No game looks as attractive as one that was never released. Cut content always seems ingenious, because the brain itself completes the missing connections, balancing and dozens of hours of debugging that were never there.
And if we are talking about demos shown before the release, then this is no longer just a fantasy, but an officially formalized promise.
It is in this trap that he still sits BioShock Infinite. A montage from presentations from 2010-2011 has again circulated in the community, where Columbia is completely different, Elizabeth wears a different image and hardly resembles the final version, and the battle is built around mechanics that are not present at all in the release.
Among the most discussed things that did not survive until March 2013:
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telekinesis, which made it possible to hold someone else’s weapon in the air and shoot from it
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intercepting a flying tank shell right on approach
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QTE with euthanizing a dying horse in the middle of the street
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an early design of Elizabeth that causes her to be confused with the Lutece twins’ sister
The solution to this discrepancy is simple and well documented. Ken Levine toyed with ideas for years, scrapping months of work, and towards the end of development, Irrational Games brought in people from the BioShock 2 team, and in 2012, Rod Fergusson came to the studio to bring the game to print-ready state in about nine months.
Rapture vs. Columbia – which BioShock city is more realistic to build?
One of the discussion participants formulated this harshly, but to the point:
Levin is a great visionary and programmer, but a terrible development manager.
At the same time, the “beta was better” argument breaks down to a simple thing: almost everything shown was cutting linear slices, and not working systems. Telekinesis with someone else’s gun looks impressive exactly once, and in order for it not to remain a useless toy, it would be necessary to rebuild the level design and all the shooting mathematics.
Catching a projectile either forces the player into a single combat scenario, or breaks the balance, and the same goes for a public execution or cabaret, which look beautiful in the frame, but it is not clear what and where they lead to.
The story with the two current heirs of the series looks even more fun. Ghost Story Games has been around since 2017 and has been showing Judas in the form of a teaser and screenshots since 2022, and Cloud Chamber has been tinkering with the fourth BioShock for the same amount of time, but has not publicly shown anything at all other than hiring announcements and rumors of varying degrees.
