In the year after the release of Security Breach I held a “Pizzaplex tour” on twitter, the aim of which was to really share with the community the beauty and merits of the game while also giving myself something to focus on as I explored the game and looked for any secrets that might lie within the Pizzaplex itself. People seemed to really engage with an opportunity to see the game from a different angle and it presented a great opportunity for us to talk about theories or share fun finds.
Unfortunately, twitter is an ill-suited format for any kind of long form image sharing or searchability and at this point many of those original posts that I made are very difficult for me or anyone else to easily find. Therefore, I have decided that with this new site at my disposal I will revamp my tour a little and people can join me once again as we venture back into the Pizzaplex for yet another tour!
The first consideration that I made when doing this tour was which version of the game should I use? This might sound like a very straightforward decision, but at this point there are several different major versions of the game that I am aware of. Of course, this is not the kind of in-depth nuanced versioning that Steel Wool might have used internally, showing each patch and each step of progress along the game development path, instead I take a much looser approach to these versions and mostly delineate them with my own terminology. I make zero claim here that I’m any kind of expert on this process or that my understanding is without flaws, there are doubtless other people out there who could argue my reasoning, but I thought it might be interesting for people to see what I am referring to when I use specific terms. I’m not some guru on Unreal engine or game development and I make no claim to be. I don’t model or mod. I’m just someone who wanted to take some screenshots and found some stuff that I thought was fun and if it’s interesting to you then here it is.
Before I begin, I also want to thank those involved at the TechnicalFNAF discord for their hard work digging into the game and uncovering the fascinating elements of its design and providing many of the tools I and others use every day. Without their assistance and that of other FNAF fans on reddit, twitter and beyond, I would not even be aware of the depths we could explore! I’d also like to thank Steel Wool and Scott for the game itself and for taking such a friendly stance towards those of us prying under the hood of the game all the time!
PRE-RELEASE
Whenever I use the term “Pre-Release” I mean exactly what I say, I mean all versions of the game that existed prior to its official release on the 16th of December 2021. As you might expect, most of these versions of the game are a complete mystery to us, known only to employees of the company who would be under NDA and unable to discuss what this might have looked like. Normally this is how it remains, with little access to any early builds of a game outside of open testing. As far as I am aware, Security Breach had a secretive production without open beta testing.
So how did we obtain the pre-release version of the game that we have today? As far as I am aware, the community managed to obtain a pre-release version of the game through a known workaround on the PlayStation network, where – with the correct conditions and correctly interrupted download of the game files – it is possible to obtain the earliest build of the game uploaded to the PlayStation servers. This resulted in the community coming into possession of a pre-release build of the game. As far as I’m aware thereafter a user named Tamash modded this build and its associated files back into the PC version of Security Breach.
This pre-release build of the game has numerous deviations from the final build of the game and gives fascinating insight into the development of the game itself. It also shed light on earlier unseen builds of the game, present in the opening load screens.
An example of these very early builds would be the parts and service area that is only seen in the load screen video of the game, we never see this exact build and so can only speculate what it might have looked like from any other angle than what we have.
I have done a full play through of the pre-release version of the game linked below if you are interested in seeing it in more detail.
DAY 1
The next version of the game that I find myself referring to is what is known as the Day 1 build of the game, this is the one that anyone who played Security Breach after the 16th of December 2021. Steel Wool themselves seemed braced for some of the bugs in this version of the game as they mentioned in their update regarding when it would be live.
https://www.steelwoolstudios.com/announ … and-beyond
When it went live, it was exactly as they expected, going from a small team of testers to the entire world. Numerous bugs were uncovered and touted to an excessive degree on social media. I wasn’t happy with the way the fandom handled the launch and I’m still not very happy now. However, the fact of the matter is that many of the large streamers on youtube and beyond who played this game encountered if not one then many of the bugs in the day 1 patch of the game. This included glitches in character AI (Freddddddyyyyyy) and unforeseen issues with quest items and loading. This version of the game is of most interest to game explorers as an enormous number of unused locations and assets were left in the files (its files are 78GB for instance versus the later chopped down side), containing fascinating insight into the development of the game. I’ll go into these in more detail as we go along, but the most remarkable is an entire set of scrapped maps which were part of “utilidoors” connecting various areas of the Pizzaplex, potentially removed for flow reasons.
This version of the game also disabled save stations entirely for the latter half of the game, which rendered it an incredibly brutal slog given the common glitch in the boss encounters and elsewhere. However, ingenious as always, fans found another glitch to counteract this limitation, realising that if you returned to Roxy Raceway and collected the staffbot head again, every save station would resume functioning.
This is considered to be the most buggy iteration of the game, and given that the festive season was hard on its heels, Steel Wool regrouped and set about aiming to create a mega patch known as patch 1.05 which was made available on February 28th 2022 The fixes below are here
https://www.steelwoolstudios.com/announ … -notes-105
The changes in this patch were substantial, but I don’t maintain an install of patch 1.05 personally, instead opting to maintain an install which includes both 1.05 and 1.11, as close to the launch of RUIN as I could get it.
PRE-RUIN
This is the version of the game that I did most of the FNAF longplay on and most of my screenshots. This includes all the later patches that Steel Wool released after the initial day 1 version of the game, and I considered showing it off to the community important to show just how much work the team over there put into getting the game into a clean and serviceable state. Many of the issues people had with the Day 1 version of the game had been addressed at this point, with load screens enabled and some optimisation introduced. Many of the graphical features also now function as intended.
The biggest improvement for me from the day 1 version of the game to the later patches was the reintroduction of high-resolution textures. There was something wrong with the day 1 version of the game which meant that even on the highest settings that the textures were blurry and unreadable, the best example I have of this is the Atrium map where you can see the difference between the low- and high-resolution textures even though both versions of the game I am using have identical settings.
Unfortunately, this version of the game came with its downsides, many of the original scrapped content was removed from the game to reduce the file size, including the debug menu and other elements that were interesting to data miners. So I can look at the lovely textures, but I can’t see them in every single utilidoors map!
Steel Wool also compromised and gave us a save station in the Atrium, but this still means a whole lot of struggle because the saves everywhere else don’t work! It’s not unattainable though.
RUIN
The most recent version of Security Breach contains both the original game and the DLC, along with the associated optimisations and graphical alterations that came as part and parcel of this. The game has marked performance improvements, but I feel like there are some subtle variations between this iteration of the game and the state it was in pre-ruin.
This is the next version of the game that I’m inclined to do a playthrough on just to see where the differences lie.
This most recent iteration also includes a patch that was released on the 23rd of August 2023 which mostly dealt with some bugs present in the day 1 of the RUIN DLC itself.
Either way, hope this is helpful to see what I’m talking about when I refer to each of these. I will almost always be playing on completely max settings when doing screenshots unless otherwise specified (or I’m trying to do literally any cameras in RUIN without crashing out)
Can’t wait to see you there.