While most other gamers have moved on to newer, shinier gaming pursuits, there are some who still enjoy unearthing the many buried secrets hidden in the code of FromSoftware’s 2015 gothic masterpiece Bloodborne, and few of these gaming archeologists are more intrepid than Lance McDonald. In the past, we covered some of McDonald’s previous findings such as a boss rush mode that was ultimately cut from Bloodborne and an official free-for-all PvP experience for Dark Souls 3 that was scrapped ahead of launch. Now, McDonald is back with yet another exciting find, this time in the form of unused Bloodborne story content that pertains to the tragic figure Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower.
Minor spoilers for Bloodborne follow, consider yourself warned!
As any dedicated Bloodborne players likely know already, Lady Maria is a fairly prominent figure in Bloodborne’s sole DLC expansion, The Old Hunters. In fact, she appears front and center on the DLC’s main cover image, though it’s admittedly a little hard to tell it’s her given that her head is tilted down and she’s wearing a large tri-point cap.
In the standard Old Hunters experience, players interact with Lady Maria in much the same way that they interact with most other prominent lore NPC’s, by fighting them. Maria initially appears dead when the player encounters her in the Astral Clocktower, but upon approach she suddenly springs to life and engages the player in one of the most challenging boss fights of the entire DLC, not to mention the entire game. However, as McDonald notes in the below findings video, such was not always the case.
According to what McDonald found in Bloodborne’s game files, the original plan for The Old Hunters DLC was to have Maria be alive when the player first meets her, and to also have her serve as an ally to the player. If they wanted to, the player could embark on an optional side quest which would result in another NPC, Simon, killing Maria, thus leading into the boss fight that’s present in the final game. It seems that, for the final release of The Old Hunters, FromSoftware decided instead to do away with all that extra story nonsense and just set a default world value in which Simon had already killed Maria with no previous input from the player.
It’s a little disappointing that so much story content ultimately wound up on the cutting room floor, but its absence from the final game in no way diminishes Bloodborne’s finalized presentation. Still, as is the case with all of McDonald’s work, it’s still fascinating to get a glimpse into what Bloodborne could have been.