The Deep, the untended graves, the profane flame, the serpents, londor, birthing dragons, people turning into trees, the pus of man. Whatever DS3 was supposed to be was a way more interesting game than the butchered leftovers we got.
There is also that giant leak from early builds that seemed credible for the most part about how different the initial game concept was, and deep digging into early code and dialogue apparently reveals a lot more about how different the game was meant to be.
I could talk for hours about Dark Souls 3's cut content I find it very fascinating.
A lot of what you're writing near complete fanfiction based off of hearsay and other assorted speculation (likely by loregrifter troons) of the odd leak or datamining.
Some of which is COMPLETE horseshit, like the "QA Leak", which was actually just some faggot pulling the wool over people by repeating already datamined info alongside his made up bullshit.
The game changed a lot, well so did every other FS game, including games people think had no changes, like DS1 or BB. And "lore" is never finalized and is left deliberately vague and underwritten until late in development because the game changes a fuckload every time. DS3 just had the misfortune of being the game with a leak, so people think shit was unique to it. (DS2 is the odd one out, because that was a genuine distastrous mess that was cobbled together.)
Some of what you brought up is completely off base.
- The profaned flame lore couldn't have existed until late in development, because none of the characters involved with it (Yhorm, Pontiff) were connected to the Profaned Capital before then. It used to be a far earlier level and Wolnir, who was always an undead king, was the boss in it-> the mythical super interesting original vision didn't even have the "profaned flame"
- The deep was always tied to the slime cannibal pope, and was just more dark/abyss shit. He was originally the boss in the Deep Cathedral, so it was clearly just theming for what was always intended as one of the main bosses of the game. -> it's pretty much exactly the same
- There's 0 reason to think tree hollows would be any different than what they are in the final game. Some vague hint about how the primal form of hollows is fucking trees. The mysterious black tree roots in the leaked images... were just black tree roots overgrowing the Castle.
- The DS1 serpents were never in the game in any significant capacity. The QA leak made that shit up, and even the statues in Lothric Castle were added super late in development.
- Also, the flying serpents in the leak? The model is just a DS2 dragon without legs. That shit was clearly just a concept and a placeholder, which was replaced with Pilgrim Butterflies in the final game.
- "birthing dragons", I've no clue what this is meant to be, but if I had to guess, it's something to do with the cut dragons in DS3, one of which had MotherDragon as its code name. Sad to tell you, but it's pretty much the same as it is in the final game.
It's a slightly more complex explanation, but basically, Archdragon Peak used to be an (somewhat larger) area that somehow meant to connect to Lothric Castle, and it had dragons in it, with atleast 2 dragon bosses, MotherDragon and something called "Ancient Dragon Guardian". Well, the thing is, AP is still a dragon level, it just got cut and turned into a secret optional level. MotherDragon got cut and the fight was turned into Midir in the dlc while the model was used as the dragon in the mountain. The Guardian Dragon became the Ancient Wyvern, and all the dragons were turned into wyverns.
TLDR, the level got shuffled around, the dragon models got replaced with wyvern models and the boss was made into a better version of itself in the dlc. (Suspiciously mirroring Kalameet from the first game, who was also a cut base game boss.)
It is very disappointingly mostly the same level, sans a boss.
There were some leaked screens floating around for a week or two before they announced the game and they looked so wonky I swore they were fake. I don't think the game had that long in the oven considering DS2, Bloodborne, and DS3 all came out within a two year span.
All three of those games were being developed at the same time for about 2 or 3 years. DS3 started development in either 2012 or 2013. IIRC, it may have had the longest dev cycle out of the three games. Funniest part is that there's actually cut DS3 music in DS2's third dlc.
The leaks were of an internal prototype meant for some kind of presentation explaining the game to some party, probably Bamco.
