What if the beginning of the masterful Elden Ring hadn’t been the one we know by heart? A dataminer made a rather edifying discovery in this sense.
By digging through the Elden Ring files, YouTuber Sekiro Dubi has indeed restored a prologue entirely deleted from the final game. More than just a very different starting area, the whole thing even featured its own cutscenes and lines of dialogue. We dig deeper into the bowels of FromSoftware’s masterpiece.
Another Elden Ring secret discovered
The vast and masterful open world of Elden Ring is already full of many secrets. Two years after its release, the game’s huge community of fans is still discovering more. The one that interests us here, however, does not exist in the Between-Earths as we know it. This was in fact excluded from the final game, but still appears in its digital depths.
We owe this discovery to Sekiro Dubi. Somewhere during the development of Elden Ring, FormSoftware imagined another departure for the Shardless. After the traumatic fight against the first “boss” of the game in the Chapel, our fate could have been radically different. Instead of being teleported into the tutorial cave, it was a matter of falling into the seas below. We would then have ended up stranded on the beach of Necrolimbe. Melina and her faithful steed would then have found us in this state. An entire dialogue was even recorded, which we will never hear in the final version.
A wise change
After this fateful encounter, we would have been more or less led towards the famous cave well known to players. However, given the immense freedom offered by the Elden Ring, many might never have visited it. The cave had, however, been imagined from the start as a tutorial. Without this, some might have missed FromSoftware’s absolute masterpiece.
If the prologue that we know is less coherent than the one unearthed by Sekiro Dubi, the Japanese studio seems to have made the best decision. Especially since the starting cave is rather ingenious in more than one way. It indeed represents a good introduction to both Souls-like veterans and newbies. Its structure, very similar to a Dark Souls dungeon, makes it possible to add a nice “ wow » when our character takes his first steps into the fascinating open world of Elden Ring. Hopefully FromSoftware will demonstrate the same genius with the highly anticipated Shadow of the World Tree DLC.