Games that come with commentary tracks or documentaries on a game's development? Something in the vein of…

I'm fond of the designers' commentaries in-game, especially in HF2 as you pointed out. Ratchet & Clank series always have a Museum planet where you can go around and explore, learning about cut content and playing a few mini-games in the museums, for example in 'A Crack in Time', it had a minigame where you make a weapon/armour setup for two bulk aliens taking on robot foes in the office.

Duly noted for my own game

Also

Neither HL1 nor HL2 has commentaries. The Source games that have developer commentaries are HL2:E1, HL2:E2, Portal, TF2, L4D, L4D2 and Portal 2.

The commentary from L4D and half life are particularly good. Getting to hear lord Gaben's voice is icing on the cake.

One of my favorite bits is how they explain that for L4D they used light to help guide players through the level. Basically they used the light as a tool to subconsciously influence people to go a certain way in a stage. They also used this trick in half life 2 as well to some extent I believe.

I also like how they go over the focus testers and how they have to rework a stage over and over until it makes sense for the testers.

I remember that.

If you're going to do the "commentary mode" I would take notes from the source engine commentaries. Definitely comment on all your design choices and the reasons you did a particular thing design wise but I wouldn't turn the game into a documentary of itself unless you want to make a documentary about your game. Which is fine if that's what you're doing.

You may want to nullify the difficulty for the "commentary" run so the player can take their time and soak up the information you're trying to impart without having to worry about dying.

:ok_hand:

DooSex has a commentary that is triggered during gameplay and cutscenes(if you enable it in the extras).
I think some EA games like Harry Potter 6 and LotR Return of the King had extras with the cast talking about the game, though I think it was about the voice actors saying how much fun they had with it.

This is the coolest thing ever, now you have sent me on a downwards spiral of behind the scenes videos for PSX games.

I forgot about DE:HE. I enjoyed the commentary in that game but I'm afraid I might have missed a few spots given how you have to trigger the commentary nodes.

Life is strange has commentary, but I haven't listened to it.

Primordia has a lot of optional dev commentary.

What I like was that even though he was approaching the composition from a standoint outside of being involved with vidya prior, but still opted to sit down and actually play the games levels before composing for them. Rather than simply create tracks and hope one of them might fit a level better, he immersed himself in what sort of atmosphere the level gave him, and then composed with that in mind. I'm not sure if that's standard procedure or not, but if it's not, it ought to be. Strikes me that you'll never quite get as good of results as you could by just telling someone "we need five desert level themes and a boss theme by Thursday so we can develop the next set of levels" and handing them some concept art or screenshots for inspiration, compared to them actually sitting down and playing the otherwise finished (aside from the music) levels/game themselves.

Are those real, and if so, what game?

They're inspired by games I've played. If you want to hear stuff like this check out HL2 episode 2 and 3, L4D, Portal, TF2, and DE:HR.

I'm sure there are more games that include behind the scenes stuff but those are the one's I'm most familiar with.

The Ratchet and Clank games have these as Easter Eggs.
They're really interesting. I love seeing these types of things in games.

Dear Esther has one, the devs are full of themselves ("we created a new genre, people use the derogatory term "walking simulator" but we're proud of that" and all that shit). Boring game by boring people.

Rogue Squadron 3 (maybe the rest of the series) had one.

I miss when games also had scrapbooks and concept art hidden away as collectables if you aced the game.

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For all the controversy about those types of games in 2014, I haven't seen any big ones for about two years now. They may have created a new genre but it sure as fuck died quickly.

this is bait of the highest caliber

Bayonetta has a full commentated playthrough by Kamiya.

I just played through Bioshock remastered and they added in multiple "making of" films scattered throughout rapture. The best part is that the interview is with Geoff Keighley. It's interesting hearing from Ken about how they initially went from having the idea to develop a System Shock 2 game in spirit and how they came up with Rapture in the first place. It was at first going to be set during WWII with you being a hired gun for an organization that essentially kidnaps people that have been indoctrinated into cults, and transport them back to their families (which sounds a lot like Infinite). Then they scrapped that and instead decided you'd be some sort of supernatural monster slayer. It was going to have vampires and werewolves with various other creatures and from Ken's mouth said it would have been even more successful than Bioshock, but no publisher wanted to fund it. Then they eventually came up with Rapture and there still wasn't a publisher that wanted it, so they had some guy at Gamespot play their demo and write a preview about it. Apparently the article drew a lot of buzz and they eventually had multiple offers to fund their game.

There's also a lot of talk in it where they go over wanting to make Bioshock more of a fully fleshed out FPS instead of an RPG-lite since their previous concepts and actual playable demos of the game in the earlier stages were clunky, and I'm surprised they actually had footage of the early demos.

Overall it was worth a watch and another playthrough after the original release because after doing both it reaffirms my suspicions that 2K had some involvement in why Infinite turned out like it did at least gameplay-wise.

Halo 2's bonus disc is my favourite example of this, actually. It's got interviews about the various prototypes of Halo 1, with specific sections showing off and talking about concept's like the Blind Wolf, and even walking through shit like the original Mac demo and showing off what was real and what wasn't.

It also had like, an hour dedicated to covering Halo 2's development from start to finish, and it get's into some of the real nitty-gritty. That's actually the first time i've heard a dev say, in an official capacity, "oh that E3 demo? It was all fake, our dev cycle is fucked, we are in so much trouble, help us". You could see the light die in their eyes at some point, it was great.

There was one for Halo 3, and while it had some neat things like commentary over the Halo 1 and 2, but most of the content was shit like an RvB episode or some This Spartan Life videos. Neat and all, but the deepest it get's into the dev cycle is just the Viddocs that they already released online, and those are clearly pruned and trimmed down by the PR team.

Unfortunately, it seems every fucking limited edition has taken cues from the latter case rather than the former, if we even get a bonus dvd/blu ray at all. I'd buy tons of games, good or not, if they came with a full video of the dev cycle. Imagine something chronicling Duke Nukem Forever, from '99 to when it actually released. I'd actually buy the game for that.

I fucked up a few times there:

*There was also a disc for Halo 3
**It had some neat things like commentary over the Halo 1 and 2 cutscenes

Wrong video.

I know I'm going to get shit on because this isn't in-game commentary and it is "babby's first FPS", but I really enjoy hearing how much really went into Halo 2 and Halo 3's development. Whoever wrote the story should be shot out of a MAC cannon though.

Halo 3 had some of the best animation work I have seen in a game though, the dudes who made this game run at least 30fps (maybe 45?) consistently really deserve a shitload of credit. And Marty was a great composer, plus the sound assets were great. Gameplay of course was meh, custom games were really fun in 2 and 3 though. TOWER OF POWER. NIGGERS

Pic related had a developer commentary that you could enable after completing the game

It's really great since the lead designer of the original game also helped design Anniversary. So they talk about all of the differences between the original game and the remake and "what they wanted to do" originally vs what they were finally able to do with newer technology. A good example is how they talk about how the fmvs in the original game were rushed and awkward and they were able to redo the cutscenes in the remake closer to what they wanted.

There is interviews with GA employees in the first making of, i know that for sure. They also did one for Arc the Lad, but that was more about how Sony wouldn't really let them translate the games unless they did all 4 at once, and the nightmare associated with that. They didn't really talk about rewriting the game iirc, at best, they just talked about the technical improvements they did, how they improved the quality of the cutscenes and stuff like that.

The purpose of dev commentaries is to make you want to kill the playtesters.

didn't rare have one of these in one of their games ?

shame on y'all

They did a bunch of neat shit with the way they loaded the game in 3 too, which is why it actually runs worse if you decide to install it.

Okay, I can give them that sounding like a very daunting task, given how much Sony wanted to push 3D with both the later PS1 and at least some of the PS2 era. And given that Sony themselves own Arc the Lad, they'd have had absolute say. Then again, SCEA also went on to block various 3D PS2 games they thought had inferior graphics despite Sony NOT owning the rights to them (Shadow Tower Abyss, for example), and with the PSP had that regulation against bringing ports of PS1 games that didn't have some arbitrary amount (10%, I want to say, but I might be wrong) of changes/added content west, even in cases where a native PSP port would have done good giving under-available games a chance to to do well again. Tales of Eternia (which Europe at least got to see for the first time with the PSP port) and the Suikoden I and II bundle for instance (which nowhere in the west got, though that could have just as well been a decision on Konami's end. Of course, whether or not actual releases here, UMDs being kind of shit and all, would have been that good a thing is another story. At least Suikoden I and (five fucking years after the first got up) II got up on the PSN; PS1 Tales are still very much absent (even in Japan to my knowledge).

Define "improvements". Admittedly I'm not certain what all Arc the Lad would have seen, but I remember WDs deciding to fuck around with things like difficulty in some of their games. I mean, it's one thing to, say, do things like make combat flow, or text display, work faster, but it's another to arbitrarily decide "this game's too easy as is, so lets make it harder to avoid it being rental friendly out here".

No, they were fart-sniffing hacks and made a new subgenre. It's an adventure game, and a poor one at that

L4D1's commentary made me rage at one point. They mention that when first developed the game was an open world with multiple paths to choose from in each level. The commentary goes something like:

It made me livid because it took so much replay value out of the game. They basically cut half the play area just to rush it out. You can get outside of the map and see tons of interesting areas. Valve really botched that entire game and made it even worse in L4D2.

The FMVs were fucking great in the original though, so sounds like another Lucas clone to me.

Yeah, Rogue Leader was one of the first I saw that had them. Versions of SSX Tricky had video bonuses, most of them talking about the voice actors, but also giving some info on the development of things like sound cues and lowering the BGM to know you're off the beaten path and to add layers the better you do.

MGS4 has the podcast you can play though the ingame ipod, and it tells you about every level, and tells you about the secrets and such in it.

Mark of the Ninja special edition has these speech bubbles scattered throughout the stages. Hitting one with a dart brings up a few notes, they touch on art direction, why they did certain things, and just how hard and rewarding it was to design fun levels for the ninja.

Really?
Huh. I guess I now have a reason to go through it again.

No need, they're all on jewtube

It's honestly better if you play it, since the devs tell you to look at shit, or walk to a certain point, and then tell you about it, if I remember right.

Why not just upload yourself playing it and discussing it that way? Both work obviously but it's fun to see how the devs are often not that great at the games they make while showing off their intended perception of how the game should be played. Also embed isn't the full series. I think it's all on Platinums official channel if you look though.

Next time I'll read the thread. Didn't think those vids would be posted already.

Brothers in Arms (the first two anyway but HH is inferior) come with a bunch of extra content about development and the history behind the game. You unlock it as you progress through the difficulty settings. It's interesting stuff, you can see how old Gearbox put in the effort to visit archives and even Normandy itself and so the levels actually match up vaguely to real shit from 1944. Picrelated also shows they were planning the weird pistol side-plot from HH as far back as Road to Hill 30.

Robotech: Battlecry
Legacy of Kain Defiance
These are the only games I remember having documentary bits included with the game itself

Yeah too bad they fucking stopped updating it 4 FUCKING YEARS AGO.

I was doing a playthrough with the dev commentary on some time ago, I ended up angry after knowing about all the stuff they wanted to put in the game an ended up scrapped. I would've loved an Upper Hengsha and/or a Montreal city hub, dammit.

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I rememeber them showing off what was supposed to be an alpha or demo of the original's first chapter, where Sly is looking over everything and says, in a high nasaly voice, "This looks like a job for my cliiimb move" with the devs mimicking it and laughing. Shit like this is super comfy.

Have you actually watched some of these fmvs? They look amateurishly animated, even for the time. Tomb Raider 2's FMVs were leagues better.

Actors should be banned from doing commentary. They rarely have anything interesting to say.

Listening to the Halo devs talk about making the game was amazing. I really liked how they talked about the early for of the game when it was an RTS, and how they plainly admitted the game would have been trash if they went that route. Also, I remember them talking about releasing Halo 2, and described it as "crash landing a plane engulfed in flames."

What annoys me is that they could have fixed that problem instead by putting a sign or unique prop at the beginning, or remove the loop and turn it into a dead end or some shit.

I liked the commentary on the first 5 seasons of Red vs Blue, it really shows how different the production was on it before it became a huge sanitized piece of shit. Good commentary is hard to come by these days.

The first 5 seasons of RvB it was really hard to actually capture footage

Like iirc with the original Halo parts they weren't able to have different color players in the same shot since ctf was only red vs blue. It's why during the early episodes Doughnut has pure red armor and he only interacts with Caboose when holding the flag

This is also why they dropped the flag from the plot after this and why they changed Doughnuts armor color so it wouldn't be confusing.

After Machinima became ez to do with Halo 3 onwards they didn't have to work nearly as hard to make episodes. Red Vs Blue seasons 1-5 were a really good example of art from adversity.

It's part of the reason I don't entirely approve of the way they did the blu rays. They shot everything in Halo PC, which is entirely nescecary for an HD image given that the original source was low quality xbox footage, but it takes some of the magic away when you hear them talk about shots like launching the Warthog onto red base in season 1, or how they note that they ran into walls at some points due to how they had to aim at the ground to get the lowered weapons. I'd want to hear a seperate commentary on these HD versions so I can find out if they did it old school, or if they simply fudged some of these shots.

With the PC version reshots it's less of a big deal to me since it was the only way they could get it done in HD. And because the PC version is the exact same game just allowing for actual widescreen resolutions and removing the hud options. All they had to do was recreate the shots they already had.

There were a lot of mods for the PC version so a lot of the technical limitations they used to have weren't a factor. Especially how they used to do system link to record footage but with the PC version you can just use LAN

Obviously players are going to favor the optimal path in a multiplayer game where you constantly have teammates showing each other better ways to play.

They could have solved that problem by having the AI director close off different parts of the map in each run. That would force players to be more flexible and make decisions on the fly.

Of course, their playtesters would still get confused, so Valve would never do this.

You have to put it into context. This wasn't a singleplayer game it's a multiplayer game where players need to stick together. Having branching paths can cause players to get lost or split up unintentionally and make the game much more frustrating than it should be.

They stated they did something similar with the original half-life where it was planned to be much less linear with more branching paths but they found that players would get lost and frustrated very quickly so they made it more linear as a result.

Holy shit what a badass

🄸 🄵🄴🄴🄻 🄸🅃

That's the spice

Logically, I agree, but a lot of the little mishaps I mentioned that they bring up in commentary are then removed in the reshoots. It's a better product, but it removes some of the character that it had when they were just desperately trying to make the show work.

I think that's part of why Spyro's OSTs, especially the first, were so good. Rather than being disconnected from how the game works, and making music based off simply a premise, he invested himself directly in it, even if he did horrendously at actually playing it, to know first-hand how each area felt. That's a level of care that I'm not certain all that many composers are willing to reach for.

They actually did that in 2, except it was more like closing off different hallways and not actually changing the general route through the levels.

my favorite commentary is ridley scott on alien talking about how all the effects and sets were done