Saw this going around but wasn't sure where its from. Glad to know that the beta is in fact real (along with the Darkrai movie poster having beta Darkrai as the logo).
I didn't know we had Combee prototype design artwork released before? I believe this is from the USUM strategy guide's concept art section
So they had the general concepts of the Gym Leader down at this point, though funny to see "Swampert Mask" Crasher Wake (which makes some sense as Pastoria has the Great Marsh) and clean cut Byron (guess this was what he looked like before leaving Oreburgh Gym to Roark).Separate from the Pokémon post, here's the early Gym Leaders:
Either gen 4 still had them doing the gen 1-2 style of putting pixels to screen for feeling out the pokemon or the concept art process still involved dotting out the sprites in-game to get a better feel of how things might shake out.Wow, I wasn't expecting much from these DP beta asset leak but I was quickly proven wrong! Beta designs a-go!
- Piplup Line: Now, I think this Prinplup is a work in progress as it's clearly just a skrunken down Empoleon that they're slowly modifying (which is interesting, did the other Starters also go through this process?). But, wait, if that was the case it would look a bit like Prinplup, but it doesn't. Was there no concept artwork of Prinplup? Did all the Starters start out as such, they made the sprite first and then finalized it with concept art? Interviews about the Unova Pokemon made it always sound the concept art came first, was this not in practive when they made Gen IV and they were still doodling with the sprites like we saw with in the Gen II beta?
I can see why people think Stegosaurus but I'm actually thinking it was a spiked wheel. You'll note that what we see of the backsprite goes tail, 3 yellow spikes, then the head. They're all roughly equidistant and the tail & head are stilled "spiked". I think the bottom half of the "wheel" would also be spiked, mirror the top half's yellow spikes, with the tail/head being the exact middle
- Lickilicky: At first I didn't know what it was supposed to be from that backsprite, but then Goatee McGee points out it looks like a stegosaurus and now I'm sad they changed it. I guess they wanted to vary the "evolves by knowing a certain move" concept to more than just Ancient Power. Guess we'll need to wait for a Fossil Pokemon. "Well the Fossilized Drake was likely a stegosaurus..." THAT DOESN'T COUNT!
That's how final Combee is, too; the middle grub is the one with the queenly mark and sticks out of the honeycomb in the back.-The center larva in the Combee art is the biggest and has the mark that only shows up on female Combees. Is that the one that evolves into Vespiquen?
The Munchlax/Weavile sprites were first seen pre-release in these pictures.Apparently TCRF has sprites from a March 12th, 2006 build, so some commentary:
Charizard: Not misplaced, but it does look like he's straining himself.Apparently TCRF has sprites from a March 12th, 2006 build, so some commentary:
We were discussing this on the Smogon discord, but Kimairan literally had the same typing and base stats as Giratina. In fact, while not ALL stats were final (for example, Mamoswine is insanely bulky wtf), a lot of them like Garchomp and Arceus are actually final stats.DP probably did have development problems. The first mock ups were heavily based on the GBA and they announced the games very early. And DP was...lackluster, we'll say, in some departments
but my understanding is the last few months of development is where things actually come together and start interlocking, not 3-6 months of just touch up.
Also while there was some lore changes going on here and there, we also don't have the full story behind when these pokemon were marked to be changed, if htere was art finalizing designs elsewhere. Kimarian might've been set to become Giratina for a while, but was still just Kimarian until they reached it for revisions.
The rest of the game seems to be "there", more or less, so UI revisions and new spritework were probably jsut saved for the end of development. Or hadn't been inserted yet, in general.
And on this note, I would be willing to suspect that Platinum was primarily about correcting the final product of DP. In terms of differences from the original games, Platinum is on a different level than Emerald and Crystal. Without needing to build the skeleton, Platinum could be what they wanted DP to be.Y'know, the knowledge that this leak is of a build 3 months out from launch makes it a little... Concerning.
I don't wanna pull the armchair game developer stuff other people do with impunity but from what I'm aware (and correct me if I'm overhyping this) the last few months of a game's dev cycle under a normal schedule should basically be nothing beyond minor final tweaks and debugging. So the fact that within the final 3 months they were still making huge design/lore changes (e.g. Garchomp line and Giratina), using placeholders for major trainers and had such rough sprites and battle UI seem like telltale signs of an incredibly troubled development. Hell, that might be actually be a generous estimate: Remember, games have to "go gold" a few weeks out from release so they can stop development and begin producing physical copies so with that in mind we might actually be looking at something closer to the state the game was in 2 months out from its dev cycle concluding.
Many people, myself included, love to meme on the awful DP Pokedex and its seemingly completely baffling exclusion of most of the cross-gen evos. But honestly? After this leak, it's a genuine possibility to consider that it may have been a victim of development problems. Perhaps with time quickly running out they decided compromises had to be made to get the game out on schedule with one of the sacrifices being the cross-gens' exclusion from the regional dex so they wouldn't have to spend time on their encounter tables and giving them to trainers and such. Besides, they weren't technically brand new, never-seen-before Pokemon species, just extensions of pre-existing ones, so making them postgame-only couldn't be that bad, right?
I wish Platinum's code had leaked out just to see what typos caused Acid Rain
Well...There's likely no beta pokemon or anything (...)