The cut sword in Elden Ring that stirred fans up for months is actually not cut, and it was hiding in plain sight. Keen players and PC dataminers believed they had stumbled onto an in-depth questline that never made it to the final game, and Twitter user Ziostorm might have just confirmed it (thanks, GamesRadar).
Dataminers originally found a set of icons tied to unused swords in the game and assumed they were tied to a quest for swords that were no longer in the game – except one of them was. The large sword you can see adorning some of the graves in The Lands Between was part of that quest once upon a time, though now it’s just an ornament.
What that quest was is a bit unclear still, though Ziostorm suspects it centered on forging a powerful weapon. The icons for the grave sword are also present for two similar-looking swords, one with Haligtree designs and another with twisted metal that could point to the Frenzied Flame or maybe something associated with Volcano Manor. All three sword icons have the same hilt design, and while it’s just speculation, Ziostorm thinks they might have existed for you to forge together.
As we’ve covered in the past, there are two other cut sword icons that share the same hilt as this one. One of them has Haligtree iconography and the other appears to be burned by frenzy.
There was likely a quest involved to mold this sword into the other two versions. pic.twitter.com/rzh55l6PK6— Ziostorm (@Ziostorm1) October 22, 2023
Those two never saw the light of day, but maybe that’ll change when Elden Ring’s DLC launches at some point in the future. And then again, maybe they won’t. FromSoftware’s games tend to have hefty pieces of content removed from the final product that stay lost, even when expansions release.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
