Dark Souls and Discovery in Game Design

His advice is vague. "Go up and below" isn't as clear as the difficulty of the nearby enemies and, in the case of the elevator below, is outright misleading.

He says:

Well, listen carefully, then… One of the bells is up above in the Undead Church,

There is only one path that goes upward. The path to New Londo is straight down all the way, and the path to the Catacombs goes up a feet feet at the very beginning and then you enter the temple thing that Frampt in, and go downward from there. It's notable that you start going down steeply and can see that the rest of the path towards the Catacombs goes downward before encountering enemies.

but the lift is broken. You'll have to climb the stairs up the ruins,

You need to climb stairs to get to the Undead Burg, so this felt like a pretty strong hint that the area with the large cliffside staircases is probably where you're supposed to go. There is a much smaller staircase leading to the Catacombs, but again, that path goes down instead of up.

and access the Undead Burg through the waterway.

There's nothing in view that could possibly be a waterway except for the actual waterway, and cliffside staircases pretty clearly lead to it.

The other bell is back down below the Undead Burg, within the plague-infested Blighttown. But I'd die again before I step foot in that cesspool!

This is incredibly non-specific since you don't even know where "below Undead Burg" is. That said, it seems logical to assume that you need to go to Undead Burg to get below it (and this ends up being the case unless you find the alternate entrance), leading you to explore Undead Burg first anyway way. That's how it went for me and most people I've watched in streams and videos, anyway.

You're right but it's sort of semantics here. What he said could be taken as learning enemy animations so you can time your roll accordingly.

He didn't really say it that way, but it doesn't really matter. It's not like it's a huge problem either way.

Are you sure? That's definitely not the case in Dark Souls 2.

Jumping is really weird in Dark Souls II. Sometimes you'll get huge jumps and sometimes you'll get hilariously tiny jumps, even with the same equipment. I don't know what causes it to be so inconsistent in DS2, but in Dark Souls, your jump distance will never change as far as I know. I can jump off a specific piece of geometry and land in the same place, in the same position everytime at every equip load.

Downloading the DSFix mod and playing game with 60 FPS activated will reduce your jump distance, however.

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