Gamedev may as well be conducted in a black box as far as many players are concerned, so it can be easy to think of a good game as one where development went smoothly and a bad game as one where things went terribly awry. But in the case of The Outlast Trials, making something sickeningly good took a lot of struggle.

As Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin told Gamespot in a recent interview, it took six years to turn the vague notion of a co-op Outlast game into something ready to launch via early access. It was "a fucking long time," as he recalled it, and the product of "a shit-ton of prototypes."

"[The Red Barrels team] went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability," he told Gamespot. "We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast." The article notes that a seemingly shippable build was produced within four years, but playtests went poorly enough to send the team back to the drawing board.

I suppose concerns about replayability have been put to rest now that it's mutated into a sizable live service game with around 20,000 people playing as I write this, though the game's ongoing development isn't entirely free from strife—as the article points out, players are mixed on its use of AI-generated imagery, and Outlast 3 was seemingly put on the backburner after Trials proved a huge success.

At a glance

• The rough prototype looks to have been binned early in development, and it's largely avoided discussion before Doneda's work.
• Some portions appear to have been part of an interconnected area, others are likely different versions of the same concept.
• It may have been related to what became the Undead Crypt in the final game.
• Doneda uses Elden Ring Nightreign to load in and explore what remains of the levels.
• The files contain a coliseum zone, mines, a strange underground tower (potentially a sequence of arenas, like Nightreign's DLC?), and a crypt portion.

Doneda, the dataminer who showed off the unused levels, has been proving a genuine authority on Dark Souls 2 in particular. Previously, they made a Nightreign-compatible version of Dark Souls 2's Eleum Loyce. Doneda has also shown off a tantalizingly ambitious early version of Dark Souls 2's The Gutter.

In hindsight, the entire pre-Sekiro Souls series (perhaps sans-Bloodborne) seems defined by difficult, rushed development cycles. Hidetaka Miyazaki took over Demon's Souls partway through as development foundered, and the final game was missing an entire archstone world. Dark Souls has its rougher, less beloved back half, particularly Lost Izalith. Dark Souls 3, though far more consistent than the prior games, had a striking world state system completely struck from it at some point.

Even among that field, Dark Souls 2 had it rough: Wunderkind Miyazaki was completely focused on Bloodborne, DS2 attempted a divisive new combat feel/hit detection system unlike anything FromSoft made before or since, while early trailers and cut content point to significant story rewrites. That's before you get to the backlash over a significantly downgraded lighting system in the final game versus its early trailers⁠—I never minded that much, but people were big mad about it back in 2014.

All of which is to say: It's not surprising to see so much cut and prototype stuff lingering in the game's files. The sheer majestic scale of the coliseum makes me wistful for the version(s) of Dark Souls 2 we never got, but it increasingly looks like a small miracle that the game came together as well as it did. I wonder where this complex was planned to fit in the game, but the iteration of DS2's story it corresponds to may be all but unrecognizable to me anyway. We'll likely never get a full accounting of this oddity in the game's files.