tatu wrote:
I agree with AS2 very likely was bigger, terrain wise. However, I do not believe they ever developed it with that size, like they did with JR. JR's size got smaller, but AS2 got cut off. We do not know when they started working on the Ascient levels either. In build 55, both BE and SUM is at their really early stage so it is possible Ascient wasn't really started either.
Yeah, I definitely agree with this.
From looking at the terrain, it seems AS1 is fairly close to its original terrain iteration with minimal editing - it does appear clear to me that the area near the shore to the left of the starting valley in retail was originally much more open, as you can see some poorly edited terrain near the end of that ridge, and of course the valley beneath the Mayan Village was definitely open at one point as well. Whether they actually put any effort into these areas before cutting them aside from some trees, I have no idea.
AS2 on the other hand seems to have originally been intended to be much more open, but was cut down in size before much work was done on it at all. You can tell because there are far less off-the-map objects in this level, and the terrain editing isn't half as janky as it is in most other levels where the terrain was obviously edited late in production (compare the AS2 cliffs to the added ones in JR, or even the ridge next to the Geo Plant in B96 PV - it looks a lot cleaner polycount-wise and has actual TrnObjs). It seems that AS2 was already small by the time they'd started much work on it.
That being said, opening up what I believe may have been the intended size of the AS levels in the early days of Trespasser is definitely a goal of the Isla Sorna project...for instance, the cliffs to your left in the valleys of AS2 would be gone so that the valleys reach all the way down to the ocean. There probably wouldn't be much of interest down there, maybe an alternative way around the level, but I think visually it will look quite nice, and of course most of our other levels are expanded massively anyway compared to the B96 versions. Doesn't help that we don't have a lot of information regarding the final levels of the game in the walkthrough!