[General Discussion] "On the Cutting Room Floor", or "Previews and their horrible, horrible lies."

I've always been interested in seeing games evolve through their development and inevitably having content cut from them, leading to a wealth of screenshots, videos, interviews, and even music and sound effects that are never seen in the released game. Unseen64 has some great material on it, I've gone through quite a bit on the site and it always amazes me how is removed before games see the light of day. They also posted the trailer of Dinosaur Planet on Youtube, which is really quite interesting because it seems like the game was almost complete at that point.

Zelda 64 probably recieved one of the biggest overhauls, since it was originally a 64DD game and was supposed to have all kinds of amazing features that took advantage of it. For example, there was going to be some persistant features if the world: cut a bush or tree, and it would remain cut for the rest of the game. It was also going to be based on an in-game time system where you basically had 7 days to save the world, and the day and night cycles were going to be much more dynamic and have a larger focus in the game. Some of the features were eventually rolled into OoT and Majora's Mask (which got a cut down, 3-day time system), but quite a few were never seen. And noone has been able to quite figure out why there's a fully working and fightable Arwing in the game code of OoT...



Resident Evil "1.5" as it's now come to be known was another big one that even today a lot of fans want to see released. It was basically a more action-oriented version of RE2 that had many things not found in the released version. Speaking of Resident Evil, RE4 is another one that went through so major design changes. The first version of it was eventually turned into Devil May Cry, the second (and possibly third) attempts were never shown, and the second-to-last version was eventually shown and videos of it were released. I think it looks like a perfect fusion between the "classic" RE style and RE4...shame nothing came of it.

As far as Half-life 2 goes, I was pretty disappointed that many of the E3 2003 scenes were drastically altered in the final version, but the leaked alpha of the game probably had virtually nothing to do with it. Almost all of the removals and changes were done because the game was, at that point, so unfinished that nothing really fit together in yet, and they weren't even making major design decisions until well after that point. Anyone else remember the Borealis?



It was the first major part of the game they revealed, the tanker that you would start off in and they talked about it a bunch in early interviews and showed screenshots of it and everything, yet it was cut very early during the game's development (before they even showed the game at E3 2003). The entire part in Episode 2 where they make a reference to how the ship "disappeared without a trace" and such seemed to be a direct joke about how they had suddenly removed it from HL2. The "Raising the Bar" book is a good source to find all kinds of information about how the game changed during it's development.

Oh, and another funny thing: neither of the 2 screenshots on the back of the original retail Half-life 2 box are in the game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Top Dollar

Remember those C&C: Tiberian Sun previews... where they promised us a full-fledged voxel engine?

That much was true actually, many of the units and some structures (to my surprise) were actually voxel-based models. It obviously doesn't use them for everything, but the game definitely used quite a bit of voxel rendering.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Nall

Also, I remember there were lots of games on the PS2 that were supposed to have online modes, but scrapped them way before release when the whole PS2 modem plan imploded. Square said FFX was supposed to have an online mode of some kind way back when it was first announced, but never gave any details on what it was supposed to be. Most people thought certain scenarios would be played online with other people, which would be a sort of baby step for people getting ready to play FFXI, which was fully online and quite possibly the evolution of the series. As cool as it might have been, I'm glad the line between MMOs and CRPGs wasn't blurred too much here. You have to keep these genres fenced off in separate pastures, otherwise they'll interbreed and you'll have some gangly sterile hybrids on your hands that you can't sell.

You know, I remember hearing about that, but from what I recall it was something about using the PlayOnline service to "connect" to other users (which was a pretty vague statement) to get help to advance your quest, like asking others for advice and discussing aspects of the game as you play. I thought the whole concept was rather silly and pointless since it sounded like you'd just be using an online message board on the console or something like that. I think they were just using FFX to market their PlayOnline service for when they actually decided to use it in a game.

On the subject of cut online modes for PS2 games, Ace Combat 5 comes to mind. I was pretty disappointed that it was cut since I had just finished Ace Combat 4 right beforehand and was really looking forward to some online dogfights. I think that caused me to lose interest in the series, I loved Ace Combat 4 but I haven't even gotten around to playing 5 or Zero yet, and I didn't even care enough to bother seeing if Ace Combat 6 finally has that feature or not.

Oh, and I can't believe I forgot about one of the most horrible preview lies ever: Red Steel. It was the first Wii game that had any "screenshots" shown of it, and it looked quite impressive for a system that was supposed to just be an extension of the Gamecube. Then it turns out that those were just pre-renders, and the actual game looked like total crap and all those cool features that they talked about in the preview were incredibly boring, poorly executed, or non-existent.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.