Shenmue Dojo

Let me tell you, this game ate up a lot of weekends and late nights. Even with that extra time in, we didn't have enough days to finish the game the way it was imagined. There was just too much stuff. Designers had planned the forges and powers that went along with them. One day, we had a come to Jesus moment where we just had to look at the (extremely large) overhead map and just start Xing out areas, powers, and abilities. It was painful and difficult. Each forge was tied to an ability, and each ability was supposed to unlock a new area, AND new mechanics. So it was all interwoven. Each cut was not minor.. it literally tore apart pages of well thought out design. (It was like killing your baby.. but Game Devs are the only ones who cry over it.. and people who find out about it later LOL). It was cut about 2/3 into the game. I think all the remaining glyphs were cut at the same time.. sometimes having too many ways to kill a Vampire can be bad too.. we realized there was a lot of redundancy as well. It takes resources from every department (Character, Environment, Engineering, Audio, FX, UI, Design, and Production) to get a single feature realized, so we made cuts that helped as many departments as possible, and sharpened the overall experience.

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Any flat area like that was probably a secret area or pathway that got cut.

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The Priestess, several vampire Hunter types, Demon designs, and vampire variants were all thrown out due to time or just plain not liking the design. I even tried to make a modular demon design so we could swap in parts and make different mix-and-match demons. That idea didn't last long. I tried some Sluagh variants and Vampire Wraith designs too.. and some Spectral creatures that nested in and around the Elder God. I have them all on a hard drive or CD.. somewhere.

The Undercity (which I loved.. LOVED) would have used a lot of pulley/chain puzzles to create walkways, portcullises, and drop stairwells.

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You would need shift at will, passthrough, glide, wallcrawling, and water immunity for undercity I believe.

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Well the Undercity just didn't work technically. We split the streaming into two haves but didn't have time to reconcile the visibility limitations for playable space. We didn't have enough memory to do vistas either. It literally got the point where if you looked left you could see half the city and the other half disappeared, and if you looked right the opposite would occur. It is, of course, possible today, but you'd have to know how to add a level to the system. It was influenced by noted architect Lebbeus Woods. I also like the lighting and look of http://riversforgotten.com/ so it would fall along those lines.. some areas claustrophobic, and others vast and beautiful (and too much for a Playstation 1)

(Source: Daniel Cabuco, former Crystal Dynamics lead, August 2012.)