New Elden Ring datamine video sheds further light on those mysterious colosseums
Seen but not Erd.
Last month, prominent Soulsborne dataminer Lance McDonald offered Elden Ring fans an intriguing peek behind the Lands Between's conspicuosly sealed colosseum doors, and now, a fresh delve inside has revealed more of what developer FromSoftware may have had planned for the currently dormant structures during development.
Elden Ring players will no doubt be familiar with the gargantuan colosseums that lie at three points on the map - one just beyond Stormveil Bridge, another jutting out from Caelid's coastline, and a third set high above Leyndell, Royal Capital. They're imposing things on the outside, and McDonald's initial boundary break video revealed, somewhat surprisingly given their impenetrable nature, that FromSoftware hadn't skimped on their innards either.
By following a series of intricate passageways beyond one of the colosseum's closed doors, McDonald emerged in a vast arena overlooked by a lavishly rendered viewing area. And while the discovery lead some to theorise the arenas could be intended for PvP play at some future point, a fresh delve has suggested there maybe a little more going on.
Using the DSMapStudio map editor and file references to the Leyndell Colosseum, Elden Ring dataminer Sekiro Dubi has now reconstructed the location as originally intended, uncovering a few more of it secrets along the way. At one point, for instance, the Leyndell Colosseum was clearly intended as a notable destination, given that a Site of Grace can be found along a torch-lit corridor (somewhat curiously referred to as the "return point Bonfire Reception desk" in the game's code) just beyond the building's entrance.
From there, players can follow a winding series of corridors out into the arena itself, below which Sekiro Dubi discovered two unused enemies. It's not entirely clear what capacity these were intended to be used in but given their names - Gladiator Large and Old Lion of Arena - they were presumably intended to do battle at one point, either against each other or the player, rising up via the two lifts on either side of the area.
Granted, that still leaves many questions unanswered - were the colosseums, for instance, intended for PvP play or perhaps a multi-part PvE quest spanning the kingdom? - but, as Sekiro Dubi notes in their video, the Ritual Shield Talisman found outside the Leyndell Colosseum may provide another clue, revealing as it does that the colosseums were once used as a place for ritual combat held in honour of the Erdtree way back in the Lands Between's past, before the age of King Consort Radagon.
Could that, then, suggest future DLC for Elden Ring that'll whisk players back through time to the point when the colosseums were once in use? Given that Dark Souls 1, 2, 3, and Bloodborne have all dabbled in a spot of temporal relocation for their post-launch expansions, it's not a particularly far-fetched theory. But with no DLC yet announced, it may be a while - if at all - before we know what those colosseums are truly for.