Underground is a cancelled action / open world game that was in development by Volition for the Playstation 2 / Xbox. The game was set in england and players would have took control of a thief, free to explore the city and to decide what and how to steal. Undergound was in development for about a year, but after the release of GTA 3, Volition though that their project’s quality was not up to the expectation that gamers had from an open world game and decided to stop working on it.
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Saints Row 2 is a sandbox / action game game developed by Volition Inc and published by THQ for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2008. James Tsai, SR2’s Lead Designer, in and interview with IGN revealed that some content had to be removed from the game before it was published:
JT: In the early stages of development we had some really crass stuff in the game, the kind of things that put you in that weird place where you’re laughing and squirming uncomfortably with guilt at the same time. One prototype had you driving a truck full of smuggled underage foreign prostitutes across the city while rival pimps rammed into you, knocking the girls out and cutting into your human trafficking profits. Another had you using a high pressure fire hose to wash homeless people off the street and into the gutter. Not exactly Nobel Prize material.
There was a lot of stuff we had in that didn’t register very high on the human decency scale, so we dialed some things back. For instance we changed the gender of the first character you encounter, since beating a female doctor to death with an IV stand wasn’t the impression we wanted to leave with the very first player action in the game. Instead, we have you beat a male doctor to death with an IV stand, to ease you into the killing.
From the early screens we can also notice various beta differences:
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Thanks to Gone is Gone Blog we found out that Saint Row, a sandbox-style action game for the XBOX 360, was also planned to be released on the Wii. Developed by Californian Mass Media Inc, the game should had the same gameplay of the 360 version, but with less graphic details. The game was cancelled, probably for porting problems. A couple of screens from the Wii proto can be found at GiG, archived here for preservation purpose.
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