ubisoft

Red Steel 2 [Wii – Prototype / Beta]

Red Steel 2 is the presumed sequel for the famous FPS that was released for the Wii in 2006, a project that was in development at Ubisoft Paris / Montreuil (this studio was also responsible for Red Steel 1) in 2007. It seems that these screens and documents were taken from an early, different concept of the project, some of which are from a set of “fantasy themed levels” (maybe for bonus missions or multiplayer modes).

Development of this Red Steel 2 prototype was stopped in October 2007 when Ubisoft raised concerns about the game’s quality. Since then, Ubisoft Paris started from scratch and a “new” Red Steel 2 is planned for a release in 2009. Ubisoft Montreuil went on with making Rayman Raving Rabbits 2 and TV Party.

Thanks to Hey Hey & SG for their contributions!

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Prince Of Persia: Prodigy [Beta – Xbox 360 PS3]

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Prince of Persia Prodigy (also know as Prince of Persia Zero in its early beta days) is an action-adventure and platforming game developed by Ubisoft Montreal. It was released on December 2, 2008 for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Proof of conception for this new title was found in September 2006, when a file that was leaked to the internet was found to contain concept art for the game, although Ubisoft didn’t announce the game until May 2008. [Infos from Wikipedia]

In january 2008, Surfer Girl released some screenshots from an early prototype of this new Prince Of Persia, in which the main character was followed by a mysterious flying girl. As you know, the final game has not flying-girls that follow the prince. As we can read over at GameSetWatch, thanks to “David Pettitt” we learn that this version was “a target render that the team pitched the game with”. It seems that Ubisoft showed the full Target Render at a Vancouver SIGGRAPH event. Below you can see the full video!

Some other rumors even say that originally Assassin’s Creed was meant to be part of the Prince of Persia series. Probably Ubisoft created a lot of different ideas for the project, before choosing the final one.

Even the released game has some differences from the official beta screens that we can find online. As noticed by FullMetalMC:

  • Different colors for the Hunter
  • Elika’s clothing is a bit different
  • A removed  enemy
  • Prince’s sword has a alternate design
  • Different Tree
  • Elikas magic has less detail

In an interview with Prince of Persia Producer Ben Mattes, we can read more about Elika’s development:

To further answer your initial question of how her design evolved, at the beginning of the game, one of the things we were thinking about was — should she have more of an autonomous personality? Should she have a little bit more autonomy as a gameplay mechanic?

So we developed ideas of her sometimes taking the lead, or her sometimes wandering off and looking at key game points, or her basically just taking initiative. Some of them only got as far as concepts and brainstorms, some of them actually got as far as prototypes, but what we quickly realised was there was a lot of design that had to be done in terms of simplifying Elika’s involvement to make sure we delivered on that promise that she never gets in the way and she’s never a negative.

We had instances where we had interest points in the world — little objects that would attract her attention, and if you idled for a few minutes she would wander over to one of those objects to look at it, but then the player would, y’know, haul ass to the left and Elika’s wandering over there looking at that thing and then he has to stop and wait and go and get her and bring her back, and it was these things that detracted from that overall core message, which is more important than anything else.

[…] initially we kicked around the ideas of Elika being a young girl, but that brought up the whole babysitting thing, and then we toyed very briefly with the idea of Elika being a partner like a brother or a father figure or something, but it didn’t have the kind of sexual tension that’s fun to play with. And then within a couple of months we had the design of Elika almost fully fleshed out as it exists now.

Thanks to Surfer Girl & Grahamx227 for the contribution!

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Project Katana / Red Steel [Beta / Prototype]

Red Steel is a FPS published by Ubisoft for the Nintendo Wii, created by the Ubisoft Paris studio and released on November 19, 2006 in North America. Red Steel was one of the first Wii games to be developed by other studios outside of Nintendo. [Info from Wikipedia]

When the game was just a concept, it was know internally as “Project Katana” and Ubisoft started to work on a  GameCube prototype, as the Wii Development Kits were still not available. Some screens from the Katana GameCube prototype build were somehow leaked thanks to Wombat on the Assembler Forum: “screenshots from the booting sequence of Project Katana ‘playing ground’. These were made prior E3 2006 and running on an standard GameCube devlopment kit, but offcource with the Wii-controller connected to it. This ‘playing ground’ was used by the makers to see how the wii-mote reacts and works.”

Additionally, some early concept arts from Project Katana can be seen in the gallery below: it’s possibile that some of those places were not used in the final game and even the protagonist’s character design seems a bit different from the final one. Also, there were some target renders released before the published game, that have a much more better graphic than the final one.

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Killing Day [PS3/X360 – Cancelled]

Killing Day was a 1st person shooter being designed for the Xbox 360 and ps3, a pre-rendered video was shown at E3 2005 for the Ps3. Not much more is known about this game other then that it was cancelled in the middle of production. Jan Sanghera from Ubisoft UK has stated that the game has been cancelled in early development.

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