Thanks to the4thsonichero for the subtitles! Fixed by MSFan222! No credits needed. After finishing Banjo-Kazooie, the next logical step for me was to play Banjo Tooie, one of the few video game sequels done right. Tooie added new transformations, new moves, new gameplay mechanics, bigger worlds, more characters, returning characters, new playable characters and so much more! When Rareware did a sequel they did it right. But sadly, Rare isn't the same as it used to be. But lucky for us, we now have Playtonic Games. And as you've likely heard they're making a new game That's like Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie, called Yooka-Laylee. And thanks to their Kickstarter campaign receiving overwhelming support we will be playing this game one day in the future. But back to Banjo-Tooie. As with many sequels there aren't as many changes because, well... they've usually got everything figured out by them. And not only that, the stuff that did change in Banjo-Tooie are just kind of confusing. And it's hard to come up with a theory of why they were removed. So instead of theorizing and potentially getting everything wrong, I decided to go straight to the source. And thankfully, Gavin Price, Steven Hurst, and Steve Mayles who work at Playtonic and originally helped create Tooie. Have been a tremendous help in this video. So if you're listening guys, thanks again. So on this episode of Beta64, we're going to talk about the beta of Banjo-Tooie. Banjo-Tooie began development in June of 1998 and was designed by Gregg Males There's very very limited info on the development of Kazooie's sequel. And where info is found, so are rumors and errors. Luckily, I called him for some help to clear things up. First off... I found on a website that Tooie was originally developed for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (DD). This is false according to Steven Hurst, who was the lead environment artist for Tooie and Kazooie. He said that the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive was never on the table for Tooie. In fact, after trying the 64 Disk Drive with Project Dream, the add-on was pretty much what Steven called a dead duck. and even Banjo-Kazooie wasn't considered for the Disk Drive either. Luckily, that's not all. I managed to come across roughly three and a half minutes of early beta footage from E3 2000. And there were quite a few things I noticed in the footage that I couldn't find mention anywhere else. Firstly, at this point, you'll notice that the subtitles are the same font size in color as the title font. Instead of in the final game where it's pink and much smaller. Notice also that there is a dash between quarter and final, which is missing in the final game. You might also notice that a Jinjo says stuff at the beginning with Bottles' voice. Which is different from the final, but this isn't actually a big deal. Thanks to Gavin's help and others, I learned that the characters faces and voices for new characters, use the older character icons and voices as placeholders. So this Jinjo here, is just a placeholder. However what he does say is slightly different than what's in the final game. Once the game starts, you'll notice that the timer uses the old Kazooie icon instead of the new Grunty one. Also, all of the character icons on top are crocodiles. But I assume those were just placeholders as well. And speaking of placeholders, I want to make sure to mention that Bottles was a placeholder for Jamjars. And Bottles always meant to die at the beginning of the game. So when you see Bottles tell Banjo and Kazooie how to split up, just know that this was just a placeholder. In the E3 Demo, Banjo and Kazooie have all eggs available, as well as all moves from the game. Gavin tells me that these were all unlocked specifically for the demo, and not meant for the final game, which makes a lot of sense. The E3 Demo also had multiplayer modes that you could try out. If you look at this footage, you'll see Banjo and Kazooie. What's so different about that you ask? Well, look at the players. Notice that they are all the same color. Though they're all the same character! In the final game, if everyone played as Banjo and Kazooie, They would be different colors. Which was a good idea to include into the final game to keep people from getting confused on who's who. Some footage from E3 of the Saucer of Peril Ride, shows a very small change. The point numbers shown when you shoot a target are coloured slightly darker in the final game than the beta. Not a big change, but a change nonetheless. The last change I found in the E3 footage, is the health icon for Banjo and Kazooie. The beta used the original icon from the first game, while the final game used a new icon that was designed for Tooie. There are some changes in screenshots as well. One such change is the Warp Pad. Instead of a swirl, it was originally a B and T. Which... means Banjo-Kazooie! Wait, what, no. Banjo-Tooie. Darn it! Also, Jolly's Juice was originally called Dud Beer. Humba Wumba went through the most changes, I think. First up, she originally wore a red dress, and a mask. At least on her character icon. And lastly, Wumba also used Mumbo Tokens instead of Glowbos. And perhaps Mumbo did too... Now let's move on to unused objects in Banjo-Tooie. First there are two sounds that were left over from Kazooie. The first one is the sound for collecting the final Jiggy in the world and opening a note door. But in Tooie there are no Note Doors. Nor is there any special sounds that play for collecting the final Jiggy in the world! Also, there is another leftover sound from Kazooie, that was used when collecting an extra life. But Tooie has no lives, so it wasn't used. Now there's a chance that these sounds were never planned to be used, and just every sound from Kazooie was put in the game. Leaving these leftovers. It happens all the time. Now let's move on to unused graphics, shall we? This one is used whenever you use the Banjo-Van in an area where the health bar is forced onto the screen. Since the Banjo-Van can't get hurt in Witchyworld, the health bar never appears. According to Steve Mayles, who is the father of Banjo-Kazooie, This icon was likely a placeholder created for when the character doesn't have a rendered head. So this icon was not just meant for the Banjo-Van, but also for any character without a head icon. Some unused objects were found in Banjo-Tooie as well. These appear to be of a floor or ceiling and something with three doors. Steven Hurst thinks that these were simply test objects, used by one of the programmers to.... test something out. In the end, he definitely believes that these were never meant to actually use in the game. The next thing we're going to check out is what appears to be an unused animation for the Banjo-Van. One of it's swimming. Now of course there's no water accessible by the truck in Witchyworld. Fact the only water that is in the world is in the Dive of Death. Which I don't see why it would have been planned to be accessible by the Banjo-Van. So, why is the animation there? Steve Mayles seems to have the answer. It isn't there. He's very confident that there was no swimming animation for the Banjo-Van as there was no water ever planned for Witchyworld. He believes that the van is using the same animation Banjo uses in Bear Form which makes sense, because some of the joints he says were named the same and thrusly, when used they will move around, but very randomly... Draw your attention to the front wheels. Crazy random, right? Of all this the biggest thing scrapped in Banjo-Tooie is the game mode, "Bottles' Revenge". Which you probably heard from my interview with Playtonic Games, but now it's time for me to give you some more details. "Bottles' Revenge" was a mode in Tooie that allowed a second player to terrorize, or assist the first player by using Bottles' ghost to possess monsters and even originally bosses! Bottles' Revenge was scrapped because of time constraints during debugging. But this mode did work quite well according to the developers. In fact this mode works so well, that you can actually play through the final game with the mode enabled. Thanks to a GameShark code. This mode even has a cool opening cutscene. Which I recorded on my console. That i'll show you now, in full. Even with the Gameshark enabled though, you can't control bosses in the game. It turns out the developers only had gotten Old King Coal programmed into this mode. But this actually isn't in the final game at all. Not even accessible by Gameshark. It's a shame really. It would have been pretty fun! So that's the beta of Banjo-Tooie. Of everything that was removed, it's really sad to see Bottles' Revenge had to be cut. Such a mode would have been amazing to play with friends. How more amazing what Tooie been if you could play with two people in story mode? Still, I hold no grudges. And plus, thanks to the Gameshark code We can still have those fun times within know they were missing. So this has been Beta64 with the Banjo-Tooie Beta. Thanks for watching.
The idea of looking at beta version games and comparing their differences with the release is cool, but most of these are, "This color's subtexted changed, woah" and "They used a different icon here, amazing"
It would be cool if they talked about game features they cut instead of just changing placeholders. The only really cool thing he featured in this video was the Bottles Revenge feature that was scrapped.
Funny story about this game. I played it when I was like 8 or something. One of the levels didn't have a front entrance, and you had to find the secret way of getting in. There was a train you could activate that would take you inside the level, but for some reason my pathetic 8-year old brain thought this was the easy solution they built in for people that weren't smart enough to figure out the real solution.
I spent FOUR DAYS circling the level, trying to find the "real" solution. It didn't help that there were a number of ways you could almost make it, but your jump came up short. Eventually, I gave up and thought to myself "Maybe the train really is the solution." So I hopped on the train and got in the level. The second I get off the train, alarms start going off saying INTRUDER ALERT, and I was like "OH SHIT, I was right the first time!" I genuinely thought I had screwed something up.
I didn't figure out that that really was the solution until years later.
Gametrailers' Pop Fiction already did a pretty decent episode on cut content from BK/BT, including the "cart swap" method which this video for some reason doesn't even mention.
For anyone interested in more stuff like this, Gregg Mayles, the lead designer for Banjo Kazooie/Tooie has recently been posting some early level designs to his twitter.
Most notable is probably the cut Castle level from Tooie (I think it survived in Cauldron Keep but was just really cutback), but he has designs for a lot of other levels like Grunty Industries, and even early concepts for Banjo Kazooie there.
He's been posting lots of other early designs and concepts that I'm too lazy to link, so his twitter is worth checking out if that stuff interests you.
They cut features from Tooie? I felt the released product suffered the same problem as DK64: Too much shit. Both games needed to be scaled down a bit. Fewer features and some smaller environments. It would have helped the framerate a lot.