Having a look at the game files (how have no one done this?)

Entering my third year with The Pathless i started to play with the game files (finally). It's something i really wanted to do ever since the idea popped in my head about one year ago, but i knew it would be hard not because it is essentially hard, but because it was an uncharted path for me. I even needed a push from my boyfriend to start diggin in (i was so lost with this one that i didn't even know what keywords to use in the search bar), and it's thanks to him i am writing this right now (thanks toca).

And when i thought there was nothing else to talk about this game (specially when i got to the party late), here i am!!! Can't wait to see what i can find in five years when i finally learn whatever is going on with unreal. Anyways.

Before I start the list i will state that not everything i found/saw is here, just what i deemed interesting (and also due to me not knowing everything about coding and the specificities of Unreal Engine, Blender and code - it is a real bummer but believe me, it's a rabbit hole for another moment)

General details

Here's a listing of some small things i noticed that don't need their own space but still worth mentioning:

In the files the cursed gods are not referred by name, they are name like 'Cursed Elk', 'Cursed Sauropod', 'Cursed Hydra' and 'Cursed Behemoth'(yes, it is Kumo). Curiously, there's a 'Cursed Lizard' folder that is empty, likely the remnants of an early version of Sauro;

The people/civilization of Abzu (from that secret room in the game) is called Abzubians in the game files (which i find a very funny name, sounds like alien people);

The butterfly in the files is named 'Monarch Butterfly';

Apparently there are dandelions and dragonflies in the files, but i have never seen them in game (maybe due to a quality setting? i'm not sure, someone will have to confirm this one to me);

The flora of the game is named in the files and among them there is: bear berry, big bluestem, big leaved lupine, bracken fern, bracket fungi, caribou moss, cat tail, five-finger fern, ivy, lily pad/lotus flower, oregon grape, osmunda fern, pampas grass, red trillium, redwood sorrel, sword fern, thimble berry and yerba buena. For trees we have tamarack, quaking aspen, redwood, white oak, pine trees, birch trees and other generic/variation models. I recommend you give a search for all of these because, you guessed it, they exist in real life.

It's important to note i can't confirm all of these plants are in the released version of the game.

As for animals and creatures, there are two folders that only have the texture file, 'Paraceratherium' and 'Giant Wild Boar', and other two folders with the texture and mesh (3D model) named 'Bullfrog' and 'Fiddler Crab'. Since they don't have animations like the other animals (deer, boar, wolf and rabbit which are in the game) i assume they were not used (remnants of a distant past, i'm close to call this archeology);

The name of the custom tools they built to use in their games is called 'Squid Tools' (and now we have cow tools too hm);

The fonts used in the game are Nunito Sans, Trend Sans One and Noto Sans and their variations.

Lore

What i think grabbed my attention the most is the little notes left in some of the text files

ok by itself 👍

sacrificed 👍

why not, put some animals eating their flesh too for even better environmental storytelling

SO TRUE DEAR DEV, HUNTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you are so right... hunter my beloved

Something i did notice is how in the files many dead people are referred as hunters, tho they don't look like they have any ties with Hunter.

Icons

One of the most surprising findings in this journey is these pixel icons that i presume are icons for a simple map that was used for internal control and planning. I think they are so cool :D

there's more of them

And also these for the mobile version (you have to understand i'm collecting these. I love them all.)

hunter my beloved

Glyphs

The game features a lot of glyphs, from drawings of the Tall Ones to what seems to be an alphabet. The definition of glyph seems to be loose here but it's how they are identified in the game files

There are 3 files that showcase lettering and the alphabet they created. There isn't a "Rosetta Stone" case for this lettering, so it's impossible to know what they mean (if they even mean anything). I don't think there's a way to draw any meaning from it however they look very cool and can serve as a nice drawing detail.

this file in particular features what seems to be calligraphy, a more natural way of writing, unfortunately the quality is very bad

luckily, the lettering can be seen in better quality in this scroll texture (i think that this image or the previous one is rotated, but i am not sure which one); you can actually see this one in the game if you play a bit with the camera but this way is more convenient ;)

these are the symbols that appear in the steles (this one is named Glyphs.png)

But mostly important, there's a main file that unites all the mural drawings, used and unused, and oh boy this one is mind blowing.

In this one, we have the depiction of the Tall Ones, Godslayer, the Sun and others but let's talk about the ones that do not appear in the game. First there's the bow, which for me is very sad we didn't get, specially since there's no moon murals or drawings or mentions of it except that text in the sun sword temple, we could have at least the bow, no? ;-;

if you are wondering why these images look like this - they are normal maps, used to mimic depth without having to model in 3D every nook and cranny, puter magic at its finest

we also have kumo frilly mural drawing, i don't remember seeing it ingame

I'm also including the mama eagle mural drawing, this one is in the game and you can find it at the entrance of the Oracle Temple in Kumo's plateau. It is partially destroyed however, so i included it because it's very pretty

And now the thing that made me fall off my chair, there's a dolphin in there. If i found this before Sword of the Sea released i'd find it weird, but now knowing Sots events, this feels incredibly cool (and another hint at the wider connection between the games) but also how the process goes, they were considering a dolphin Tall One since then!! Too bad this glyph didn't appear ingame.

Note: I had an Abzu replay recently and found the same dolphin glyph, i think during Abzu the dolphin glyph was really just decoration, but by the end of development in the pathless they were certain they would flesh out the dolphin as a character, later included in Sword of the Sea.

Characters

My focus here will be Hunter and Godslayer (for obvious reasons). There's nothing mind blowing here, but peeking under the hood is so satisfying and also gives new perspectives (literally even).

Godslayer and Hunter

I found that it's easier to see the differences between the models when they are side by side so. Specially, our very-big-very-tall and very bad villain was full of surprises. Here's what i noticed, in no particular order:

Godslayer is gray

It's probably no surprise to many, since you can infer it from Godslayer followers. Still, it's easy to perceive him different given his appearance in cinematics (i am also used to draw him in red).

Godslayer wears heels

whore

Hunter feet is wider (or is Godslayer's feet narrower?)

They don't have faces

I was not going to include it at first, but then i thought some people might think there is something there - there isn't. Faces are super hard to sculpt and even hard to animate, one of the reasons they hide the faces of their humanoid characters. It's too complex and too much work for a small team. What is funny to me is that Hunter barely has a neck and Godslayer head-to-mask proportions makes his head looks small.

The veil that Godslayer has around his head is called "Cloth Hat"

which implies that the triangular shape he has in his head is actually a hat...? makes sense if you follow the logic, i always thought it was just his head

Godslayer and Hunter ass pants are the same

hunter and godslayer probably come from the same base humanoid model, you can see that the folds of the fabric are the same

(and they are very flat (they deserve each other))

giant squid is afraid to give their characters cake

Godslayer dress/robe has 5 parts and two layers

It is partially visible ingame in the final boss start cinematic where Godslayer sits with his legs crossed while floating, i don't like it because it hides his juicy legs too much.

Also I always thought that, on his back, the dress was only divided to make room for the tail, but it is divided again right before the opening of the tail so it makes 5 parts (two on the back, two on the sides and one on the front)

Godslayer hands are big

aghhghgahhghhghhhahghghghhghghghhghggggghhhhghgahghghhahghghghghghh

Godslayer is tall

and he gets even bigger during the boss fight, although im not sure how much bigger since i could not find anything about it in the game files

Animations

Mostly focusing on Hunter and Godslayer again, i could do a blog post just exploring the other characters animations in another moment. On the topic of files, i checked the animation files inside the animation folder inside the folder of each character, so probably every single animation was not checked (there's a chance that there are more animations outside the characters main folder, although i believe it's unlikely that's why i didn't check)

Godslayer had some temporary animations that were very simple and in some cases even static, which is something i didn't find for Hunter. Hunter has some unused animation for discarded concepts.

Godslayer

Godslayer has a honk shoo animation

see Combat_prayable; he actually looks up and then lies down completely, absolutely nap time

"I cast stop" animation

see Attack_fireball; the transition on this one is so goofy

whatever is happening here

see Attack_GroundSlam; i thought this was bugged at first but it seems it is used in the game (at least the part prior to this pose)

There are animations for an attack where Godslayer would spin at your direction (it is insanely goofy)(see Attack_spin and Attack_spinend ESPECIALLY Attack_spinend)

He also has a double slash attack (i dont think it was used)(Strong_attack_doubleslash)

See Eagle_strikable for Godslayer Whoring Out

The teleport animation has Godslayer rolling in the air, peak blorbo material

Hunter

Most Hunter animations are known because, well we see them in the game. Here's the extras i found:

There's an animation where Hunter jumps to the wall and stays there a bit like spiderman yk, my friend ads said it could be a discarded animation for the tree climbing mechanic

(WallScramble)

wink wink

looks like a selfie :3

why

(ShootWalk_Add_F)

The animation for the post credit scene is... longer? After Hunter receives the eagle in her arm, she gets up and looks up (to the sky)(S24_Ending2A_02)

Hunter has animations to feed the eagle (EP_Feed01 to 03)

SpiritTeleport_Prayer animation is the one hunter purifies/prays, nothing big i just mentioned because it's one of my favorites :]

I think BlownBack_InPlace_Air is not used in game

Hunter S13_Bossdefeat_01 animation is funny too

Audio

Unfortunately leaflet doesnt allow audio files so this section will be rather empty. Additionally, it didnt help that there are easily more than 4 thousand individual files that needed to be analyzed - all of them in a proprietary audio format (Wise) that needs to be converted in an audio format that actually exists so VLC or WMP can open it. However, on the few files i checked i had interesting discoveries.

There are some audios where different people (i counted maybe 3 different voices) spoke in a gibberish/simlish way that is not related to the conlang in the game. Most likely a placeholder for the real voice acting that would come later but it is curious to see it inside the game files after release, there is distinctively a voice of an old woman speaking in some of them

Hunter has very few lines despite being the protagonist, Godslayer on the other hand has plentiful of them, some even that are not included in the final release. Most of these extra files sounded like tests Troy did, some of the audios cut too soon and some other the voice acting feels slightly different from what we hear in the game. Curiously, i could identify in these test audios phrases in the conlang that we dont hear in the game, following a similar structure but using different words. I couldn't find anything similar for Hunter tho.

This post is taking long enough to finish (as you can see by the dates) so i'll probably end it here. It does not mean i finished exploring the files however, i merely looked at what i was more curious about. I also had technical problems and had to learn how navigate blender in the way (it was way too hard 💀, blender truly is not for the weak), that was one of the reasons it took so much to finish this.

I wanted to show interesting things all across the board and mostly important, that these information needed to be easy to access (that's why im trying leaflet)(i'm feeling more and more averse to have things behind a login screen)

Something i didnt predict was that after a certain quantity of images, leaflet starts to compress everything (that is one of the reasons i didnt do gifs for the animations section)(i actually dont know if leaflet supports gif, anyways), so my bad for the low image quality, when i noticed what happened i just accepted my fate TvT

If you wanna explore the game files too, you can extract/read the game files with Fmodel (no AES key needed) (the game UE version is 4.25). If you want to go through the the Blender journey yourself i recommend visiting this UE modding guide . If you dont wanna waste time of your life you can have my blend file (beware that because of the animations the file can be quite laggy, be patient when pan/zooming around).

If you read until here, thanks!

In order to view animations, go to the animation workspace(beside shading and rendering) and select the model you want to view the animations, change it to "pose position"

then go to dope sheet (shift+f12 if you dont locate it) and change the action

NOW it's the end, thanks !!!!!!