By Rob Nelson gave Famitsu a big interview, and the most talked-about detail from it is a feature the game doesn’t have. Rumour The safehouse was meant to be fully interactive: drop a bottle on the floor and it stays there, to the end of the game if you like.
It got cut because of Lucia. Jason lives with her, and the idea was that she’d get angry about the mess. So it wasn’t the engine that couldn’t handle it — the character didn’t allow it. I’ve been in game development for eleven years and I’ve never once seen that priority: at reviews, the feature usually wins, not the heroine’s personality.
What else is in the interview:
- Kissing the sleeping Lucia on the forehead, or fixing her blanket, adds to the relationship. Rumour
- Almost any heist can be done without killing: a shout keeps hostages down, a shot near the feet keeps guards back.
- Any heist can be done in full stealth. Rumour
- The map shows in advance how much a job will pay.
- Outfits come in several thousand variants — that one Nelson confirmed himself.
The shooting near feet, the job prices on the map and the thousands of outfits are from the interview itself. The bottle, the kiss and the stealth are from retellings, which is why they carry the rumour tags. I hope the retellings are right: the bottle story is too good to turn out to be made up.