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FromSoftware’s Elden Ring might have had an enemy codex or bestiary built into the game during the early stages of development, which was later removed before the game was officially released.
New game files have been unearthed which strongly hint at the presence of a bestiary that might have been present earlier in the RPG.
The Twitter handle that goes by the user name of JesterPatches, is the one that revealed some of the NPC and enemy icons that were there in the game files but were not used in the final version of Elden Ring.
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The community member is quite notorious for their datamines, and for opening up discussions on topics surrounding SoulsBorne titles. Hence, it’s one of the reasons why the bestiary and codex speculation has so much weight, and why it’s highly likely that Miyazaki and team might have looked to introduce one in the early stages of development.
Elden Ring may have had a codex at one point during development
In the first tweet, JesterPatches stated that,
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“Looking through the game files I came across a few icons making me believe that a bestiary was planned at some point. There are 128 icons showing different NPCs. Each NPC shown has 2 icons, one greyed out and another one filled in, so it could be not found and found.”
To cement the speculation further, the Elden Ring community member posted some screenshots of the icons that were found in the game’s internal files. From the Caelid Dogs to Crows, and Pigeons, there was supposedly an icon for every single NPC and enemy type in the RPG.
There were many icons for enemy types which even the community member could not recognize, and possibly they were forms of creatures that FromSoftware looked to introduced previously, but then thought against it.
It’s hard to imagine the type of experience that a bestiary or codex would offer to the gamepay that Elden Ring is boasting at the moment, or even if it would have seamlessly gone with the vision that FromSoftware had for the final version of the title.
However, it’s a fun idea to play around with, and many feel that it might have just added a different flavor to how players explored and discovered the past and narrative of the Lands Between.
