Although Dark Souls is an unforgiving game at the best of times, Firelink Shrine is one area that is particularly haunting for veterans who ground their way through the tough, dungeon crawling boss battler. To showcase that, one fan has put together a heatmap of where 20,000 deaths occurred throughout that particular part of the world and it's telling where most people fell to their doom or succumbed to the blades of the area's various enemies.
Developed by Twitter user DriftItem, the map took into consideration 20,000 Dark Souls bloodstain and soapstone message locations to create the detailed map you see in the gallery above. If it's a little hard to put together which area is which from this sort of overhead view, he also released a second map with place names to help people understand things a little better.
The hottest parts of the map, where people died the most, were to the Gargoyls, the Hellkite bridge, Dark Sun Gwyndolin's battle area, the Iron Golem's back garden and the Taurus Demon, the first boss fight in the game. The Capra Demon and Bed of Chaos were also particularly dangerous foes to take on.
By popular demand, here is a map of Anor Londo. #DarkSouls pic.twitter.com/dNACDsI9Nl
— DriftItem (@DriftItem) March 8, 2018
That's not to say that people didn't die elsewhere. Every time there's a narrow stretch of bridge to cross, or a particularly precarious part of the map, players tended to die in droves. There were also plenty of outliers, with some individuals dying in bizarrely safe spots, but that's often the beauty of Dark Souls -- you can die everywhere if you aren't careful.
This effort by DriftItem is largely described as a historical record keeping. With the remastered version soon set to kill off much of the original player base, the peer to peer data that Dark Souls players sends to one another could be lost. This map however, will remain forever.
