It Turns Out Dark Souls Remastered Has A Lot of Cut Content

Dark Souls Remastered has officially arrived, allowing players to explore a newly remastered version of Lordron complete with graphical boosts, expanded network features, and a version of Blighttown that won’t make you want to break your controller over your knee (praise the sun indeed!). However, as one intrepid Dark Souls explorer has discovered, there’s also a lot of hidden unused content buried in the game’s files, and some of it is truly bizarre.

If you’re a hardcore Dark Souls fan, you might already know about a man named Lance McDonald. While he mainly works as an indie game developer, McDonald also enjoys using his video game engineering skills in a more hobbyist fashion, booting up older versions of games so that he can unearth their buried secrets. One of McDonald’s favorite game series’ to explore in this fashion is From Software’s Souls series, so naturally he was ready to dive in and peek behind the proverbial curtain when Dark Souls Remastered launched last week.

McDonald also enjoys sharing his finds via his Twitter account, and even though Dark Souls Remastered is only a few days old, he has already made some promising discoveries. For example, it turns out that Dark Souls Remastered has a whopping 17 unused map files buried in its code, and one of them is actually a rough render for the opening park of Demon’s Souls’ Bolataria map:

Then there’s this frozen asset for what appears to be Anor Londo’s giant blacksmith.

Or this one of the giant bird that ferries the player to the Undead Berg during the game’s opening moments:

It turns out there’s a whole map filled with the blacksmith and bird assets, all at different sizes:

Be sure to brows McDonald’s full Twitter feed for more finds not just from Dark Souls Remastered but also other Souls games like Dark Souls 3 and even Bloodborne.