For the past couple months, leaks about episode 3′s development have been coming from two different people who knew beta testers that got to play early drafts of the game.

They cut sooooo much stuff. And I’m 99% sure the leaks were real and not a troll because they got so many details right and knew things like what days information was going to be announced and what songs would play in what parts. A lot of the stuff they said would happen, did happen. According to them, Deck Nine cut the best parts of the episode:

There was a scene with Steph where Chloe would talk about Rachel Chloe would tell Steph she was realizing that she was a lesbian (and supposedly she was going to be very explicit in her language here. no “uh idk i think i might like girls no labels tho”)

Chloe and Steph were going to hug There were multiple kisses There was an implied sex scene The bedroom scene was longer and you could talk to Rachel about running away.

There may have been a morning scene where you could change into Rachel’s clothes at her house. Rachel initially wasn’t supposed to get hurt because Sera would save her Sera and Rachel would actually speak Sera was confirmed supernatural. She apparently had something to do with the crows and Chloe’s dreams. There was a choice where Sera wanted Rachel to come back to California with her and Chloe could be for it or ask Rachel to stay in Arcadia (shit happened afterward and Rachel would always ended up staying though) Sera knew about Chloe and Rachel’s relationship Rachel was going to kick Eliot’s ass when he got creepy on Chloe Rachel was going to be there when Chloe got knocked out by Damon It was going to be Rachel’s idea for Chloe to dye her hair

Rachel was going to be with Chloe when she dyed her hair Rachel was going to meet Joyce and David and defend Chloe against David (this may have been dependent on if you’ve pissed off David) Max was originally in the play dream sequence Max was going to be mentioned in the epilogue Drew, Mikey, and Steph had more plot around their involvement with Damon

Supposedly even in the “just friends” path Chloe said something that implied she had romantic feelings for Rachel in the ending. There was supposed to be a lot of really cute dialogue in the epilogue scenes. (You can honestly tell this is true because they went through the trouble of animating the characters talking and it looks like the dialogue just never got put in) There was a kiss at the end (depending on intimacy) There were 6 variations on the endings (3 for each, I believe, and I believe this had to do with your intimacy counter with Rachel.) All endings were meant to be happy. No mention of the dark room being shown at the end.

The information came from beta testers which means that Deck Nine had all of this content. They wrote it and they voiced it and they animated it. It’s not like they cut it because it was Too Much to do. They literally…. did it… and then just… threw it away???? At least that’s my understanding. I’m SO baffled right now tbh.

Even if the beta testers were somehow lying and coincidentally managed to get insanely weird details correct, their fake episode 3 was better than the real one, and I’m pretending this is the version we actually got.