Some of the leftover stuff in Skyrim always makes me laugh. There's literally a cell in the game called something like "CellJeremyRemoveWhenDoneTesting", and there's plenty of other stuff, searching "help test" in the command console returns a list of game assets with "test" in the name, which makes for a fun little browse of unused/testing assets. This also includes a massively OP sword, with a base damage of like 10,000, the TestVorpal sword.
In the case of Bethesda games (or moding friendly games in general) i guess part of the reason the don't bother removing it, is exactly because they are sure someone can use the assets in a mod later, and they don't have to do shit.
Zenyl IIRC, theres an item in Skyrim that makes reference to this. Saying something like "Jeremy make a description for this item" or something like that
As a software developer (not games, but software in general) your explanations were perfect. It's not just true in games, but true in all of software where sometimes, it's easier to just disable user access to some buggy feature so that other components can use the solid and useful parts of that feature than to spend the money to have developers refactor the useful features into something deliverable and remove the broken stuff
Case in point: Windows. I love it, but still love to knock it. (Anyone else who ever used DOS shell prior to Windows, you're a true professional in my eyes and I count you among the true nerds of the world. Respect.)
As a game tester I can say the video is pretty much spot on. Except that part about QA testers. Sure we find tons of issues. If only you guys could see the database. My point is that sometimes even QA bugs are waived. I've had many devs comment on issues I've entered in the database saying that attempting to fix it could break too many things and they don't want to risk it, or devs will attempt to fix it a number of times using tricks to mask it or remove the issue without messing anything up and then give up because it didn't work. I've literally had a dev call me over to his desk to try out this fix he was trying for the 10th time so he could see what I was doing and watch the code in realtime, and then just give up because there was no way to fix it at the time. The issue was later fixed when some other stuff got implemented, but that was actually just a happy accident.
Luther may or may not care, but in general when someone shares a story like that about personal experiences, they are not going to get specific about who what and where. Just FYI.
This video was a lot more interesting than I expected, thanks Gameranx (and specifically Falcon)! I really do love everything about video games, even these weird programming ticks... but I sure as hell don't ever want to be involved with the programming side of things lol.
Something completely not mentioned but is invaluable in development is having test spaces, when shipping the game you may want to preserve your dev teams test spaces for dlc work. Bethesda is notorious for having such test spaces that people sometimes confuse with cut content. Why would you need a test space? So you don't accidently bugger up part of the game when you remove your test regardless if what was tested was implemented or didn't work correct. Then it is a controlled environment so the rest of the game doesn't bugger up your test. Testing always comes with iteration for itself so you don't want to test where you plan to implement it because that increases the chance you could accidently break something, example of why is you build your test room to test some flame particle effects. You place your emitters and objects in the room, load the game and see how they look, then you go back and add a new wall sconce to the test and have to move the rest around and you accidently had a floor piece selected and moved it 1 unit up with that wall sconce, run a dozen more tests and iterations without ever noticing the floating floor tile. If that were the actual game world or a used interior players are going to come across that floating floor tile and see what it is instead of the floor it's supposed to be.
Short answer: it's faster and easier to just nullify the code by not calling on it within the active script rather than actually delete it. Deleting it is extra work, and there's no value in it for the customer, so it's not worth the time and money. This is business, not art (the process, not the product): the code doesn't need to be perfect, only the part the customer sees matters.
100% Correct! Finding a game that DOESN'T have unused content would be a really cool thing to find out actually, because every game pretty well goes through this process. BUT, having less of that content is always a good thing. That means that productivity is doing VERY good and you are conveying your ideas to the team members well. Great Video!
I am so glad you made this video. This is a recurring argument in my circle of friends, especially the handful that enjoy "going out of the map." For some reason, those are the friends that get up in arms that there's an unused area they can get into when all they enjoy is getting into unused areas. Then i explain basically this video to them. Now i can just link them this. So thanks.
It broke my heart when I purchased Dark Souls 2's dlc. I would wait for the download, because I had a slow connection, but then it shot from 1% to 100%...
Speaking as someone who has a game development degree, my final project in college was to write my own game. I ran in to a lot of these issues even though I was the only one developing my simple game. There would be times where I would add something to the game's code and it would break the entire game. I remember going to fix a minor glitch in the code that once I fixed prevented the game from even running. Creating games is a difficult process so there are bound to be problems. As far as hidden/inaccessible rooms, I remember playing around with the original Doom and finding rooms that were inaccessible to me, the player. They were used to hold the monsters that would teleport into areas that were playable. It was pretty awesome to see how the game had been put together and how the monsters were already in the area before they spawned near the player.
I used to work at QA, and everything is pretty much True about what you said in this video. Near the launching date, it is insane how many "Will not fix" bug is out there because holy cow it is expensive to pay only one team for a lone Day.
Usually, dev time only account for the time needed to get all the features done + acceptable performance - refactor only if it drastically improves performance. dev here but not game dev.
Jared Lilley yeah I know. Once the tried to fix a simple bug near the end of the launching date and right after the little changent of coding, half the map Was place holder numbers.
I'm a simulation developer and yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. The biggest problems occur when you're using a third party software or device with your development and they update it and things like ID numbers, array sizes or change how data is delivered or viewed after a certain point. An example of this, you may outsource your graphics engine and the people who deliver your assets may do something like change their coordinate system so X started as being the right side of their original assets but changes to being forward after their 2.0 update. Ideally, you'll never get in this situation. Unfortunately for me, I have and it really sucks when the assets built on the original version have a flipped coordinate system from the standard we asked for, cause they didn't catch all the old ones in the update
Eat My Booty ubisoft plug and play development total dependence on already written code. Minimal effort if you just mix and match pre-developed code focus on asset creation instead.
Falcon is my favorite person on this channel. Sorry Jake, we may share the same name, but Falcon is the biggest reason I stop my life to watch gameranx
when I went to school for graphic design we developed some music videos and also had repository files full of unneeded sound and video files. this is like let's say a box full of everything that your video or game needs to refer to and sometimes just a small portion of the file is needed out of a much larger file. I'm glad you mentioned repository file because that's exactly what it is.
Falcon is anthropomorphic meaning hes just an animal with humanlike features. Like Zootopia. Theres no reason to make a realistic falcon playing with a controller.
That's my fault actually, while I was "doin' mah god thang", I had ran out of knees by the time I invented birds and couldn't be fucked going to Walmart.
As a game developer: Sometimes they are even test rooms used by the QA staff. Cheat codes could be used in development to teleport QA to the area to do their testing. That room may just be left in since once the cheat codes are removed, the room doesn't break the game in any way, so we would just leave it there sometimes.
This is very true. Some unused content is also simply a hold-over to be added at a later date (ie how R* adds some update content early bundled along side another update)
Because whether you have the disk or not is irrelevant. All games get installed onto the HDD to reduce load times. Last gen there used to be promt that popped up asking if you wanted to after inserting a new disk, now its done automatically.
Thanks for attempting to explain this very complicated issue in a video. I'm not a developer myself, but I have an understanding of game development and I see a lot of people complaining about things that are just common sense at the end of the day.
Simple answers. 1.) It may be hard to remove as some used things in the game might be using data from it. so hiding it makes it easier. 2.) There may be so much unused stuff that you would have to wade through waves of info just to see what's used or not used. 3.) A combination of both of those. Also if you think Ocarina of Time has a lot of unused rooms, just go onto the TCRF (The Cutting Room Floor) website and take a look at the unused rooms page for the Wind Waker... er, I mean 4 pages worth of unused rooms. There's more unused rooms than the number of islands in the Great Sea.
I'm a developer myself, specifically a web developer, but I can bring in some incite. The process of changing the project that won't directly affect the end user experience is called refactoring. There are many reasons one may refactor a project such as minor improvements, bug fixes, optimizations, code readability and maintainability but the way I tend to approach this is to get a working product up an running that fits the project specs, and then go back and do all of my refactoring once the product is up and running and I'm not as pressed for time. The idea behind this workflow is to start generating the business money to better justify having me work for them and then doing the grunt work later while revenue is coming in. There are some things that you may need to get out of the way before deployment such as making the program as secure as possible/required (some projects like a medical prescribing software may need to be virtually bulletproof because of HIPPA regulations for instance) but generally things, like removing old assets or legacy code and making them as efficient as possible, can usually wait. This would be a good reason as to why games leave unused code/assets in a game.
Some of those rooms are developement rooms for experimentation, or in the case of an MMO, there can be a separate room for devs and mods to gather in game, or to bring players to if they need a private, isolated location for a discussion, or something. I know at least Perfect World used to have a dev room where the admins could gather in game. Don't know if this is the case anymore.
Not sure if it's just me, but I love finding beta/ unused content that was originally planned, but was scrapped/ unfinished. makes you think what the game could have been.
I am a Indie game developer, and to be honest mainly content like that stays behind for a number of reasons. 1. the group working on the project don't have the time to polish that extras out so they either move that assets either outside the see-able window or just move them so that they look like they belong there. 2. As you said the coding can be in the last stages and in truth when the game nears completion, you don't mess with the code. Removing it can remove the "Bug" but in a way can do damage to the final product on a area that needs the proper coding, so if that link work just let it be. 3. expansions normally we leave assets like that for expansion reasons, by all ready having that part set up for future changes. and 4. the developers wanted to make the world even bigger but because of the time that goes into making the game they just left the rest. In many cases it gives the world a bigger feel. that concludes the reasons why some games have that areas that no one can go into
I'm a cis major in collage and had to do a simple vb project it was a simple set of code and yet it took days to Finnish and manly that way because of debugging the code my friend told me about a quote someone said to him "I may wright the entire code for something in a hour or day and take a week or 2 debugging it" debugging is a long process it's like proof reading something in a different language especially if someone coded something in a way you did not think of
And here is where mods come in! With Skyrim, there is a mod called "Cutting Room Floor". This mod unlocks this cutted content to the game. There are a few new quests available, npc's unlock sertain dialog, and some small buildings are added.
Most left over content in games are normally in one of 4 categories. 1: Testing levels. The levels where character models are tested and debugged at. 2: Levels where characters are displayed at to make sure textures and character models are displayed to check to make sure the looks of everything is appealing together. 3: Incomplete content that development time Just flat out prevented the content from being complete. 4: Future Download content on the disc... (The flat out not cool move.)
When you are programming something it's very common to use things like functions or event triggers that call on the same object that have a single variable linked to many other things . That way you don't end up with a database full of objects for your sanity. Call this > set this > what is it set to? > if set to x > then load this. It's far easier to disable x then to remove it as removing it would possibly required rewriting a lot of programming already there.
I am currently in app development and you my man hit the nail on the head. Sometimes removing things can cause more harm and potentially break the game. But since people are so quick to judge and know nothing about coding at all they call it "cut content". You have no idea how many people pretend to be programmers and think removing a bug or adding in features is as easy as pressing enter or backspace on your keyboard. I can tell you it is not that easy at all.
I've coded before so I completely understand this video and the logic behind it, usually when you remove something from a line of code it starts going haywire and things don't end well which is why you make back ups (or you're going to learn to)
For unused content I immediately think about _Demon's Souls_. There's an entire Archstone which isn't used in the game the "broken Archstone" which led to the land of the giants, but it isn't accessible. This is worked into the lore, but in fact it was originally supposed to be this giant sprawling castle on a snowy mountain, filled with weird hairy headless demon things, all of which can be found in the unused data (there's an amazing video about it on TH-cam from some guy who hacked into it: he provides an actual walkthrough of the whole area and we can see the creatures and other assets). _Dark Souls_ also has some incredible unused data, including entire story elements with dialogue, NPCs, and stuff related to the original plan for the game where you played as Crossbreed Priscilla and Andre the Blacksmith was actually some kind of powerful king/ruler. Also Firelink Shrine was originally a pond in a lush water temple thing. And there's also this entire boss hidden away in the game files, he looks like a bizarre 80's hair metal guitarist, fucking bizarre, actually kind of glad they removed him. :/
Yeah, apparently all of these reasons are why so much unused content was left on Knights of the Old Republic 2, which led the way to one of the most essential mods in gaming.
Sometimes people just forget things, i make games as a hobby and i sometimes forget to remove soundbytes, backup events, and other stuff while in the midst of the development cycle.
One consideration for not cutting the crap out ouf game is... effective resource management. Game assets when they are packaged into a final game are not stored as individual files. They are crammed together to form collections that make sense to load together. Like a pack of objects that populate a specific dungeon. And obviously at runtime you want the process of unpacking those assets to be as time efficient as possible. And the most efficient way is to have a table noting positions of each item in the library. And the libraries are created and packed midway through the process. So if near the end of the development you decide that you don't need a specific item... you don't want to recompile the library recomputing the indices... So you just keep it as it as is.
As someone who does QA, I completely understand why it's in there. It is a pain in the ass when even fix a normal bug, that can completely break unrelated system thanks to code dependencies. We have had situations where fixing a weapons damage has broken crafting another. I wouldn't complain about extra stuff on the disc or bugs, we try our best and at the end of the day if money isn't made than we don't get paid. So sometimes games are shipped buggy because you have weeks or even months from the time of submission to the time of actually release to the public, hence day 1 patches. A game can take many weeks to be pushed through sony and especially disc based games. Where you have to manufacture everything and have it shipped globally. All the while those weeks and months that process takes you are still finding new game breaking issues everyday. So give the devs a break, we try really hard.
You can say whatever you want, but Im pretty sure that the guys in rockstar games will be very careful on leaving unused content in their games especially sexual content, I mean if that hot coffe thing was not on purpose anyways.
From what I have learnt writing various amounts of code in javascript, it is a pain in the ass when removing an item that ties in with bits of other code. For example in a minecraft mod, if a crafting recipe calls for an item that is removed, it will give an error. If you have an item that is required in recipes, multiblocks, etc it will give many errors, and sometimes render whole scripts useless, and very difficult to get working again without the "asset" It would put an error where ever your block/item is actually being registered, the block/item class, where ever it is being called upon, so crafting recipes, multiblocks, if your mod implements electricity apis' then that would ruin the class for a manager of cables (depending on how you wrote it) and numerous other things.
Sometimes you just build random shiz, just to see what a room / character would look if decorated differently. Sometimes canceled Easter eggs probably Also canceled area of levels or room dumping grounds for deleting
as an app dev let me say this- ive seen a couple of comments here asking about a things that leads me to this point- yeah when you're working on something small like a 2mb app you're not gonna have many problems removing extra code, that's a 45min-1hr job, but when you're working on a giant ass video game like grand theft auto it makes sense not to waste time
The way you describe it makes sense. The one thing I've never understood though is why developers never finish some of the code. I mean from a financial stand point doesn't it make more sense to release DLC that you only had to finish rather than spend time developing an entirely new thing?
A good additional tidbit would be from the PS1 days - some studios structured the order of data written on the physical media, using a big blank file at the beginning of the disc, so that the real content - now sitting in the outer section of the disc - can be read and loaded faster.
Yeah, that honestly doesn't surprise me, It's like if you're drawing an art piece in photoshop, you're gonna do it in layers, and you're going to be piling on the layers as you go, the extra rooms and stuff of this scenario are basically layers right at the bottom, the rough draft layers, where sure, you may have mistakes and it may not look pretty, but those layers have things on them that you need, as they can also be contributing to the overall look, and so working to get rid of those layers entirely would be a waste of time, because it wouldn't really affect the art piece, and it's not like anyone is going to be able to see the those layers really unless they have access to more than just a picture file of the art piece.
Much easier to comment out a call to a sub or procedure that you have decided to not utilize than it is to just remove the called procedure and then discover that "Oh hey, Bob six months ago found that procedure to be really useful and used it 400 times in his parts of the project." Which now ceases to function entirely or freezes inexplicably because someone removed that code because it was "Not needed after all".
Hell, another good reason is just that people forget it's still in there. Simply put games are big and take a long time to make and if someone had to go through every asset in a game and see if it's in the final game would take forever. While there are automated systems to tell if an asset is referenced some how that doesn't mean it's possible to know it's being used or remember if it's being use. Imagine your making a shooter and there is some kind of beach level, your artists make a sand being shot particle system and the game play programmer adds the functionality when a sandy surface is shot use that particle system. Later on in development they decided the beach level is cut and no other level has sand in it. Now as the game play programmer, is the thought "I'd better remove the sand particle system" in your mind. Probably not, you have more important things to worry about. Hell you might even do a quick look to see which particle systems should be removed and you come across "Wizard Spell" particle and think we cut the wizard long ago and take it out and then you come across "sand shot" particle and think nothing of it because it seems like something that should just be there.
the older forza games have the ability to upgrade cars with quad turbos but the feature was removed in the final version before release. its still possible with mods however.
Bethesda does this a lot. but there is an added bonus for them to leave it in: modders. they will immediately data mine the entire game and, quite often, be able to resurrect the cut content. with most bethesda games is a 'cutting room floor' mod that opens up a lot of the stuff bethesda didnt have time to finish, or stuff that was too buggy to use.
a room or item may not be used or accessible but it can still be redone in a dlc to be released at a later point and if not maybe it can be broke down to be used as another item or to save time later as a templateof sorts and removing this source room or item would corrupt anything made using it as a base for its existence in scientific terms removing it is like splitting an atom it will destroy all in its path and create a chain reaction
I once found a cave in skyrim where I swam to the very bottom, clipped through a wall and spawned in a completely different part of the map in a weird room with no way out or in.
I remember the glitch in cod modern warfare 2 (or 4 I cant remember) where you could leave the map I remember seeing a fire struck you could walk into with textures on the inside even though you didnt go there at all during the game
another good reason for junk data is what the crash bandicoot team did, pushing the final product to the edge of a disc makes it read faster. hardly matters nowadays but hey you never know when it might help.
Somehow he listed every type of thing video games come on 3:15 except Cartridges. you know those things that EVERY Nintendo console has used outside of Gamecube/Wii/WiiU
the data left on games was for intentional use but after playing the games by testers and creators they decide to block it off as its cheaper and quicker then coding the whole room floor or level there is so many games with extra content nobody would be able to find or even name them all
A lot of development tools include dependency/package generators that check for leftover files that're never used, ever. These orphaned files are simply deleted and the resource files rebuilt. If anything's missing, you'll be told. These tiny tools are so basic and common, sometimes I wonder why people are so lazy and don't use them. In fact, if these tools didn't exist, the first thing I'd do is write one. It's simply just a checker that finds all assets referenced, and drops everything else.
Another reason for cut or dummied out content is often for balance, like they would remove weapons because they could be redundant or too powerful. Instead of leaving a hole in the list of weapons, like would happen if they removed it entirely, then they can simply dummy it out and make sure that no monsters or shops have that weapon as a reward. Like you said though, there's a good part of it is due to many teams working separately, so when they want to make the final product, they have to make decisions and rearrange things. One example of this is FF7. There are a few cases in that game that are of interest. There's a whole scene that was scrapped out in Midgar's Slum 7. Normally it's triggered by Cloud exiting the Seventh Heaven, but the game doesn't normally let you do it. But the code and scene are still there if you cheat your way. The japanese text is still there. The scene itself is more or less a retelling of events later explained in the game, so they probably removed this scene for story cohesion. Another case of interest, entering Nibelheim the first time will have comments from your party members. All of your party members have comments, even translated... EVEN if they are not supposed to be in your team yet, like Cid or Vincent for example. This could be a case that they reworked in which order the events happen or which order the villages are visited. Another thing is Aerith has animations for all attacks in the game, even spells and abilities that you couldn't get at the point she's still in your party. Again it would be troublesome to either code her to not have those animations, or removing them. She also has translated lines in areas after she leaves your party, if you hack or use the debug room to add her to your party. One such example is the mountain lodge. So it's quite possible that events were coded ahead of time, but the final product changed the order of things. The last point of interest is that famous scene where Aerith meets Sephiroth. Sephiroth's gloves disappear, the angle of the sword, the lack of blood... it's possible that they took several CGI scenes and made a single larger one with it, since it doesn't seem consistent. The remake will hopefully make it more cohesive.
Coder here (Objective-C, C++, C#, Java) You are right i sometimes work on huge projects (Have worked on some games but mainly software) And we leave in huge chunks of code all the time. Weather it be for time or 1 thing is dependent on that section of code and it would be a waste of time to rewrite the entire code just to shrink it down a few lines. Yes it took a lot of time to write the original code but when you start adding revisions to a piece of code that does not bother anything you start adding massive amounts of time. And you are right in my early days of coding i used to be a perfectionist however as time went on i noticed it wasn't worth it. We always used to call it Ghetto code just the term we used for code that was put together in such a way that only the original developer knows what the hell it did, or how to use it right. There is no payoff to writing a streamlined piece of code when no one is going to see it (Unless you are doing API or SDK work for another company wanna make your work look good so you get more contracts). Your argument is %100 valid and true from my view and experience.
So I code websites, and this is very much the case. But there's other reasons why I'll leave extra code in the server, and thats when I use code previously made (not like stolen code but like older code I made, rubygems, etc) and paste it over to implement a certain feature, it's often that the code doesn't fit quite right the way I want. So instead of trying to write the code again, I'll stitch together and add to the code I have. But there will likely be code thats not used, and I may not know it even exists. It's not worth my time to look for it, so I publish it like it is. If it works, and it works well, why the hell would I change that.
The only unused content I didn't mind were the Ratchet and Clank games because they have the insomniac museums that explain why certain things didn't make it in the game.
Besides being a perfectionist, the only real benefit of taking time to remove these unused stuff is to save file space as they are basically "a waste of space" however that only really matters if you've run out of space on the disk & need to make room for more assets. While not common, some games have a decent amount of file space being wasted with unused assets....then again with how a lot of game companies do DLC, it's more common than it used to be. On the subject of Ocarina of Time, wish you showed off the Airwing enemy from Star Fox which has the ability to blast you with lasers, they even explode when they hit the ground after you shoot them down with the Slingshot or with Arrows. Most speculate that it was used to test the Fire Temple Boss because of how it flies in the air, but the model & lasers must've been a bonus thing for the developers. Very easy to get into the game with GameShark Codes to modify what object spawns when entering a room. One of the cooler unused bits in the game.
I still remember finding a CGA PC game called Pop Corn (breakout clone) on the Little Big Adventure 2 CD Rom all those years ago! If that's not an interesting easter egg, I don't know what is!
I think there should be an inside protocol to tell programmers to start deleting and debugging game Code to make sure it’s good when they want to have this thing removed at that moment, instead of at the end of development.
as long as bugs don't ruin an experience by getting in the way of something, or it's very clear you'd have to go out of your way to activate the bug, then bugs are awesome, they're hilarious and fun to fuck around with
This video reminds me of how the channel "Extra Credits" structured their video on why Mass Effect Andromeda's facial animations didn't work at release.
GTA San Andreas had the same thing too. I think it was called going to heaven...where you see so many in game assets in the sky...you could even recognize some assets that were used in game.
Some of the leftover stuff in Skyrim always makes me laugh. There's literally a cell in the game called something like "CellJeremyRemoveWhenDoneTesting", and there's plenty of other stuff, searching "help test" in the command console returns a list of game assets with "test" in the name, which makes for a fun little browse of unused/testing assets. This also includes a massively OP sword, with a base damage of like 10,000, the TestVorpal sword.
i forget the name but there is a room for all player killed named npcs its weird as hell
Elesweyr? that is the name btw.
some cut content has good dialog and quests
In the case of Bethesda games (or moding friendly games in general) i guess part of the reason the don't bother removing it, is exactly because they are sure someone can use the assets in a mod later, and they don't have to do shit.
Zenyl
IIRC, theres an item in Skyrim that makes reference to this. Saying something like "Jeremy make a description for this item" or something like that
Matt No, Elswyre is the room Miak the Liar goes to when he isn't in the overworld/loaded cells.
As a software developer (not games, but software in general) your explanations were perfect. It's not just true in games, but true in all of software where sometimes, it's easier to just disable user access to some buggy feature so that other components can use the solid and useful parts of that feature than to spend the money to have developers refactor the useful features into something deliverable and remove the broken stuff
orion black, Candy Crush itself is a knock off...
Actually yes. Bejeweled started it all or at least was the one who made that genre popular.
Bejeweled
Case in point: Windows.
I love it, but still love to knock it. (Anyone else who ever used DOS shell prior to Windows, you're a true professional in my eyes and I count you among the true nerds of the world. Respect.)
Actually Bejeweled is a knock off from a game in the 1990s called Shariki.
As a game tester I can say the video is pretty much spot on. Except that part about QA testers. Sure we find tons of issues. If only you guys could see the database.
My point is that sometimes even QA bugs are waived. I've had many devs comment on issues I've entered in the database saying that attempting to fix it could break too many things and they don't want to risk it, or devs will attempt to fix it a number of times using tricks to mask it or remove the issue without messing anything up and then give up because it didn't work.
I've literally had a dev call me over to his desk to try out this fix he was trying for the 10th time so he could see what I was doing and watch the code in realtime, and then just give up because there was no way to fix it at the time. The issue was later fixed when some other stuff got implemented, but that was actually just a happy accident.
Which game was it, mr. Luther ?
Luther may or may not care, but in general when someone shares a story like that about personal experiences, they are not going to get specific about who what and where. Just FYI.
@Captiiva, Exactly. I think I've said enough. Besides the point was to illustrate that the industry is a small place and all interconnected.
2:15 I swear I have seen that glitch more than anyone on the planet and so I just want it fixed but nope
"Today on gameranx we ASK the question..."
bitch please, youre ANSWERING the question
Ilm9001 yeah they are asking the question so we know what they are going to answer
its in the title
great content as always
Thanks.
Great content 👍, but the comments though... came here to see reactions from devs, maybe I should read more... a LOT more. :D
+gameranx How much content was left out of this video?
It is not about the content left out, it is about the unused content left in the video between the scan lines
Raven Pope
videos are very different to games
This video was a lot more interesting than I expected, thanks Gameranx (and specifically Falcon)! I really do love everything about video games, even these weird programming ticks... but I sure as hell don't ever want to be involved with the programming side of things lol.
Interesting topic. Keep up the good work! 👍
Something completely not mentioned but is invaluable in development is having test spaces, when shipping the game you may want to preserve your dev teams test spaces for dlc work. Bethesda is notorious for having such test spaces that people sometimes confuse with cut content. Why would you need a test space? So you don't accidently bugger up part of the game when you remove your test regardless if what was tested was implemented or didn't work correct. Then it is a controlled environment so the rest of the game doesn't bugger up your test. Testing always comes with iteration for itself so you don't want to test where you plan to implement it because that increases the chance you could accidently break something, example of why is you build your test room to test some flame particle effects. You place your emitters and objects in the room, load the game and see how they look, then you go back and add a new wall sconce to the test and have to move the rest around and you accidently had a floor piece selected and moved it 1 unit up with that wall sconce, run a dozen more tests and iterations without ever noticing the floating floor tile. If that were the actual game world or a used interior players are going to come across that floating floor tile and see what it is instead of the floor it's supposed to be.
99 bugs,
fix 1 bug,
999 bugs remaining,
life of a programmer
Short answer: it's faster and easier to just nullify the code by not calling on it within the active script rather than actually delete it. Deleting it is extra work, and there's no value in it for the customer, so it's not worth the time and money. This is business, not art (the process, not the product): the code doesn't need to be perfect, only the part the customer sees matters.
100% Correct! Finding a game that DOESN'T have unused content would be a really cool thing to find out actually, because every game pretty well goes through this process. BUT, having less of that content is always a good thing. That means that productivity is doing VERY good and you are conveying your ideas to the team members well.
Great Video!
I am so glad you made this video. This is a recurring argument in my circle of friends, especially the handful that enjoy "going out of the map." For some reason, those are the friends that get up in arms that there's an unused area they can get into when all they enjoy is getting into unused areas. Then i explain basically this video to them. Now i can just link them this. So thanks.
It broke my heart when I purchased Dark Souls 2's dlc. I would wait for the download, because I had a slow connection, but then it shot from 1% to 100%...
5:59, extra content on a disc, like in that picture for instance, there's a center on the disc where there should be a hole.
Another great topic you wouldn't see on most gaming channels, keep it up Gameranx!
Speaking as someone who has a game development degree, my final project in college was to write my own game. I ran in to a lot of these issues even though I was the only one developing my simple game. There would be times where I would add something to the game's code and it would break the entire game. I remember going to fix a minor glitch in the code that once I fixed prevented the game from even running. Creating games is a difficult process so there are bound to be problems.
As far as hidden/inaccessible rooms, I remember playing around with the original Doom and finding rooms that were inaccessible to me, the player. They were used to hold the monsters that would teleport into areas that were playable. It was pretty awesome to see how the game had been put together and how the monsters were already in the area before they spawned near the player.
That laughter at 3:05 ... It's *addictive*. I want a one hour version of it !
I used to work at QA, and everything is pretty much True about what you said in this video. Near the launching date, it is insane how many "Will not fix" bug is out there because holy cow it is expensive to pay only one team for a lone Day.
Usually, dev time only account for the time needed to get all the features done + acceptable performance - refactor only if it drastically improves performance. dev here but not game dev.
Jared Lilley yeah I know. Once the tried to fix a simple bug near the end of the launching date and right after the little changent of coding, half the map Was place holder numbers.
I'm a simulation developer and yeah, you pretty much hit the nail on the head. The biggest problems occur when you're using a third party software or device with your development and they update it and things like ID numbers, array sizes or change how data is delivered or viewed after a certain point. An example of this, you may outsource your graphics engine and the people who deliver your assets may do something like change their coordinate system so X started as being the right side of their original assets but changes to being forward after their 2.0 update. Ideally, you'll never get in this situation. Unfortunately for me, I have and it really sucks when the assets built on the original version have a flipped coordinate system from the standard we asked for, cause they didn't catch all the old ones in the update
Ubisoft. That's all I need to say.
Those "deleted scenes" in AC3 are too good to cut.
Its like you didn't watch the video.
Eat My Booty ubisoft plug and play development total dependence on already written code. Minimal effort if you just mix and match pre-developed code focus on asset creation instead.
they would make you pay for the cut content as well
DPowered Smith EA since early 2000s
Falcon is my favorite person on this channel. Sorry Jake, we may share the same name, but Falcon is the biggest reason I stop my life to watch gameranx
I like Falcon but his name is just so cheesy.... Like seriously "Hi guys I'm Falcon" That sounds ridiculous.
when I went to school for graphic design we developed some music videos and also had repository files full of unneeded sound and video files. this is like let's say a box full of everything that your video or game needs to refer to and sometimes just a small portion of the file is needed out of a much larger file. I'm glad you mentioned repository file because that's exactly what it is.
Tell your illustrator falcons don't have knees like in your thumbnail. They're birds. Falcons have bird legs. Because they're birds.
Falcon is anthropomorphic meaning hes just an animal with humanlike features. Like Zootopia. Theres no reason to make a realistic falcon playing with a controller.
PixelPusha has bird knees dude
what about Bee's Knees? hahaha
PixelPusha neither can they hold stuff with
wings, or are qualified to talk about unused content from video games
That's my fault actually, while I was "doin' mah god thang", I had ran out of knees by the time I invented birds and couldn't be fucked going to Walmart.
As a game developer: Sometimes they are even test rooms used by the QA staff. Cheat codes could be used in development to teleport QA to the area to do their testing. That room may just be left in since once the cheat codes are removed, the room doesn't break the game in any way, so we would just leave it there sometimes.
This is very true. Some unused content is also simply a hold-over to be added at a later date (ie how R* adds some update content early bundled along side another update)
+Gameranx why does a digital download take up the same amount of space on the hard drive as a disk of the same game?
Because whether you have the disk or not is irrelevant. All games get installed onto the HDD to reduce load times. Last gen there used to be promt that popped up asking if you wanted to after inserting a new disk, now its done automatically.
Thanks for attempting to explain this very complicated issue in a video. I'm not a developer myself, but I have an understanding of game development and I see a lot of people complaining about things that are just common sense at the end of the day.
Great video Falcon, this makes a lot of sense and was very interesting to watch! Keep up the great work!
Simple answers.
1.) It may be hard to remove as some used things in the game might be using data from it. so hiding it makes it easier.
2.) There may be so much unused stuff that you would have to wade through waves of info just to see what's used or not used.
3.) A combination of both of those.
Also if you think Ocarina of Time has a lot of unused rooms, just go onto the TCRF (The Cutting Room Floor) website and take a look at the unused rooms page for the Wind Waker... er, I mean 4 pages worth of unused rooms. There's more unused rooms than the number of islands in the Great Sea.
"We thank you very much for watching this video on falcon"
Wtf, how did you know I was flying my pet bird while watching??!
I'm a developer myself, specifically a web developer, but I can bring in some incite. The process of changing the project that won't directly affect the end user experience is called refactoring. There are many reasons one may refactor a project such as minor improvements, bug fixes, optimizations, code readability and maintainability but the way I tend to approach this is to get a working product up an running that fits the project specs, and then go back and do all of my refactoring once the product is up and running and I'm not as pressed for time. The idea behind this workflow is to start generating the business money to better justify having me work for them and then doing the grunt work later while revenue is coming in. There are some things that you may need to get out of the way before deployment such as making the program as secure as possible/required (some projects like a medical prescribing software may need to be virtually bulletproof because of HIPPA regulations for instance) but generally things, like removing old assets or legacy code and making them as efficient as possible, can usually wait. This would be a good reason as to why games leave unused code/assets in a game.
Some of those rooms are developement rooms for experimentation, or in the case of an MMO, there can be a separate room for devs and mods to gather in game, or to bring players to if they need a private, isolated location for a discussion, or something. I know at least Perfect World used to have a dev room where the admins could gather in game. Don't know if this is the case anymore.
Not sure if it's just me, but I love finding beta/ unused content that was originally planned, but was scrapped/ unfinished. makes you think what the game could have been.
I am a Indie game developer, and to be honest mainly content like that stays behind for a number of reasons.
1. the group working on the project don't have the time to polish that extras out so they either move that assets either outside the see-able window or just move them so that they look like they belong there.
2. As you said the coding can be in the last stages and in truth when the game nears completion, you don't mess with the code. Removing it can remove the "Bug" but in a way can do damage to the final product on a area that needs the proper coding, so if that link work just let it be.
3. expansions normally we leave assets like that for expansion reasons, by all ready having that part set up for future changes.
and
4. the developers wanted to make the world even bigger but because of the time that goes into making the game they just left the rest. In many cases it gives the world a bigger feel.
that concludes the reasons why some games have that areas that no one can go into
this brings me back to destiny in the beta where you can can find a part from the first dlc.
Falcon you legend and enigma keep up the amazing work you and gameranxs do!
I'm a cis major in collage and had to do a simple vb project it was a simple set of code and yet it took days to Finnish and manly that way because of debugging the code my friend told me about a quote someone said to him "I may wright the entire code for something in a hour or day and take a week or 2 debugging it" debugging is a long process it's like proof reading something in a different language especially if someone coded something in a way you did not think of
And here is where mods come in!
With Skyrim, there is a mod called "Cutting Room Floor". This mod unlocks this cutted content to the game. There are a few new quests available, npc's unlock sertain dialog, and some small buildings are added.
1:22 Ah the Heavy dragon bone armor. I remember editing the chain mail mod of this using some texture software and I felt like a hacker. Good times
Most left over content in games are normally in one of 4 categories.
1: Testing levels. The levels where character models are tested and debugged at.
2: Levels where characters are displayed at to make sure textures and character models are displayed to check to make sure the looks of everything is appealing together.
3: Incomplete content that development time Just flat out prevented the content from being complete.
4: Future Download content on the disc... (The flat out not cool move.)
I like the videos that falcon does explaining in depth the science and developement behind games. It's very interesting in my opinion.
This is actually a nice and informative video, good job gameranx
When learning to program we are taught to keep functions and files independent. But on huge projects it gets hard to do.
When you are programming something it's very common to use things like functions or event triggers that call on the same object that have a single variable linked to many other things . That way you don't end up with a database full of objects for your sanity. Call this > set this > what is it set to? > if set to x > then load this. It's far easier to disable x then to remove it as removing it would possibly required rewriting a lot of programming already there.
I am currently in app development and you my man hit the nail on the head. Sometimes removing things can cause more harm and potentially break the game.
But since people are so quick to judge and know nothing about coding at all they call it "cut content". You have no idea how many people pretend to be programmers and think removing a bug or adding in features is as easy as pressing enter or backspace on your keyboard. I can tell you it is not that easy at all.
I've coded before so I completely understand this video and the logic behind it, usually when you remove something from a line of code it starts going haywire and things don't end well which is why you make back ups (or you're going to learn to)
For unused content I immediately think about _Demon's Souls_. There's an entire Archstone which isn't used in the game the "broken Archstone" which led to the land of the giants, but it isn't accessible. This is worked into the lore, but in fact it was originally supposed to be this giant sprawling castle on a snowy mountain, filled with weird hairy headless demon things, all of which can be found in the unused data (there's an amazing video about it on TH-cam from some guy who hacked into it: he provides an actual walkthrough of the whole area and we can see the creatures and other assets).
_Dark Souls_ also has some incredible unused data, including entire story elements with dialogue, NPCs, and stuff related to the original plan for the game where you played as Crossbreed Priscilla and Andre the Blacksmith was actually some kind of powerful king/ruler. Also Firelink Shrine was originally a pond in a lush water temple thing. And there's also this entire boss hidden away in the game files, he looks like a bizarre 80's hair metal guitarist, fucking bizarre, actually kind of glad they removed him. :/
Unused content, The new Call Of Duty Games
Sonic052 Black Ops3 and Infinite Warfare are cut content from Advance Warfare but are now sold separately. sad really
Yeah, apparently all of these reasons are why so much unused content was left on Knights of the Old Republic 2, which led the way to one of the most essential mods in gaming.
Sometimes people just forget things, i make games as a hobby and i sometimes forget to remove soundbytes, backup events, and other stuff while in the midst of the development cycle.
One consideration for not cutting the crap out ouf game is... effective resource management.
Game assets when they are packaged into a final game are not stored as individual files. They are crammed together to form collections that make sense to load together. Like a pack of objects that populate a specific dungeon.
And obviously at runtime you want the process of unpacking those assets to be as time efficient as possible.
And the most efficient way is to have a table noting positions of each item in the library.
And the libraries are created and packed midway through the process. So if near the end of the development you decide that you don't need a specific item... you don't want to recompile the library recomputing the indices... So you just keep it as it as is.
I want this kind of video more. Good work.
As someone who does QA, I completely understand why it's in there. It is a pain in the ass when even fix a normal bug, that can completely break unrelated system thanks to code dependencies. We have had situations where fixing a weapons damage has broken crafting another. I wouldn't complain about extra stuff on the disc or bugs, we try our best and at the end of the day if money isn't made than we don't get paid. So sometimes games are shipped buggy because you have weeks or even months from the time of submission to the time of actually release to the public, hence day 1 patches. A game can take many weeks to be pushed through sony and especially disc based games. Where you have to manufacture everything and have it shipped globally. All the while those weeks and months that process takes you are still finding new game breaking issues everyday. So give the devs a break, we try really hard.
You can say whatever you want, but Im pretty sure that the guys in rockstar games will be very careful on leaving unused content in their games especially sexual content, I mean if that hot coffe thing was not on purpose anyways.
Debug rooms for testing game mechanics when the full game is load, then just removing the access door.
From what I have learnt writing various amounts of code in javascript, it is a pain in the ass when removing an item that ties in with bits of other code. For example in a minecraft mod, if a crafting recipe calls for an item that is removed, it will give an error. If you have an item that is required in recipes, multiblocks, etc it will give many errors, and sometimes render whole scripts useless, and very difficult to get working again without the "asset" It would put an error where ever your block/item is actually being registered, the block/item class, where ever it is being called upon, so crafting recipes, multiblocks, if your mod implements electricity apis' then that would ruin the class for a manager of cables (depending on how you wrote it) and numerous other things.
I'm a website developer and totally understand the extra code left in final products as long as the version the customer sees is working just fine
Sometimes you just build random shiz, just to see what a room / character would look if decorated differently.
Sometimes canceled Easter eggs probably
Also canceled area of levels or room dumping grounds for deleting
as an app dev let me say this- ive seen a couple of comments here asking about a things that leads me to this point- yeah when you're working on something small like a 2mb app you're not gonna have many problems removing extra code, that's a 45min-1hr job, but when you're working on a giant ass video game like grand theft auto it makes sense not to waste time
The way you describe it makes sense. The one thing I've never understood though is why developers never finish some of the code. I mean from a financial stand point doesn't it make more sense to release DLC that you only had to finish rather than spend time developing an entirely new thing?
lovin all the falcon content y'all
A good additional tidbit would be from the PS1 days - some studios structured the order of data written on the physical media, using a big blank file at the beginning of the disc, so that the real content - now sitting in the outer section of the disc - can be read and loaded faster.
I love unused content. Makes for fun discoveries, like the weird room in the water of GTAV
thank you for answering this question. I always wondered why there was unused stuff in games thank you so much. also nice video as always.
Yeah, that honestly doesn't surprise me, It's like if you're drawing an art piece in photoshop, you're gonna do it in layers, and you're going to be piling on the layers as you go, the extra rooms and stuff of this scenario are basically layers right at the bottom, the rough draft layers, where sure, you may have mistakes and it may not look pretty, but those layers have things on them that you need, as they can also be contributing to the overall look, and so working to get rid of those layers entirely would be a waste of time, because it wouldn't really affect the art piece, and it's not like anyone is going to be able to see the those layers really unless they have access to more than just a picture file of the art piece.
Much easier to comment out a call to a sub or procedure that you have decided to not utilize than it is to just remove the called procedure and then discover that "Oh hey, Bob six months ago found that procedure to be really useful and used it 400 times in his parts of the project." Which now ceases to function entirely or freezes inexplicably because someone removed that code because it was "Not needed after all".
Hell, another good reason is just that people forget it's still in there. Simply put games are big and take a long time to make and if someone had to go through every asset in a game and see if it's in the final game would take forever. While there are automated systems to tell if an asset is referenced some how that doesn't mean it's possible to know it's being used or remember if it's being use.
Imagine your making a shooter and there is some kind of beach level, your artists make a sand being shot particle system and the game play programmer adds the functionality when a sandy surface is shot use that particle system. Later on in development they decided the beach level is cut and no other level has sand in it. Now as the game play programmer, is the thought "I'd better remove the sand particle system" in your mind. Probably not, you have more important things to worry about.
Hell you might even do a quick look to see which particle systems should be removed and you come across "Wizard Spell" particle and think we cut the wizard long ago and take it out and then you come across "sand shot" particle and think nothing of it because it seems like something that should just be there.
*FALCON* I would've used Jenga instead of house of cards,but great video as always, & thanks for your time.
the older forza games have the ability to upgrade cars with quad turbos but the feature was removed in the final version before release. its still possible with mods however.
Bethesda does this a lot. but there is an added bonus for them to leave it in: modders. they will immediately data mine the entire game and, quite often, be able to resurrect the cut content. with most bethesda games is a 'cutting room floor' mod that opens up a lot of the stuff bethesda didnt have time to finish, or stuff that was too buggy to use.
"if it's not broken, why fix it?"
pretty much sums it up
a room or item may not be used or accessible but it can still be redone in a dlc to be released at a later point and if not maybe it can be broke down to be used as another item or to save time later as a templateof sorts and removing this source room or item would corrupt anything made using it as a base for its existence in scientific terms removing it is like splitting an atom it will destroy all in its path and create a chain reaction
I once found a cave in skyrim where I swam to the very bottom, clipped through a wall and spawned in a completely different part of the map in a weird room with no way out or in.
I remember the glitch in cod modern warfare 2 (or 4 I cant remember) where you could leave the map I remember seeing a fire struck you could walk into with textures on the inside even though you didnt go there at all during the game
another good reason for junk data is what the crash bandicoot team did, pushing the final product to the edge of a disc makes it read faster. hardly matters nowadays but hey you never know when it might help.
Somehow he listed every type of thing video games come on 3:15 except Cartridges. you know those things that EVERY Nintendo console has used outside of Gamecube/Wii/WiiU
the data left on games was for intentional use but after playing the games by testers and creators they decide to block it off as its cheaper and quicker then coding the whole room floor or level there is so many games with extra content nobody would be able to find or even name them all
Good example of an unused data is from 007 Goldeneye's abandoned gun turret and man made island behind the Dam in the first level of the game.
A lot of development tools include dependency/package generators that check for leftover files that're never used, ever. These orphaned files are simply deleted and the resource files rebuilt. If anything's missing, you'll be told. These tiny tools are so basic and common, sometimes I wonder why people are so lazy and don't use them. In fact, if these tools didn't exist, the first thing I'd do is write one. It's simply just a checker that finds all assets referenced, and drops everything else.
Another reason for cut or dummied out content is often for balance, like they would remove weapons because they could be redundant or too powerful. Instead of leaving a hole in the list of weapons, like would happen if they removed it entirely, then they can simply dummy it out and make sure that no monsters or shops have that weapon as a reward.
Like you said though, there's a good part of it is due to many teams working separately, so when they want to make the final product, they have to make decisions and rearrange things. One example of this is FF7. There are a few cases in that game that are of interest.
There's a whole scene that was scrapped out in Midgar's Slum 7. Normally it's triggered by Cloud exiting the Seventh Heaven, but the game doesn't normally let you do it. But the code and scene are still there if you cheat your way. The japanese text is still there. The scene itself is more or less a retelling of events later explained in the game, so they probably removed this scene for story cohesion.
Another case of interest, entering Nibelheim the first time will have comments from your party members. All of your party members have comments, even translated... EVEN if they are not supposed to be in your team yet, like Cid or Vincent for example. This could be a case that they reworked in which order the events happen or which order the villages are visited.
Another thing is Aerith has animations for all attacks in the game, even spells and abilities that you couldn't get at the point she's still in your party. Again it would be troublesome to either code her to not have those animations, or removing them. She also has translated lines in areas after she leaves your party, if you hack or use the debug room to add her to your party. One such example is the mountain lodge. So it's quite possible that events were coded ahead of time, but the final product changed the order of things.
The last point of interest is that famous scene where Aerith meets Sephiroth. Sephiroth's gloves disappear, the angle of the sword, the lack of blood... it's possible that they took several CGI scenes and made a single larger one with it, since it doesn't seem consistent. The remake will hopefully make it more cohesive.
Coder here (Objective-C, C++, C#, Java) You are right i sometimes work on huge projects (Have worked on some games but mainly software) And we leave in huge chunks of code all the time. Weather it be for time or 1 thing is dependent on that section of code and it would be a waste of time to rewrite the entire code just to shrink it down a few lines. Yes it took a lot of time to write the original code but when you start adding revisions to a piece of code that does not bother anything you start adding massive amounts of time. And you are right in my early days of coding i used to be a perfectionist however as time went on i noticed it wasn't worth it. We always used to call it Ghetto code just the term we used for code that was put together in such a way that only the original developer knows what the hell it did, or how to use it right. There is no payoff to writing a streamlined piece of code when no one is going to see it (Unless you are doing API or SDK work for another company wanna make your work look good so you get more contracts). Your argument is %100 valid and true from my view and experience.
0:34 A LEMMiNO video in the recommended of gameranx? HELL YES!
Absolutely true - also, this content may be later used in an update, so it is just left there for future use :) .
Super interesting question that I've always thought. Thanks gameranx!
Portal2 had some very interesting stuff in its unused files/assets
Well, that was an interesting watch. Thanks gameranx.
also like gta 5 online a lot of the extra rooms and stuff are used for future dlc's content or maybe used for certain jobs or missions
So I code websites, and this is very much the case. But there's other reasons why I'll leave extra code in the server, and thats when I use code previously made (not like stolen code but like older code I made, rubygems, etc) and paste it over to implement a certain feature, it's often that the code doesn't fit quite right the way I want. So instead of trying to write the code again, I'll stitch together and add to the code I have. But there will likely be code thats not used, and I may not know it even exists. It's not worth my time to look for it, so I publish it like it is. If it works, and it works well, why the hell would I change that.
The only unused content I didn't mind were the Ratchet and Clank games because they have the insomniac museums that explain why certain things didn't make it in the game.
Besides being a perfectionist, the only real benefit of taking time to remove these unused stuff is to save file space as they are basically "a waste of space" however that only really matters if you've run out of space on the disk & need to make room for more assets.
While not common, some games have a decent amount of file space being wasted with unused assets....then again with how a lot of game companies do DLC, it's more common than it used to be.
On the subject of Ocarina of Time, wish you showed off the Airwing enemy from Star Fox which has the ability to blast you with lasers, they even explode when they hit the ground after you shoot them down with the Slingshot or with Arrows.
Most speculate that it was used to test the Fire Temple Boss because of how it flies in the air, but the model & lasers must've been a bonus thing for the developers. Very easy to get into the game with GameShark Codes to modify what object spawns when entering a room.
One of the cooler unused bits in the game.
This is very informative good work guys.. this should humble some game players too RESPECT WORKERS LABOR.
I still remember finding a CGA PC game called Pop Corn (breakout clone) on the Little Big Adventure 2 CD Rom all those years ago! If that's not an interesting easter egg, I don't know what is!
This is the kind of shit why i subscribed to your channel.
I wonder if the hot coffee would have broken anything had it been removed...
I think there should be an inside protocol to tell programmers to start deleting and debugging game Code to make sure it’s good when they want to have this thing removed at that moment, instead of at the end of development.
as long as bugs don't ruin an experience by getting in the way of something, or it's very clear you'd have to go out of your way to activate the bug, then bugs are awesome, they're hilarious and fun to fuck around with
Can you do a video of the best deals in the Steam Summer Sale?
This video reminds me of how the channel "Extra Credits" structured their video on why Mass Effect Andromeda's facial animations didn't work at release.
GTA San Andreas had the same thing too. I think it was called going to heaven...where you see so many in game assets in the sky...you could even recognize some assets that were used in game.