Secret of Evermore [SNES - Beta]
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Here is a comparison list between beta screens of Secret Of Evermore and their counterparts in the final game. You can see that in the course of the development of the game Square USA made some interesting changes and probably the original story was a bit different from the one that we know.
Beta version
Final Version
The character bar was much different in the beta. While the area is essentially identical, with only little background differences, the enemies in the beta version are not the same as the final. The strange blue creature was completely removed, and you encounter raptors only much later in the prehistoric level. Also, you get the sword in Antiqua, the second location of the game.
Beta Version
I don’t recall this area anywhere in the game. The green dinosaur on the left was removed in the final version.
Beta Version
Final Version
Yet another enemy that was removed from the final game: the warrior with the pike at the center of the screenshot. Also, in the final version the machine is green (in the beta it looks black/grey) and there aren’t enemies in this area, maybe because the story was different. The fake Fire Eyes (the girl at the center of the screen) didn’t exist or didn’t appear in the beta version.
Beta Version
Final Version
An area with almost no changes. In the beta version the dog is still the prehistoric one.
Beta Version
This is a really strange beta screenshot. We can see what it looks like an early and much different version of Ivory Tower (or Ebon Keep when it is populated again) where there is the King. In the final game, the King is not here. Maybe the story was different ?
Now we can see some more screenshots from a pre-release version of Secret Of Evermore. The “dog bar” at the bottom of the screen has the “dog face” to the left, while in the final version it is on the right.
Pre-release Version
Final Version
In these screenshots, we can see that this section of the market didn’t change at all. However, as in all pre-release and beta pics, the golden bar is different, and the dog is still the prehistoric one, while in the final version there are four different dogs.
Pre-release
Final Version
This area is different from the final version. There are not as many black crystals and there is only one skull. Also, the location seems much more barren. Thanks to Robert Seddon, that has found some old infos from a developer / tester of the game, we know that they changed the Mammoth Graveyard because there was an issue with AI getting caught on the tusks. You can read more of these beta-infos on this old news: SoE beta infos
Pre-release Version
Final Version
You can see that in the beta versione there was no “heart” at the center of the spider.
Pre-release Version
Final Version
Again, as in the beta screenshot, the fake “Fire Eyes” girl is not here, but at least the machine is green now.
There are a couple of other beta screens in the gallery below, but they are not much different from the final version.
Images:
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- Tags: action adventure, action rpg, evermore, square
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8 Responses to Secret of Evermore [SNES - Beta]
Robert Seddon
May 14th, 2008 at 10:32 am
As I mentioned on the other page, some of these have the dog in the ‘wrong’ form for the area he’s in; in the final version there’s a different form for each world.
Regarding the ‘missing dog’ question: as far as I remember there’s only a short scene at the beginning where the dog’s missing in Prehistoria, and I don’t think soescan02.jpg is it…
Fehdrau said: ‘Secret of Evermore only acquired its “Secret” about two months before going gold. It was simply called “Evermore” for most of its production. The marketing department decided to modify its name and logo at the last minute.’ These shots, scans included, show the ‘Secret of…’ tag, although they might have been made earlier than they were released.
monokoma
May 14th, 2008 at 11:06 am
The strange thing is that in Nintendo Power 68, from January 1995, they already call it “Secret Of Evermore”, while the game was released only in October 1995.. i dont know when it went gold, but it cant be in January, can it?
Robert Seddon
May 14th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
It does seem a long time… unless the cartridge production was slow or something. Fehdrau has trouble remembering stuff sometimes, so maybe that’s inaccurate; perhaps it’s e.g. two months before the beta-testers got it, raher than two months before it was signed off as ready for release.
monokoma
May 15th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Maybe i’ll try to find him and ask for some more infos :) Yota is working on a new article with comparison shots between the beta and the final version of SoE, there are some nice differences in there!
Robert Seddon
May 16th, 2008 at 10:04 am
http://uk.youtube.com/profile?user=ItsBillsFault shows a last login date of three weeks ago, so that might be worth a try.
videowizard
June 25th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
What gets me is both the early white text bar “Beta” and the later gold bar “Prerelease” look better than the awful final bar in those shots. Oh well, what can you do?
ItsBillsFault
September 19th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
I’m a couple of years late responding to this, but yes, I (Brian Fehdrau) do often have trouble remembering exact details from Evermore’s production. We were all working very long hours for a very long time, and the last year or so is pretty much a big, tired blur in my memory. :) I may have it wrong that it was only a couple of months before we finished that the title changed.
On the other hand, we’re talking about the days of cartridges and much stricter certification processes, so the period between going gold and getting on the shelves was much longer than it is now for disc-based games that can patch over the internet. I’m pretty sure we first submitted to cert in summer. It was usually 2-4 weeks waiting in the cert queue, and then a month or two for manufacturing. That’s the best I can remember.
Regardless of exactly when, it was pretty late in the 2.5-year process when the name was changed.
monokoma
September 20th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
Thanks a lot for the info Brian, it’s really appreciated :) If you’ll ever read this, do you remember anything else that was changed / removed from the final game?