It’s interesting to hear what gets cut from some triple-A games.
Monolith Productions, the Washington-based developer behind last year’s surprise hit Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, recently shared a development post-mortem with Gamasutra. And design director Michael de Plater revealed that the open-world action game nearly featured a giant, climbable monster, which sounds reminiscent of the PlayStation 2 classic, Shadow of the Colossus. Cutting it was painful for the team, and it shows how ruthless the game development process is.
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“We not only had to trust each other in terms of the process of creating the game, we also had no clear benchmarks or data to demonstrate that it would work even once it was created,” said De Plater. “This insecurity about our core systems led us to direct a lot of effort to peripheral systems such as side activities and even some epic features like a climbable Great Beast that later got cut.”
Unfortunately, Monolith was overly ambitious in its initial vision for Shadow of Mordor, and that’s what resulted in the loss of the Great Beast, along with some large wilderness areas.
“During pre-production, we didn’t have good metrics on our production capacity,” said De Plater. “This led to the specification of the game being over-ambitious, which as we started to get a clearer picture of reality required us to make some pretty big and painful cuts.
“This created a double dip of pain; firstly there was the lost work on the features that were cut. Secondly we created quite significant amounts of new work to replace the cut features or content including some large wilderness areas and epic creatures such as the Great Beast mentioned above.”