Portal 2 is a first-person-shooter-type-puzzle game. Developed for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC and released by Valve sometime in April 2011. Some beta information were shared thanks to interviews and by fans of the game, but sadly no screenshots are currently available.
At some point during the development, the player would have been allowed to use a type of gel that could give the ability to walk on walls. The gel was cut due to the fact it could have cause motion sickness.
Quoting the article from www.escapistmagazine.com:
Portal 2 writer Erik Wolpaw has revealed that Valve originally planned to include a gel that let you walk on walls in Portal 2, but dropped it after it made people queasy.
Wolpaw said that the gel had added a nice gameplay twist, but that it was incredibly disorientating. He added that nausea was a constant concern when developing first person games, so the decision was made to drop the gel. He added that Valve was so concerned about the possibility of Portal 2 making people nauseous in general – a very real threat in a game that has so many rapid changes in position and perspective – that it adjusted the frame rate and movement to try and minimize the effects. Wolpaw said that this action on Valve’s part should help even people who normally do suffer from FPS motion sickness to enjoy the game
Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi … als-Writer
Another piece of information comes from an interview with Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton about portal 2’s early story scripts. Originally portal 2 was to be a prequel rather than a sequel and Cave Johnson was amuch more important character in the game originally. GLaDOS wasn’t in the early scripts of the game.
Quoting the article from www.escapistmagazine.com:
Portal 2 writers Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton revealed in a recent interview that the game nearly included nothing that we knew and loved from the original Portal, because none of it existed yet.
Speaking to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Pinkerton said that Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science featured in Portal 2, was once a much more important character in the game. “At one point two years ago some Cave Johnson dialogue got leaked – so I can now tell you, two years ago Cave was the bad guy in Portal 2 and GLaDOS wasn’t in the game,” he said. “It was a prequel. We liked the character enough that we snuck him into this.”
Source: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi … -a-Prequel
Also, as linked to us by Robert Seddon, kotaku published a story about a removed competitive multiplayer more:
“Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer,” Valve’s Erik “Old Man Murray” Wolpaw told 1UP.
“We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running — the best way to describe it is sort of Speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analogy. And it quickly became apparent that while it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path.”
As noticed by user caseyfam, wheatley has a different voice in the E3 demo. It was also noticed that wheatley says something different in comparison to the final, same context, just different wording.
From Shacknews we can read some more beta differences:
a rare look at the game’s canned competitive multiplayer mode. “While it’s fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that,” Wolpaw explained. “It quickly just devolves into pure chaos.”
The original concept for Portal 2 featured a different main character, but the concept behind how the game would start was largely the same. Here, the player is waking up in a gorgeous environment designed to look like paradise–but it quickly falls apart in The Truman Show-fashion, revealing that the player has been trapped in a relaxation chamber for an unknown period of time.
Beta images:
E3 Beta Demo:
E3: Hey, hey lady! Over here. Aw good, you’re back. I thought maybe you’d tried to escape without me. Pop a portal over there. Oh thanks. Now they told me, I’m never never ever to disengage myself from this rail or I’ll die. But, we’re out of options here, so get ready to catch me on the off chance that I’m not dead the moment I pop off these things. On 3 ready? 1,2,3…
Final: Hey, Oi oi! I’m up here! Oh brilliant. You did find a portal gun! Aw, you know what? It just goes to show: people with brain damage are the real heroes in the end aren’t they? At the end of the day. Brave. Pop a portal on that wall behind me there and I’ll meet you on the other side of the room. Okay, listen, let me lay something on you here. It’s pretty heavy. They told me NEVER NEVER EVER to disengage myself from my Management Rail, or I would die. But we’re out of options here. So get ready to catch me, alright, on the off change that I’m not dead the moment I pop off this thing. On 3 ready? 1,2,3…
Finally we have a cut character from Portal 2. The characters name is MEL (as seen to the right of this paragraph). Mel can be found in games files and she was originally meant to be used/controlled by the PC in co-op. Instead the co-op mode featured two robots (ATLAS & P-Body) and the human test subjects were cut from the co-op mode entirely. The player can only control the human test subject, Chell, in the single player campaign.
Source of the image and info: http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Mel
Update: May 23, 2011:
Thanks to user Eris, it has been discovered that within the games files there is unused dialog of GLaDOS. The video below mentions garfield the comic book cat and how GLaDOS tweaked it to help make the robots more “human” (which was the co-op plot before it was changed to just finding humans). You can view the unused dialog in the video below:
The other video of GLaDOS unused dialog mainly consists of garbled messages, gibberish really. You can video the below:
Additionally, there are several functional prop items that didn’t make the final cut but remained in the code, including a set of collapsible furniture and several light-up indicators.
As pointed out by: bari, In one of the video, as posted on VALVe’S youtube channel, there were going to be a diversity vent. The vent would suck objects up into tubes. The diversity tubes were cut from the game. You can watch the diversity vent in action in the video below:
In addition, unused dialogue for Caroline can be found in the game’s files. Some of the lines were removed; Ellen McLain cried while recording them, and J.K. Simmons refused to record his lines because it “seemed too much like rape to him.” You can view the video below:
Thanks to Eris & bari for their additions to this article.