Above all I just want to see the story as it was originally envisioned. Lorne came up with an amazing story and there is sooooooo much we haven't seen yet. It would be a shame if the movies/story never gets made.

It's not exactly an original unique ingenius intricately woven plotline, though, Is it?

MLP meanwhile...

I never said it was, and it doesn't need to be, either.
Maybe Oddworld doesn't, but Havoc was saying it did, so why attack something completely unrelated and besides the point?

We all know Oddworld doesn't have an amazing plot (in a sense, MLP does. Ahahahahaha) but we don't like it for the plot, we like all it's other aspects. And just because it's plot is overused, doesn't mean it isn't a decent one.

MLP...has an amazing...plot...

...wow...I think I had a tiny heart attack when I finished reading that sentenc-ARRRGH!!!

I specifically meant to say that the mares do, not the show.

I'm far more interested in the Molluck/Maggie b-plot that was dumped than any of Munch's shitty adventures. I'd really enjoy a game that was entirely from the point of view of the Industrialists, so I think Sligstorm still gets my vote.

If you're looking at just the games, no. But that's also because the 3 Abe games we've gotten so far only tell a tiny part of the story. Keep in mind that major parts of the story were either changed or cut to make them fit in a game medium and within budgets.

Lorne has revealed parts of the original story he came up with for the movies before he made the transition to games. There is stuff in there that, while based on existing real world concepts, could make an awesome story with plot twists at every corner. I doubt it's going to be a revolutionairy story, but still good enough for it to be a waste if it was never made/completed.

I like this idea you all have that there's this original story that we're going to see, and that it hasn't evolved and iterated hundreds of times in the past twenty years.

Are you sure? Because even while Abe's Oddysee was being made it was almost unrecognizable as the final product. What are you thinking of?

I had no idea the story was so malleable to Lorne, I really thought he had one story and that he stuck to it.

F'rexample:

Things like Abe originally not being able to chant until he returned to Rupture Farms, not being able to speak until he had his stitches cut. Stuff like that.

You don't even know the whole plot though? For instance, as far as I remember, there is a whole strata of management above the big executive glukkons that practice predicting the future of their companies from the dismembered entrails of mudokons in small, smoky conference rooms. That's pretty fucking original.

Yeah I'm with STM on this one. The plot hasn't had enough room to develop properly yet, I for one never had a problem with the plot in the Oddworld games, and it would be extremely unfair to judge it because it hasn't fully unfolded yet. The series is designed to unravel as more games/films are released.

Based on reality. They usually used chickens, though.

An even earlier draft has Abe ripping his own stitches out only at the very end of the game. It was still a game at that point and GameSpeak wasn't even a feature. I'm skeptical of any claim that any particular story was from some pre-games 'film' version of the story.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge that the entire quintology was supposed to be movies before Lorne realized that making games would be a faster and cheaper way until he had the resources to make the movies?

You missed his point. The story you know that didn't end up in the final game was actually from an earlier iteration of the game rather than the film.

I think this is a common misunderstanding… it may well be perfectly correct, but it's never been communicated explicitly.

What Lorne has told me is that he writes all his stories (in broad strokes at least) in a form that can be adapted to both games and films. So the story structure of Abe's Oddysee is such that it can be easily adapted into a big-screen product.

Certainly in the very earliest scripts I can find (going back to mid 1995) the details are vastly, almost unrecognizably different, but the factory-native-factory story of escape, growth and return is always the core.

But then there's about five years of history between Lorne starting to write stories and founding the company (three between him telling Sherry he wanted to start a game studio) for which we obviously won't have any records. Who knows what form those stories took.

By any chance, are those scripts also fit for book publishing? :p

Hehe, maybe one day.

If I was a rich man I would try and buy a copy of every iteration of Abe's Oddysee. I loved the idea that Rupture Farms was this giant temple as detailed in the First Ten Years book.

Buy a copy? Or do you mean 'Commission someone to develop a copy'?

I mean, I'd love to buy all the pages of ideas, the design documents, concept art, story lines and stuff.

I can't imagine that most of it would be in a coherent enough format that anyone not working for them could appreciate, though.


Although a folio of every single production design and drawing in the OWI archives would be cool, if prohibitively expensive.

I don't care, I have a job now and I'm filthy rich... OWI, make this happen!

Yeah, if they released another art book, 'The Second Ten Years' or something, I'd definitely fork out for some more unseen concept art.

A folio of Oddworld pre-concepts would be the shit too.

Wouldn't 'The Second Ten Years' be supposed to be covering 2004-2014? This is going to be a depressingly thin book.

It took Cathy Johnson months to filter through to the very best of ten years' artwork for the first book. With everything done since then we could probably cobble together a couple of pages.

EDIT: Well there's Fangus, I suppose. Could probably include Citizen Siege stuff too, I guess.

I see, the book is simply not going to be released in 2014 but when the artwork can be publicly revealed once those projects are released... right?