This week's gaming discourse revolves around leaks and how early builds of games should or shouldn't look. Amid the critique for what the leaked GTA 6 clips and screenshots look like, a BioWare writer has come to Rockstar's defense revealing for a chunk of Mass Effect 3's development, Shepard didn't have a head.The reply from BioWare writer Patrick Weekes was prompted by an odd take in response to the leaked build of GTA 6. The original post claims “what you see is almost exactly what you will get”, adding to the growing pile of people who know very little about how games are developed outing themselves this week.Even if the leaked footage from GTA 6 is from right now, it is far from what the finished product will look like. As Weekes highlights, builds of games can look very different from the finished article at almost any stage of development. “In ME3, one year from ship, the only run ME3-ready animation we had was for the Reaper husk, so that was how Shepard ran for a full month,” Weekes wrote.
The writer's reply was actually in response to the initial reveal that two years prior to ME3's launch, Shepard didn't have a head. Note this was the third game in the series being built on the same engine, yet it still looked very different from the one people would eventually play. If footage from that build had leaked showing a headless Shepard, would people have assumed the Spectre would be inexplicably and magically sans head at launch?
Suffice to say, those worried about the way GTA 6 looks right now can stop worrying. As Rockstar made clear in the official statement it has issued, these clips were never supposed to be seen by the outside world, and the game's launch is still a long way off. Also bear in mind that if footage from early builds of the new Mass Effect ever leak, don't assume characters without heads will be that way when the game actually launches.