What if Bionicle Heroes was a First-Person Shooter?

[Hapori Tohu]

A

on the GameHut YouTube channel goes behind-the-scenes with an early build of a level of the Bionicle Heroes game (GameHut was created by TT Games founder Jon Burton). Most notably, the video tells the story of how the third-person shooter was once a first-person shooter, where you would act as the Bionicle character instead of watching the character. The way ESRB ratings worked in 2006, the first-person shooter game would have received a T (Teen) or M (Mature) rating, which would have been a no-go for LEGO, which was looking for an E (Everyone) or E10+ rating.

 

View the full article

[CHTrilogy]

They might've gotten away with it, Chex Quest did.

[Distorted]

This is interesting, because the version of Bionicle Heroes released on he Nintendo DS was a first person shooter. I wonder if they started developing the DS version while the version on other platforms was still first-person?

[Chronicler06]

Having played the official game so often, I was able to quickly recognize the content of this "prototype" level. It's apparently an early version of levels 2 and 3 of Thok's Mountain. In fact, now that I think about it, I did find it rather interesting how for all four levels of each of the six areas, the beginning and ending locations of each successive level were very similar, as if to give the impression that you're continuing through the area right where you left off. If this early version is any indication, it looks like the original plan was to have the six areas each be just one really long level, but were later broken up into four separate levels.

 

Based on how you move around and interact in this game, it totally makes sense to me that the initial plan in the prototype version would be a basic first-person shooter. Personally, I'm glad the final version is the close-in third-person shooter style, because it's just easier to identify which Toa is currently selected than what I saw in this video. Though it certainly was quite a surprise to find out the reason such a change had to be made was because just the simple difference in perspective was all it took to dramatically raise the rating. (It had to be the perspective, because destroying enemies in the prototype version is actually not much different from the final version; they just simply turn into a bunch of scattered pieces.)

 

I also noticed that the prototype version had Rahkshi as minor enemies, though I didn't see any Vahki like the final version does, so I guess the later were added in so the former could be used as boss fights.

[Iver]

It looks a lot like the DS version, which was a pretty good game. I was surprised by the use of a secondary blast from the left hand that shot pieces. I guess that was supposed to be a backup for when your weapon overheated, with the caveat that it would cost money to shoot. I guess some of the more annoying elements of Bionicle Heroes can be chalked up to the ESRB, since Bionicle Heroes was originally supposed to have first person controls.

[Scrapmetaru]

Am I the only one whose noticed that the standard Tt game setup would have made for a game that actually told the year's story, and would've been a jumping-on point when Bionicle definitely needed it? Then again, the Tt games are always made of stories that have been released for a while, so good luck having it all written in time. And I doubt trying to make a canonical game would've reigned in Greg.