I constantly hear that people are “Data mining” images from video games and they can see what the game looked like way before release (even extremely early prototype versions). How do they even do that and why are these images still in the game ?
In: Technology
games generally ship with ALL the images the game uses. Thats the 90GB the game takes up. With the right technical knowhow, you can read the image data. Especially if it was made by a major game engine.
Devs sometimes remove old art, but often they just leave it. Its there because it takes a conscious effort to remove, and its just easier to leave it.
It’s rare to be able to completely recreate early beta versions just from the final release. Yes sometimes old assets aren’t deleted from the release for one reason or another (maybe they were overlooked, maybe they are part of another asset that is still being used and they don’t want to break anything).
But usually reconstructing old betas relies on looking at early prerelease screenshots published about the game and actual leaked early beta/prototype versions.
These days everyone has a 1TB disk and every game uses up 20GB so game developers don’t give a damn about disk space optimisation unless it’s something egregious. So they use some model in the beta, then switch to another one but don’t know (or don’t care, or forget to check) if they are in use somewhere so they just let it be and it eventually makes it to the final game even though it’s not used anywhere.
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