: I don't entirely buy Urk's "cut content" spiel, but I don't think
: that game fans especially tend to romanticize the cut content in their
: heads. The reality is you only have X amount of time, and barring some
: dramatic changes chances are getting Y would mean Z and A would have to
: suffer in comparison.

I think that what makes cut content not work is in the details. It always sounds awesome because game designers never say "Let's add this to the game. It'll be totally boring and horrible!" but when working on the idea, the designers realize that there's a bunch of problems that they didn't foresee coming. Mass Effect 2's hybrid cooldown/thermal clip system is one of those. It sounds cool and perfectly logical to Mass Effect's technology, but the balance between reloading and cooling down simply couldn't be found. Most of the people who actually played the system admit that it was clunky and sucked the fun out of combat.

Driving a Scarab through the ruins of New Alexandria sounds awesome. But how do you control a Scarab, and how does that control mesh with the Scarab's walking animation? How do you see anything? The Scarab is huge and those legs get in the way.

The Cougar is another famous cut-content vehicle, and it wasn't even recycled into the main campaign like the Rhino was. Reading the stats and the concept behind the vehicle, I can't help but wonder if it was supplanted by the Cobra. Both are relatively fragile vehicles with twin-gauss cannons for killing other vehicles, but the Cobra has an extra lock-down option that turns it into a dedicated anti-building turret.