Not going to lie DL2 might just have been the biggest gaming disappointment I have ever felt, and likely will ever feel.
When the first game came out I was barely in high school and got addicted to it, and between the weeks after the Following released and the first rumors of a sequel started to swirl and its release so much time had passed that I had already graduated... I literally spent over a fifth of my life waiting for it.
Not because I was some retarded consoomer that wanted more of a product but because I had fallen in love with the concept presented at E3 2017.
Techland at the time tried to sell itself off as a company that listened to its customers, so when they responded to complaints of the previous game buy hiring one of the key dudes responsible for New Vegas and multiple of the writets from Witcher III to write the next one I was hooked.
I read every single interview they gave and obsessed over every bit of the story and factions we got. I was eagerly awaiting siding with the Peacekeepers, who I thought were going to be antiheroes that would balance out their harshness by rekindling the torch of civilization, even more than I eagerly awaited to see more of the Renegades who were meant to be escaped prisoners that ended up reforming and creating a decent settlement for themselves and their families and primarily just wanted to be left alone.
Even after Avellone got fired I grasped at straws hoping that it would still be good... You can imagine how disappointed I was 24 hours before the game released when leaks came out on 4chan showing the how they replaced all of the great voice actors in the 2018 E3 demo with crappy ones or how retarded the story was or that there were effectively only 2 endings, both of them bad.
And you know the worst part of it all? Some guy actually delved through the game's code to see what they cut after they deleted everything Avellone wrote and discovered just how much they cut.
Not only did they cut Elysium (the beautiful 18th century Paris style city you saw in the 2017 E3 reveal) and a bunch of minor things like animals (including crocodiles?) but they they cut just about everything that had to do with real choices (at one point you would choose to destroy or rebuild a bridge, if you rebuilt it you would get loot and access to a island but new infected would spread to the rest of the map) and factions, and boy did he find a lot of factions that got axxed.
As for the original ending apparently the game would end in a massive battle for control of the Peacekeeper's castle in which you and the factions you sided with would emerge victorious... However you could also before then choose to pull a father Elijah and release a captive Kyle Crane (who turned into a night hunter) from a GRE facility and let him destroy the city.
Here are the cuts. Its a shame that we were *this* close to having what might have been the best western RPG to date
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bIxFoTZZ7PpihnWbNQsCq2GSIlYFSyOQvN3-WSy291M/edit?usp=sharing