Yeah, imagine playing this game, have those rewind on death moments, terrifying poket dimension planet, nauseating black hole travel, going through gas giant atmosphere, having that scary disappearing moon, and now out of nowhere you see that huge ominous black sphere in the sky for absolutely no reason cuz you forgot your scout in pocket dimension. I feel like they had to not cover, but double down on it and make it even more scarier, lol, I swear this game one of the best horrors.
"the intention was for you to immediately go explore Dark Bramble" Bro I put off Dark Bramble so much cause I was terrified 😭. I launched my scout into the seed on Timber Hearth early in the game and it took me 15 hours to go explore Dark Bramble
I went there following the music. I didn’t even know there was a seed on timberheart until I was far into the game and mostly done with bramble (tho I missed the fact that you could scan the launch pods)
Dark bramble was the first place i went to after the hearthian moon xd... then i died to supernova without knowing what killed me, so i left exploring the dark bramble for some time.
Still to this day have no idea where to go in the Dark Bramble. Every path I take eventually leads into a tunnel that's filled with those monsters and no way to get past as they attack almost immediately.
@@dotXyore In the cave on a planet that fills with sand there is a skeleton and a note on how to get past them spoiler on solution below They are blind and hunt you based on the sound made by your engines when accelerating., so you can fly past them by flying with your momentum without engines.
I think this is less of a technical limitation and more of an oversight which occured naturally in the development process. I imagine they created the entire pocket dimension warping system in dark bramble first. At that point, the scout was probably not fully implemented yet, and didn't keep the areas physically loaded while placed somewhere. Then at some completly unrelated part of the game, they may have noticed that the scouts photo function fails when you're far away because the area gets unloaded. So they fixed that bug in a generic way by keeping things around your scout loaded. But just didn't think about dark bramble at that moment. Afterwards it may have simply slipped through playtesting, since I gotta be honest, I played the game myself and watched a dozen of playthroughs and nobody noticed that thing. It's easy to see when you know it exists, but when you follow the natural gameplay loop, you miss it. That's my theory at least. I cannot imagine it was due to technical limitations. I have created shaders myself and it's quite easy to make something not render for a camera which is further than a certain distance away from it. And they showed they're capable of creating an even better effect with the stranger. And even if there were technical limitations, they could have simply placed it inside the sun, since you can never access or see that area anyways. So it must have been an oversight.
You might be right that it was just an oversight, or at the very least they could have fixed it but choose not to since it would have been a waste of time for something that most people will never notice. That makes sense to me. For your first point though, the scout with its camera predates Dark Bramble's dimensions. In the alpha the scout could take pictures, but back then DB was just a massive wad of vines bigger than Giant's Deep and filled with fog that you could fly around in.
@@Texture-Turtle nope, back in the alpha dark bramble was just a mass of dark thorny branches surrounded by fog with a bunch of angry fish inside it, there was no weird pocket dimension stuff going on with it back then so they didnt have to worry about rendering its insides separately
Exactly, the vessel dimension already exists in the Alpha. And it‘s also located in the same place below the sun, just unprotected, and IIRC you can just fly there, it’s just easy to miss because it‘s pretty tiny - OW alpha also shrinks player and ship when they enter DB to make the inside appear larger, thus the Vessel dimension can be made quite small, dunno if the full game still does that shrinking
I used this info to try and smuggle a Nomai corpse out of Dark Bramble. At the Nomai Graveyard, you can use the scout launcher to push a Nomai body into your ship. If you just fly out of the portal into the first room of Dark Bramble, the body unloads and stops updating. If you keep your scout attached to the body before flying out of the portal you can take photos to see when the object loads and unloads. If you re-enter the dimension containing the Nomai graveyard, the body starts updating and rendering again. By staying in there a while, the body’s continued velocity (from when you flew through the portal) will carry it further along until it exits the fog sphere and the black sphere so the solar system becomes visible in your scout photos. You can then exit Dark Bramble and fly to where your scout is via HUD. The nomai body won’t be updating or rendering when you’re flying in space, but if earlier you let it get far enough from the pocket dimension you can at least see your scout. It will be perfectly still floating in space. Leaving my ship in that dimension was not sufficient to prevent the body from unloading, so it would seem that shipless shenanigans probably do not help.
@noob1160 my disappointment was, after I visited the quantum moon for the 1st time, I communicated with the help of tablets I immediately decided to take tablets with the ash hour projects and so on ( I took everything) since I still did not know how to get to the ash hour , it took effort What a disappointment it was that these tablets could not be used in dialogue with nomai Although this is an obvious thing that the player will try to do
I found this accidentally, and thought I had discovered the end game! I noticed the occlusion of stars and thought, wow that's so smart! What a pay off to have it hidden in plain sight!! Then when I flew into it I couldn't do anything. I showed a buddy who had beaten the game and we worked out what it must've been, because he assured me it wasn't the end game.
This was actually the original plan at some point, having the eye hidden in plain sight inside the solar system! But as development went on, they realized this wasn't a good idea (since you could find in accidentaly, undermining the whole search thing and making the conflict of the nomai of not being able to find the signal a little bit pointless)
I haven’t seen this brought up yet so I thought I would mention it. I believe the position of the pocket dimension is less to do with the floating point error issue, and more because the pocket dimension needs to be the same distance from the sun as dark bramble for the supernova. If placed farther away, it’s likely the nova wouldn’t even reach the player.
I wonder, if you sent your ship unmanned on a trajectory toward the invisible pocket dimension, and then you entered Dark Bramble at the perfect time, if your ship would appear inside Dark Bramble.
you would probably have to somehow park your ship so it would be in the sphere by the time you get to timber hearth and launch your scout in. Then it would activate with your ship inside.
It's at that spot for when the sun explodes so that the explosion is at approximately the same distance as Dark Bramble, so you get killed, and get killed at the same time as if you were at Dark Bramble. You need to travel pretty far outside the solar system for the floating point issue to become a problem, so they could have easily placed it much farther out away from sight.
What makes this game design great and so deeply memorable is also what makes it cruel. And it is the fact that it is an entirely experience based game. And you must cherish every moment, regardless of how puzzling or frustrating it might be, because it's an experience you can only have once. You don't come out of exploring areas with leveled up traits or upgraded gear, you don't collect, grind, clean rooms or even defeat bosses. This game inverts the usual gameplay cycle. Progress is made through exploration and experience alone, so not only do you progress in order to experience, you *must* experience in order to progress. And experience is something unique, and it is immensely difficult to craft an universe that can provide us with that, and yet it can only be had once. So a game that has this unique take in gameplay and story telling is very, very rare. It takes a colossal amount of work to craft something that can only be experienced once. It is not very profitable, dare I say, and the reason we won't have another Outer Wilds very soon. And that is cruel. Very cruel.
@@talonbrown9751I know I'm commenting many months later. People who really get into OW are known to be fairly likely to emit high praise and monologues of reflection about it, without necessarily being specifically prompted. It's definitely a meme on the OW subreddit.
What's crazy is the devs could explain the fact a giant planet spawns with the scout launcher in the seed is that it's observing the planet so now it exists like with the quantum moon
One thing to note about floating point error is that they actively have the solar system move around the player, not vice-versa. So whichever bodies are closest to the player will always be safest from floating point anomalies due to the player's coordinates being 0,0 at all times. So in theory it's fine when the player is going through bramble to have it be far outside the solar system, but not so much when the probe is in it.
Yeah in the end I think I was really overthinking the placement of the interior. It's at the perfect distance so it gets hit by the supernova when bramble does, so that's probably the real reason.
Seeing the whole "physics gets weird as you get far away" way incredibly interesting to see. Playing on the Switch version, I once got a bug that just launched me in a particular direction at an absolutely absurd speed (never happened to me on PC). As I got further away, I noticed that whenever I checked the Solar System map, everything was VERY shaky/buggy, just like it does at 5:24. I had thought at the time that the glitchiness of everything had to do with how fast I was moving, so to hear it's actually because of how far away I was is cool to learn.
It's pretty easy to crash the game using those Nomai gravity ships. If they hit the sides of the launch pad sometimes it can cause the collision to glitch out and launch you at extremely high speeds - if it doesn't kill you on impact then after about a minute your map and UI will become increasingly more shaky until the game crashes.
I was too dumb to finish Outer Wilds, but this is literally one of the first big things I found during my first few loops. Mostly because I sucked at controlling the ship and got thrown way off course trying to reach the duplicate signal. I wasted a lot of time trying to re-find this weird black void in later runs beacuse I figured it was that "quantum moon" thing that I had found mention of. Didn't realize til right now that it wasn't an intended part of the game
@@ledumpsterfire6474 If you're still struggling with the lab. There is a hidden entrance to the city near the gravity cannon which allows you to get to the lab much quicker
Unfortunate to hear stories of players accidentally finding this sphere early on and getting frustrated over trying to investigate it. Hopefully devs make a patch at some point to camouflage the sphere so there's no risk of losing players because of it
(Spoilers) Oh, maybe they could give it the same effect that the Stranger has? You might still run into trouble if it's between timber hearth and the sun, but it could help a bit
this is the exact reason why I didn't want to continue playing, I instead opted to watch my fav youtuber play it. It was a 15 hour long episode, with his entire experience. It was amazing to watch, I am somewhat glad I didn't play it myself as some puzzles are really frustrating and would piss me off.
1. I am fairly sure the dark sphere retains its repulsion/collision even when it’s invisible. The best way to try this is to lock onto the sun, position yourself so that the sphere is between you and the sun, recall your scout, and attempt to fly into the sun. The sphere pushes you but only enough to be just out of the way, and does not permanently change your trajectory. 2. (More importantly!!) you can breach the dark sphere by being inside your ejected cockpit-it is not repelled. The easiest way to do this is with the similar setup as Thing 1 but instead of recalling your scout give yourself some speed (you don’t need much) and eject. So long as you are strapped into the broken cockpit chair when it reaches the sphere you will pass straight through. You can reach one of the invisible nodes (often by accident) this way and when you do it immediately becomes active as if you entered Dark Bramble-but depending on your angle you may or may not be “in bounds”. The fact that breaching the sphere lets you immediately enter these nodes even when they are not loaded by a teleported trigger also further confirms my understanding that the sphere repels you even when it is invisible. I encourage you to try this yourself!
I'll have to try it! And yeah I've heard of that eject glitch, I wonder if you can do the same thing to clip into the white hole? I think it uses the same repulsion as the Bramble sphere
@@xen-42 Update: I have bonked into the white hole at almost 1km/s. I hear a collision sound but the cockpit bounces off very gently and I am unharmed. Maybe the collision I am hearing is the remainder of the ship crashing into the white hole... or the back of the cockpit, can't tell. Conclusion: cool, but not remarkable in any major way. I suppose it is the best way to go from incredibly high speed to almost zero without dying, so theres that.
I kinda love weird things like this. The times where the seams split every so slightly and for just a moment you're reminded that you're not playing some sleek and over-polished experience designed to remove all trace of artistry, but rather, the opposite. Such clear reminders that this is a game, made by real human people who found real human solutions to the problem. Outer wilds is a game about flying spaceships around mini solar systems as an alien, investigating other aliens, and yet somehow it's the most human piece of art I've experienced in a long time.
Seeing the giant sphere would actually be a pretty easy fix as the Unity engine allows you to hide or show certain objects on a per-camera basis, allowing the scout camera to see it while the main player camera can't (unless you're actually inside it). I guess they just didn't consider it a large enough issue to bother.
@@Dan0RG Not to mention the fact that the time of your death after the sun explodes is a function of your distance to the sun. If it's inside the sun you would die instantly, unless they did some other bodging to force a specific time if you are inside the bramble.
@@fatboychummy They could probably just add an if statement, like, if player inside dark bramble then use dark bramble location to calculate how long it takes you to die
As a Unity developer, the ideal solution for this would be to put the Dark Bramble interior on a different layer that's normally invisible and has collision disabled. Then, when an object with a camera or collision enters, the colliders and cameras of the object entering can be modified to only register collisions and render objects with this tag, presumably with a MonoBehavior
OMG OMG OMG! Finally! I wasn't imagining it :D I've SEEN that giant black orb! I could never work out how to get it to show up, and until the end of the game I thought I'd missed something... then at the end you go to eye of the universe, i figured I must have just seen that somehow off in the distance
This is really cool! Thanks for covering it. It's always interesting to see the inner workings of games. So much goes on behind the scenes to create a game that you can lose yourself in
There was an amusing part of Preach's Outer Wilds playthrough related to this. He played the game in a pretty early version, and he seemingly encountered a bug with the scout in the seed. When he opened his map, the map showed the scout at Dark Bramble's interior location, but the regular HUD showed it at the Dark Bramble planet. Unfortunately he didn't spot the giant sphere in the sky, but he did notice a spherical object (where the map claimed the scout was) blocking out the background stars on the map down there, so he thought there was another black hole or something of the sort there (he grew a bit obsessed with black holes after somehow falling through the brittle hollow one at least 5 times per loop). If anyone wants to go have a look, his playthrough is unlisted for some reason but you can find it among the playthrough playlists on the channel. It's on his highlights channel rather than VODs channel for whatever reason.
Just found your channel with this video and i love this kind of content, peeling back the curtain and seeing how devs solve issues like this is really interesting to me. Like boundary break but more detailed, good stuff
Of course, I never considered that the scout has to be considered a secondary player camera in a lot of ways. Great video, thanks for sharing your insights. Such a great game with rock solid design -- why do anything more complicated
Couldn't they have put it inside the sun? I mean, maybe the whole inside of Dark Bramble is too big, but you only really need to render 1, maybe 2 because of the scout, pocket dimension(s) at once, right? Surely those could have fit inside the sun?
Maybe? It then people would find some glitch where the sun is not deadly anymore, because they would have to make it safe if you were going to be temporarily moved in there. So then if you left a scout in there the sun would become safe to fly into.
@@PloverTechOfficial Not necessarily. Just because an object is inside Dark Bramble, that doesn't mean you have to turn off the killbox entirely. You could just check whether the object is actually supposed to be in Dark Bramble. If it isn't, then burn the object, otherwise don't. But who knows, there's probably some other reason that putting Dark Bramble into the sun would have been impossible or just a huge pain in the ass.
@@thebiggay598 I think there is another overlooked reason to put Dark Bramble insides where they put them. It has to do with the supernova. Putting the Insides at (roughly) the same distance as Dark Bramble itself, it takes the same amount of time between supernova and your death if you're inside. The global sounds also still work as you'll hear the explosion happen somewhere outside (since your sense of orientation is lost while you're in there you won't know that it's technically from the wrong direction) and then it takes the correct amount of time and plays the sounds correctly until you get caught by the blue stuff and die.
@@Ridorim Great point actually. I mean the people working at Mobius are waaaay smarter than me, so I had no doubt there had got to be a reason they didn't do this.
Distance is a great point. Also, I'll point out they probably weren't worried about you seeing it. If I'd seen that, I would have assumed it was related to the quantum moon...
I have close to 200 hours in Outer Wilds and I believe I have seen almost everything there is in this game but never thought where the inside of the dark bramble is
I wonder why they couldn't have had the stars render in front of it if you're not inside... Even if the planets rendered normally, the skybox seems like quite an easy thing to do that with
I find this kind of stuff amazing, it's just such an elegant way to conceal what otherwise look like a very complicated thing to do. It'd be a problem if you could realistically stumble upon it in a normal playthrough but honestly it's unlikely and even if you did you can't enter it and the black sphere will just feel like a curiosity of the universe, some mystery and that's cool too.
I've actually been very curious about how every planet and area looks with low LOD when you're far away. Should definitely make a video on it! I always wanted Lore Explorer to do a video like that but he never seemed to I guess. Aha so dark bramble is invisible at the bottom, and the Stranger is "invisible" at the top!
Should still totally do a video on that ;) I discovered this video again, and it is still fascinating. I just wish I didn't know there's an invisible giant black death sphere below the solar system.@@xen-42
Probably not gonna see this but, the scout you can fire when walking around is the same scout that your ship fires so you can get out, fire it into the DB hole on Timber Hearth, and then get back into your ship and look at it
There's a very cool story mod that actually takes this technicality of the game into account! It's called Astral Codec, and it includes a lore entry about the matter. I haven't completed it, but I'd recommend it if you want to play more Outer Wilds
I know there's a glitch to get into the Simulation with the ship so I think it would be fun to load the Simulation and Dark Bramble at the same time and see how that would look from the outside (Assuming that the Simulation works the same way as DB)
I made a mod that lets you see the solar system from inside the dreamworld so if you use that mod then put a scout in bramble then go to the simulation it should be possible to see it in the sky. I'm planning on doing a video on the simulation too so maybe I could show the Dreamworld and Bramble loaded at the same time. Could uncloak the Stranger too to show everything.
I remember the devs talking about how the x and y coordinates are always at 0,0 and all movement is done by moving the relative position of planets. This explains the floating point errors when traveling far away.
Floating point errors also kind of build up over time for the way that Outer Wilds runs, it was one of the early factors into why they went with a time loop structure. One of those happy accidents that come along in game dev.
I found it randomly in my playthrough and was hoping the dark shadow sphere would be explained, once I had finished the game and didn't get any explanation I found out it was from dark Bramble
0:16 Ok, who’s the one that mashed the Outer Wilds and Outer Worlds logos together? And why do you feel the need to mess with my brain even more, I have a hard enough time saying the right one as it is! Two games that came out pretty close together in time with such similar names, and such wildly different gameplay. Both are pretty good too, give Outer Worlds a chance if you are into Fallout style games. It’s pretty linear, but very story driven as a result which can be nice.
Can’t believe you still showed me something new about this game after all this time, liking and subscribing and prob not giving you money but maybe might if you keep this up?
Another thought is, couldn't they have hidden it inside the sun and just make the sun kill zone an invisible sphere and only intersecting the surface of said kill sphere be a sun kill?
Hummm, what about if tou send you're scout through the main entrace of dark bramble? Is it the same? And what about if you, for exemple, let yout ship inside Dark bramble, and leave, fly to timber hearth by using you're personal fuel/refills, is it there? Also, can you do a "deep-impact" situation and get enough momentum to go against the barrier that stops you from entering? Damn, this video and topic are so interesting
I'm not actually sure about the ship, I'd guess that yes it would be there but maybe not since the sphere is to hide the visuals you see with the scout and with the ship you wouldn't have that issue. The deep impact question is a good one too, I've heard that you can clip your way inside of it by ejecting from your ship so that might work too!
Yep! There's a bunch of checks that see when the player, the scout, or the ship enter an area that handles that. For the player and the scout it'll turn the graphics back up
30:40 Unity is capable of having multiple scenes loaded simultaneously. I wonder why they decided to actually place the dark bramble interior on the same overworld scene. I guess it was a simple and quick solution.
I think the most elegant way to do this, would have been to hide active dark Bramble inside of the quantum Moon, because you can't have your Scout inside of dark bramble, and have a picture of the quantum moon to land on it at the same time
Funny thing, devs could have added a shader for that sphere to show the stars behind it and it would be near impossible to find. I also wonder if you can be lucky enough to launch the scout and make it enter the bramble seed while staying in the spot there the bramble dimension appears (to bypass the repulsive field).
is the sphere it actually that visible from the surface of timber hearth or are you using a mod to make it visible? i know it looks pitch black from space but thinking about it I've never actually looked from the surface
Yeah its actually that visible, I was really surprised I had never noticed it during my first playthrough because it looks so obvious. But there's just no reason in the game to ever put your scout into Dark Bramble and then go to the other side of Timber Hearth so it goes unnoticed. Could probably see it through the atmospheres of the other planets too, might look interesting
Whoa, that's really interesting. I had no idea it worked like that. I almost think I've seen the Bramble orb before but I was positioned weird and assumed it was the Quantum Moon or The Stranger
Glad you found it interesting! Yeah it's definitely something that people notice randomly appearing, first time I ever noticed it I only saw it blocking out the background stars and found it pretty creepy
I wonder if players discovering the mysterious dark spot off the plane of the solar system and trying to figure out what it is gave the devs ideas for the DLC
I actually saw this but didn't realize it until now. I saw it early on before I knew about the quantum moon so that when I did find out about it I assumed that was what I had seen.
I get why they did this, but it's kind of silly... They could've easily just used proper occlusion and backface culling and you would never see the interior level- or even easier, just make the material of the outside boundary always draw what is behind it (like a refraction shader but with no volume bounce processing). Both of these are extremely simple to implement and something I have done more times than I can count. You can even pretty simply make physics and rendering be object-specific, so it's not that tall of an order to even have the Dark Bramble level always stuck to the player and have it be completely unnoticeable. This obviously requires some kind of markup to indicate which objects have traveled to or from one of the pocket dimensions, so it's not my prefered method in most cases, but it would be pretty straight-forward in this one. Edit: My point is that when you are creating a scene or simulation, you have control over _everything_ and most game engines expose a lot of this pre-built design to you in a pretty user-friendly maner. It's weird that they didn't just use this to control what the player can see. This feels like a solution you would use when making a mod for a game and can't repackage the entire game in a new build.
I wonder if it was a performance consideration or something to do with time constraints? I've tried seeing if any of the interviews the devs have given mentioned why they choose to do it this way, but haven't found anything.
@@xen-42 From my experience writing software (8+ years), I don't really see a practicle reason for building it this way unless they realized they wanted to have pocket dimensions later-on in development. In that case, it would make less sense to rewrite parts of the codebase or, if they were working with boilerplate engine code, restructure the game to work with a different rendering technique. To me it feels like they might have hit a wall where they realized they would have to go back through a bunch of rendering code and shaders if they were to implement a way to truely hide the pocket dimension.
@@fiveoneecho That makes a lot of sense then, and yeah if you look at the alpha versions of the game Dark Bramble was just a giant dark cloud without the pocket dimensions, so they did only decide to add it later on. So I think you're probably spot on
I thought they would have done something similar to one other area in the game, where it's somewhere "beneath" the sun and has a shader alongside a forcefield to avoid players from seeing or bumping into it, maybe a big rectangle to fit 4 of the seed pods at once if the need arises from the scout and ship being abandoned in other parts.
@@xen-42 It's more of a whole planet that has this same treatment, not found at all unless if you have the DLC. Somewhat was backed into a corner since I can't not say a small spoiler due to the context of the situation.
when i saw this in game i thought that there were 2 quantum moons for a moment. i had already done the quantum moon stuff so i never actually went to check it out. interesting to know that it was actually dark bramble. odd that they couldnt have had the skybox simply render in front of it like most games do with distant sub-areas
I never thought it would be so poorly hidden, lol. Then again, I never noticed. I guess it works for 99% of the players or so. An interesting factoid is that in Outer Wilds, the player is the center of the coordinates system. As far as the coordinates system is concerned, its the solar system that moves around the player, not the other way around. So yeah, teleporting the player to a very far away point could cause the entire solar system' physics simulation to become inaccurate. I assume the reason why they made the player character the center of the coordinates system is for that same reason: they want the most accurate physics calculations to be the ones happening in the immediate vicinity of the player.
You know, Dark Bramble does actually work in this context if you consider the quantum stuff in the game proper. Like yeah it's 99% chance to be an oversight and nothing more, but there's something oddly eerie about the idea that the void is only there when there's a direct link between someone outside the bramble, and someone inside. With just an extraordinarily low chance on anyone on timber hearth noticing it casually, in the same way it took so long to find the Stranger. Idk, I know it's not the case, something about that theory just tickles my brain in the way I enjoyed a lot about the other parts of Outer Wilds.
I do wish more games that involved space travel and planet visitations would focus on details. Certainly far more fun to explore in this game than No Man's Sky. 1:29 and as you fly through this murky place, I am made anxious again, just like playing it through the first time myself. I don't know how this game and subnautica makes me feel so anxious. Normally all kinds of horror don't have any kind of impact on me. But these submerged areas of murky unknown gets to me.
Sounds right to me! I think the entrance nodes have their own fog volume that's separate from the fog inside the pocket dimension, and I assume Light Bramble only removes the latter
This is a clever workaround but not entirely needed these days since scenes and levels can be loaded basically like parallel universes. Occupying the same location but out of "phase" so only certain things can interact with each other. I've seen games even do this by creating really tiny representations of pocket worlds that you can see into / out of (much like the skybox in the source Engine).
Yeah, imagine playing this game, have those rewind on death moments, terrifying poket dimension planet, nauseating black hole travel, going through gas giant atmosphere, having that scary disappearing moon, and now out of nowhere you see that huge ominous black sphere in the sky for absolutely no reason cuz you forgot your scout in pocket dimension. I feel like they had to not cover, but double down on it and make it even more scarier, lol, I swear this game one of the best horrors.
"the intention was for you to immediately go explore Dark Bramble"
Bro I put off Dark Bramble so much cause I was terrified 😭. I launched my scout into the seed on Timber Hearth early in the game and it took me 15 hours to go explore Dark Bramble
Same here, that place is nightmare fuel. Even taking clips for this video was freaking me out lol
I went there following the music.
I didn’t even know there was a seed on timberheart until I was far into the game and mostly done with bramble (tho I missed the fact that you could scan the launch pods)
Dark bramble was the first place i went to after the hearthian moon xd... then i died to supernova without knowing what killed me, so i left exploring the dark bramble for some time.
Still to this day have no idea where to go in the Dark Bramble. Every path I take eventually leads into a tunnel that's filled with those monsters and no way to get past as they attack almost immediately.
@@dotXyore In the cave on a planet that fills with sand there is a skeleton and a note on how to get past them
spoiler on solution below
They are blind and hunt you based on the sound made by your engines when accelerating., so you can fly past them by flying with your momentum without engines.
I think this is less of a technical limitation and more of an oversight which occured naturally in the development process.
I imagine they created the entire pocket dimension warping system in dark bramble first. At that point, the scout was probably not fully implemented yet, and didn't keep the areas physically loaded while placed somewhere.
Then at some completly unrelated part of the game, they may have noticed that the scouts photo function fails when you're far away because the area gets unloaded. So they fixed that bug in a generic way by keeping things around your scout loaded. But just didn't think about dark bramble at that moment.
Afterwards it may have simply slipped through playtesting, since I gotta be honest, I played the game myself and watched a dozen of playthroughs and nobody noticed that thing. It's easy to see when you know it exists, but when you follow the natural gameplay loop, you miss it.
That's my theory at least. I cannot imagine it was due to technical limitations. I have created shaders myself and it's quite easy to make something not render for a camera which is further than a certain distance away from it. And they showed they're capable of creating an even better effect with the stranger. And even if there were technical limitations, they could have simply placed it inside the sun, since you can never access or see that area anyways.
So it must have been an oversight.
You might be right that it was just an oversight, or at the very least they could have fixed it but choose not to since it would have been a waste of time for something that most people will never notice. That makes sense to me.
For your first point though, the scout with its camera predates Dark Bramble's dimensions. In the alpha the scout could take pictures, but back then DB was just a massive wad of vines bigger than Giant's Deep and filled with fog that you could fly around in.
@@xen-42 There actually was a DB pocket dimension in the alpha that worked in the same way it does now (I thinky?)
@@Texture-Turtle nope, back in the alpha dark bramble was just a mass of dark thorny branches surrounded by fog with a bunch of angry fish inside it, there was no weird pocket dimension stuff going on with it back then so they didnt have to worry about rendering its insides separately
@@Eira_ I was talking about the vessel room
Exactly, the vessel dimension already exists in the Alpha. And it‘s also located in the same place below the sun, just unprotected, and IIRC you can just fly there, it’s just easy to miss because it‘s pretty tiny - OW alpha also shrinks player and ship when they enter DB to make the inside appear larger, thus the Vessel dimension can be made quite small, dunno if the full game still does that shrinking
I used this info to try and smuggle a Nomai corpse out of Dark Bramble.
At the Nomai Graveyard, you can use the scout launcher to push a Nomai body into your ship. If you just fly out of the portal into the first room of Dark Bramble, the body unloads and stops updating. If you keep your scout attached to the body before flying out of the portal you can take photos to see when the object loads and unloads. If you re-enter the dimension containing the Nomai graveyard, the body starts updating and rendering again. By staying in there a while, the body’s continued velocity (from when you flew through the portal) will carry it further along until it exits the fog sphere and the black sphere so the solar system becomes visible in your scout photos.
You can then exit Dark Bramble and fly to where your scout is via HUD. The nomai body won’t be updating or rendering when you’re flying in space, but if earlier you let it get far enough from the pocket dimension you can at least see your scout. It will be perfectly still floating in space.
Leaving my ship in that dimension was not sufficient to prevent the body from unloading, so it would seem that shipless shenanigans probably do not help.
Wow
Peak explorer
Take It to riebeck and see his reaction lmao
@noob1160 my disappointment was, after I visited the quantum moon for the 1st time, I communicated with the help of tablets
I immediately decided to take tablets with the ash hour projects and so on ( I took everything)
since I still did not know how to get to the ash hour , it took effort
What a disappointment it was that these tablets could not be used in dialogue with nomai
Although this is an obvious thing that the player will try to do
I found this accidentally, and thought I had discovered the end game! I noticed the occlusion of stars and thought, wow that's so smart! What a pay off to have it hidden in plain sight!! Then when I flew into it I couldn't do anything. I showed a buddy who had beaten the game and we worked out what it must've been, because he assured me it wasn't the end game.
Does seem strange for a game so based on curiousity-driven exploration to have a giant red herring like that!
This was actually the original plan at some point, having the eye hidden in plain sight inside the solar system!
But as development went on, they realized this wasn't a good idea (since you could find in accidentaly, undermining the whole search thing and making the conflict of the nomai of not being able to find the signal a little bit pointless)
I haven’t seen this brought up yet so I thought I would mention it. I believe the position of the pocket dimension is less to do with the floating point error issue, and more because the pocket dimension needs to be the same distance from the sun as dark bramble for the supernova. If placed farther away, it’s likely the nova wouldn’t even reach the player.
I completely agree, in retrospect I realized that's a much better answer than what I originally suggested in the video
I wonder, if you sent your ship unmanned on a trajectory toward the invisible pocket dimension, and then you entered Dark Bramble at the perfect time, if your ship would appear inside Dark Bramble.
Reminds me of the speedrunning tech to get your ship into the Dreamworld. I bet it'd work!
DB's "repulsion" sphere is always on even if the inside isn't loaded
@@Texture-Turtle I swear I fly through where it was in the video
@@xen-42 nope!!!
you would probably have to somehow park your ship so it would be in the sphere by the time you get to timber hearth and launch your scout in. Then it would activate with your ship inside.
It occurs to me that the idea for the Stranger might originally have been a reference to the black sphere that contains Dark Bramble's level geometry.
Would make for a real cool origin story for the mechanic
I'd love a sequel, maybe not story wise, but in terms of gameplay
same, a tiny solar system to explore is such a good setting it'd be a shame to see no other games do the same
Well, you are in luck because there is a sequel.
@@viktordoe1636 there is?
@@The_KingDoge well, maybe I misspoke, I was thinking about echoes of the eye which is technically a DLC and not a sequel.
@@viktordoe1636 ah, I played EotE.
It's at that spot for when the sun explodes so that the explosion is at approximately the same distance as Dark Bramble, so you get killed, and get killed at the same time as if you were at Dark Bramble.
You need to travel pretty far outside the solar system for the floating point issue to become a problem, so they could have easily placed it much farther out away from sight.
Good thinking! 🧠
What makes this game design great and so deeply memorable is also what makes it cruel. And it is the fact that it is an entirely experience based game. And you must cherish every moment, regardless of how puzzling or frustrating it might be, because it's an experience you can only have once.
You don't come out of exploring areas with leveled up traits or upgraded gear, you don't collect, grind, clean rooms or even defeat bosses. This game inverts the usual gameplay cycle. Progress is made through exploration and experience alone, so not only do you progress in order to experience, you *must* experience in order to progress.
And experience is something unique, and it is immensely difficult to craft an universe that can provide us with that, and yet it can only be had once.
So a game that has this unique take in gameplay and story telling is very, very rare. It takes a colossal amount of work to craft something that can only be experienced once. It is not very profitable, dare I say, and the reason we won't have another Outer Wilds very soon. And that is cruel. Very cruel.
Well said
What does this have to do with the video?
games like outer wild is like an book or movie
@@talonbrown9751I know I'm commenting many months later. People who really get into OW are known to be fairly likely to emit high praise and monologues of reflection about it, without necessarily being specifically prompted. It's definitely a meme on the OW subreddit.
What's crazy is the devs could explain the fact a giant planet spawns with the scout launcher in the seed is that it's observing the planet so now it exists like with the quantum moon
There's some story mods people are making that remind me of that! Nothing released yet tho
but then it would always be there because of Feltspar (is that how you spell his name?)
@@boredplays138 Feldspar surely
@@boredplays138 I would say feldspar lack of common sense disqualify them from being conscious =p (also hearthians use they/them pronouns)
One thing to note about floating point error is that they actively have the solar system move around the player, not vice-versa. So whichever bodies are closest to the player will always be safest from floating point anomalies due to the player's coordinates being 0,0 at all times.
So in theory it's fine when the player is going through bramble to have it be far outside the solar system, but not so much when the probe is in it.
Yeah in the end I think I was really overthinking the placement of the interior. It's at the perfect distance so it gets hit by the supernova when bramble does, so that's probably the real reason.
@@xen-42 That also explains why they couldn't just hide it inside the sun, which I was wondering about
Seeing the whole "physics gets weird as you get far away" way incredibly interesting to see. Playing on the Switch version, I once got a bug that just launched me in a particular direction at an absolutely absurd speed (never happened to me on PC). As I got further away, I noticed that whenever I checked the Solar System map, everything was VERY shaky/buggy, just like it does at 5:24. I had thought at the time that the glitchiness of everything had to do with how fast I was moving, so to hear it's actually because of how far away I was is cool to learn.
It's pretty easy to crash the game using those Nomai gravity ships. If they hit the sides of the launch pad sometimes it can cause the collision to glitch out and launch you at extremely high speeds - if it doesn't kill you on impact then after about a minute your map and UI will become increasingly more shaky until the game crashes.
I was too dumb to finish Outer Wilds, but this is literally one of the first big things I found during my first few loops. Mostly because I sucked at controlling the ship and got thrown way off course trying to reach the duplicate signal. I wasted a lot of time trying to re-find this weird black void in later runs beacuse I figured it was that "quantum moon" thing that I had found mention of. Didn't realize til right now that it wasn't an intended part of the game
man that sucks, the first real mystery you discover and its actually a game design oversight
Watch a playthrough if you can't finish! The ending is beautiful
Look up a guide for the parts you're stuck at. Most of them only tell you how to get through one specific part and don't spoil anything else
@@thethingwithit It can be tough even with a guide. Like finding the lab on the planet filling up with sand; that place is an absolute maze.
@@ledumpsterfire6474 If you're still struggling with the lab. There is a hidden entrance to the city near the gravity cannon which allows you to get to the lab much quicker
Unfortunate to hear stories of players accidentally finding this sphere early on and getting frustrated over trying to investigate it. Hopefully devs make a patch at some point to camouflage the sphere so there's no risk of losing players because of it
There's a patch coming so we'll see, I think they've said this will be the last one too
(Spoilers) Oh, maybe they could give it the same effect that the Stranger has? You might still run into trouble if it's between timber hearth and the sun, but it could help a bit
this is the exact reason why I didn't want to continue playing, I instead opted to watch my fav youtuber play it. It was a 15 hour long episode, with his entire experience. It was amazing to watch, I am somewhat glad I didn't play it myself as some puzzles are really frustrating and would piss me off.
@@Terandium this is a rare bug, don't let stuff like that stop you from playing excellent games
@@Terandiumthat’s pretty sad, man.
You can’t experience a sense of discovery and accomplishment without at least SOME mild adversity.
I love how each time I see a video about how Outer Wilds functions, it’s about something I’ve never seen before in other videos. Great stuff!
Glad you liked it!
1. I am fairly sure the dark sphere retains its repulsion/collision even when it’s invisible. The best way to try this is to lock onto the sun, position yourself so that the sphere is between you and the sun, recall your scout, and attempt to fly into the sun. The sphere pushes you but only enough to be just out of the way, and does not permanently change your trajectory.
2. (More importantly!!) you can breach the dark sphere by being inside your ejected cockpit-it is not repelled. The easiest way to do this is with the similar setup as Thing 1 but instead of recalling your scout give yourself some speed (you don’t need much) and eject. So long as you are strapped into the broken cockpit chair when it reaches the sphere you will pass straight through.
You can reach one of the invisible nodes (often by accident) this way and when you do it immediately becomes active as if you entered Dark Bramble-but depending on your angle you may or may not be “in bounds”.
The fact that breaching the sphere lets you immediately enter these nodes even when they are not loaded by a teleported trigger also further confirms my understanding that the sphere repels you even when it is invisible. I encourage you to try this yourself!
I'll have to try it! And yeah I've heard of that eject glitch, I wonder if you can do the same thing to clip into the white hole? I think it uses the same repulsion as the Bramble sphere
@@xen-42 ...i might have to try this too, but you'll probably have to go pretty fast to fight the anti-gravity of the while hole as well!
@@xen-42 I just tried it and it looks like the white hole is actually solid! I just bonked off it. I'm going to try it again but at a higher speed.
@@xen-42 Update: I have bonked into the white hole at almost 1km/s. I hear a collision sound but the cockpit bounces off very gently and I am unharmed. Maybe the collision I am hearing is the remainder of the ship crashing into the white hole... or the back of the cockpit, can't tell.
Conclusion: cool, but not remarkable in any major way. I suppose it is the best way to go from incredibly high speed to almost zero without dying, so theres that.
you're telling me those angler fish were right next to my home this whole time???
they were watching you all along
I kinda love weird things like this. The times where the seams split every so slightly and for just a moment you're reminded that you're not playing some sleek and over-polished experience designed to remove all trace of artistry, but rather, the opposite. Such clear reminders that this is a game, made by real human people who found real human solutions to the problem. Outer wilds is a game about flying spaceships around mini solar systems as an alien, investigating other aliens, and yet somehow it's the most human piece of art I've experienced in a long time.
Well said!
Seeing the giant sphere would actually be a pretty easy fix as the Unity engine allows you to hide or show certain objects on a per-camera basis, allowing the scout camera to see it while the main player camera can't (unless you're actually inside it). I guess they just didn't consider it a large enough issue to bother.
Or they could have put it inside the sun.
@@abelnemeth4346 I imagine some lighting problems could arise then. All the sunlight in the game comes from the center of it, after all.
@@Dan0RG Not to mention the fact that the time of your death after the sun explodes is a function of your distance to the sun. If it's inside the sun you would die instantly, unless they did some other bodging to force a specific time if you are inside the bramble.
@@fatboychummy They could probably just add an if statement, like, if player inside dark bramble then use dark bramble location to calculate how long it takes you to die
@@pyrogreg8 "unless they did some other bodging to force a specific time if you are inside the bramble"
As a Unity developer, the ideal solution for this would be to put the Dark Bramble interior on a different layer that's normally invisible and has collision disabled. Then, when an object with a camera or collision enters, the colliders and cameras of the object entering can be modified to only register collisions and render objects with this tag, presumably with a MonoBehavior
OMG OMG OMG! Finally! I wasn't imagining it :D
I've SEEN that giant black orb! I could never work out how to get it to show up, and until the end of the game I thought I'd missed something... then at the end you go to eye of the universe, i figured I must have just seen that somehow off in the distance
Glad to have solved the mystery!
This is really cool! Thanks for covering it. It's always interesting to see the inner workings of games. So much goes on behind the scenes to create a game that you can lose yourself in
I thought it was too, glad you enjoyed it!
There was an amusing part of Preach's Outer Wilds playthrough related to this. He played the game in a pretty early version, and he seemingly encountered a bug with the scout in the seed. When he opened his map, the map showed the scout at Dark Bramble's interior location, but the regular HUD showed it at the Dark Bramble planet.
Unfortunately he didn't spot the giant sphere in the sky, but he did notice a spherical object (where the map claimed the scout was) blocking out the background stars on the map down there, so he thought there was another black hole or something of the sort there (he grew a bit obsessed with black holes after somehow falling through the brittle hollow one at least 5 times per loop).
If anyone wants to go have a look, his playthrough is unlisted for some reason but you can find it among the playthrough playlists on the channel. It's on his highlights channel rather than VODs channel for whatever reason.
That's an interesting bug, that'll definitely ruin the devs plan to just hide them in plain sight lol
Really cool video, more of this type of videos would be great!
Thank you! Was thinking of doing the Dreamworld next
Just found your channel with this video and i love this kind of content, peeling back the curtain and seeing how devs solve issues like this is really interesting to me. Like boundary break but more detailed, good stuff
Glad you liked it! I plan to do more content like this in the future
Of course, I never considered that the scout has to be considered a secondary player camera in a lot of ways. Great video, thanks for sharing your insights. Such a great game with rock solid design -- why do anything more complicated
Couldn't they have put it inside the sun? I mean, maybe the whole inside of Dark Bramble is too big, but you only really need to render 1, maybe 2 because of the scout, pocket dimension(s) at once, right? Surely those could have fit inside the sun?
Maybe? It then people would find some glitch where the sun is not deadly anymore, because they would have to make it safe if you were going to be temporarily moved in there. So then if you left a scout in there the sun would become safe to fly into.
@@PloverTechOfficial Not necessarily. Just because an object is inside Dark Bramble, that doesn't mean you have to turn off the killbox entirely. You could just check whether the object is actually supposed to be in Dark Bramble. If it isn't, then burn the object, otherwise don't.
But who knows, there's probably some other reason that putting Dark Bramble into the sun would have been impossible or just a huge pain in the ass.
@@thebiggay598 I think there is another overlooked reason to put Dark Bramble insides where they put them.
It has to do with the supernova. Putting the Insides at (roughly) the same distance as Dark Bramble itself, it takes the same amount of time between supernova and your death if you're inside. The global sounds also still work as you'll hear the explosion happen somewhere outside (since your sense of orientation is lost while you're in there you won't know that it's technically from the wrong direction) and then it takes the correct amount of time and plays the sounds correctly until you get caught by the blue stuff and die.
@@Ridorim Great point actually. I mean the people working at Mobius are waaaay smarter than me, so I had no doubt there had got to be a reason they didn't do this.
Distance is a great point.
Also, I'll point out they probably weren't worried about you seeing it. If I'd seen that, I would have assumed it was related to the quantum moon...
That 'title screen' really caught me off guard. brb getting the launch codes to retrieve my sides
Huh, I find it hard to imagine I didn't notice a massive black sphere in the sky every time I had a scout in the dark bramble
Same, pretty wild
I have close to 200 hours in Outer Wilds and I believe I have seen almost everything there is in this game but never thought where the inside of the dark bramble is
I wonder why they couldn't have had the stars render in front of it if you're not inside... Even if the planets rendered normally, the skybox seems like quite an easy thing to do that with
That's a good question. Would be an interesting idea for a mod, trying to get the skybox to render on top of it!
I always wondered why upon flying too far, all my minimap started having a seizure! This video explains it!
I love the fact that you found out about dev secrets using the sight quantic principle
I find this kind of stuff amazing, it's just such an elegant way to conceal what otherwise look like a very complicated thing to do. It'd be a problem if you could realistically stumble upon it in a normal playthrough but honestly it's unlikely and even if you did you can't enter it and the black sphere will just feel like a curiosity of the universe, some mystery and that's cool too.
I've actually been very curious about how every planet and area looks with low LOD when you're far away.
Should definitely make a video on it! I always wanted Lore Explorer to do a video like that but he never seemed to I guess.
Aha so dark bramble is invisible at the bottom, and the Stranger is "invisible" at the top!
That's a good idea, I could totally do that
Should still totally do a video on that ;) I discovered this video again, and it is still fascinating. I just wish I didn't know there's an invisible giant black death sphere below the solar system.@@xen-42
I love the stuff you do and you explain it very well. You are the first channel I have decided to become a member from ❤
Thank you very much! You're my first TH-cam member!
Probably not gonna see this but, the scout you can fire when walking around is the same scout that your ship fires so you can get out, fire it into the DB hole on Timber Hearth, and then get back into your ship and look at it
Yeah true I was just messing around there, completely immersion breaking tho how did my scout get on top of my ship makes no sense
@@xen-42 Warp technology. (Though I think you might still be able to see it on the shelf by the suit after you fire it, that'd be the real oversight.)
There's a very cool story mod that actually takes this technicality of the game into account! It's called Astral Codec, and it includes a lore entry about the matter. I haven't completed it, but I'd recommend it if you want to play more Outer Wilds
That's actually what inspired me to make this video in the first place, I was part of a really early playtest of the mod a year ago!
I know there's a glitch to get into the Simulation with the ship so I think it would be fun to load the Simulation and Dark Bramble at the same time and see how that would look from the outside (Assuming that the Simulation works the same way as DB)
I made a mod that lets you see the solar system from inside the dreamworld so if you use that mod then put a scout in bramble then go to the simulation it should be possible to see it in the sky. I'm planning on doing a video on the simulation too so maybe I could show the Dreamworld and Bramble loaded at the same time. Could uncloak the Stranger too to show everything.
This is always very cool, I was just playing with this feature yesterday!
I have crashed with Timber Hearth at such a high speed that the colision didn't load, so I ended floating on some out of bounds water.
someone needs to send a scout into the seed and get their ship in position where the sphere is located as the probe enters the seed.
I was wonderimg what that dark spot was about. I noticed it by accident one time when looking at the map.
Feels like a Dyson Sphere. Also, this game terrifies me so much that I have had to alt-f4 out a few times or have a heart attack.
Same, hated bramble so much
I remember the devs talking about how the x and y coordinates are always at 0,0 and all movement is done by moving the relative position of planets. This explains the floating point errors when traveling far away.
Yeah, much better to have the distant planets shaking like that than to have your player start doing it instead
It's like a magic trick.
It was there the whole time. But you are too busy looking at something else to notice.
True!
It's just a once-in-a-lifetime game, I reckon.
Game altered my brain chemistry, dude.
Thank you for solving the mystery of the black hole for me, i knew I wasn't crazy.
From the title I guessed "oh it's in the sun? You get teleported into the sun?"
Anyway GREAT VIDEO
I thought the exact same thing during my first playthrough. Glad you liked the video!
How you have so many hours in this game is beyond me, but I respect it because Outer Wilds is my favorite video game of all time
making mods and playing mods!
The darkness that showed like that reminds me of the stranger when you are frost going into it with the sun behind it
Floating point errors also kind of build up over time for the way that Outer Wilds runs, it was one of the early factors into why they went with a time loop structure. One of those happy accidents that come along in game dev.
That really cool... kinda wonder though too, if noticing the bramble sphere lead to some inspiration for the DLC as well. 🤔
It might have!
This game fascinates me
I found it randomly in my playthrough and was hoping the dark shadow sphere would be explained, once I had finished the game and didn't get any explanation I found out it was from dark Bramble
There's absolutely no way I never noticed that, I'm tempted to reinstall the game just to see if I really was that oblivious
Outer Wilds do be having that Outer Worlds title screen at 0:14
800 hours comes out to just about 2200 consecutive loops. Assuming no deaths!
Wondered what what random black Sphere was. I always thought it was just the quantum moon with some sort of texture glitch
0:16
Ok, who’s the one that mashed the Outer Wilds and Outer Worlds logos together? And why do you feel the need to mess with my brain even more, I have a hard enough time saying the right one as it is!
Two games that came out pretty close together in time with such similar names, and such wildly different gameplay.
Both are pretty good too, give Outer Worlds a chance if you are into Fallout style games. It’s pretty linear, but very story driven as a result which can be nice.
Can’t believe you still showed me something new about this game after all this time, liking and subscribing and prob not giving you money but maybe might if you keep this up?
I really liked this
I found this early on and tried to get into it because it was the sixth location.
Another thought is, couldn't they have hidden it inside the sun and just make the sun kill zone an invisible sphere and only intersecting the surface of said kill sphere be a sun kill?
what about when the sun goes supernova, when it collapses in you'd see bramble inside
Hummm, what about if tou send you're scout through the main entrace of dark bramble? Is it the same? And what about if you, for exemple, let yout ship inside Dark bramble, and leave, fly to timber hearth by using you're personal fuel/refills, is it there? Also, can you do a "deep-impact" situation and get enough momentum to go against the barrier that stops you from entering?
Damn, this video and topic are so interesting
I'm not actually sure about the ship, I'd guess that yes it would be there but maybe not since the sphere is to hide the visuals you see with the scout and with the ship you wouldn't have that issue. The deep impact question is a good one too, I've heard that you can clip your way inside of it by ejecting from your ship so that might work too!
2:15 Does this work if you're far away enough from a planet that it becomes low-detail, and THEN you send your probe to it?
Yep! There's a bunch of checks that see when the player, the scout, or the ship enter an area that handles that. For the player and the scout it'll turn the graphics back up
Looks a lot like Stranger.
Yeah it really does! I wonder if anyone has ever gone to the Deep Space Satellite trying to find the Stranger and found this instead.
30:40 Unity is capable of having multiple scenes loaded simultaneously. I wonder why they decided to actually place the dark bramble interior on the same overworld scene.
I guess it was a simple and quick solution.
I think the most elegant way to do this, would have been to hide active dark Bramble inside of the quantum Moon, because you can't have your Scout inside of dark bramble, and have a picture of the quantum moon to land on it at the same time
Funny thing, devs could have added a shader for that sphere to show the stars behind it and it would be near impossible to find.
I also wonder if you can be lucky enough to launch the scout and make it enter the bramble seed while staying in the spot there the bramble dimension appears (to bypass the repulsive field).
is the sphere it actually that visible from the surface of timber hearth or are you using a mod to make it visible? i know it looks pitch black from space but thinking about it I've never actually looked from the surface
Yeah its actually that visible, I was really surprised I had never noticed it during my first playthrough because it looks so obvious. But there's just no reason in the game to ever put your scout into Dark Bramble and then go to the other side of Timber Hearth so it goes unnoticed. Could probably see it through the atmospheres of the other planets too, might look interesting
they didn't want it to move at all so its anchored to one point so the game always knows where it is.
Whoa, that's really interesting. I had no idea it worked like that. I almost think I've seen the Bramble orb before but I was positioned weird and assumed it was the Quantum Moon or The Stranger
Glad you found it interesting! Yeah it's definitely something that people notice randomly appearing, first time I ever noticed it I only saw it blocking out the background stars and found it pretty creepy
3:35 the transition is so smooth lol
I wonder if players discovering the mysterious dark spot off the plane of the solar system and trying to figure out what it is gave the devs ideas for the DLC
So all of the 12 nods are in that black sphere or is it just one node at a time ?
All in the one sphere
Wow ok... Played this game for 40 hours, finished it, and never noticed this GIANT black thing 😅
I didn't know the moon of Timber heart was the fragment of a exploded planet. The more you know...
I actually saw this but didn't realize it until now. I saw it early on before I knew about the quantum moon so that when I did find out about it I assumed that was what I had seen.
Great vid! Love learning more about this game always.
Thank you! :)
I get why they did this, but it's kind of silly... They could've easily just used proper occlusion and backface culling and you would never see the interior level- or even easier, just make the material of the outside boundary always draw what is behind it (like a refraction shader but with no volume bounce processing). Both of these are extremely simple to implement and something I have done more times than I can count. You can even pretty simply make physics and rendering be object-specific, so it's not that tall of an order to even have the Dark Bramble level always stuck to the player and have it be completely unnoticeable. This obviously requires some kind of markup to indicate which objects have traveled to or from one of the pocket dimensions, so it's not my prefered method in most cases, but it would be pretty straight-forward in this one.
Edit: My point is that when you are creating a scene or simulation, you have control over _everything_ and most game engines expose a lot of this pre-built design to you in a pretty user-friendly maner. It's weird that they didn't just use this to control what the player can see. This feels like a solution you would use when making a mod for a game and can't repackage the entire game in a new build.
I wonder if it was a performance consideration or something to do with time constraints? I've tried seeing if any of the interviews the devs have given mentioned why they choose to do it this way, but haven't found anything.
@@xen-42 From my experience writing software (8+ years), I don't really see a practicle reason for building it this way unless they realized they wanted to have pocket dimensions later-on in development. In that case, it would make less sense to rewrite parts of the codebase or, if they were working with boilerplate engine code, restructure the game to work with a different rendering technique. To me it feels like they might have hit a wall where they realized they would have to go back through a bunch of rendering code and shaders if they were to implement a way to truely hide the pocket dimension.
@@fiveoneecho That makes a lot of sense then, and yeah if you look at the alpha versions of the game Dark Bramble was just a giant dark cloud without the pocket dimensions, so they did only decide to add it later on. So I think you're probably spot on
Well I certainly didn't notice it. Maybe they could have stuck it inside the sun though, there would be a lot of space in there probably.
I wonder if this bug was inspiration for the DLC with how the Stranger's cloaking field works
Might have been!
Imagine Outer Wilds Remake having no limitation in its simulations 😁
I thought they would have done something similar to one other area in the game, where it's somewhere "beneath" the sun and has a shader alongside a forcefield to avoid players from seeing or bumping into it, maybe a big rectangle to fit 4 of the seed pods at once if the need arises from the scout and ship being abandoned in other parts.
what area are you referring to?
@@xen-42 It's more of a whole planet that has this same treatment, not found at all unless if you have the DLC. Somewhat was backed into a corner since I can't not say a small spoiler due to the context of the situation.
when i saw this in game i thought that there were 2 quantum moons for a moment. i had already done the quantum moon stuff so i never actually went to check it out. interesting to know that it was actually dark bramble. odd that they couldnt have had the skybox simply render in front of it like most games do with distant sub-areas
I never thought it would be so poorly hidden, lol.
Then again, I never noticed. I guess it works for 99% of the players or so.
An interesting factoid is that in Outer Wilds, the player is the center of the coordinates system. As far as the coordinates system is concerned, its the solar system that moves around the player, not the other way around.
So yeah, teleporting the player to a very far away point could cause the entire solar system' physics simulation to become inaccurate.
I assume the reason why they made the player character the center of the coordinates system is for that same reason: they want the most accurate physics calculations to be the ones happening in the immediate vicinity of the player.
You know, Dark Bramble does actually work in this context if you consider the quantum stuff in the game proper. Like yeah it's 99% chance to be an oversight and nothing more, but there's something oddly eerie about the idea that the void is only there when there's a direct link between someone outside the bramble, and someone inside. With just an extraordinarily low chance on anyone on timber hearth noticing it casually, in the same way it took so long to find the Stranger.
Idk, I know it's not the case, something about that theory just tickles my brain in the way I enjoyed a lot about the other parts of Outer Wilds.
I came in thikning they were hiding the rooms in the sun, honestly
They totally could have. Maybe it's for the supernova, you'd see weird stuff if you were outside watching the sun with your Scout inside Bramble.
Trophied the base game, didn't notice!!
I do wish more games that involved space travel and planet visitations would focus on details.
Certainly far more fun to explore in this game than No Man's Sky.
1:29 and as you fly through this murky place, I am made anxious again, just like playing it through the first time myself. I don't know how this game and subnautica makes me feel so anxious. Normally all kinds of horror don't have any kind of impact on me. But these submerged areas of murky unknown gets to me.
Funny how the ominous sphere kinda looks like the Stranger. I wonder if anyone's ever gone to it by accident after seeing the radio tower photos 😂
I've heard somebody say that it did mix them up once
I have unlocked a new sfear.
ur telling me you find the ominous black orb filled with killer anglerfish scary?
@@xen-42 Horrorb
1:48 -- So if the fog is hiding the scene change, is that why you still have that moment of fog in the transition, even with the "Light Bramble" mod?
Sounds right to me! I think the entrance nodes have their own fog volume that's separate from the fog inside the pocket dimension, and I assume Light Bramble only removes the latter
thats pretty cool , great vid!!
Very cool! I wonder if this was an inspiration for The Stranger as well.
This is a clever workaround but not entirely needed these days since scenes and levels can be loaded basically like parallel universes. Occupying the same location but out of "phase" so only certain things can interact with each other. I've seen games even do this by creating really tiny representations of pocket worlds that you can see into / out of (much like the skybox in the source Engine).
none if this is a technical oversite, dark bramble is just quantum.
big brain