Portal 2 Post-Mortem

[Chris D]

Valve have been at the Game Developers Conference this week. Overall, they been pretty quiet about things. Aside from the announcement by Razer that their Hydra controller will support over 250 Steam games, there hasn't been much from Valve at all; even though it was this time last year that Valve announced Steam Big Picture Mode and all of the recent talk of a console.

Chet Faliszek and Eric Wolpaw, however, have provided an entertaining post-mortem of Portal 2. In an article entitled The Portal 2 that never was, Eurogamer has documented the best bits of the post-mortem which reveals that Wheatley was originally going to die, we nearly ended up with a competitive multiplayer mode and there was nearly such a thing called a "Morgan Freeman" sphere.

"As an example, this was one of them, something called the Morgan Freeman sphere," said Wolpaw, showing a still of a sphere sitting on a pedestal in an empty room. "So he'd been sitting on that little pedestal for a few centuries, and he was just incredibly, incredibly wise - but only about the 20 by 20 space that he was in.

"So as soon as you dragged him 22 feet out of the room, his mind was blown and he was pretty much useless. Although as the game progressed, he eventually got his feet under him and started delivering some homespun wisdom that all related back to this 20 by 20 space."

The rest of the article is even better, so head on over to Eurogamer to read more.

Check out the original Portal 2 intro sequence below:

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[MuToiD_MaN]

Heh. As fun as some of their ideas sound, I'm still happy with how it turned out.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

The Morgan Freeman sphere would have more than made up for how meh the rest of Portal 2 was. Damn. I want to see that character recycled into a future product.

 

[ríomhaire]

Love how the ending came about. The bad endings thing sounds like it would have been cool. Too bad it got dropped.

 

[Yorick]

The Morgan Freeman sphere sounds awesome. And the endings having their own songs makes me think of the Oompa Loompas, which would have been brilliant as well.

The Morgan Freeman sphere would have more than made up for how meh the rest of Portal 2 was. Damn. I want to see that character recycled into a future product.

What didn't you like about Portal 2? With the exception of it being piss easy, I thought it was better than 1 in every way.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

The whole campaign just felt sort of unnecessary to me. I thought Portal 1 ending with Chell out cold or possibly dead on the surface was a suitable enough ending. That was just me though. That said I liked the co-op campaign.

 

[Yorick]

That is fair enough. I actually still haven't played the Co-Op Campaign.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

I recommend it. It's pretty damn fun if you play it with someone you know who won't f*ck about way too much and cooperate with you.

 

[Chris D]

That is fair enough. I actually still haven't played the Co-Op Campaign.

We should play it together, Mike. Now we actually have time!

I completed the whole thing with Kadayi. True story.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Portal 2 co-op is immense fun.
Chris and Yorick, I demand that you two play it together, then review it.

 

[kineaesth]

The whole campaign just felt sort of unnecessary to me. I thought Portal 1 ending with Chell out cold or possibly dead on the surface was a suitable enough ending. That was just me though. That said I liked the co-op campaign.

I agree that Portal was the least deserving of an expansion - it was a perfect little vignette of a game, just the right length, just a little taste of this story and these characters and then it was over.

edit: why didn't that quote work???

 

[Yorick]

We should play it together, Mike. Now we actually have time!

I completed the whole thing with Kadayi. True story.

You poor ****.

Portal 2 co-op is immense fun.
Chris and Yorick, I demand that you two play it together, then review it.

Actually that could be a thing. I don't know how bad the lag would be, but we could certainly give it a try. Chris?

edit: why didn't that quote work???

You have to refresh the page for quotes to work, it's a bug I haven't found out how to fix yet.

 

[Chris D]

I'm up for that. I've always wanted some one on one action with Yorick.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Lag shouldn't be an issue. FishBulb is practically in a third-world country, and we managed to play okay.

 

[Yorick]

It's a date!

Lag shouldn't be an issue. FishBulb is practically in a third-world country, and we managed to play okay.

Oh please, Australia's not even a country.