FromSoftware’s hugely successful game (which will soon receive a content expansion) has undergone some changes during development, which is only natural.

In the video embedded below by Sekiro Dubi, an expert in data mining for Souls games, we learn that the Elden Ring originally began somewhere else. In the Chapel of Anticipation, the “supposed to lose” battle against Grafted Scion would have taken place, and then we would have woken up on the shores of Limgrave: we would have been thrown into the sea, not awakened underground. It’s a concept FromSoftware has used for a long time: a stylistic area where you get beaten up by a strong character, and then after tens of hours of gameplay you come back and beat them to a pulp.

After Grafted Scion knocks us down (or not: we defeat him, but still fail…), we wake up in a tutorial dungeon called Stranded Graveyard, which is a rather unusual twist as we go from an island to a cave, similar to Dark Souls 2’s infamous Earthen Peak elevator. But according to Sekiro Dubi, there’s an ID discrepancy between the scene in Melina and Torrent (where we find our character) and the location, as we were originally supposed to wake up on the west coast of Limgrave, near the Seaside Ruins, southeast of the Stranded Graveyard, and a nearby cave entrance would lead us to the tutorial dungeon.

Waking up on the beach is more logical, as you fall from the temple into the water, which then throws your character ashore. It is likely that FromSoftware changed this concept because even after the change, players found it difficult to find the tutorial in Stranded Graveyard, and if the Japanese studio had let players loose in the open world, many would have been even more lost in the world of Elden Ring.

In the comments, ruikfarimus points out how effective and iconic it was to have the first player to see Limgrave leave the Stranded Graveyard on their first step. That wow factor would have been missed if the audience had been distracted by the tutorial available to them by default.

Source: PCGamer