[February] Week 2 : James has escaped containment

He has escaped.

[Dark Souls without Walking]

It's been a painful week researching how to make James escape his cell. It was not straightforward as I have hoped it would be.

The method used here is Purple Cowards Crystal Storage Invasion Point Wrong Warp. It's been featured at the end of the last video as an ace in the hole, that ultimately failed.

The main issue is that the invasion point is outside of Northern Undead Asylum. As such, performing the glitch will lead to basically nowhere and will cause the character to fall in the void and die. In order to fix this, the invasion coordinate somehow needs to be situated inside the Asylum. Since the asylum cannot have any player online activity this seems impossible.

The solution is to trick the game into thinking that the invasion happened at the Asylum. This can be done with something called Ladder Storage.

By performing a crit and getting on the ladder at the same time, your stable position will be stuck next to the ladder. As long as you don't run out of stamina, stagger, hit a load screen, use a ladder etc, your coordinate will be stuck here.

Now normally the next step would be to walk all the way up to Anor Londo to use a black eye orb. However, this is impossible in this case. Main reason is that the "curl up in a ball" animation breaks this ladder storage. So the only way to escape is to be a fresh save or NG+ that just arrived in the Asylum, and get the cutscene to teleport instead of curling up in a ball. This means that we can't ring the 2 bells beforehand and clear a path to Anor Londo. Since we can't quit out or use a ladder, we can't get to Anor Londo.

OK, so if NPC invasion is impossible, how about player invasion? Sadly this glitch only works in PTDE and the online services have been discontinued.

...Or has it?

By using a custom server* we can once again play Dark Souls PTDE online!

So we do the ladder storage, reach firelink, go to Undead Burg, and invade using a cracked red eye orb.

...aaaaand the item is greyed out.

The online works fine, as I got invaded shortly after.

Turns out, if your actual coordinate and stored coordinate is different, all online items are disabled. And since this glitch relys on those two being different, it's another dead end.

Ok, can't use item. What if we item swap the orb to force use it? Well, item swap requires you to fall down a ledge, and falling down will disable ladder storage.

I was losing all hope at this point.

Worth a shot?

Aaaand after a few seconds...

It worked!!!

With the invasion coordinate saved, we can create a brand new savefile (James May), and do a PCCWW next to the DLC entrance just like in the previous video.

And the result can be seen in the above video.

Big thanks to Elo, BobDoleOwndU, and Kahmul for helping me with the research.

And thank you for all your support!