I've spent the last few months following Lance McDonald's Bloodborne alpha cut content videos, wishing he'd move onto Dark Souls so I could write about them here. Yesterday, praise the sun, the series turned its attention to optional Dark Souls 3 boss Oceiros, the Consumed King.
The unhinged paledrake sorcerer is best remembered for being unusually vocal (against most other Soulsborne baddies) and for cradling an invisible child—the latter of which was, apparently, originally visible.
"Let's take a look at Oceiros as he looked just a few months before the game was released, this is the alpha version of his model that was edited in the final game to make little baby Ocelotte invisible," explains McDonald in the following short's description. "I had no creative input in this model's appearance, this is exactly how it appeared as the developers shipped the alpha version of the game for playtesting. His intro cutscene also has some different camera angles, too. Pretty happy with this for my first look at Dark Souls 3 cut content."
An indie developer with game engineering experience—McDonald is responsible for the Syndicate-esque Black Annex, among other things—the "creative input" McDonald mentions above has seen him restoring Bloodborne's cut features to varying degrees of playability, and placing them in lore-friendly areas of the game.
The below, McDonald explains, is how Oceiros almost featured in Dark Souls 3's full release, without any of his own tinkering.
Interesting, huh? Considering Oceiros' fragile state, I reckon Baby Ocelotte's absence from the final game makes most sense—but it's nevertheless cool to see how it might have been. Much of the Soulsborne series' lore relies on players bridging plot gaps with their imagination and/or personal theories, so perhaps, as McDonald posits above, invisible Baby Ocelott helped maintain a degree of ambiguity about the optional boss' character.
At the end of the video, McDonald explains he's still in the "very early days" of pulling together his Dark Souls cut content series. Look out for words from the creator himself on his processes in the coming weeks.