That Grand Theft Auto VI Leaks were big news for all sorts of reasonsbut one of the more interesting talking points was rekindling a discussion about how “bad” a game can look in public.
As I said the other daywhile there have been and always will be assholes who say the dumbest shit, I think the vast majority of normal people when confronted with footage like the one we’ve seen of GTA VIeither thinks: “clean” or: “wow, that’s really cool to see the sausage made like that.”
Of course, part of this allure stems from the fact that we almost never get to see big games in a state like this! And if the GTA Lick does nothing else I hope it can at least help normalize the idea (at least to the general public) that these games don’t look “bad” when being worked on, they just look like they’re being worked on.
In the wake of the leaks and the wider discussion about a game’s graphics during development, a number of other developers and studios have come forward and shared footage of it her Games looked like early. And it’s all great, every single picture of it.
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Before we continue, you should know that some of these comments that you are about to see refer to the tweet that you see above, which was very bad, and which – next to that GTA Leak itself – prompted many developers to delete (or dig up) a lot of this footage.
comes first control Chief designer Paul Ehrlichh, who used to be today tweeted:
As graphics are the first thing finished in a video game and CONTROL has won several awards for graphic excellence, here is footage from the beginning of development 🙂
The team behind it also made fun of the “done first” tweet cult of the Lamb:
Next we have Frozen synapsewhich was a BBC Micro adventure game for a year before becoming one of the most important tactics games of all time:
Here’s what Sea of Thieves looked like in 2014 (that is four years before its final release):
One of the funniest/best was shared by immortality Sam Barlow, who says “This is what IMMORTALITY looked like for the first 2 years as we focused on balancing the AI and combat gameplay”:
This is how this scene looked in the finished game:
TO UPDATE: And here is Uncharted!
Some PowerWash simulators:
Aside from developers sharing their own work, here are a few more notable (and rarer) examples of studios sharing footage in development:
