10 Video Game Enemies So Hard They Got DELETED
These enemies got canned for being too much of a pain in the ass.
The creation of any video game is littered with the corpses of hundreds of ideas that just don't make the cut for one of many reasons.
Levels get erased, entire plot points are wiped out, and it goes without saying that many potential enemies end up being cast aside before a game goes gold. And in rare cases, it's down to just how damn difficult they were to deal with.
Perhaps QA testers struggled to deal with these foes, to the point that the gameplay wasn't fun anymore, or at a wider inside baseball level, maybe the devs themselves struggled to implement these enemies in the game in a way that actually made technical sense.
Whatever the exact reason, these 10 video game enemies were all erased from their respective game because of the challenge they presented to player and developer alike - though some did still sort-of live on in the game code itself, as was eventually discovered by dataminers.
Whether the developers were "right" to remove these enemies or not, it's certainly fascinating to consider what might've been had they made the cut...
10. Fast Zombies - Half Life: Alyx
There's no denying that Half-Life: Alyx is an inherently more intense and challenging experience through sheer virtue of taking place in VR - the added layer of immersion makes even seemingly trivial combat encounters decidedly more stressful.
But if you thought that battling Headcrabs in VR was bad enough, Alyx originally included an even more pulse-quickening foe - the Fast Zombie.
Fast Zombies appeared in prior Half-Life games and are exactly what you think - zombies which are more agile and can attack the player with considerably greater haste, due to having a Fast Headcrab latched onto their head.
However, during development of Alyx the decision was made to remove Fast Zombies to balance the game's overall difficulty and ensure that more anxious players weren't discouraged from continuing to play.
Level designer Dario Casali told Gamespot, "The shock of having that guy come around the corner and latch onto you before you'd even know what was going on was just too much."
On behalf of all squeamish Half-Life fans out there, thank you Valve.