

Instead, he’s considering any enemy that’ll fit inside The Depths’ dark and claustrophobic tunnels and ducts, and even reckons the area’s Gaping Dragon arena – where players do battle with the titular boss in the base game – could make for a natural end point. On the enemies front – as if Butchers, infected rats, and Basilisks weren’t terrifying enough – Grimrukh plans to broaden the scope of foes, suggesting keeping combatants lore-friendly would get boring quickly. I sent a tweet out just for a laugh, and it certainly had an interesting reaction.” Out of your Depths “I hit run on that, I waited a few minutes, and I ended up with some horrible, ungodly, infinite Chalice Dungeon set in The Depths that can just grow and grow and grow.

“I thought to myself: what if I just set up a kind of random system where I have a procedural generation algorithm, where I start with some room and then it randomly selects a compatible room to connect to it, and repeats and so on, going down all the branches endlessly?” says Grimrukh. In essence, he’s bringing Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons to Dark Souls. Because while crafting Dark Souls: Nightfall, he devised a custom map that turns The Depths into a randomly-generated death run. I can also safely assume that Grimrukh – the co-creator of Nightfall, one of Dark Souls’ most ambitious community projects that’s due later this year – is a glutton for punishment.

It’s been 10 years since my first plunge into The Depths, and I can safely say: it ain’t a nice place.
