Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon had an outdated game engine, a broken render and no art director

A new art upload from one of the environmental artists who worked on The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon with Etranges Libellules revealed new details behind the development of the game, such as the bloom and the change in character texture maps. Not only did the console game had an outdated game engine and a broken game render, it also had no art director.

This explains so much, why Cynder's scale colors were changed from black to dark purple, to why the Chronicler's colors were changed from gray to bright blue. Even the enemies had to have their texture map colors changed!

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WBokoG 

Yannick Gombart wrote: 
"I won't talk much about Spyro because for me it's one of the worst productions I've worked on.
Our engine was too old to correctly display normal maps.
It was decided to boost glossiness and had an orange bloom. The whole game render looked oily and ugly"

"On most ELB productions, we didn't have an artistic director and decisions were made by the studio manager.
These choices were decisive in the final rendering of the game.
It was difficult to bring subtlety to the textures since the render was broken."

Original coloration of the Wyvern, which was made red in the final game to stand out in the game's bright bloom