Elden Ring is already a huge game filled with moments where you think you’ve seen the extent of the world only for it to unveil another area or underground zone. It can be startling to realize just how large the game is, but thanks to the work of several tireless dataminers we have evidence that at one point during Elden Ring’s development, it was planned to be even bigger.
Dataminer ‘Sekiro Dubi’ has put out a video showing off some of the alternate areas they’ve discovered. Soulslike games have a tendency to be littered with remnants of past development and the breadth of Elden Ring means that discoveries have been coming thick and fast since the game’s release. These newly unearthed maps vastly expand upon two underground regions we visit in the final game, Deeproot Depths and Mohgwyn Palace, and Sekiro Dubi has even put together a work-in-progress look at how the geography of these zones would play out.
Deeproot Depths, where Fia’s questline culminates, looks pretty similar to how it appears in the final game but to the northeast, there’s a long river chasm that leads to a different area. This section would have held an elevator reaching up to the icy late-game Consecrated Snowfield, which may be how this zone was originally meant to be reached instead of via the Grand Lift of Rold.
The other unused map lies underneath the area where we battle Radahn. In the final game, a meteor descends after killing the colossal horseman opening up a route to Nokron, Eternal City, in Limgrave. Originally, however, it appears something would smash open the ground where Radahn dies, letting players explore an area adjacent to the blood-filled Mohgwyn Palace. Sekiro Dubi theorizes that this Caelid crater may have been caused by a falling Astel, the space-themed boss who doesn’t quite fit with the Lake of Rot zone it’s currently found in. Another dataminer, ‘Zullie the Witch’, previously discovered an unused animation for the boss which shows it descending from the sky, which may be the event that would’ve opened up this underground pit.
This all ties into a mechanic which was cut from the game prior to release, named Cataclysm. Dataminers in 2023 discovered that developer FromSoftware at one point intended that the world of Elden Ring would be far more malleable as the player progressed through their adventure. Events would occur that would cause the game world to change, letting the player access areas that were previously impossible to reach. Snowdrifts might recede, meteors would plummet from the skies, and now we have a boss potentially slamming into the ground which may have all at one point altered The Lands Between.
In the end, only the meteor following Radahn’s demise made it to the final game, with teleports and elevators letting players explore the world instead of relying on world-shattering events. With more content coming soon for Elden Ring now we have the Shadow of the Erdtree release date, we’re confident there’ll be plenty for dataminers to uncover about the game in the months to come.
If all this talk of Elden Ring has you thirsting to head back to The Lands Between, our guide to the best Elden Ring builds will see you carving a swathe of destruction in no time. Should you instead want to shake up your experience, our best Elden Ring mods guide will give you the start you need.
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