Sea of Stars nearly had a skate park style boating mini-game
In an interview with us, Sabotage Studios has revealed some of the cut-content from the incredible RPG, Sea of Stars.
Speaking with Lyle Carr, creative director Thierry Boulanger explained one of the ideas that didn’t quite make the cut for the final version of Sea of Stars. Boulanger explained, “So in the boat you know we have the drifting and all that. Do you know Cobra Triangle on the NES? It’s like an isometric boat game where you’re drifting and jumping and spinning in the air, and I was like “we’re doing that”. The ocean was basically a skate park and there was a grappling hook on the boat, so you could grab a part of the world map and just start spinning and when you released you’d get a speed boost”.
Boulanger added: “You’d have to land jumps to get to certain areas and stuff like that, and it was super involved and really fun. But then looking at it we were like “hold on, what’s the actual mental bandwidth that we want you to put into this”, it’s like that makes no sense at all. It was still fun, but we ended up cutting it. I still feel like a grappling hook on a boat is a great pitch, but we had to kind of remove all that for the sake of simplicity”.
He also revealed that “Other than that no, I would say everything made it in. We did the eight iterations on everything, so there were things we didn’t keep from that”, explaining that “For instance there was always going to be the locks system, but it didn’t have the hindering, power removing mechanic for partially breaking them. You either broke them or you didn’t. So we had a game loop where it felt great to break the locks but you felt terrible when you just had one lock left. So we thought okay let’s just add a little power label so when you’re working through the locks you still feel like you’re doing something”.
You can read more in our massive Sea of Stars interview, coming very soon. We spoke about future plans, DLC, previous title The Messenger, and a whole lot more. So don’t miss the interview when it’s published. Check out our complete guide to the game, in the meantime.
Sea of Stars is out now for PC and consoles.
