Onslaught Design Diary Part 3 : Cut ideas and how the game compares to the initial concept

I am doing this dev diary about 2 things. Onslaught's Concept vs Final Version and also how many ideas were cut from the final version. Onslaught had SHIT TONS of cut ideas. It's crazy. To go into them all would make the whole post insanely long. Too Long in fact for this site. At first our idea was filled with a lot of bland Duke3d/shadow warrior/blood styled stuff. One liners, gory deaths, etc. Then in 1997 things changed. Slowly realism was being included into the equation. I wanted realistic bullet damage and health bars for all of bastards body parts. I also wanted 3d textures and deformable terrain. I also wanted "realistic" post apocalyptic weather in the game. Realistic in quotes because it's not really THAT realistic in the first place. But there were gonna be ice and fire tornado's you would have to avoid by staying indoors. Many vehicle ideas were cut from the game due to the fact Zdoom Cannot do vehicles. Many were cut like flying a blimp from and underwater base to baltimore, driving a mack truck, driving a monster truck over packed cars on a NYC freeway, driving mechs, driving motorcycles, etc. A lot were taken out. Ideas for the character were also taken out. You were at one point being able to change your shirt you were wearing under your armor to be whatever metal band shirt you wanted. This simply could not be done. You also had a melee attack, a bitchslap of some kind with a metallic arm. Many weapon ideas were cut because they could not be done. Some were heavily altered to make them doable in zdoom. The spiked yoyo, the cattle prod and some others were cut. Now these things definitely are missed by me and Hitman213. He wanted his weapon ideas so badly to be put in the final game, but only 3-4 made it but many of his great ideas simply could not be re-created because things resembling them don't exist on the realm667 beastiary. I had to rely on beastiary shit for guns and enemies because I simply cannot draw for shit.

The level size was originally going to be gigantic and would have driveable vehicles capable of driving you from one city end to another in massive city sized levels. It was crazy really, and way too much for even now. The game however, if you ask me lives up to it's design rather nicely. Sure a lot didn't make it, but I am happy with the result. It's still fun, I like playing it, and lots of people on twitter like it. Hitman213 has never played it yet but he will soon enough I hope...... the Guns really live up to their initial design. The enemies are a bit different but they still work well. A lot made it into the final design. The levels look amazing for doom engine levels and have amazing city designs. The Music is fantastic and is 100% a metal soundtrack for a metal game. The voiceovers are great and make the character sound like a total badass. The only thing that is not great is the difficulty. At times it is tedious as hell, and lots of instakilling enemies don't help. It was designed to be hard, but in reality it's too hard. Besides that it's fine. I like it a lot. It came out good.