Developers Share Work In Progress Footage In Solidarity With Rockstar Following GTA 6 Leaks

Over the weekend, Rockstar dealt with a massive leak that saw numerous screenshots and videos from the development of GTA 6 appear online with missing assets and features.

Seeing these leaked images, some corners of the internet decided to use them as ammunition to criticize Rockstar’s unfinished business.

“If you knew how a game’s development goes, you’d know that the visuals are one of the first things. This game has been in planning and development for four years. What you see is almost exactly what you’ll get. Next year is mission coding and debugging. All the backend stuff. Sounds dumb,” one Twitter user said.

This is not the case. In fact, 3D character artist Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart Xavier Coelho-Kostolny dubbed this “the greatest take extremely confident but has no idea what they’re talking about”. [they’ve] déjà vu.”

Now, many developers and members of the games industry are sharing their own work-in-progress clips, claiming that what the leaked GTA 6 footage showed us was no indication of the quality of the final product.

Control lead designer Paul Ehreth has shared a YouTube video of Remedy’s award-winning game.

Accompanying the clip, they write, with their tongue in cheek: “Since graphics are the first finished thing in a video game, and Control has won numerous awards for excellence in graphics, here is some early development footage. ”

Uncharted 4 co-lead designer Kurt Margenau meanwhile shared footage of the game’s famous jeep chase scene in his “blockmesh vs art blockmesh vs final art” stages, commenting that it’s “up to what the art looks like for a video game in development”.

Sticking with Naughty Dog, here’s The Last of Us in its early days.

Indie developer Massive Monster has shared the first images of their recent Cult of the Lamb release. This clearly shows the rudimentary design that characterizes the early stages of game development.

Immortality director Sam Barlow tweeted two stills from his latest game, saying, “FYI, here’s what Immortality looked like for the first 2 years where we focused on balancing AI and gameplay. combat gameplay compared to how it was delivered.”

Meanwhile, reporter Cian Maher has shared an early photo of one of Horizon Zero Dawn’s Thunderjaws. “Yes too, it’s a gun, this was prototyped using Killzone assets as the games don’t look like the finished product until extremely late in development,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet.

Destiny fan Excelhedge has shared the following footage from Bungie’s sci-fi MMO. In their words, “Never trigger game developers, especially when [you] know nothing [about] their work. Below is [Destiny’s] first Alpha version against Destiny Rise of Iron.”

Meanwhile, Bit Loom Games has shared a side-by-side comparison of its Tray Racers game, showing a big difference between the game’s progress in 2020 and 2022.

Finally, although this God of War (2018) video hasn’t been re-shared by the developer recently, this Sony Santa Monica footage compilation highlights just how many stages a game has to go through before the product final is really ready to go out.