If the thing they saved hadn’t been saved, it makes me wonder if they would have remade it as written, and then either have to throw that out or release what was by all accounts not a good first pass.

I suspect some character models were reused, and recovering what they did enabled the rewrite that came after.

I think it’s still fair to characterize this as a big save even if it wasn’t used as-is. They arguable needed the first version to decide to move away from it.