Cut content of Unreal II

Almost one fourth of the game was cut from Unreal 2. This page lists most of the cut content, although it is likely that there were more things cut from the game.

Races

Three races (N, Striders, Shian) that include nine or more enemies were cut from the game.

The N

The N are trans-dimensional aliens that can occupy many simultaneous places in space and time. In reality, there are only three N – but because they can somehow be in more than one place at once, there appear to be hundreds of thousands of them. N weapons are all ranged and psi-based – and each of the three N has a different weapon. You can't really 'kill' an N – when you shoot one, the weapon simply depletes the energy used to fold space and time at that particular node of the N.

There were three different N that could clone itself. None of the content was included, although some of the OGG tracks might have been used for their levels. See the main article for more information.

The Striders

The Striders grow their own armor, weapons, and even spaceships. One Strider Pod alone is not intimidating at all – a conical blob of goo on four squat legs that is dumb as a post and is armed with little more than serrated teeth. Unfortunately, the Pods will combine with each other to form the much harder Strider Villains. And multiple Strider Villains can clump to create a towering and lethal Strider Nemesis with dramatically increased intelligence and firepower. The larger Strider monsters can navigate around obstacles and through small openings by disassembling themselves long enough to get past or through.

Striders had three forms - Strider pod, Strider Villain and Strider Nemesis. None of the content was included in the game, but some OGG tracks might have been made for their levels. They are also oficcialy mentioned in the Unreal Tournament timeline and in the game itself. See the main article for more information.

The Shian

The Shian are an underwater community (and the underwater regions look extremely cool). They appear to have lobster shells and tentacles, and communicate with you telepathically, in that your mind simply "hears what they're saying." Where this really comes into play is that they, just like fairy tale mermaids, are able to summon all the sea creatures in the area to serve in the battle. You'll spend a lot of time not fighting them directly, but instead fighting all the creatures that they're summoning from different parts of the ocean.

The Shian could summon sea creatures, that means there were at lest 2 of them, probably more. They were one of the most important races, together with the Drakk and the Skaarj. Some of the content is left in the game - the pawns ShianWorker and ShianWarrior as well as the music - Mission_07Ambient, Mission_07Battle and Mission_07Underwater, which makes it possible to imagine them. See the main article for more information.

Weapons

Five weapons (Tractor Beam, Stun Baton, Mind Claw, Shock Rifle, Flak Cannon) were cut from Unreal 2.

Tractor Beam

The last and hardest thing to really put into words was one of the multiplayer levels that we got a glimpse at that was set in an asteroid belt. It was really, really cool. Really. The basic premise is that you are floating along amongst these pieces of space rock shooting at your opponents. But to move around, you have to pull yourself towards asteroids with a special tractor beam type of grappling hook.

Nothing more is known about the Tractor Beam. It was not included in the game, but there is a test item called a Grapple in UnrealEd.

Stun Baton

The Stun Baton is a very mysterious weapon. Nothing more than it's name is known, but obviously it was a melee weapon and could stun enemies.

Mind Claw

"A fearsome psi-weapon", "a crystal-based psionic weapon that channels health from your enemies to you"

Nothing more about the Mind Claw is known. As the N had psi powers, it might be true that it belonged to them, but together was cut from the game.

Maps

The number of levels is starting to lose its meaning these days... think of Half Life and its collection of many, many smaller levels. Our level count is already well over 30, but some are larger than others. I think we'll have a good solid single player game with 20-25 hours of game play.

Around seven maps were cut from the game, some of them were very interesting and unique.

After you clear the ramp and run a safe distance, the dropship claws skyward on a plume of blinding white fire. You take a moment to look around the surface of Charon. The landscape is made up of twisted spires of rock and ice. Volcanic vents spew fire, smoke, and steam into the twilight sky, which is dominated by the sight of the gas giant planet Janus.

This map was obviously on Charon, moon of Janus. The game contains a map of Janus itself instead, but it is not a gas giant.

The Tractor Beam quote mentioned a map with asteroids, which apparently was cut out. The XMP addon, however, contains the map XMP-FreeFall that is on an asteroid belt, so it might be true that that map was ported to XMP.

The three cut races obviously had their own missions and maps, and probably a few of them. The Shian had an amazing underwater map, nothing about other two races is known.

Technologies

Various graphics, gameplay and sound technologies were cut from the game.

MP3 technology

We will be playing MP3s in-game for single player music - but they come with their own set of performance problems.

MP3 technology was changed into the DirectMusic technology for easier integration:

MP3's usually have a much bigger file size compared to the UMX, although they have a better compression. UMXs are a sequenced collection of samples, instead of one sound file. That's why you can't convert mp3s to umx format, without 50mb+ filesizes.

GOLEM tool and models

We're using our own proprietary animation system, not Epics. The U2 animation system doesn't use .utx packages anymore, it simply references bitmap files (.bmp, .pcx, .tga or .dds) from a directory. Changing skins is as easy as dropping the new skin in the appropiate directory - boom, it's ready to use.

The system in Unreal 2 uses UTX packages, they are even importabe to other Unreal versions.

GOLEM is more accurately a mesh control system then a strict animation system. It uses layered plug-in type effects to control the mesh in any way conceivable. Since these things are multi-layered, you can get a variety of effects happening simultaneously that simply weren't possible before. A lot of the effects are dynamic, so as you apply them all together they can create unique movements that aren't just standard canned animation-loops.

It is not known if the GOLEM technology was used.

The primary editing tool for working with Golem models is called Golem Studio (working title). It's a standalone app with capabilities for creating and manipulating models, and viewing them within a D3D-based render window that uses virtually the same pipeline that the application (Unreal 2) uses, so you can get a feel for how your model will look. This includes animations, material settings (with multitexture support and a lot of other color and blending controls), and so forth.

The GOLEM Studio was not included for unknown reasons, the UnrealEd 3.0 is also buggy. To read more about the GOLEM sudio and it's technology, see the Cleaned BeyondUnreal page.

Co-op mode support

Co-op mode support was not added because of the maps being hard to configure for co-op play. This quote from the Infogrames forum explains their decision:

We've said it several times before, and I'll say it again: there will be no coop in U2. Sorry, live with it. We're making a very story-driven SP game here, with dialog, tons of scripted sequences and quite a bit of non-linear gameplay. No, all that will not take away from the action (Unreal was an action FPS game and U2 will be the same), but it's simply impossible to include a coop mode that works well and is bug-free (do you have any idea how easily scripted sequences break when there's more than one player? ;)) without adding a few more months to the schedule. We realize that a lot of the hard-core fans love coop, but we have to make tradeoffs here. HL is still the biggest FPS game out there, and it doesn't have coop (nor do I hear many people *****ing about it). If you want coop you should wait until a 3rd party team creates a mod for it - until then you can play straight action-shooters like Serious Sam :)

Technically, as Mattchias Worch explained, it would have been possible to create co-op mode. If Legend had made co-op support, Unreal 2 would be a lot more played nowadays. This decision was one of their biggest mistakes.

Multiplayer support

We'd rather not make the rest of the game suffer greatly to support a feature that very few people actually play. Maybe if we dropped multiplayer (DM, CTF, XMP, etc.) out of the game we would have the time and resources to support a great co-op mode. I don't think most people want that however.

Strangely, multiplayer support was never finished either, even though it is in the game. It is possible to play deathmatch and Capture the Flag and there is even a mod for launching maps, but bot support was never completed and their skins are not changed depending on the team they are in.

This quote explains the reasons multiplayer was not finished:

Until January 2002 it was planed that U2 would have multiplayer. Many were concerned that U2 and UT2002, which were both to be released in 2002 with multiplayer, would split the community and hurt eachother’s sales. Thus Epic, Infogrames, Legend and DE sat together and re-arranged the whole release schedule and features of the two games. It was decided that UT2003 would be strictly multiplayer and released in mid 2002, while U2 would be strictly a story-based singleplayer game, to be released end of 2002.

Dynamic conversation system

Dynamic conversation system was never done. Even though it was promised, it wasn't entirely completed. This quote describes how the creators didn't want it to be and how it actually ended up being in the game:

With character development, we are trying to move the genre ahead a bit. We want the player to have conversations in realtime, not the stilted, horrible 'choose-a-dialogue-statement-off-a-menu-while-the-NPC-does-an-awkward-idle-animation' conversations that are common to the current crop of games.

This quote describe how the system was intended to be:

You can even interrupt conversations and be interrupted in turn. On the Atlantis, the crew will remember where you left off conversations and how you interacted with them - if you continually leave while someone is talking or you are rude to them, they will begin to react negatively to you. You may see tense or unhappy expressions on their faces and you'll get clipped, strained speech instead of warmth or banter. Positive interactions lead to positive reactions. You can change your relationship with someone on your crew - and the nature of the conversations you will have - by changing the way you interact with them.

Armor changing

Armor changing is included in the game, yet it was never used and the armor has no model.

References

Cleaned BeyondUnreal