#Maybe I will. Blow the dust off my Substack and get a new newsletter out for the first time in like 6 months haha

[solradguy]

I'd seen a comment that the finalized design for Venom seems to have an unbuttoned shirt when compared to the buttoned vest of the concept art from the S4 trailer (which had leaked unfortunately), so maybe that's where the confusion might be coming from. Does make me curious how often they change a detail like that so close to model work being done, given so much of Strive's concept art (at least the ones I've seen) does tend to match what we get in the final game.

I must've blocked the correct amount of people because the last character leak I knew about was the Slayer one that was like a whopping 12 hours or something before the actual reveal anyway lol

We were actually talking about concept art through alpha then beta designs in the wiki server yesterday!! It's really interesting how far some concepts made it in the timeline before getting changed. @shmuelbrain dug these up.

Elphelt from the 3rd location test for Xrd Sign (late 2013?) still had a pink clover on her ear that she's got in her concept art (it got changed to green in the final release):

Sol's outfit changed pretty late in Sign's development too. The story preview they showed there had an interesting saturated color filter. I like it, but the more natural colors in the final version definitely look/read better. From the 3rd loc test.

We were musing over what could have made them change their minds about Sol's outfit for the story that late into development and decided that it was possible his arm anatomy kept bugging during animation so they gave him sleeves to hide it lol

Sol's story mode outfit (with the longsleeve jacket) seems to be a light reworking of the outfit he had in the Xrd prototype from 2011 (!!). He's on the right in this screenshot, but the imposter on the left's outfit is really similar too

Throwback to the fingernail gloves from his Holy Order uniform...

The Xrd prototype design fascinates me because it's essentially a 3D version of Sol's Vastedge XT design. He's even got the Junkyard Dog Mk.II in the prototype build. The design there is 1:1 to its design in VXT.

Note: The neon colors here are placeholders, it doesn't actually have that bright cyan in Vastedge.

The Xrd prototype/Vastedge design is cool because you can still see elements of it in Sol's Strive outfit. They tightened up his silhouette and made things like the gloves/hands read easier, but it's almost possible to argue that this is likely the same jacket. They've been tweaking this for at least 14 years!!

It's tricky to figure out this stuff for most of the cast, but Sol's design changes are really well documented. I think he's usually the first character they make for games, so he's usually their graphics and gameplay test dummy