Games where the Demo is actually unique content?

Xenogears had a demo. You play until the village burns down, but Bart comes in on the mountain path to Citan's house and they break the fourth wall a little. This is well before Bart appears in the game. Not a full story but I remember playing it before I bought Xenogears.
 
This sort of thing is part of why companies usually don't make demos anymore, it was a ton of effort, didn't necessarily accurately reflect the game, and

The best demos I played (these weren't unique content) were Mafia 2 and Just Cause 2, both of which basically just gave a very limited amount of time (half hour in each?) to run around their sandbox. The Just Cause 2 one was awesome and perfectly encapsulated the gist of the game, which is running around blowing up stuff constantly and hijacking helicopters and tanks. The Mafia 2 demo showed off how you could turn lights on and off and buy sandwiches in a diner, which I thought was cool, but wasn't.
 
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I think RE 8 had a special demo for console? Instead of playing Ethan Winters you play a nameless maiden trying to escape Lady D's gay slaughter basement years before the actual game takes place iirc. The gameplay or location wasn't unique but the story was. I think you can even find her necklace or something at one point in the game. I could be misremembering though
 
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Not sure if it counts, but MGS Ground Zeroes was a paid demo and prologue for MGS V, and some people have an opinion it was better than the resulting full game
 
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Technically this doesn't count, but Jagged Alliance 2s demo featured a map highlighting it's combat gameplay that was unique to it.
This demo map could actually be found in the final game with the help of bugs. A sector that was positioned in the ocean at the lower left corner of the worldmap, usually unreachable, contained this very demo map.
 
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Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
This sort of thing is part of why companies usually don't make demos anymore, it was a ton of effort, didn't necessarily accurately reflect the game
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Eh, it was a different market. It doesn't matter if it accurately reflects anything as long at it sells the game, and often you could tell demos were basically alpha test sections or vertical slices for publishers before they got cleaned up and shipped. Working at a studio today you can waste a ludicrous amount of time thanks to being able to actually talk to the idiot dipshit players so I think I liked things better the old way.

You saw a lot of these back when PC mags still had cover discs. "Demos" would sometimes be just a fucking field with a bunch of alpha assets standing around for you to blow up and nothing else. So the standard wasn't always that high, but I guess it makes sense that the memorable ones are the ones people remember.

And I mean it still kinda happens in that Early Access stuff is basically a demo rushed to market and then bloated with incohesive ideas instead of ever finishing the damn game half the time. It kinda sucks that so much gets set in stone so early now because of this, you don't really see games turn into a completely different game in development anymore.

Edit: oh and trade show demos which are absolutely demos except nobody remembers until the point where you need to crunch for a month and instead of giving it to the players you actually care about you have to sweat your ass off showing it to disinterested journalists in some asshole city somewhere for a week. Never volunteer for this crap; you won't have time to see anything anyway
 
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Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive had a demo CD with just one level that wasn't in the full game and was also just plain better than anything in the full game.
 
Involuntary Celebrity said:
You saw a lot of these back when PC mags still had cover discs. "Demos" would sometimes be just a fucking field with a bunch of alpha assets standing around for you to blow up and nothing else. So the standard wasn't always that high, but I guess it makes sense that the memorable ones are the ones people remember.
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I really liked XBLA games because there was a required demo that was just the full game a dev cap on how far it went. If you wanted to continue playing you could pay right then and there with no interruption other than the pop-up screen. It was perfect and I bought a lot of games just because of that.
 
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A couple of the the 3ds Pokémon games had some demos. OrAS demo I remember being particularly elaborate, and even gave some Mega Stones.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
I really liked XBLA games because there was a required demo that was just the full game a dev cap on how far it went. If you wanted to continue playing you could pay right then and there with no interruption other than the pop-up screen. It was perfect and I bought a lot of games just because of that.
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PS5 has this but it's a plus plus feature which is fucking stupid and probably because they couldn't think of much else to put on that membership tier. I only tried it for a month but I did buy one thing I wasn't sure about that way so it is a good idea.
 
Never played it but I think it was for Danganronpa 3 they created an original murder/trial so nothing about the game would be spoiled. Think they even used characters from past games also.
 
Atlas Sneezed said:
Not sure if it counts, but MGS Ground Zeroes was a paid demo and prologue for MGS V, and some people have an opinion it was better than the resulting full game
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You were supposed to be able to go back to the island in TPP but they cut it.
 
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There was a Square PS1 RPG demo that was different, but I can't remember which game it was (not any Final Fantasy). I think it even broke the 4th wall by having characters acknowledge it was a demo or something like that. It's been decades so I can't really recall specifics.

Raiken said:
both bravely default and bravely second happen before the games.
pokemon ultra moon/sun have short side stories as demos.
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That's what came to mind for me.
 
SSj_Ness said:
There was a Square PS1 RPG demo that was different, but I can't remember which game it was (not any Final Fantasy). I think it even broke the 4th wall by having characters acknowledge it was a demo or something like that. It's been decades so I can't really recall specifics.
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Xenogears, I said it earlier in the thread. But in the early game, Fei has to go to Citan's house and pass through a valley area. At the start of the area Bart and Elly show up and Fei tells them something like "You're not supposed to show up yet" and Bart replies that this is more like a rehearsal, so it's okay for them to be there.
 
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Kheapathic said:
Xenogears, I said it earlier in the thread. But in the early game, Fei has to go to Citan's house and pass through a valley area. At the start of the area Bart and Elly show up and Fei tells them something like "You're not supposed to show up yet" and Bart replies that this is more like a rehearsal, so it's okay for them to be there.
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I've been wondering about that off and on for a long time, that's pretty cool.
 
ProfDongs said:
I don't know if this counts but before Dead Rising 2 was out or a standard demo for it, they released Case Zero which was its own little story set right before the main game in a little desert town. That was paid though.
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I was going to mention this. I don't remember if there was a free version. In some ways, the smaller game was better than the full release, since you could learn the zone inside out, and it was a small town and not a casino. There was a sequel that did the same, but set in a lab. It had a higher price though.

s0mbra said:
I think RE 8 had a special demo for console? Instead of playing Ethan Winters you play a nameless maiden trying to escape Lady D's gay slaughter basement years before the actual game takes place iirc. The gameplay or location wasn't unique but the story was. I think you can even find her necklace or something at one point in the game. I could be misremembering though
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Are you thinking of RE7? I ask because the premise of the RE7 demo is that you're a ghost hunting team that explore the house and end up dying in the basement before the events of RE7. You can even find their van and bodies in RE7. If you get the insanely obscure secret, you unlock a coin for the item cages.

I doubt this counts, but the Resident Evil 2 demo that came with Directors Cut is interesting. It's not "new content" but it is a lot of subtle changes in existing content that I find interesting. Cutscenes happen in different places, a van blocking a shortcut isn't there, etc.

Metal Gear Solid 2, and I want to say one of the FEAR games, had demos that were prologues to the main campaign, but they were also included in the final game.
 
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