Bloodborne's Master Willem encounter was a boss fight at one point
During the development of Bloodborne, FromSoftware considered having the player fight Master Willem.
Master Willem is the head of Byrgenwerth college. Those who played Bloodborne will remember their encounter with Willem, who barely has enough life left to point towards the Moonside Lake just before the Rom fight.
However, that wasn't always meant to be Willem's fate. Modder Lance McDonald, who has a solid track record of uncovering cut content in FromSoftware games, has gone back to Bloodborne to dig up some new details.
In their new video, McDonald loads up the Bloodborne alpha to find Fresh Livers, themselves cut items originally intended as rewards for defeating bosses. One of these livers is tied to Willem. When loading up his character details through the in-game debug menu, Willem appears to be listed under Team 23, which is a collection of enemies in Bloodborne.
Seeing as the provost only appeared as an NPC in the final game (part of Team 26), the findings indicate he had a much larger role to play during development. What's more, Willem apparently had more dialogue which was also cut.
In fact, Willem attacks the player when picking a certain dialogue option, clearly part of a bigger fight. You can watch the fascinating video below in full:
