Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’s Dragonrot Mechanic Was Originally More Complex

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a much talked-about game, from it’s massive sales success for FromSoftware, to its unforgiving difficulty that has rekindled an ongoing debate about difficulty and accessibility in video games, to how the game changed quite a bit early in development. Even before release, Sekiro was much talked about- particularly the mechanic of resurrection and Dragonrot.

The latter was always vaguely defined. We only knew that death would have some sort of repercussions in the game which had largely been undefined. It was never clear pre-release how this would affect your game, with many worried that the multitude of deaths the game promised would hinder progress or affect the game’s plot in some way.

In the end, Dragonrot wasn’t a major issue, but how it worked was at one point different. Discovered by modder Lance McDonald while digging into the game’s cut content, while Dragonrot still spread in the same way and had the same effects, at one point in development, the game required you to go to every single afflicted NPC to cure them with Dragonrot Pellets, which Emma would have to craft from a certain powder (both items cut from the final build). So at one point, the Dragonrot would have taken much longer to cure than the single press of a button it did for the retail release.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. You can check out the cut content mentioned at McDonald’s YouTube channel – including the aforementioned Dragonrot content – below.