How can people extract images of beta versions of video games ?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.