Cut content from Square Enix’s action role-playing game, Final Fantasy XV, has emerged, revealing that it once started with a fully realized Insomnia city.
Newly uncovered cut content from Final Fantasy XV has shed light on just how different the game’s opening once was, revealing that Square Enix originally planned for players to begin their journey inside a fully explorable Insomnia. Thanks to a recently restored mod, fragments of this abandoned prologue can now be experienced firsthand, offering a glimpse into an ambitious vision that never made it into the final release.
While the restored material is clearly incomplete and fragmented, it strongly suggests that Final Fantasy XV was once designed to open with a lengthy intro sequence set in Insomnia before its destruction. The content includes multiple quest fragments intended to teach Noctis the basics of combat, alongside free exploration of the city itself. Rather than being a rough placeholder, Insomnia is fully modeled, with detailed streets, buildings, and lighting that make the city feel alive in a way players never got to experience in the final game.
This aligns closely with the tone and structure shown in the game’s E3 2013 trailer, which depicted Noctis, his friends, and King Regis present in Insomnia prior to the invasion. The restored footage suggests that players would have spent significant time with all the main characters in the capital, allowing the city’s eventual fall and the king’s death to land with far greater emotional weight.
The accompanying video showcases nearly an hour of raw footage exploring this pre-invasion version of Insomnia, highlighting just how much content was cut. Traces of this idea survived into the released game in limited form. In the original disc-installed version of Final Fantasy XV, players could fight daemons in the Citadel’s courtyard, and by going out of bounds, it was possible to catch glimpses of Insomnia before its destruction. At the time, this was the closest look fans had at the city as it once stood.
Modder Rinual has now restored this map and its associated tutorial content in full on PC, building on earlier work by Luthus Nox Fleuret. Collision has been reintroduced using the Chapter 14 map from the pre-Royal Edition of the game, meaning the overall layout and main streets are accurate, though some barriers and invisible walls remain. While not perfect, it is more than sufficient to demonstrate how Insomnia originally functioned as a playable area,
It’s worth noting that assets outside the Citadel’s original playable area have been replaced with their ruins seen in Chapter 14, and a known bug can cause the train station to disappear at certain distances. Still, this version of Insomnia is the only one where players can see the city illuminated at night, complete with clean, intact architecture.
