darkSpyro

(I was honestly waiting for Aura to post this but I'm impatient)

From dA, to r/spyro, now here. A user on deviantART that has been contacting Jared Pullen, concept artist for the first two LOS games, got tons of art from him recently, all in a nifty dropbox folder. Didn't look enough to see if there's TEN art yet, but there's so much that it's probably not enough for just one of the boards.

Even if you don't like the games,you gotta admire how unique Jared's art made it; incredibly exaggerated and cartoony yet gloomy and menacing at the same time. He also put tons of notes in some, and you really see that despite the impossibility of some of these designs, the team really wanted to make it work in the universe's rules in many ways.

To be honest, I thought someone else would post about this by now pff

Also reminder that the two folders at the top have more stuff(TEN,finally caught up to them).

Huh,will you look at that, Gaul's troops with crazy spiky purple armor were known as Shadow Wraiths and had their own symbol unrelated to Cynder. That's some neat worldbuilding left out on the game.

This is awesome! Thanks so much for posting this. I'll have to set aside some time and look through all this stuff- there's so much art here.

I kinda thought there'd be more people bringing this up elsewhere,but people seem more focused on the one prototype screenshot near the bottom for some reason.

Doubt Dark52 will ever care about reposting those to the TEN and ANB galleries but hey it's there for the time being.

Seeing all of this put a smile on my face~

Always loved ANB/TEN's art, and I still wish Krome could've made DotD. What could have been...

I love the style! This definitely is one of my artistic influences!

Looking through all this stuff is awesome-he put so much care into ANB that it makes me want to reply the game right now and appreciate it more. So many details of his were put straight into the game, yet so many were also left out completely.
And we have this just because someone contacted someone and asked for it- man we need to do this more often. This kind of stuff is awesome.

His art IS great, but the games failed to do it real justice, especially where Spyro is concerned. He's really cute in the concept art and so very ugly in game IMO. The level designs were also very dull overall, despite what colour they had and downright dark and gloomy at times (especially the Swamp in ANB and the Temple in TEN respectively). Yes, I'm aware it was nighttime and thus supposed to be dark, hence The Eternal Night, but you can still do night settings in a beautiful, vibrant way, like in Winter Tundra or the caves leading to the Chronicler in TEN (I forget the level's name). Don't get me wrong, there are some designs that wowed me like the dream sequences in TEN or Cynder's Castle in ANB to a lesser extent, but all in all the look of the games left a lot to be desired.

Even so they might be worth a replay, if I can bother myself to do so.

Those are issues with the graphical limitations more than anything. Also, Tall Plains and Fellmuth were incredibly vibrant, since they're daytime levels. If the engine had better light manipulation I bet it'd look closer to the concepts.

I'm aware of limitations of the consoles, but I don't think that excuses much, if anything. Games that were years old when TLoS came out were able to look stunning through style rather than graphics so Krome should have been able to do the same.

Should they? We don't know much about the budget. Considering they got kicked out two games in Sierra could be giving them the bare minimum at that point to get something decent.

Also, I don't know that it's fair to do a direct comparison between the art and the game. I'd say that most concept art is just that: a concept. Exaggerated and stylized. I think that the atmosphere between the art and the game is rather similar, though, which I find impressive. Though I do understand where you're coming from, SpyroLUV, TEN was generally a bit too dark for my taste. As in actually literally dark, hard to see kind of dark (though I still love the game in spite of that).

If we assume a reasonable budget, yes Bifrost, they should. But you do raise a good point there are certain variables that could have impeded them, budget being only one.