Part 39

So this is one of the reasons I decided to do this LP. I'm apparently the only person who's found that a lot of this game's unused content is spawnable in-game. I've searched extensively but no one else seems to have documented it.


[ Hosted / Viddler / Blip / YouTube ]
(EDIT: Viddler version is up now.)

This video serves as both a summary of some big content that didn't make it in and vehicles that are actually workable. Here's a rundown.

[ 1 ]
An unused spacesuit for Olivia, largely just a palette swap of Marin's. Since the only time you can actually see anyone besides Gideon wearing a suit is in the early cutscene in chapter four, these went completely unused.

[ 1 ]
I'm not sure whether the ATV was originally intended to be part of the game and scrapped during development, or if it wasn't intended to be in the game at all. The only evidence of it being in the game at some point is this single screenshot released early on, and one spot in the audio clips where I can only infer that they're talking about it. It appears quite heavily in Rock The Planet, though.

[ 1 / 2 ]
Similarly, there's only one piece of art out there of this tank, and a lone destroyed model that appears in chapter three. If it was ever made to be useable, they removed most any reference to it. Now it simply lives as three separate static meshes.

[ 1 / 2 ]
I largely just wanted to include the Aurelian Dropship because you practically never get to see it outside of cutscenes. It's unpilotable and doesn't seem to serve as anything other than a prop, but as evidenced by the cutscene from chapter six, it had vehicle properties.

[ 1 ]
Leftover playable characters. They probably took these out because they wanted to focus entirely on Gideon, or maybe they had side missions planned for Marin in particular that ended up being transformed into Advent Shadow. Normally, Marin and Ethan spawn with a gun (or in the former's case, two guns), but the playable model doesn't wield anything.
When you damage them enough, the sound effect that plays when Gideon's health is low activates. There's no OliviaPlayable model, though.

[ 1 ]
The ambassadorial shuttle was a vehicle you were supposed to be able to drive to and from the Aurelian mothership in-game, instead of it just being a cutscene. It has seats, it has a camera set up to follow it, and there's code to tell the game how it handles. It ended up only being used in the game's cutscene to show you crashing into Luriam, and curiously, this half-broken model is the only version still left in the game. It was originally called the Gildstar Monsoon Diplomatic Coach.

[ 1 / 2 / 3 ]
An unused psychic power that would restore Gideon's health. The "Heal Radius" effect implies that you could also heal allies, which further implies that your allies (potentially including story NPCs) originally could die. "Heal On Hand" I can only assume would heal Gideon slowly if equipped in either hand, sort of giving you the option to recover health over time in a battle and fight with only one hand. Obviously at some point in development, they just imagined it would be better if Gideon regained health after not taking damage for a while and scrapped this.

[ 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 ]
These guys are the first things I always remembered as distinctly missing in Advent. They didn't have as much exposure as the Warhammer, but they were both extremely mysterious and nameless, featured in one promotional wallpaper, a concept picture, and one screenshot. I still wonder how finished the Robosapien was at the time of release, though. I assume that the human grenade it drops is evidence of the developers not having set its drop items yet.

Additionally, there are several lines of dialogue from Seekers in both Chapters 4 and 6 referring to "replicon" vats. Since they're just voice clips, I can't tell if this was a different thing entirely, but I doubt it since there're no traces or any other reference to replicons. "Replicon" might have been their official name, but at the same time, it might have been their beta name.

[ 1 / 2 / 3 ]
The giant staff the Seeker Elites use. Unlike other weapons you can spawn into your hand like the Aurelian Pulse, the Disruptor has graphics for first person mode, but unfortunately it can't fire. The only evidence I could find of it having an actual attack was an implosion effect. I really like the idea of the Elites being a fairly rare enemy that drops a powerful weapon when you beat it, though.

[ 1 / 2 / 3 ]
Pretty much the most hyped feature of the game, next to flick targeting. The Warhammer--in all my desperate attempts--is undrivable. Even if I could set it to, I have no idea how you would enter the driver's seat. The only part of it that works is the right turret, which won't let you exit, so all in all, finding this was kind of disappointing. Of interesting note, the model for the Warhammer is loaded up but unused during the canyon chase in chapter two. It may have originally been called the Hurricane, and there's a weapon in the game called, "WarHammerTurretMissles_Weap," despite the fact that its turrets are normal turret weaponry.

I imagine the development team had immense difficulty in getting the physics for this to work, especially on the rocky terrain outside Bahr Han, which led to its eventual scrapping. In fact, its physics are set to "none" when you spawn it, and no other physics setting will put it on the ground.

[ 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 ]
The most awesome vehicle in the game, but it's also caused my computer to fatally crash a few times. You can't exit the Speeder once you climb on. Several things to note: like the Warhammer, an enemy variant of the Speeder is loaded up in the canyon chase in chapter two, called SeekerSpeeder_Canyon (and SpeederBot_Canyon); the escape from the Island of Teran at the end of chapter six was supposed to take place on a Speeder; and the following was taken from an unused subtitle file for the cutscene after crashing landing on Aurelia and losing Olivia or Ethan:

Enorym: The city of Arniss [sic] lies on the other side of this canyon, Exhalted [sic] One. There we will find protection and brave allies. The Seeker racers could be overhead at any moment.
Enorym: Move now! I hear racers approaching.
Olivia: Gideon, wait.
Enorym: Human, you are unarmed.
Gideon: I'm sick of people dying for me. This ends now!

The Speeder's official name is the Ock'Uhls Razor.




Miscellaneous stuff

There are two vehicles that only have one bit of code referring to them. The "Skiff" and the "Seeker Fighter." Unfortunately, the Skiff is an animation set (and some wreckage) and the Fighter is a driver seat assignment. The Fighter I assume is this thing which looks like a Seeker Speeder with a cockpit.

Gideon has an unused haircut called "gideon_face_buzz" that makes him look a lot like Ethan.

There's also an unused objective for after you beat the Skinwalker, telling you to "rush to the Skinwalker's starship." This is because originally you were intended to actually chase the Skinwalker back to his ship while he tried to possess another body to fight you with.

The Skinwalker by the way is referred to as "BountyHunter3" in the game's code. BountyHunter2 is Barrakka Bahma... so who's BountyHunter1? There are only a few mentions of it and a few seem to imply very similar abilities as Bahma, so I assume it was in fact an early version of Barrakka (unfortunately nothing relating to it actually spawns). But Bert Lewis, a modeler for the game, posted a rejected concept drawing for a bounty hunter on the conceptart.org forums.



There's also a lot of unused hint boxes in the game. I cut all of them out during the videos, but here are some of the more interesting ones that seem to imply abilities that weren't implemented or simply thrown away at some point.

LstrHINT_Jumping_A="Press [jump] to jump; hold it down to jump higher." [Jump longer, not higher]
//LstrHINT_Jumping_C="While moving, pressing [X] and [jump] simultaneously will perform a long jump."
LstrHINT_Melee_C="Try combining jumps, high-jumps, and long-jumps with a melee attack."
LstrHINT_PowersWeapons_B="To throw a weapon, hold down [throw grenade] and then tap the corresponding R or L weapon fire." [This doesn't work unfortunately.]
LstrHINT_Use_C="Target a weapon and press [W] to pull it to you."
LstrHINT_WALLLEAN_A="Pressing into a wall will allow you to do a wall-lean."
LstrHINT_WALLLEAN_B="Pressing left or right while doing a wall lean will caWhite Button [sic] Gideon to lean around a corner."
LstrHINT_WALLLEAN_C="Try wall-leaning against the alternate Negate power." [Wall-lean against Sphere?]
LstrHINT_MISC_A="A locked door? Open it with your fist."


If there's something else I mentioned in the videos you'd like to see, ask!