Sekiro Dubi, data manager for the Souls series, recently discovered evidence of another starting point in the Elden Ring. After the battle you "should have lost" with Grafted Scion in the Anticipatory Chapel, instead of waking up underground, you were washed up on the beach at Limgrave.

This is the sequence FromSoft has enjoyed over the years of hanging out in a funky area, getting stomped by a boss, and returning to that boss and that funky area after 15+ hours of gameplay, after Grafted Scion has taught you humility (or professionally defeated and dead), Elden Ring awakens in the Stranded Graveyard, a tutorial dungeon.

Dying on a cliffside island and waking up in an inland cave is a bit of a non-event. It's reminiscent of the infamous "Peak of Dirt" elevator in Dark Souls 2, another example of the "Elden Ring" influence.

But Sekiro Dubi found another starting point that is less surreal: an ID mismatch between the cutscene where Melina and Torrent first find your character and the area where the cutscene plays, which changes the data minor to the discovery. At one point in development, you were supposed to wake up on the west shore of Rimgrave, near the Seaside Ruins, southeast of the stranded graveyard. A nearby cave entrance served as a back road to a tutorial dungeon.

Now, waking up on the seaside makes more logical sense: fall off the cliffs of the Chapel of Premonition into the sea and your body will wash up on the shore. Players had already had enough trouble realizing that the tutorial was in the "stranded graveyard" and it was a closed fork in the road. Starting in an open world would have given first-time players even more headaches.

Furthermore, in a comment on the video, ruikfarimus points out how effective and symbolic the moment of exiting Stranded Graveyard to First Step and seeing Limgrave spread out before you is. Besides, From Software is all about the surreal and the inexplicable. Even when things don't make logical sense, you have to go with it. Nevertheless, it is this attitude that led me to believe at the launch of "The Elden Ring" that the handful of broken quest lines were all working as intended.