Developers Are Sharing Early Builds Of Their Games Following GTA 6 Leak
From Control’s “Throw Me” boxes to Cult of the Lamb’s horned humans, developers are sharing early versions of their games.
Last week, more than 90 videos of GTA 6’s in-development gameplay flooded the internet, sparking a backlash from people who said it looked ugly and unretouched. So, in response, other developers have started sharing early alpha footage of their own work to reveal what the game will really look like in pre-release.
The key point in all these tweets is the graphics no It’s done in development first, so GTA 6 – 6 years after release – doesn’t look like a full game.Developers tend to use alternative models or recycle old assets, either using Killzone’s role in Horizon Zero Dawn or Real photos of developers doing yoga poses In Necrodancer’s Rift.
Over the past few years, EA has been showing more development footage of the Skate & Dead Space remake, giving us a glimpse into the real making of the sausage. It’s not always pretty. For example, Dead Space has a blocky monochrome texture as an artistic alternative with an unfinished UI.
The cute animals of the Lamb Cult used to look like horned humans, dangling awkwardly around the camp. Textures are blocky and lack detail, while animations are more rudimentary. An early version even saw the player as a demon rabbit, rather than the lamb of the same name.
As lead designer Paul Ehreth pointed out, Control won for its visuals, but it wasn’t the prettiest game in development. The floor is an orange lattice, the landscape is gray with no details, and the throwables are squares with the words “Throw Me”.
Immortal, where you piece together lost movie clips, is no different. The untextured grey shapes represent tables and chairs, with the text at the bottom as a placeholder, “Marissa_Marcel: Insert generic bark here”.
Given that this is a leak of in-development footage, GTA 6 hasn’t been shown yet, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t look like a fully-fledged final version. The game is pieced together, and the graphics aren’t the first thing to be done.
