Midnight Whale actually in the game?

Back when Paul Arendt posted about working on it, I remember I was most excited to actually fight a Midnight Whale in the game. Has it ever been implemented, or is it just in lore fluff?

It was never implemented as an enemy, and only appears in occasional text snippets.

well that’s a shame. do we know why not?

Not to my knowledge. I’d guess it was an issue with implementing the follow-to-surface behavior - the Whale is listed as an enemy in the game files, so it was being worked on at some point.