This would have been a good level, and it seems to match AS1 and AS2 decently, the Scaffolding fight would be impossible, and the raptor kong would have been interesting.
There seems to be a lot of scripting going on in these, and the game was promised not to have any!
Hammond: When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!
Ian: Yeah, but when Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists...
It really does seem to match AS1 and AS2 exactly, which is strange. It seems like nothing was ever meant to fill that big gap between LAB and AS1 in the retail game. So why are the end of LAB and beginning of AS1 so far apart?
machf wrote:Have you played the Beta? There's the full AS level as originally designed (no gap), in the final release they shortened it. It was really HUGE...
Though admittedly the area they cut out was nothing to write home about. Very sparse dino population, some trees and boulders, etc. And don't forget that at the beginning of the level you could see the edge of the game world, which is probably related in some way to why they cut the level altogether, but I'm just guessing there.
machf wrote:Have you played the Beta? There's the full AS level as originally designed (no gap), in the final release they shortened it. It was really HUGE...
Haven't gotten around to playing the Beta yet, but now I'm more interested than ever. Does anyone have a clue why the Ascent was shortened, other than hppav's suggestion? Granted, I haven't played it yet, but the edge of the game world seems pretty easy to hide. I can't imagine it being very buggy like PV. The Ascent is pretty much a straightforward trek across rough landscape.
machf wrote:Maybe they needed to make space on the CD... remember, other levels grew a bit more from the Beta to the retail, and back then CDs had 650MB capacity.
Could be. They could have had a 2 CD installation, but I suppose hard drives were a lot smaller in those days, too.
I remember the first family computer we had in 1999, it had 8 GB of Hard Drive space. It was a standard HP Pavilion (hp pav ) we got at the Walmart that I now work at. Due to Windows 98 bloat and all the stuff stored on there we usually had around 100 MB of free disc space at any given time. Ah, those were the days,
The part of AS1 that was cut ended up being not much, sadly. It goes up hill with some rough ridges along the way. Actually it reminded me a ton of Nem's No Retreat, except he actually had some puzzles in it. I fully suspect it was cut with the same reason as other things like the entire PH level - the game lost so many of its puzzles and variation that they knew people would start to get bored with more of the same and just want to progress to the next interesting thing. Cutting out a strip of uphill dino battles is an easy way to do that. I ultimately suspect this is also the reason they did not include PV - it would have been awesome just to look around even if no puzzles worked and were not required to progress, but they wanted to shore up the pacing of the working game events. Probably something about being professional, not that Trespasser had much chance of that by then in most eyes.