Bloodborne‘s Chalice Dungeons are a lot to dig through, and people have discovered some strange things in their game files. Now data digger Lance McDonald has found several boss rush arenas that never made it into the final game.
Chalice Dungeons are wholly optional dungeon dives in Bloodborne, and they can be accessed by using specific items in the Hunter’s Dream.
In the video, McDonald notes that he is accessing boss rush arenas that would be related to a boss rush effect that could be applied to a Chalice Dungeon (for a sense of how this works, you can read this Reddit post). Bloodborne‘s cut boss rush mode was not some kind of run through of all of the bosses, but instead a purposeful back-to-back boss fight with different, powerful enemies, which is a real difference from both the Chalice Dungeons and the main Bloodborne game as they are now.
As McDonald notes in the video, the original strategy guide for Bloodborne suggested that there would be small boss rushes in the game, but they never appeared in the final product. However, it’s fascinating to see that there are many different pairs of boss rooms littered throughout the game files.
It suggests that these boss fight pairs were supposed to show up in the Chalice Dungeons and it also implies that there were meant to be a variety of them for players to experience as they make their way through the game.
For my own part, I’m surprised that McDonald has managed to find so much unreleased content within Bloodborne. It seems like every week he releases a video that shows off some kind of enemy, mechanic, or part of a level that was once in the game and now is not.
His work demonstrates quite nicely how much experimentation goes into game development on the practical development side, and I’m curious to see what else gets dug up out of the game.
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