Microsoft

Frame City Killer [X360 – Cancelled]

Frame City Killer was an Xbox 360 video game under development by Namco.The player assumes the role of secret agent Crow who must hunt down Khan, a terrorist and drug lord, who is creating Visual Acid. After repeated delays in development, a lack of presentation in numerous trade shows, and with media releases that failed to impress, Namco decided to cancel the title in May 2006. – [info from Wikipedia]

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Mass Effect [X360 – Beta]

ENG: This entry in the archive doesn’t have a description yet. If you want to add some info about the beta / cancelled stuff that you see in these images, just write a comment or send us an email! We’ll add your info in this page and your name in the contributors list. Thanks a lot for your help! :)

ITA: Questa pagina dell’archivio non ha ancora una descrizione. Se vuoi aggiungere delle informazioni riguardo le differenze della beta o la descrizione di un gioco cancellato, lasciaci un commento o mandaci una email! Inseriremo le tue informazioni nella pagina ed il tuo nome nella lista dei collaboratori. Grazie per il tuo aiuto! :)

Shephard looked a bit different.

Beta:

shepardbeta01.jpg

Final Version:

shepardfinal.jpg

The HUD was different.

Different galaxy map.

Removed area?

Removed Squad commands.

Different menù.

more… ?

Early prototype video:

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BioShock [Beta / Concept]

Originally, BioShock had a storyline which was significantly different from that of the released version: the main character was a “cult deprogrammer”-a person charged with rescuing someone from a cult, and mentally and psychologically readjusting that person to a normal life. For example, Ken Levine cites an example of what a cult deprogrammer does: “[There are] people who hired people to [for example] deprogram their daughter who had been in a lesbian relationship. They kidnap her and reprogram her, and it was a really dark person, and that was the [kind of] character that you were.”

This story would have been more political in nature, with the character hired by a Senator. By the time development on BioShock was officially revealed in 2004, the story and setting had changed significantly. The game now took place in an abandoned World War II-era underground laboratory, which had recently been unearthed by 21st century scientists. The genetic experiments within the labs had gradually formed themselves into an ecosystem, centered around three “castes” of creatures, referred to as “drones,” “soldiers,” and “predators.” This “AI ecology” would eventually form the basis for the “Little Sister,” “Big Daddy,” and “Splicer” dynamic seen in the completed game. [Infos from Wikipedia]

In some early screenshots and concept arts, we can see different designs for “Big Daddy” and a removed “Garden Level” area.

In the beta videos there is a very early looking beta hud and a removed plasmid called Speed Boost that makes you move faster so you can avoid the turret. Also at one point near the end you see a little sister get killed by a splicer which can’t happen in the final game. At one point in development the developers wanted plasmids to have a more permanent effect and permanently alter your body much like the splicers. For whatever reason they decided to cut it out of the game, but you can still see it in the second beta video. You can see that after he uses that one gunk ball plasmid thing and switches back to his weapon his hands still stay altered from using the plasmid until he switches to a new one. Where in the final game if you use a plasmid that alters the way you look and switch back to a weapon your arms and hands instantly go back to normal.

At Irrational Games’ website they published even more info on the early / unused characters:

Frog with a Funnel in its Anus: Before BioShock’s “gatherers” became Little Sisters in an artistic process characterized by false starts and filled garbage bins, they were sea slugs. Nobody empathized with the creatures enough to care whether they lived or died. When the call went out to come up with a character that players would pity, Art Principal Scott Sinclair submitted this insipid image of a toad with a funnel and sun tea jug attached to its anus. Scott insists that fellow artist Shawn Robertson’s “dog in a wheelchair” is more embarrassing by far.

Stay Puft Bouncer: Initially reluctant to add a drill arm to the Bouncer Big Daddy variant at Creative Director Ken Levine’s insistence, artists Nate Wells and Robb Waters started exchanging a series of images in which they attached marshmallows, human butts, and other items to the character’s hand.

SloProFum: SloProFum, the studio’s internal name for this prototype Big Daddy variant that mauled players with an enormous hook and fired iron bearings from a barrel, stands for “slow projectile/fucked-up melee.”

Also, in another article they talks about an atmospheric pressure system and other things removed from Bioshock:

BioShock was slated to simulate deep-sea atmospheric pressure changes. In fact, the feature was functioning when the game shipped.

Technical Director Chris Kline explains: “Any area in BioShock could be associated with a ‘pressure region.’ Machines in each region allowed players to change the local pressure between low, normal, and high parameters. For each room in the game, there were entirely different light, fog, and HDR rendering setups, and when the pressure was changed, the whole atmosphere in the room would smoothly blend from the current setup to the new setup. In addition, every AI responded differently to pressure, meaning that, depending on the current pressure, the AI would have different animations, vocalizations, appearance, speeds, vulnerabilities to different damage types, and damage bonuses. […]

“In practice, the system was a disaster because it caused several gameplay and production issues. Most importantly — and this is the issue that put the nail in the system’s coffin — was that we never found a good way to clearly convey the effect of pressure through audiovisual changes.

Interestingly, some remnant of this system shipped with BioShock. “While we ‘cut’ pressure from the game,” Kline says, “the portion that controlled lighting and fog changes was left in the code. At one point, I discovered (to my horror, because the code hadn’t been tested in ages) that artists were hijacking the pressure system to script lighting and fog changes — most notably in the Arcadia level when the trees die and are brought back to life. So I suppose that the code was solid.”

“Early on during BioShock’s development, we went through a phase that placed much more emphasis on biotechnology,” says designer Alexx Kay. “Audio logs, instead of being tape recorders, would be squishy, organic things, with lips and ears. Machines that seemed mechanical on the surface would actually have mutated humans operating them behind the scenes — something that players would only come to realize partway through the game. There is a small remnant of this notion in the hacking mini-game; originally, the fiction behind it was that you were increasing the flow of Adam to this addicted, mutated slave, and he was giving you extra benefits in gratitude.

BioShock’s insect-based ecology: According to designer Alexx Kay, “One of the original inspirations for BioShock was Ken Levine’s belief that it was getting too hard to create meaningful human interactions in games. His first take on a solution: model meaningful insect interactions, like you would see on a nature show. BioShock would feature a complex ecology of creatures that interacted in simple, easy-to-get ways. Harvesters would gather resources and bring them back to Queens. Aggressors would attack the Harvesters, Protectors would guard them. (The Queens were large, immobile creatures, with lots of Adam, who could summon Protectors if attacked.) There would never be any speech, or any indication of higher intelligence.

BioShock’s navigation robot: During the middle stages of Bioshock’s development, the team realized that due to the complex connectivity of Rapture, players needed assistance in order to navigate the city and complete quests. Technical Director Chris Kline says, “We wanted a map, but were concerned that this would take too much programming and design/art time to implement. So I came up with the idea of Nav-Bot: You could press a controller button to summon your Nav-Bot, activate him with another controller button, and then select from a list of destinations in a 2D user interface. You could then follow him to the designated location.

Thanks to Earthwormjim and Robert Seddon for the contribution!

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Halo 3 [X360 – Concept / Alpha / Beta]

The Halo 3 Beta was an intermediate build of the multiplayer functionality of Halo 3. It was first released to selected members of the public on May 11, 2007, and its purpose was to collect information and feedback from the millions of play test games played through the multiplayer beta to refine Bungie Studio’s final multiplayer product and to advertise Halo 3

Over the four weeks of the Beta, 820,000 unique users clocked up over 12 million hours of play – the equivalent of a single person playing Halo 3 for 1,400 years (Xbox 360 world magazine).

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Perfect Dark Zero [XBOX 360 – Beta / Proto]

The original Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64 was loved by many because of it’s action and stealth. It was also one of the few First Person Shooters for the N64. Development of Perfect Dark Zero, the sequel of Perfect Dark, began on the Nintendo Gamecube but as it was almost completed, RARE was bought by Microsoft so all development had to be ported to the original Xbox. Around the same time, RARE released some screen shots that revealed a “cartoony” or cel-shaded Joanna Dark.

A couple of years later and then another console switch occurred… this time to the Xbox 360. The Xbox version was about 12 months away from shipping before the switch and this caused many problems as to updating the engine, graphics, etc. The scenes and characters that you can see in the screenshots below (as those soldiers), were not used in the final game. Joanna Dark’s design was changed many times before the final one.

Finally, after many ports and switches, Perfect Dark Zero was released as a launch title for the Xbox 360 by December 2, 2005. If you notice some interesting differences in the concept arts from the videos below, please let us know!

Also, as wrote on Wikipedia, Rare had announced plans to make the multiplayer feature matches of up to 50 people, an upgrade from the current 32 player limit. As of March 2010, this update has not been released and Rare has stated that they will not be releasing any more downloadable content. A new Counter-Operative mode, much like the one found in the original Perfect Dark, was also promised to eventually become available as a new game mode for Perfect Dark Zero. However, this update is not available and Rare has no intention on bringing it out. Counter-Operative is a mode where one player plays as Joanna whilst the other player takes on the role of Joanna’s enemies, in the original title this took place in the same setting as the Single Player Levels.

Thanks to DCodes7 for the contribution!

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Related games in the Unseen Archive:

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Concept Art Videos from the Perfect Dark Zero collectors edition DVD:


Previsualization: