Abandoned Elden Ring Cutscene Tied to Malenia's Haligtree Resurfaces Four Years Later

Four years after FromSoftware released Elden Ring — the Open-World RPG that reshaped the genre — a cutscene nobody had ever seen has surfaced from the game's code. Researcher Lance McDonald published the footage this week, extracting it from an unused map file connected to the Haligtree, the region where players find and fight Malenia, Blade of Miquella.

The clip runs short. A bleeding sapling takes root as the demigod Miquella, Malenia's twin brother, dedicates the newly planted tree. The scene was coded to trigger immediately after the player collects the Haligtree Medallion, the item that unlocks access to the area. It never appeared in the final game.

"My last drop of dew," Miquella says in the footage. "Let all things flourish, whether graceful or malign. If thou covetest the throne, impress my vision upon thine heart, in the new world of thine making."

— Miquella

That speech connects directly to one of the game's core premises: Miquella planted the Haligtree to replace the Erdtree, the divine structure ruling the Lands Between, with the additional goal of curing Malenia of the scarlet rot consuming her. In the released game, none of this is stated outright. Players reconstruct it from item descriptions and environmental staging. The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion carried the premise further, closing with the player killing Miquella as he attempts to rebuild the world around his own vision — a conclusion the base game foreshadows but never speaks aloud.

Lance McDonald is the researcher who previously recovered Bloodborne's cut alpha maps and, in 2022, excavated a scrapped Elden Ring system built around dream-collecting. In that case, he found sleeping wolves and a land octopus in the 2021 network test build — enemies that would yield dream mist, which players could trade to a monk for a consumable called Dreambrew that prompted NPCs to reveal secrets. The entire system, along with the monk's surrounding questline, was removed before launch.

The Haligtree footage is a different category of omission. Dream-collecting was a mechanic. This cutscene was exposition — direct, voiced context that players currently have to piece together on their own. I think the gap between those two approaches reveals something deliberate about FromSoftware's storytelling philosophy, even if it remains impossible to know whether removing the scene was an intentional narrative decision or a production constraint.

The clip circulated quickly after McDonald posted it. Viewer reaction split between disbelief and frustration.

"Imagine having to cut something that good," one commenter wrote on YouTube.

The reaction holds up. Reaching the Haligtree demands sustained effort — the Medallion splits across two halves, scattered across separate regions of the map. A cutscene showing the tree's origin at that exact moment of arrival, delivered by the same demigod the player eventually confronts in the DLC, would have anchored the location in immediate, concrete meaning. I know FromSoftware's decision to strip it produced a leaner, more demanding kind of storytelling, but the footage makes a clear case for the road not taken.

McDonald has not indicated how much additional buried material remains in the game's files. Given its scale, the excavation is likely far from complete.

Read also, behind-the-scenes footage from the upcoming Elden Ring film adaptation has surfaced online, showing constructed sets that fans identified as Marika's Temple and a structure resembling the Zamorhills pillar. Director Alex Garland, who has reportedly completed the game seven times in preparation, is leading the production.