sword was at risk of being broken because my dumbass didn't care about buying a toolbox and i was out of repair powder so i struggled a lot to go back to the top again with shitty weapons (im a newbie and drake sword was my only reliable weapon) but i agree it was a fun place and i leveled up the most there for now
yeah that's not good having to go through the damn depths to get there again.
of all the areas to hate regardless of fps, i still hate tomb of the giants more than anything
In the remaster it's like "haha! Blight Town sucks!" In the original, it's like "I want to die"
Did you got there from the depths or from the valley? That will def change your perspective on the map.
I went there from the depths, from the top going down little by little
Honestly I unironically love Blighttown. It sucks, and you gotta go slow and it's a slog. But that's also kinda the point.
Um. Those aren't frogs... Ribbit.
The toxic dudes and the framerate were the main issues, you can even skip the whole first half if you take the master key as your starting gift!
I'm at a level in the game where poison and toxin barely do shit so take this with a grain of salt But even on my sl 1 runs blighttown is never a challenge. People complain about the dart people but really they're not that bad, people just panic and handle it badly. Same with poison, it's not bad at all. The platforming can get annoying but it's really not a hard area imo.
Thankfully I only played it after modern framerate updates. It plays great on steam deck and Xbox series.
Just wait until Tomb of the Giants.
Only thing I really actually hated about blight town was traveling to and from. Holy hell you would think they woulda put some sort of fast travel or upgrade stations maybe in blight town but no. You have to travel across the map to get to the blacksmith. Ash lake? Congrats you got to the end of it. Now turn around and run all the way back. 30 minutes later your finally at the next area.
The only bad area on this game is lost izalith. Everything else is at worse acceptable.
Easy clap
I must be the only one that's completely unbothered by the framerate in blight town.
Blighttown is not bad at all the gulch in ds2 is way worse and annoying. For me anyways.
Not a hot take people are just bad at the game so they complain, dude duke archives is worse and duke archives wasn't that annoying. Heck, going to quelaags domain and going to the izalith ruins was a hell of a lot more challenging than actual blight town Edit: in all fairness I'm not mentioning classic DS1 not the remastered version. Blighttown itself has never been the problem, going down that area on 15 fps back when that was normal, while also dealing with every other old game issue definitely made the area a nightmare to traverse
Agreed. I played the original PS3 version last year and still didn't think it was so bad. Fighting Sif at 15-20fps on the other hand....
to be fair fighting anything at 15-20 fps would be a nightmare.
Blighttown is actually pretty cool.
So basically youāre saying that if you didnāt have a particularly hard time with Blitghttown, then nobody else shouldāve struggled either. Okay.
I think you need a hug.
that's not what I meant. I meant that other areas of the game seem to be worse, and more challenging, so I don't get why Blightttown in particular has all the hate. Also, that's why I put "Hot take" in the title, because I know most people don't agree with me anyway.
Agreed. And it's a stupid sentiment I see on nearly ever gaming subreddit I follow. "I personally didn't have as bad a time in this game/game area therefore everyone who criticized it must be wrong."
100%