Game development is tough work. It’s an incredibly time-consuming, sometimes arduous task that can take hundreds of employees and thousands of hours of worওk. The end result is a product that♕ the average player might only spend twenty to thirty hours completing.
Now imagine that you’ve poured your heart and soul into making a game, only for your publisher to walk into the office one day and tell you everything you’ve done up until now is going to be scrapped. Sadly, this is a rather common reality of video game development, with countless incomplete games like Rockstar’s Agent and LucasArts’ Star Wars: 1313 being outright canceled, never to see the light of day (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:some of them looked fantastic too). On the odd occasion, however, some dℱevelopers are offered the opportunity to ✃start again.
9 Resident Evil 2: Only 'Resident Evil 1.5' Remains From The First Attempt
Hot off the back of the success of the first game in the series, Capcom immediately got to work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 2. Unfortunately, their eagerness to develop a sequel led to disagreements about how the story and the world of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil should unfold halfway through development, causing them to trash all of their progress a♍nd bring in acclaimed screenwriter Noboru Sugimura to retool the script.
A prototype of the original take on Resident Evil 2 (now dubbed “Resident Evil 1.5”) is all that now remains. The build is only about 40-50% complete, but it's still a fascinating glimpse into what the future of the franchise could have been. Still, the final product of Resident Evil 2 remains a great game (though it differs a lot betwꦦeen the original Nintendo 64 and PlayStation editions).
8 𝔍 Resident Evil🍨 4: Four Different Versions Were Worked On
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 was scrapped three separate times during its six-yea♔r-long development. Some of these prototypes, developed under the working titles “Fog”, “Hook Man”, and “Hallucination” were abandoned completely, even though the “Hook Man” version was showcased at E3 in🌸 2003.
The earliest of these prototypes actually ended up being salvaged and transformed into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Devil May Cry, with its stylish and dramatic action𓃲 heightened even further. In the end, both the Devil May Cry series and Resident Evil 4 as we now know it became huge successes.
7 🐭 Final Fantasy 15: Final Fantasy Versus 13 Vs Final Fantasy 15
Work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 15 initially began back in 2006, en🐼visioned as a darker, more mature spin-off title that was to be released exclusively on the PlayStation 3 under the name Final Fantasy Versus 13. Over the course of six years, work on the title was incredibly slow and it was clear that new director Hajime Tabata had to do something drastic.
The announcement of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation 4 was the final nail in the coffin of Versus 13, with Square Enix choosing to abandon the majority of th꧅eir work and rebrand the title into a mainline Final Fantasy game. The team was switch♓ed around, including the original director Tetsuya Nomura, and work on Final Fantasy 15 was finally completed in 2016.
6 Uncharted 4: Almost Quite Literally A Thief's End
Development on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted 4: A Thief&rꦇsquo;s End began in early 2011, led by Justin Richmond and Amy Hennig. Although a fiv🃏e-year development period might not seem too extreme, it’s been reported that the majority of Uncharted 4’s development actually took place over the course of its last two years, following Hennig and Richmond’s departure.
Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley, now household names for their work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us, took over development on the project in 2014. They ended up making big changes to Unchart🐬ed 4’s story, resulting in a final product diff๊erent to the one Hennig envisioned.
5 🔥 Nioh: Souls-Likes Die𝄹 Twice
Back in 2004, four years before their merger with Tecmo, Koei began work on what would eventually become Nioh. The original idea for the game was for an action title based on Akira Kurasawa's Oni. After Koei became Koei Tecmo, all the work on the title up until this point was abandoned and developmental duties were transferred to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dynasty Warriors developers Omega Force.
This version of the game also ended up being scrapped. In 2011, Team Ninja was brought on board to lead the project and Nioh was eventually published in 2017, meaning the title was in development for roughly thirteen years before it saw the light of day. Gamers will probably be debating 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:whether or not it's harder than Dark Souls for another thirteen years, too.
4 Mother 3: An Unfortunate Casualty Of The Nintendo 64's Disc Drive
Mother 3 was original༒ly🐈 announced for the Nintendo 64, under the name EarthBound 64 in the West, and was initially set to take advantage of the failed Disc Drive peripheral.
Following the poor sales of the 64DD, deꦰvelopment temporarily shifted to producing a cartridge-bꦯased title, until Mother 3 was unceremoniously canceled prior to Space World 2000 (with the GameCube looming). Although Mother 3 did eventually see release on the Game Boy Advance, the original game (that was supposedly 60% complete) was abandoned completely and neither version received an English-language release.
3 Halo: Real-Time Strategy Game Evo🎉lved
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Halo’s development was, to put it lightly, troubled. During development, Halo switched to a real-time strategy game with the working t🗹itle “Monkey Nuts” and then once again switched to a third-person shooter. It was then shown off under 🎀its new title, Halo, at the 1999 Macworld Conference & Expo.
Microsoft acquired Bungie in June 2020, and immediately announced that Halo would be launched alongside the Xbox. During this time, Bungie transformed their game into the groundbreaking first-person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. Needless to say, the series became an enormous success for Microsoft. Even the trailers promoting the games are o༒ften beloved.
2 Metroid Prime: A Brand New IP🐼 Retooled For Metroid Fanꦉs
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metroid Prime, developed by Retro Studios, wasn’t even a Metroid game during its early years of development. Retro was explicitly🌠 founded on the basis they would design and publish games exclusively for Nintendo’s GameCube, and immediately began work on several൩ new IPs in the hope of appealing to a more mature audience.
After Shigeru Miyamoto himself visited their office and saw the first-person shooter Retro had been working on, he suggested they repurpose it into a Metroid game. The game was transformed into a third-person shooter, but 🗹then (once again, ꦬat the behest of Miyamoto) changed back to an FPS at a later date – causing Retro to erase all of their progress on the title twice before eventually publishing the game.
1 Okami: The Original Concept Was, Ironically, Very Paintꦗ-By-Numbers
When Okami was first conceived, developer Clover Studio opted for a more photo-realistic take opposed to the watercolor-inspired art style the series is now famous for. Okami wasn’t too far into dev🔯elopment by this time, but it was far enough along that there are plenty of pre-release screenshots and videos showcasing the original, more grounded take on the franchise.
This drastic change in art style was also the inspiration for many of thไe mechanics that made Okami so unique, such as the Celestial Brush. It also pushed the team to find more direct ways for Amaterasu to interact with and change the environment itself.
