I remember playing with a buddy of mine, swapping the controller back and forth. He was running around the blighttown swamps while I wasn't in the room, and he found the first illusory wall for the great hollow, looted the chest, and left.

I came back and started playing and ended up back in that same area.

"I already searched there."

"Might be an illusory wall."

"There was, I already hit it."

I swung anyway. Our jaws dropped. Two illusory walls requires two people to find, apparently.

The messages are an integral part of the game, it allows them to be as secretive as they are because they want people to use the message system. Using them isn’t aid or cheating, it’s entirely intentional and I think fosters a great sense of community.

You'd discover one of them by accident sooner or later and then you'd go 'Huh...wonder what else I missed.' 

Well, the game leans on the community sharing information with each other, that is true. But then again, some of the more obscure secrets (double illusory wall to the hollow tree) and hidden mechanics do get found by people playing offline. I stumbled across the hollow tree all by myself, and that's just beacuse I'm always rolling and smacking around, like so many others do, in fear of mimics.

The bit with siegmeyer in Izalith can easily go wrong, if you're not prepared, and so it does go wrong for so many players. I think it's refreshing in a time where so many developers want their game to be fully accessible for everyone. It's very RPG-ey for a player to stumble around not knowing what they missed, and I thinknitnis excellent design.

For a lot of the illusory walls you can actually see into the area behind them. The one in Anor Londo hiding the Havel Armour for example has a window into the stairs to the basement at the end of the corridor outside the room. You can see the Darkroot Gardens bonfire if you skirt around the edge of the cliff.

Player messages combined with guidebooks available on, or close to, launch. They expected players to try and help each other or talk about these things.

...make me feel like the dev's didn't wan't them to be found.

I think they just wanted things to be missable, otherwise exploration in a video game is kind of pointless/ weak if you can't be well rewarded for it and are instead likely to have the same playthrough experience as everyone else.

thats literally what the messages are for

a lot of the secrets aren’t that hard to find for people who like scurrying around for details, the only exception is probably the dlc entrance which was revealed by the devs iirc

It's the kind of game that rewards exploration, and sharing things with the community. The double invisible wall to get to the great hollow/ash lake is my favourite.

This is an aspect which people either love or hate about the games. Basically no I don’t think there’s any way that the devs would have expected the average player to find all or even most of the secrets if they were playing with no online help or in game messages.

I think the idea was to put as many difficult to find secrets in the game, so that anything that a player DOES find feels particularly satisfying for them.

At the same time, I think the games are also made with the expectation that the community will share information and collaborate with one another to find all the secrets together. The in game message system in particular feels as though it was intentionally added to facilitate this sort of collaboration.

The franchise is really built around multiple playthroughs, utilizing the message system and sharing discoveries within the community.

I feel like it’s just Japanese game design. A lot of older platformers are riddled with things seemingly impossible to stumble upon by chance. And that was before the internet to. I mean, Castlevania: SOTN basically hid the entire second half of the game behind doing some really thorough exploration prior to killing the halfway boss. If the requirements aren’t met, a cutscene plays leading you to think the game has ended. It has illusory walls to and in many senses feel like a spiritual ancestor to the dark souls games.

You’re supposed to explore and also play the game more than once.

Dark Souls secrets are meant to be discovered by some, then shared with others. All the early players were on forums sharing stuff back and forth. For some things, such as how to get to the DLC, were strongly hinted at by From Software on some forums.

In general, no, I don't think they intended every player to play the game completely blind while offline. Some will, and they will miss some things and find others, but nothing mandatory is secret.

There are indeed some messages from the developers that will appear if you use a miracle (Seek Guidance) to make more messages appear. Some of those hidden messages actually are very strong hints about various things that aren't obvious (the skeletal blacksmith, trading with Snuggly, etc).

I’m on my second playthrough currently and found the bonfire at the top of sens…..

I went through the whole thing from the blacksmith every single iron giant attempt on my first.

In a single playthrough? No, of course not. None of them are necessary to beat the game. Also, it was the developer who put the messaging mechanic in the game. They wanted people to tell each other what to do.

Games where you can effortlessly 100% all the secrets on the first pass don't actually have secrets. Games where you find something you've never seen before on each playthrough, that's more interesting. Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age come to mind as another series where all these years later I still sometimes stumble upon something I haven't found before.

I don't think Miyazaki ever explicitly mentioned this in relation to Dark Souls, but Japan has a long history of "message sharing" related to video games. Back when arcade games were king, Japanese game centers would even have physical notebooks on hand for people to share discoveries and tips about the games.

The Tower of Druaga (1984) is an absolutely foundational game in Japan, although it is almost unknown elsewhere. It's a very early dungeon crawl with obscure hidden items, many of which are required to beat levels, and many can't be found except by random experimentation. Players would stumble on them and write down their findings in the notebooks, letting others build on them, and beating the game became a kind of asynchronous communal effort.

Druaga's influence on Japanese game designers can't be overstated. Miyamoto cited it as an inspiration for Zelda's design, for example. I think Miyazaki had to be influenced by it, either directly or just by virtue of being part of the Japanese video game landscape. And frankly, it really did help the Souls games catch on.

Here's a Substack article with more about Druaga and community sharing in Japan.

The messages are one of the best parts of these games. When it tells you to be wary left and you turn the corner ready for that enemy!!! Yes, thank you past person who played the game. I went through all of Bloodborne, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3 during COVID quarantine. Had a great time staying home from work for those two months.

I personally played offline because I found that aspect of the game distracting (although I totally get the appeal of both the messaging and the coop/pvp, it’s just not for me).

I missed a bunch of stuff on my first blind play thru, but didn’t regret it. You start to get a 6th sense for illusionary walls after awhile.

Which is why I felt no guilt about looking stuff up since I was playing offline.

Several of the secrets are called out with messages that you can only see if you cast the Seek Guidance miracle.

Yes but they're difficult, but that's what the messages are for and I also wouldn't have found many things without them

Unless you're that one asshole here that responded to me saying you should take more time since he found them all on his own and you should too. Fuck that guy

They wanted them to be found, which is why in-game messages and official guides were released day 1.

While I get not everyone would have access to those, there's also people that see a seemingly pointless empty room, suspicious wall, or hallway that goes a little too far and start checking for hidden stuff. The hidden bonfire in the Catacombs for instance, why not end the pathway at the ladder, then they put a stabby statue at the end further hinting there may be something there.

Granted I came from games like Castlevania that had this sort of stuff all over the place. Footwells of stairs could be broken for roast turkeys, offshoot rooms with seemingly nothing but a single piece of loot, but if you just happen to smack the wall behind it it crumbles, and a map with inconspicuous voids between two separate areas.

What doesn't seem intuitive to some is "common sense" to others; and what makes a Souls game a Souls game is the online functionality that lets players share that info in real time; either actively with messages, or passively seeing other's "ghosts" doing something you may not have thought of.

The thing about these games is that once one person finds something they'll usually leave messages. So if 1 Million people are playing, and let's say 0.01% people find a secret on their own, and let's say 1% of those leave a message, that means there will be 100 messages telling people that there are illusory walls (or whatever). That will lead to more people finding the secrets, which leads to more messages, etc, etc.

That said, some of the secrets were clearly designed to just be mysteries. Vagrants, Miiracle Resonance and Humanity-Drop are all things we didn't understand until people literally went through the code. Even then it took a bunch of testing.

So yeah, huge propps to them for including things that were inttentionally hidden from the players. It means there is more to discover, and the mystery means the game stays in our minds for longer.

Messages are part of the game and community knowledge is needed for it be "ment to find". Don't see messages as a separate part but instead as a tool for you and everyone else to beat the game.

I went in truly blind back in maybe 2011 on my ps3. The game was great and I found some but far from all the secrets. Not finding them all did not affect my enjoyment because I did not know they existed.

I always played offline, you can change your settings! No spoilers messages on the ground for me in my first runs. But I discovered many illusory walls etc. through videos afterwards ;)