My favorite sandbox (GTA style) is not exactly a current game, but that The Saboteur from the defunct Pandemic Studios released in 2009. Yes, my favorite is still a game from more than a decade ago and I completed it 100% on both PS3 and on Xbox 360, completely absorbing its universe from start to finish.
In Spain it had the misfortune to come entirely in English, being, to top it all, the last work of that Californian studio when it closed its doors that same 2009, which caused a radical reduction in the price of the game two weeks after going out to the market. market and never have any expansion. In fact, it is known that he was going to have a DLC located in Lorraine’s castle , which can still be accessed through a glitch to get an idea of what he was going to bring.
The forbidden castle … accessible by trick
First of all, we must talk about the method to access this castle , since it can only be achieved through a door, the only one that we can reach by a dirt road located to the north of said fortress. To do this, you must first enter the territory of Lorraine, being precisely on its border.
The top image shows the door, the bottom one where it is located exactly.
The glitch trick is given by means of a vehicle , preferably a sports car like Altair, placing us in parallel as close as possible to the door on the side of the driver’s seat. After a trial and error, we will find a point where Sean Devlin, when he gets out of the car, will do it right at the other end of the castle gate, at which time he can explore it with total freedom.
In case there are doubts, here on video thanks to the old v & q channel, dedicated to the game.
Obviously, it is an unfinished area and there are graphic glitches everywhere, as well as a few glitches, being able to hit the ground from a seemingly unstable roof that disappears in the blink of an eye, like the one in the central tower. It is part of the problem (although luckily, knowing that we can enter), since to move with ease inside the castle it will be necessary to do it almost completely from the rooftops, as there are many doors closed tightly. After all, this content was never implemented.
The castle of Haut-Kœnigsbourg at The Saboteur
Inside the huge castle of Haut-Kœnigsbourg in The Saboteur we can see three different parts: an unfinished missile silo at the western end, a tower with a communications system and a mill in the central section, and a hangar for the prototype (no included, except for the official artwork that we can see at the beginning of this article) XJ-05, a futuristic design aircraft, the work of the Nazis .
Both this boomerang-shaped armed jet and the missile silo make it clear that in this expansion our main mission would be to destroy both, in part by those high-powered anti-aircraft guns located very close to the two, which would give a lot of play after facing the inevitable alarm inside the castle, seeing zeppelins when activating rank 3 and already fighter jets at 5.
The task is that there is no real objective in this castle, as it was not implemented due to the sad outcome with Pandemic Studios. Beyond satisfying that curiosity to see the castle from the inside, climbing the roofs and juggling certain sections, it is noticeable that it was left half as there are endless corridors, floating objects or the absence of the spectacular XJ-05.
Curiously, there is a vehicle, although we will not be able to get on it. It is a Nazi military truck located at a gas station right in the central half of the castle, crying out for us to blow it up. It was, more than likely, another one of the objectives to “clean” within this zone to “recover the color” in that section of Lorraine. Because this feature was one of the funniest in The Saboteur , destroying key objectives of the Nazis to eradicate their dominance and that Sean and his people could breathe, watching how we went from black and white to color to symbolize that freedom . It was downright addictive.
A sad and unfair ending for Pandemic Studios
Unfortunately, Pandemic Studios is not the only studio that has closed over all these years, but it had undoubtedly become a creator of cult games, such as Destroy All Humans !, the Mercenaries or The Saboteur himself , being his most media works both Star Wars Battlefront , before DICE (Battlefield) took the lead with its eponymous reboot just ten years later.
The life of Pandemic Studios was the most ephemeral , lasting barely a decade in the market, its Full Spectrum Warrior saga being well known, but with the sadness that it also had to cancel other jobs before saying goodbye, such as Batman: The Dark. Knight , which was to be the first open world Dark Knight game (a year before Rocksteady did the same with Batman Arkham Asylum, by the way), or the long-awaited Mercenaries 3: No Limits .
Will there ever be a remastering of The Saboteur by another external EA studio? It is something that I have not stopped dreaming about since then, especially in order to enjoy the “forbidden” castle of Lorraine in conditions.
