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Content that never made it into games

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
I'd like to see this "dialogue" that Aeris makes in post death scenarios with a Gameshark.

1. The game contains a dialogue system where whatever character is in your party will speak some necessary dialogue. In this case Aeris dialogue is easily explained away.

2. If this dialogue IS original for Aeris, perhaps they simply rearranged a scenario to be after her death instead of before.

I believe it's just the former though. There is no cut Aeris ressurection element.. It's just that it was an extremely desired thing in the late 90s so there was a lot of false information based on hope spread around. Kind of like the Lara Croft nude code.
 
Halo 2 had (at least) 3 levels cut.
"Covenant Ship (Level), Forerunner Tank (Level), and Forerunner Keyship(Level). In the "Making of Halo 2" documentary there was concept art seen regarding a level location The Ark, although the design was later placed into Halo 3's The Storm (Level) as the Portal. The former could have been apart of pre-production for Halo 3. Marty O'Donnell was also quoted in a Bungie Podcast (Episode 13, at 21:00) saying that all the actors had recorded the lines to the original Halo 2 ending and that it still exists today, but he is unwilling to ever show it. The Flood Juggernaut was a character that was modeled and placed in the coding of the game but never had AI programmed or had been placed on any level, similar to the Engineer in Halo: Combat Evolved." Copied from Halopedia.

Halo 3 had a sentinel level cut, based around architecture similar to that seen the in multiplayer level 'Guardian'. There was a promo still on the Halo Zune that alluded to it.
 

tass0

Banned
BocoDragon said:
I'd like to see this "dialogue" that Aeris makes in post death scenarios with a Gameshark.

1. The game contains a dialogue system where whatever character is in your party will speak some necessary dialogue. In this case Aeris dialogue is easily explained away.

2. If this dialogue IS original for Aeris, perhaps they simply rearranged a scenario to be after her death instead of before.

I believe it's just the former though. There is no cut Aeris ressurection element.. It's just that it was an extremely desired thing in the late 90s so there was a lot of false information based on hope spread around. Kind of like the Lara Croft nude code.

If you use GameShark to keep Aerith in your party after she dies, after she snowboarding level, she does have a few lines. She probably was intended to die later on (or be revived ;p)

There is also an unused cavern level that has Aerith's music playing, but there is no code in that level at all, so you cannot move. Interesting anywho.
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
Phreaker said:
Phantom Dust (Xbox):

Yukio Futatsugi (creator) Interview:

Xboxphreaker.com: Was there any content (maps, skills, school) that didn't make it into the final game? If so, can you tell us something about them?

Futatsugi-san: スキルはアイデアだけなら500ぐらいありました。その中から整理して削って、今のスキルになっています。マップは当初はもっとたくさんつくる予定でしたね。アイデアとしてあったのは、
「水族館」

これは、廃墟となった水族館になぜか水が張っていあり、魚だけが泳いでいる。水槽の中だけがライトアップされて、戦闘で壊れると消える。床には水が薄く張ってある、というようなイメージでした。
「駅」
もうひとつは駅です。東京の地下鉄は複雑に入り組んでいて、ひとつの駅が立体的に構成されています。そこに記憶の列車を走らせて、列車にのると他のホームに移動できる。列車の中にカプセルを置く。というような動的なマップを作成したいと考えていました。

まぁ、両方とも実際に作るとなると作業量が膨大であきらめましたが360でならつくれたと思います。

他には、対専用の専用マップも案としたありました。しかし、ノーマルマップを含むレベルデザインの作成には思った以上に時間がかかり、またデザイナーが開発環境に慣れるのにも時間がかかり、あれ以上のマップの作成は難しかったですね。

We had more than 500 skill ideas. From that large batch we organized them, edited them, and cut them down to the present level. At first, we had intended to create a lot more environments, including:

The Aquarium
This would be the ruins of an aquarium, with only water and fish still remaining. Only in the middle of the fish tanks would be lit up, and that light would be destroyed as players fought and destroyed things around them.

We also envisioned the floor to have leaking water on it.

The Station
The other stage we had in the planning stages was a station. In Tokyo there are a number of different subway lines, and we wanted to isolate one of them and make that into a 3D stage. In that one area there would be a memory train that was still running. Players could ride that train to different platforms. Inside the trains we would place the regenerating capsules. This is one of the very dynamic stages I had wanted to make.

You know, practically speaking it was just too much production work for our time to make these two maps, but I think we could have done it if we were creating the game on Xbox 360…

Lastly, we had also wanted to create maps to be used exclusively for multiplayer, but creating stages took longer than expected. Including normal-mapping took longer than expected, then getting designers to be comfortable with the development took a lot of time, so map creation was quite difficult.

Holy shit, what a totally different game from what we got. At least the GUI improved (as did the art-style).

Makes me want to pop in Phantom Dust again.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
Roxas said:

Aeris: “I’m sick of this.”
Aeris: “Hey. Let’s take a look at the map. Press [SWITCH].”

...

Aeris: “We can’t afford to be beaten!”

After the battle she appears again, and has another line.

Aeris: “What is this?”

...

So she basically has dialogue for a couple of of sections where any of the characters will say something relevant to the minigame. Even if these lines of dialogue are unique to Aeris (and are we sure, say, Vincent, being an optional character, wouldn't say the same generic line?).. the fact that they programmed dialgoue for every character in this scenario doesn't really imply anything.

When they were designing the Fort Condor and Snowboarding minigame, I doubt they were thinking "well, this section takes place after Aeris' death so we can leave out one of the character's lines." They probably just didn't care or notice... they just filled in lines for all the characters... and that's even assuming the order of scenarios was determined yet, which it probably wasn't. Snowboarding and Fort Condor could have taken place before Aeris' death at one point in development... or more likely these scenario programmers just had no idea of the order of events.

It even makes sense that Sony CEA would translate it to English... in a huge dump of code, who would even notice this dialogue took place after Aeris' death?

Now if there were even one Aeris line relevant to the story.. that would be interesting. But as it is, it's just prgramming junk for a minigame event.
 

Balb

Member
According to an old 1up Yours podcast, Fable 2 used to have more consequences when the player's character got hurt.

David Jaffe (I think) talked about how God of War almost had a Navi (from Zelda OoT) like character for the first level, and Kratos would kill him/her off immediately.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
Balb said:
According to an old 1up Yours podcast, Fable 2 used to have more consequences when the player got hurt.

David Jaffe (I think) talked about how God of War almost had a Navi (from Zelda OoT) like character for the first level, and Kratos would kill him/her off immediately.
:lol brilliant.

That would've been a neat way to give you a tutorial for the first few sections of the game... then kill it off mercifully with some laffs.
 

Leckan

Member
KOTOR 2 ending is an obvious one that was cut due to time constraint I believe. Also the second disc of Xenogears anyone?
 

satriales

Member
Black had a challenge mode where you would run around the level shooting targets within a set time. Not sure why it was cut as it was more fun than the main game.
 
TheSeks said:
Code Veronica was the original Biohazard 3, as well.

It went-> CV->Bio3->DMC1->Fog (announced at Nintendo World 2000, IIRC)->Dolls (or was it Hookman?)->Hookman (or was it Dolls?)->Bio4.

Adding to this, don't forget that RE2 was getting close to being completed when the team completely scrapped what they had and started again. It was to take place in the Police Station and starred Leon and a new character named Elza.

Some footage of RE 1.5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qAlyZXJm8Y
 

Shawn128

Member
tass0 said:
HL2 lovers will like this.

In 2002/2003 a nice German man hacked into Valve's network and stole the source code of HL2+HL1 Source+CSS+Team Fortress 2 and stole every single HL2 map they had, maps even dating to 1999.

Funny that looking at this map pack, HL2 was basically and entirely different game, here are some nice shots of what could of been..

Air Exchange:

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/b/b5/Airex_reactor_inside_1.jpg[img]

[img]http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/7/78/Airex_inside.jpg/750px-Airex_inside.jpg[img]

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/e/e7/AirEx_reactor_pistons.jpg/750px-AirEx_reactor_pistons.jpg[img]

[img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/e/ed/Proto_docks_fixed0006.jpg/750px-Proto_docks_fixed0006.jpg[img]

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/a/a7/D2_airex_060011.jpg/750px-D2_airex_060011.jpg[img]

Here is the first test level ever shown to the media:

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/c/c5/Get_Your_Free_TVs.jpg[img]

[img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/4/45/City_test03010.jpg/750px-City_test03010.jpg[img]

^ rebuilded from the map pack

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/4/46/City_test03_005.jpg/800px-City_test03_005.jpg[img]

Borealis:

[img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/f/fb/Borealis-ice.jpg/750px-Borealis-ice.jpg[img]

[img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/a/ab/D3_borealis_020000.jpg/750px-D3_borealis_020000.jpg[img]

[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/1/18/Borealis_worker.jpg/229px-Borealis_worker.jpg[img]

^ Crew member alive, every crew member was originally supposed to be murdered

Seems like Valve have run out of ideas since they are bringing back the Borealis for Episode 3.

Some random stuff:

(Bullsquids were in HL2
[img]http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/f/f7/Bullsquids_canals.jpg[img]

Stalkers(for some reason these guys would fire red laser beams from their eyes)
[img]http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/4/46/Stalker_beta.jpg/315px-Stalker_beta.jpg/img]

Combine guard
[img]http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/7/78/Combine_guard.jpg/346px-Combine_guard.jpg/img]

Old menus:

[img]http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/0/0d/HL2_background_Dark_Messiah.png/img]

[img]http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/half-life/en/images/thumb/4/4d/Playable_beta_menu.png/800px-Playable_beta_menu.png[img]

[B]and many, many, many, many more stuff...[/B][/QUOTE]

I'm a huge Half-Life freak and I love shit like this. Is there anywhere one could read up on more stuff about this leak and original scenarios?
 

Zenith

Banned
Shawn128 said:
I'm a huge Half-Life freak and I love shit like this. Is there anywhere one could read up on more stuff about this leak and original scenarios?

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Half-Life_2_Beta

that's a sort of central overview. Follow the hyperlinks for detailed breakdowns.

play restored content (including upcoming Episode 3's Borealis) with the Missing Info 1.5 mod.

http://www.love-tub.net/

footage of restored enemies (including that tentacle which does look fun to fight), weapons (classic Tau and Gluon guns as well as the conventional weapons seen in early HL2 screens) and walkthrough of restored levels on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-z8-RnRrs
 
Shalashaska161 said:
Adding to this, don't forget that RE2 was getting close to being completed when the team completely scrapped what they had and started again. It was to take place in the Police Station and starred Leon and a new character named Elza.

Some footage of RE 1.5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qAlyZXJm8Y

The most fucked-up thing about RE 1.5: there are completely playable builds out there, but we'll never get our hands on them. Completely new, clean footage appeared courtesy of The Playstation Museum showing someone from TPM playing through the game, but it was removed when the owner continually received threats from rabid fans who wanted a leaked copy :lol You can still find copies of the video in various places online.

My understanding is that all copies of that RE 1.5 build are traceable back to the people who have access to them. If there were to be a leak, it would be obvious who had done it and that person would be in a lot of trouble.
 
FUCK YEAH! I wanted to make this thread.

I was going to mention Sonic 2. It's already my favorite 2D game and also probably my most inspirational game (I swear I almost cry when I hear the first level's boss music).

Mega Man 3 was supposed to have much more content but of course the schedule made them run out of time.

Inafune explained the reason why is because of "...what went into the game and what was behind the release of the game." He also stated that he was forced to put the game out before he thought it was ready and during the game's production, the developers lost the main planner, so Inafune had to take over that job for completing the game. Inafune concluded, "I knew that if we had more time to polish it, we could do a lot of things better, make it a better game, but the company (Capcom) said that we needed to release it. The whole environment behind what went into the production of the game is what I least favored. Numbers one and two - I really wanted to make the games; I was so excited about them. Number three - it just turned very different."


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiji_Inafune

I would have loved to see more of Proto Man's story since he is of course the absolute best Mega Man character (Fuck you Zero!)

In the original Devil May Cry, Trish was supposed to be a playable character but...wait for it...the team ran out of time to put her in. I hear she was supposed to play differently from Dante by being quicker and more acrobatic. (Not that Dante skin shit from DMC2)
 
DMeisterJ said:
What's the story behind the Fable content?

It's not so much that they cut content as they scrapped the entire game at a certain point and slapped something much smaller together in a year or two, and that's what we got.
 

Sibylus

Banned
Missing Information was interesting to play, but I can't say I was very impressed by it, it's basically a bunch of loosely connected bits and ends of gameplay. Interesting to think of what might have been, but I'm more than content with the final, complete Half-Life 2.

Dax01 said:
I agree.

One recycled ship name and an arctic theme means Valve has run out of ideas? Really? That's a fairly big assumption.
 

Cryect

Member
Hmm, thought it was kinda known they had the vague plan for the entire HL2 series kinda laid out during HL2 development? Was too many ideas for the original game so the rest went into "episodic" content with further development as they went along. Really seems to make sense. I mean kinda sucks when there is no forethought for what sequels will bring in or the realization the story is too long so you cram it into too short of a game but can't really think when they decided to do HL2 episodes they didn't know basically where the story was going to go.
 

Leckan

Member
Number 2 said:
"You can bump into a tree and knock an acorn off. The acorn will then grow into a new tree over the next few years. Birds that would not have been born will be born just because you bumped into a tree. The now living birds will lead to more cats being prevelant and a quest will open up 15 years after the tree bumping incident where you can help a woman look for her cat. If the tree wasnt bumped she never would have become a creepy cat lady and you could have wed her."

I hate Peter Molenuex. Did he even believe this horse shit himself?
 

Combichristoffersen

Combovers don't work when there is no hair
Leckan said:
I hate Peter Molenuex. Did he even believe this horse shit himself?

He kept talking up Fable for quite some time before it was released, so yeah, eventually he probably started believing his own hubris and lies
 
bernardobri said:
A lot of content in MGS2, you can see the original plan on this PDF

Some tidbits:

- The Ninja on the Plant Chapter was supposed to be a female robot that would change her voice & personality based on whoever was closer (Snake->Meryl, Otacon->Sniper Wolf)
- The player would have been given the choice of saving either Emma or the President, and Snake would rescue the remaining one.
- Johnny Sasaki was intented to be killed after making contact with Raiden and giving him a keycard.
- The original Codec staff of Raiden where intented to be more people (everyone being an AI), with similar roles of the MGS1 crew. Most of them were references to the New York book series "City of Glass", and later where mixed with the main ones.
It's kind of depressing hearing all the great content games like these never had. I wonder if any good 3D game ever had all the content developers wanted in it.
 

B.K.

Member
In the original plan for Xenosaga Episode II, they were going to have Jr. suddenly grow up and you would be able to use his child and adult forms in battle. It was cut though.
 

Sibylus

Banned
Dax01 said:
Shut-up. You don't know. Maybe he's played Episode 3.
Is it true, tass0? Do you hide beneath Gabe Newell's desk and eavesdrop on his phone calls? Do you sneak a glance or two at the cabal whiteboards? Do you pilfer the odd page from Marc Laidlaw's story bible?

Confess your crimes.
 

Kade

Member
Zenith said:
http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Half-Life_2_Beta

that's a sort of central overview. Follow the hyperlinks for detailed breakdowns.

play restored content (including upcoming Episode 3's Borealis) with the Missing Info 1.5 mod.

http://www.love-tub.net/

footage of restored enemies (including that tentacle which does look fun to fight), weapons (classic Tau and Gluon guns as well as the conventional weapons seen in early HL2 screens) and walkthrough of restored levels on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs-z8-RnRrs

Thanks for posting these links btw. I've been reading them for the past hour or so and don't see myself stopping anytime soon. Some really interesting stuff.
 

Borman

Member
Frequency : Expansion disks!
options_beta.jpg

exp1_beta.jpg


And of course, Saved Films in Halo 2
http://superiorversion.com/?p=265#more-265

Just as a note, it is my site, but its also my content so :p
 
Botolf said:
Is it true, tass0? Do you hide beneath Gabe Newell's desk and eavesdrop on his phone calls? Do you sneak a glance or two at the cabal whiteboards? Do you pilfer the odd page from Marc Laidlaw's story bible?

Confess your crimes.
I heard that the only original part of Half-Life 2 episode 3 is the Borealis, and then the rest of the game is just Anticitizen One through Dark Energy with 1337, updated graphics.
 
First things that came to mind were Twilight Princess and SOTC.

There would have been too many colossi really, unless they were optional.
 
Just to throw an obscure one into the fray.

The Japanese voice acting for European (and American?) versions of Puyo Pop fever. The instruction manual (page 13 for the Gamecube version) mentions about it being possible to change between English and Japanese in the options but in-game it doesn't exist so I asked SEGA about it and this was their response.
Thank you for your e-mail.

As I remember correctly there was a revision to the game after the manuals were printed and unfortunately the option to change to Japanese voices was omitted from the final release.

We hope that information is of use to you,

Best regards

Product Support
SEGA Europe
www.sega.co.uk
I guess the manual for Sonic 2006 proves further still that is how SEGA do things. Print/create manual before game/localisation is complete and pray all features are included in final product.

As for why they would remove such a thing. My guess would have to be budget reasons.
 
Killer7 was originally meant to be a much larger game. But the usual story of meeting scheduled release dates and long production times, meant it was mostly cut out.

Thankfully, most of the original story was documented in Hand in Killer7
 

Sibylus

Banned
Dax01 said:
I heard that the only original part of Half-Life 2 episode 3 is the Borealis, and then the rest of the game is just Anticitizen One through Dark Energy with 1337, updated graphics.
gman2.gif


Real ending:
Freeman wakes up from a brief nap in Black Mesa. His superiors are still waiting for him in the test chamber. He pushes that crystal in that squeaky little cart, the machinery starts spinning up, waves of visible energy vibrate and flicker, the room hums... and nothing happens.

Roll credits.
 
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