Since its release in 2015, Bloodborne has amassed an enormous and passionate following, full of people who want to discover the secrets hidden in the deep and often vague lore of Yharnam. What makes that world even more intriguing are the mysteries hidden in the game’s internal content, which was uploaded to the internet by an anonymous user in 2017. It contains characters, creatures, maps, sounds, music, and scripts stored on the game’s Blu-Ray Disc, most of which never made it into the final game at all. My name is Lance McDonald, and I’ve spent the past three months uncovering parts of Bloodborne that have never been seen, until now.
From even a cursory glance at trailers and pre-release footage, it’s clear that Bloodborne went through many significant changes during development, and the alpha files that were built only 9 months prior to the game’s release confirm that. The storyline and characters are dramatically different to what would eventually ship, and as a result, there’s plenty of unused data left behind on the game’s disc. For one, there’s model data for about twenty enemies and characters that would be wholly unfamiliar to anyone who played Bloodborne.
Inspired by that - and with SanadSk’s help - I took Bloodborne’s files and started working on reassembling them back into a playable state. I figured that if I could take these raw files and actually get them to run on a PlayStation 4, I’d be able to make changes to them and explore unseen, off-camera secrets from the game. So, after some time, I eventually managed to figure out how to swap enemies around so that one character was in place of the other, starting with one particularly interesting creature that SanadSk had discovered, called “Slug Princess” (video below).
After that, SanadSk gave me an entire list of “character ids” he had discovered that had unfamiliar content. I found them in the files, injected them into one of the game’s maps, and they each came to life. There were issues, of course. Depending where I injected them, characters would get ‘confused’ by environments that they clearly weren’t built to handle, but with a lot of trial and error almost every cut creature could be revived to some playable degree. There were strange demons that looked like they’d be more at home in Dark Souls, unused variations of key storyline and boss characters, and, mostly, a whole lot of questions about the roles they were meant to play before being cut from the game entirely.
One piece of cut content that occupied hundreds of hours of my life ended up stemming from the simple discovery of some chairs I hadn’t found in the game. I noticed some areas of the game always loaded these interesting looking chairs into memory, but never actually put them anywhere. There were about six of them, each unique to an area. I forced the game to load one in-place of the game’s normal checkpoint “Lanterns” and these chairs appeared, glowing, with little animated creatures in front (seen in the video below). At first I thought these creatures were just part of the lantern I had replaced, but no other objects retained this effect. Some early alpha footage showed that the chairs were actually placed where the lanterns would end up being initially, and if I hadn’t coincidentally used the lantern as an injection-point for the chairs, I probably never would’ve noticed the weird checkpoint-style effects attached to them.
As I dug deeper, I actually found a lot of content related to the chairs. The lanterns still had attached a “WarpChairID” internally, and I discovered animations showing the player character sitting down, and even fading out of existence in a puff of smoke while seated. After loading an alpha version of the game and completely corrupting every “event” that occurs just to see what would happen, I found something new. Where before there had just been a chair, there was now a semi-transparent phantom standing in front of it, and when I approached the chair a prompt appeared reading “Shake the phantom awake”. Nothing else happened, but it seemed like the chairs were meant to be hidden to some degree.
So, with that known, I went back to the event file. There were over 300 “skip event” conditions. One by one, I removed them until I found the one that made the phantom appear, then another caused the “Shake the Phantom Awake” prompt to appear. I kept going, and eventually found one that caused the phantom to sit in the chair. With hours of editing, re-loading the game, and testing over and over, I found six lines of code that, when removed, completely restored a Warp Chair to the game (see video below). As it turns out, waking up the phantom would make it fade from existence, allowing the player to sit down, fall asleep, and be taken to the game’s hub world; a function typically performed by the lanterns seen in the final game.
Of course, the Slug Princess and the Warp Chairs are just two examples of the curious content that’s been cut from Bloodborne. I’m still tirelessly trying to revive characters, events, and items to whatever degree that they might remain, and while it’s an extremely slow process, even the slightest hint at a new discovery is one of the most rewarding things I’ve encountered, especially as a Bloodborne fan.
You can subscribe to https://youtube.com/warpchair or follow https://twitter.com/manfightdragon to keep up with Lance McDonald’s discoveries into Bloodborne’s cut content. This piece was significantly edited by Alanah Pearce.