These concept arts came from a cancelled game that was in development at Ubisoft Montpellier for the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3. The project was a shooter based on a World War II setting.
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Time Splitters 4 [Cancelled – Xbox 360 / PS3]
Time Splitters 4 was the fourth installment of the FPS series developed by Free Radical Design. Sadly Free Radical “shut down” on December 18 2008. It was later confirmed that the company had gone into administration, leaving 40 of the original 185 staff still employed, but the future of Time Splitters 4 has become uncertain and maybe it will never be finished and released. The studio was bought by Crytek, the developers behind the Crysis series and Free Radical have changed their name to Crytek UK. It’s currently unknow if TS4 could ever be finished and released by Crytek. [Infos from Wikipedia]
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Blood [PC – Beta / Prototype]
Blood is a FPS developed by Monolith Productions and distributed by GT Interactive. Released for the PC on 31 May 1997, it utilized the first Build engine from Ken Silverman to feature voxels. [Infos from Wikipedia]
Conrad Coldwood has linked us to an interesting website, in which we can find “lots of downloads regarding Blood: early betas, official screenshots, leaks and press shareware. Binaries perfectly works under DOS Box and offer a very different game than the final release.”
Personally i have never played the final game, so i cannot find all the differences that there are in these early builds, but if someone would like to try to compare them to the final version and make a list of the changes, it would be really appreciated!
Thanks a lot to Conrad Coldwood for the contribution!
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Project Snowblind 2 [XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]
The first Project: Snowblind was a FPS released for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 in 2005. It was originally conceived as a multiplayer-focused third game in the Deus Ex series, Deus Ex: Clan Wars. But after the less than expected commercial performance of Deus Ex: Invisible War, it was decided to set the game in its own universe. Nevertheless, it remains a spiritual sequel to Deus Ex and retains many visible and conceptual links to its progenitors. [Infos from Wikipedia]
The sequel, Project Snowblind 2, was in development at Crystal Dynamics, but it was later cancelled for unknow reasons (maybe for the low-sales of the first game?). The game was set in a city many years after a devastating invasion force had reduced it to a post-apocalyptic state. Only few concept arts remain for this project.
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. prototype released by its own developers!
As we can read on Wikipedia STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, previously known as Stalker: Oblivion Lost, is a PC FPS by Ukrainian developer GSC Game World, published in 2007. The game was first announced in November 2001 and had its release date, originally in 2003, pushed back several times. Due to the delays some considered Stalker to be vaporware.
While the game was really released in the end, the final version was somewhat different from the original Oblivion Lost prototype: in late December 2003, a pre-alpha build (vr 1096) of STALKER was already leaked to peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and fans of the game were then able to compare it to the final build and find some of those differences.
Last week another Alpha (vr 1935) of STAKER was made available to download and this time, it came from its own developers: on the 25 February, GSC Game World released the STALKER “‘xrCore’ build 1935, Oct 18 2004″ on their official forum! You can find links and mirros for the download in that topic.
Gamers are now able to try this early version of the game and all the changes that were made on the final project can be found and preserved. Huge props to GSC! More studios should follow their example and share interesting informations from their gaming development. It’s sad when important pieces of gaming history like these are lost forever because no one cares to preserve them somehow.
As we can read on Rock Paper Shotgun: “S:OL was also a dramatically larger game than S:SOC. While plenty of locations are familiar, there’s a distinct lack of those cocking indestructible barbed wire fences that so hobbled free-form adventuring in S:SOC. To make this huge world navigable, build 1935 includes driveable vehicles”
Thanks to Robert Seddon for the contribution!
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