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Samovar posted:I think Ludwig resembles a horse because he has turned into a nightmare - going by the very old definition of a nightmare being a horse that brings bad dreams - 'night-mare'. I also kind of wonder if this has to do with what he did in life. Was he a cavalry knight? Maybe he's merged with his warhorse?
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Mar 31, 2016 21:49
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Red-eyed hunters in the DLC drop vermin. All three that gave you vermin drops had those red eyes. So, at least in that version of the nightmare, they are vermin-infested which makes them stronger relative to the other hunters in the DLC. Interestingly enough, they drop vermin whether or not you have the league rune equipped (and I believe they drop even if you don't have the league rune, but I've never tested).
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Apr 1, 2016 00:49
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Update: 22. Research Hall
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Apr 7, 2016 18:37
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Don't mess with the Blobheads, they may look goofy and make silly sounding noises but many a hunter has been killed by them.
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Apr 7, 2016 22:07
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Pretty sure they ARE the precursor to the celestial emissaries. The celestial emissaries are found in the orphanage, which is stated to have rounded up children and experimented on them. Also, remember that anyone sent to Iosefka's clinic becomes one. Also winter lanterns are only found in the nightmare of mensis (and 1 tiny cave in the nightmare frontier). The school of mensis was all about brains and poo poo so it makes sense that brain monsters would crawl out of a nightmare created by them. The hunter's nightmare seems to be solely based on the past, and is stated to basically be hell for hunters. No hunters were involved with mensis' dumb ritual so they wouldn't have seen the giant brain. But they could have seen whatever the precursor to the choir was.
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Apr 8, 2016 03:56
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I think the Winter Lanterns are made by the minds of the player or Gehrman. They're very specifically the Doll with a giant brain head made of messengers, which is meant to be how horrific the Hunter's Dream actually is to Gehrman. They also hum Mergo's lullaby but broken, which matches the Doll raising the Good Hunter after the squid ending. Also yeah the patients of the research hall are attempts to produce celestial emissaries, they're mostly failing though because the Old Blood used is decayed and not fresh, as it's collected from the Pthumerian dungeon during this time period not Ebrieatas, who was probably found after the burning of old Yharnam which I think the first zone is partially about. Basically you go backwards a generation or two each area.
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Apr 8, 2016 08:00
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The woman in white - wasn't that Vicar Amelia? Oh yeah, the altar. Did you notice that there are five figures in it, not four? Edit: Yes, prions are terrifying things. As in, worse than smallpox, ebola. Samovar fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Apr 8, 2016 |
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Apr 8, 2016 18:30
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It's not unreasonable that the kin and the winter lanterns are different products of similar research. Winter Lanterns seem mostly to be a giant cluster of messengers formed into ... something, which makes me think they're not what the brain bags turn into (and the blue aliens have big heads too!). Maybe though those messengers have an origin in the Nightmare as well especially given an upcoming area's shelled enemies. Though the messengers having more relation to the Moon Presence seems more likely.... And in regards to if the lanterns look like they're wearing the Cainhurst noble's dress or the Doll's dress, it's hard to tell either way because the Lanterns are a bloody mess. The Noble Dress has a the more accentuated stripe that the lanterns' bloody middle rag has, but the doll clothes seem to have a more similar outline. That being said, maybe both are linked? I wouldn't be surprised if the doll's clothes have some correlation to the Cainhurst dress given yet another upcoming part in this DLC but made more dolly because Gerhman is likes his pretty real dolls  Really though, I'm banking on the big head patients to be more related to the Emissary given all the surrounding aspects of the Research Hall. Jesus, the uncertainty Bloodborne lore speculation is an exercise in quantum theory.
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Apr 8, 2016 21:38
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Yeah, there are so many potential explanations for just about everything that pinning anything down with certainty is just impossible. The game is even set up with a classic bookend structure (wheelchair man in the beginning, the doll in the end), which is a traditional indication of a story told by an unreliable narrator. What the hunter experiences may or may not be a reliable report of what actually happened in the course of the game (and anything the hunter learns is subject to that too, of course). You have to assume some things to be stable to make any kind of interesting interpretation, of course, but the whole thing or any piece of evidence in it really can be just dismissed as a fevered dream or madness without doing even the slightest violence to the story. My personal take on those big-head patients should probably wait until after the next video or two. I do not particularly believe the winter lanterns are the result of any sort of human experimentation, at least in the sense of the schools and the research hall. Their very nature as an amalgamation of stuff just says "byproduct" to me. We know other hunters have been in the dream in the past, and, because it's a FROM game (who use game mechanics to tell part of the story), I'd say it is perfectly reasonable to say that there are other hunters experiencing a different version of the dream at the same moment (cooperators, possibly npc summons as well). If I had to wager, I'd say the lanterns are a byproduct of the dream or the moon presence. We don't have any evidence from any of the endings that the hunter's dream could collapse in on itself, as it continues to exist in some fashion in all three endings, but the winter lantern would make so much sense as some sort of frenzy-inducing singularity of a collapsed version of the hunter's dream that lurks on the edges of other nightmares. Maybe they are created by the death of a hunter who has experienced the dream (but has since severed from it) by the messengers that attached to that hunter. Basically, though, we need a Bloodborne 2 to be able to make any firm conclusions about the world itself, even provided it decides to give us a story framed differently.
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Apr 9, 2016 03:09
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The celestial emissary/celestial mob enemies were definitely once human, as we can see humans being turned into them at the clinic. There's actually even a partially-turned corpse on one of the tables upstairs. Also I'm pretty sure the slug babies in the upper cathedral ward are offspring of Ebrietas, whose blood causes certain women in Yharnam to give birth to them whenever the red moon descends (see the end of Arianna's questline). That's why the place where the church rounds them up afterwards is called the orphanage, I guess? Might be too much speculation on my part but it seems to make a lot of sense.
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Apr 9, 2016 12:37
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The celestial children are all in the orphanage owned by a group of people willing to perform human experimentation. There is a good chance that they're the orphans, used to check the safety of the procedure before the Choir all changed into the Celstial mobs in the emissary fight. Which is what I think happened to the majority of them, we only meet 2/3 other members. False Iosefka, Edgar and possibly Amelia.
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Apr 9, 2016 13:20
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Update: 23. Living Failures
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Apr 9, 2016 17:29
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Sorry, but the schedule is going to be off for these last few episodes. My personal life suddenly became very busy the past couple of weeks. The remaining content has been recorded, and we'll be adding a final episode which will be a lore video. Starting Tuesday, I'll be recording footage for a Dark Souls 3 Let's Play, so if you've liked the content we've provided here be sure to keep an eye out for that. Releases will probably be much slower, as I may be moving to a different state in a month or two. notlupus fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Apr 9, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 17:34
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Update: 24. Maria, Laurence
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Apr 11, 2016 00:30
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Maria is a very cool fight but you may have noticed that she doesn't have very much health at all in comparison to previous bosses, which might be a good thing really, Lawrence meanwhile has too much health and he hits really really hard, he's the worst fight in the DLC and the game for me.
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Apr 11, 2016 07:49
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notlupus posted:Sorry, but the schedule is going to be off for these last few episodes. My personal life suddenly became very busy the past couple of weeks. The remaining content has been recorded, and we'll be adding a final episode which will be a lore video. This is a really solid Bloodborne LP and I await a DS3 LP with great interest. e: Also the Maria bossfight is loving nuts. First it's a distillation of the hunter fights, then it's full-on vileblood mode, then she pulls in all the blood she's been throwing around and it's "I'm loving vampire royalty rear end in a top hat come on" time. wiegieman fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Apr 11, 2016 |
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Apr 11, 2016 09:05
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It is in fact totally possible to parry the big Patients. They just have weird timing and you managed to shoot them either just before or just after the parry window. As the Loch Shield description suggests it is a good shield, for magic attacks not physical, meanwhile the wooden shield also has a theoretical use, it blocks bullets a bit I think. The maximum number of Living Failures is indeed 4, and due to a coding glitch if you visceral attack them with the healing or bullet from visceral rune it does quadruple effect or something. The meteors all come from the same location every time too, so once you know which way that is it becomes very easy to ignore as you can just stand in the correct location to block them all with the giant sunflower. The Living Failures themselves are exactly that, Failed attempts to transform people into Celestial Emissaries. I personally think the failure is because they're using old decayed blood instead of fresh blood, thus finding Ebrieatas lets them succeed. The location you fight them is also directly above where you fight the Emissary in the real world. I personally don't think that bone is hers, because I think she's entombed in the Clocktower specifically the coffin beneath the Clock, the Hunter's Bone is Gehrman's in my opinion. As I think it's more likely they buried Gehrman's real body in his own workshop and your hunter just doesn't realise that the bone he attributes to an apprentice is actually the Master's. Especially as Gehrman had many apprentices and all of them used Quickening, so it might be a different apprentice too. So Maria has a few cool things going on, of course the whole blood weapons and burning blood is a thing, and as you saw she can visceral attack which looks like a kiss or a whisper to me. There are two ways for her to Visceral, either she parries you with her Evelynn or back-stabs with a specific move. She's almost certainly a Vileblood, specifically a relative of Annalise and thus nearly royalty. Parry windows are very specific, it has to be during an attack frame not a wind-up or after. The Celestial Dial and the Astral Clock actually have Caryll Runes on them I believe. I actually think the Doll came after Maria left to become the Lady of the Clocktower, I also don't think she was ever part of Byrgenwerth, because she's a Vileblood which I personally place after Laurence and Willem have their falling out. Basically I reckon the forbidden blood was stolen during the upheaval that Laurence's leaving caused, and thus the Vilebloods and Church grow in tandem to begin with. Maria dislikes the actions of her family/servants and so she flees the castle and arrives in Yharnam, where she meets and trains under Gehrman. So whilst the curse is being laid upon Byrgenwerth I find it interesting that it appears to mainly target hunters, no scholars of Byrgenwerth bar Laurence are in the Nightmare and there's a reason for that. Whilst it was done at Byrgenwerth's command I personally think the only person who fought in the real Hamlet is Gehrman. So the curse actually focuses on him and those who follow in his footsteps, the Hunters of Yharnam. Laurence is dragged in because he led the students study. I think Simon actually came here the same way you did, for that matter Maria also made this trip at some point, hers being rather truncated of course because only the fishing hamlet existed at the time, this is also when she dumped the Rakuyo. Simon is of the same generation of Hunters as Gascoigne in my opinion. I think with Maria and Ludwig we have an example of every Hunter Generation actually; Gehrman --> Maria/First Hunter of Hunters --> Logarius (Not a Hunter himself but led to the Healing Church gear's style) --> Ludwig --> Djura/Eileen/Henryk --> Gascoigne/Simon --> You. I personally think that whilst what Willem was doing at Byrgenwerth would've ended poorly Laurence just royally screwed Yharnam and it's immediate surroundings in his attempt to find the path to ascension.
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Apr 11, 2016 14:27
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Lord_Magmar posted:So whilst the curse is being laid upon Byrgenwerth I find it interesting that it appears to mainly target hunters, no scholars of Byrgenwerth bar Laurence are in the Nightmare and there's a reason for that. Whilst it was done at Byrgenwerth's command I personally think the only person who fought in the real Hamlet is Gehrman. So the curse actually focuses on him and those who follow in his footsteps, the Hunters of Yharnam. Laurence is dragged in because he led the students study. I think Simon actually came here the same way you did, for that matter Maria also made this trip at some point, hers being rather truncated of course because only the fishing hamlet existed at the time, this is also when she dumped the Rakuyo. Simon is of the same generation of Hunters as Gascoigne in my opinion. Ah, but consider the wording of the curse: 'Curse the fiends, their children too and their children forever, true'. It's a three-generation curse the fish-people asked of Kos. They didn't just curse the Byrgenwerth scholars, but THEIR children (the Healing Church) and THEIR children, too (the Hunters).
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Apr 11, 2016 23:08
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Hadn't thought about that. That also sort of works, although I still think the lack of Cainhurstians or Byrgenwerth Scholars beside Maria and Laurence is suspicious.
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Apr 12, 2016 01:58
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The use of Laurence's song is one of my gripes with this DLC. It's pretty much the best boss fight song in the entire game, except maybe for one other one that's coming up. And yet it doesn't match the boss fight at all. First: The tone of the song is mournful, triumphant, soaring to exultant heights in the latter half - which plays only after he's had his legs cut out from under him and is crawling pathetically on the floor. The actual pacing of the song is almost entirely at odds with the way you fight - it's slow and deliberate, but Laurence is a desperate frantic mess of dodging and sidestepping explosions. Second: Laurence just will not shut up. It makes it very difficult to appreciate the song itself, because he's screeching constantly through the entire fight.
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Apr 12, 2016 02:28
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Update: 25. Fishing Hamlet
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Apr 12, 2016 02:31
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Not just hurled, that snailperson plummeted out of the sky. And if you look down into the water when you enter the fishing hamlet from the clocktower...
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Apr 12, 2016 04:02
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So here's why I think Simon the Harrowed actually came here the way you did and didn't die to reach here. He talks about forefathers sinning and investigating the nightmare an awful lot. He's certainly not from the same generation of hunters as Maria and came after Ludwig because he's one of the first Healing Church Hunters which were founded by Ludwig. I suspect Maria visited at some point too. What I think is going on is Simon came to the Nightmare like you did for the same reason you did, however he heard the Bell before you did and thus the Beast-Hide Assassin tried to slaughter him and not you. The Bow-Blade is really good by the way, it does extremely high damage from range and uses only 1 bullet at a time for a full charge. It makes anything with a weak-spot you can target a chump if you can keep distance and is probably the easiest way of fighting Ebrieatas/Amygdala I know of. The orbs are full of oil, probably whale oil as a lot of the tools these guys have suggest Whale Hunters. Either that or it's from the phantasms at the bottom of the cave. Interestingly Brador's set without the Beast-Hide is visibly similar to the Foreigner set you start with. Which suggests he was once like you and instead of eventually fighting against and stopping the madness of Yharnam and it's various secret and not so secret societies and joined them. I could certainly see him being the killer of Laurence, and it would fit how the first zone seems to be about the Burning of Old Yharnam and Laurence's Final Fate. As far as skill weapons needing multiple hits whilst it's generally true there's one pretty big and obvious case where it isn't. The Burial Blade, Gehrman's Scythe, when transformed eats a lot of stamina and does quite high damage. It also has the strongest rally potential in the game and a wide arc so in dungeons you can have 5-10 of the weakling guys all on you and just win by swinging and reaping the gains. Interestingly I don't think any fishing Hamlet enemy is actually Kin bar one unique exception, they might be beasts but I don't think so either.
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Apr 12, 2016 05:21
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Update: 26. Orphan of Kos
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Apr 13, 2016 13:03
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The Blacksky eye casts the spell that the white church hunter before the . It's just a small little meteor, it's relatively high damage and a good bit of range. Brador turns away because the game expects you to come in from Ludwig's Arena. The wrongs he speaks of is that you've found the secrets of the Church. My theory is that Gehrman fought the entire town alone, because I personally don't think the Hunters existed before the Healing Church and the advertisement for the Old Hunters shows a man floating into the Hamlet with Gehrman's scythe all alone. Also Kos possibly beached herself, as the Orphan might've died if she hadn't. So Kos loses her child by sacrificing herself to give birth, either way Kos died before Byrgenwerth showed up. Then Byrgenwerth hears of the the Hamlet and Willem sends Laurence, Gehrman and some students to investigate. Gehrman is ordered to assault the Hamlet when they won't share their secrets, or Laurence decides it will be quicker to study corpses instead of talk to living people. Gehrman fights his way through to the corpse of Kos and slaughters the Sweet Child of Kos whose death curses him and Laurence and all who follow them, possibly. Then they return triumphant to Willem but changed, Laurence believes Willem is too cautious, after all his methods worked faster than Willem's suggestion of long-term study at the Hamlet, and Gehrman no longer sleeps soundly because of his own misdeeds. The Orphan is very much a Great One attempting to emulate a Hunter, probably Gehrman. His weapons a placenta by the way. Basically like Mergo's Wet Nurse the Orphan is a creation of an infant great one for protection. The Wet Nurse is designed after a Shadow of Yharnam by Mergo and the Orphan is modelled after Gehrman by the Sweet Child. Interestingly if you talk to the Doll after you kill the Orphan and Maria she has special lines, but only if you do so before the Dream is on fire. After Maria she claims some great shackle has been lifted, because she and Maria are linked. After the Orphan however she says Gehrman slept soundly for the first time ever, as the Hunter's Nightmare is in my opinion built around the First Hunter's Nightmare. He is forever cursed to live through his own atrocity from the point of view of the Orphan, which is why he and the Orphan use the same crying sound, the Orphan is actually Gehrman's dreaming self.
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Apr 13, 2016 14:02
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Also, the Orphan is Kos trying to bypass the curse of the Old Ones. They can never have children, so she sacrifices herself so a new life can be created. And then you kill it. Edit: Also, the sound design for the Orphan, like so many other things in this game, is amazing. Edit edit: Maybe I miss it, but I think there's an item in the hamlet you missed, which was a decapitated fish-man head, which showed evidence of invasive treppaning, specifically to see if eyes had been formed lining the brain. I think the Scholars found this hamlet of Kos worshipers, saw how they had been changed, and slaughtered the lot of them to see if they could gain an understanding of how to better be in contact and to elevate mankind to the level of the great ones. And the curse is laid by the survivors of the hamlet against the Scholars. Edit edit edit: Well, goes to show I should watch the whole thing before making statements. Samovar fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 19:43
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One really interesting thing is the female voice at the start of the dlc repeats the curse, but changes it to fiends as the amygdala grabs you. I am personally convinced the statue body on the altar in the research hall (where you insert the token to make the elevator work) represents the orphan of kos. The legs and (I think) arms have been removed as the statue depicts. As removing those would be interesting as far as a dissection goes, it wouldn't contribute anything to the primary work which was the dissection of the brain, which that set of statues is depicting. There are also several item descriptions, such as the parasite of kos (which mentions the corpse of kos washing up on the beach), which I take to mean that the parasites are what killed kos. Some people have suggested the nature of the fishing hamlet as what appears to be a whaling site means humans killed kos out at sea, and that is viable, but I think the parasites are more likely. My take is that the orphan was, in reality, born on that beach, and German and whatever other hunters were there (maybe Maria, maybe not) removed its limbs and took it back to the church for dissection. In that reading, they may came back afterwards and slaughtered and experimented on the village itself once they found eyes in the brain of the orphan, or maybe not. Keep in mind, Adeline in the research hall describes herself as having been a blood saint (the women the church cultivates to be mothers of kin, and we see Arianna (though not a blood saint but a relative of the vilebloods) experience such a pregnancy in the course of the main game). So that must have existed before the research we witness in the hall. In all honestly, the timeline is truly impossible to pin down, I feel, since we are separated from it by so many layers and dreams that most anything can be either literal or symbolic or both. The reading of Byrgenwerth, the church and the hunters as the children, children's children, and their children certainly works symbolically, but that is also the literal formulation of the symbolic curse for all time. The woman at the beginning may be repeating the curse against Bergenwyrth, or it might have been reformulated as a curse against the great ones and the kin. It is also interesting that the orphan's scream causes the body of kos to radiate lightning and that the snail people are almost entirely immune to lightning (a pure lightning-damage arcane-build weapon will do like 4 damage a hit to them). It may be that there are great ones that are not related to the kin (and their weakness to lightning), or that may be an effect of the parasites. But if it is the parasites, they may be what caused the changes at the fishing village after killing kos. There's that note in the school of Mensis that is an urge to "hunt the great ones, hunt the great ones." I think it is quite possible that what Laurence originally intended was for the church to combat the great ones while trying to take their place. The moon presence appeared to be an ally in that regard (it does seem to wish to destroy the nightmares of other great ones). As for the research hall experiments, I feel like it is fairly clear that research on the blob people lead to the living failures. However, there was clearly something about it related to kos and the ocean. All the npcs talk about the noise of water and the plip plop. That is a far different origin than would be suggested by the celestial emissary. I also do not think that the winter lanterns are the direct result of any human research. When Adeline gets enough brain fluid and dies while, for lack of a better word, birthing the broccoli head rune, it really made me wonder. Did the research lead, in fact, to the lumenwood instead of the living failures? The kos parasite mentions that it is able to stimulate the lumenwood in a way that strongly resembles, say, the augur of ebrietas (at least visually). I wonder if the research hall isn't based more on experiments on the parasites than anything else. In fact, the failures might have been an effort to inject parasites into kin in a failed attempt to create a weapon to kill other great ones. When it failed, the church buried the research and the secrets behind it, possibly resulting in the hidden school of mensis, and doubled down on the Ebrietas angle. The idea that the school of mensis might be associated with an attempt to weaponize the children of great ones would most certainly not be inconsistent with their actions. There are just so very many perfectly legitimate possibilities with so little to disqualify any of them in bloodborne that any kind of serious interpretation is going to be almost purely speculation, as far as I'm concerned. Just take the question of the origin of the beasts. We assume it is related to the old blood since it is correlated with use of the old blood (both in historic Yharnam and present day). But is it a natural result of the blood itself, a curse attached to the blood (the beast under the operating table with orphan on it in the research hall would imply the church believes this), imperfect blood (from Ebrietas, a great one but not, according to many, a "pure" great one), vermin (or possibly parasites, or maybe vermin are parasites) as the league would believe? It is also associated with the red moon. Is that something the moon presence does to spur hunters, or is it some sort of violation of the territory of the moon presence, or is it caused by the ritual, or is the disfiguration of the moon merely part of being in the world of the hunter's dream? What if Djura and the powder kegs burned down old yharnam while under the influence of the dream (Djura knows about the dreaming) and realized afterwards that they had killed actual, non-bestial people they had believed to be beasts while under the influence of the red moon? The church kicked them out after that, it seems. The inherent nature of a world where some (or all) of what you experience is the result of a "real" dream but which may or may not reflect the waking world is just too open to pin much down. It's fun speculation, of course, since there is lots of things on which to speculate, but everything has so many potential causes and viable timelines that it just ends up being the normal futility of arguing on the internet. We know very, very little, after all, despite all the insight the game offers, which is quite thematically appropriate.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:35
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