Elden Ring’s First Boss Almost Mirrored Dark Souls Until This Changed Everything

I still remember the first time I dropped into the Chapel of Anticipation back in 2022, controller in hand, heart thumping like a caged bird. I’d danced this dance before in Lordran, Yharnam, and Ashina, so I knew the unspoken rule: the opening moments of a FromSoftware game are less a warm hug and more a freezing plunge into a lake at midnight—you’re meant to choke, flail, and drown just enough to respect the water. So when the Grafted Scion crawled out of that shadowy corner and dismantled me in seconds, I almost felt a perverse gratitude. That defeat wasn’t a failure; it was a key. But as a data miner’s recent excavation shows, that key could have been cut from a much older, eerily familiar mold.

What many players don’t realize—even now in 2026, with the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion long since explored—is that the Grafted Scion was a last-minute substitution. According to the respected hacker and digital archaeologist ZullietheWitch, an early version of the game nearly gave us a boss ripped straight from the DNA of Dark Souls 1. Peering into leftover data on the Chapel of Anticipation map, Zullie uncovered a load list revealing unused boss models. Among them was the Erdtree Avatar, a lumbering creature that shares the exact same animation skeleton as Dark Souls 1’s Asylum Demon.

Let that sink in for a moment. The Asylum Demon is the primordial ogre of modern gaming—the first brick wall that taught millions of players that “preparation” is just another word for “delay.” Bringing that same skeletal framework into Elden Ring would have been like finding your childhood bully wearing a new face at your adult job; you’d recognize the swing of the hammer in your bones before your eyes could register the change. The Erdtree Avatar, with its sweeping staff attacks and butt-slamming tantrums, would have offered a nostalgic, almost comforting opening. But that’s precisely the problem. FromSoftware aims to make your first death feel like a seed buried under frost—necessary, dormant, and eventually transformative. A recognizable Asylum Demon clone would have been a handshake where a push was required.

The design philosophy here is subtler than a scripted death scene. Tutorial losses in these games work like a theatrical trapdoor: they drop you not into darkness, but into a hidden dimension of possibility. In Bloodborne, defeat sent you to the Hunter’s Dream, arming you with a weapon and a purpose. In Elden Ring, dying to the intended first boss opens the portal to the Lands Between. If players had faced an Erdtree Avatar and, by sheer muscle memory, hacked it to pieces, they’d have marched forward with a false sense of empowerment. That first lesson—“you are not ready”—would have been replaced with a pat on the back, collapsing the entire tonal foundation.

I suspect the designers also feared thematic whiplash. The Grafted Scion is a grotesque, multi-limbed nightmare spilled from Godrick’s grafting vat, a taste of the bodily horror that permeates the game. The Erdtree Avatar, by contrast, is a holy guardian tied to the Erdtree’s grace. Starting with a sacred sentinel rather than an abomination would be like opening a murder mystery with a Sunday school picnic—it doesn’t prime the psyche for the corruption ahead. The Scion’s flurry of blades and unearthly wailing screams, “This world is sick, and so are you for being here.” That message lands far better than a familiar demon swinging a familiar club.

Zullie’s findings also illuminate a broader creative habit: FromSoftware often stitches its history into its new worlds, but usually as hidden seams. Remember Boc the seamster? His name is a quiet pun on the Bed of Chaos, a nod that doesn’t affect gameplay. Using the Asylum Demon’s skeleton, however, would have been a broadcast—too loud for a game that prefers its references to whisper. By 2026, with the studio working on their next unannounced project, we can now see how this restraint let Elden Ring establish its own identity rather than leaning on Dark Souls as a narrative crutch.

What I find most fascinating is how this data peek explains the strange emotional speed limit I felt when I first played. The Grafted Scion killed me in 15 seconds, and those 15 seconds felt eternal—like being trapped in a vat of molasses where every movement had weight. Had I fought an Erdtree Avatar, I might have dodged and rolled on instinct, tapping into decade-old reflexes. The Scion, though, was a foreign language. I had to learn its grammar from scratch, and my failure was the first syllable. That’s the alchemy FromSoftware has perfected: turning a loss into a disguised tutorial, a narrative unlock, and an emotional commitment all at once.

Looking back from 2026, after countless playthroughs, challenge runs, and the mournful beauty of Miquella’s storyline, I’m grateful they swapped the boss. The Erdtree Avatar eventually found its place as a recurring field boss, but it never could have delivered that crucial opening shock. So next time you create a new character and let that spider-like monstrosity tear you apart, remember: you’re experiencing a deliberate choice, one forged in data, tradition, and a keen understanding that some gifts are best received with bleeding hands.