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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

So the gaming community reiterated loudly and clearly that it doesn't like being lied to with "gameplay" demos crafted specifically for E3 that share no code with the actual game being developed (looking at you, Halo 2), and the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."

I would hope we could collectively rally against this sort of behavior by refusing to buy such games that refuse to preview any actual gameplay. But I doubt that will work, given that Dead Island sold five million copies[0], based off what I can only assume was due to enamor with the trailer.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Island#Sales

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You seem to think it's a very sinister practice but imagine making a video of what the product you're working on now will look like in two years.

Can you do that with what you have now? Will you get it right? We as software engineers aren't great at predicting what we'll have in two weeks.

If the community doesn't want to see target renders, good. They derail development anyway

The issue is that it is presented as if it is actual, current gameplay.

I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product yet, but it obvious that these companies are being intentionally deceitful.

I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product...

I'm struggling to think of a diplomatic way to express how naive I feel this statement is, so I'll just leave it at that.

The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. It's somewhat ridiculous to suggest they aren't capable of ignoring a "CONCEPT" watermark to get riled up about "broken promises".

> The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to.

The online community consist of millions of people, of course some of them will always be angry. However when you have millions of people hating you and very few defending you then there are usually a good reason to it, otherwise they don't unite like that.

Example: Nintendo announcing that the first game to use their paid subscription pokemon storage system wont actually be able to use all pokemon, and that no game in the future will either, meaning that some pokemon people paid to store and reuse later will never be able to be used. This lead to a lot of hate on the game, including some over the top criticism of the graphics which otherwise wouldn't be an issue but now most of the energy goes towards hating the game so nobody bothers to defend it.

However when you have millions of people hating you and very few defending you then there are usually a good reason to it, otherwise they don't unite like that.

There is usually a "reason" people get riled up online, whether that reason is "good" is usually pretty debatable to most rational people. And claiming that any "good" reason is able to be stretched into all sorts of other criticisms as you state is an even shakier stance to take.

Personally, I'm not convinced that the online gaming community is worth caring about in the aggregate. The community is so dwarfed by people not interesting in participating in arguments about their hobby online that the separation between people who have legit criticisms and people just looking to be angry about something isn't meaningful.

Say you have a million players for a game you've created, and 30,000 of those players participate regularly in online discussions, with 25,000 of them being reasonable and 5,000 being nonsensical (and the 5,000 is largely going to be at least the same if not more vocal than the 25,000). How much time and effort do you really want to spend trying to separate those 25,000 from the 5,000 given your playerbase as a whole?

>including some over the top criticism of the graphics which otherwise wouldn't be an issue

I think you're wrong about that.

https://i.redd.it/rk5t6snmp8531.jpg

The tree (and background) is from the new Pokemon game, yet it looks perfectly at home in a game released nearly 21 years ago. Game Freak has been pumping out cut rate Pokemon games for years and they deserve every last bit of the hate.

We might get a case study in this when Cyberpunk 2077 launches (possibly early next year!). CDPR, initially hesitant to reveal to the public the gameplay slice they produced for the media at last year's E3, eventually caved and released it with a prominent disclaimer watermark across the top of the screen:

"WORK IN PROGRESS - DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL LOOK OF THE GAME"

As well as having similar messages reiterated by the narrator throughout.

Previously CD Projekt Red was roasted for perceived "downgrades" in The Witcher 3, notably in lighting which CDPR had to change to accommodate the day-night cycle in the game.

That said, hype for Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly strong right now. We'll get to see whether players really do take disclaimer messaging into account when the final product launches, no doubt with "downgrades" evident in many facets of the game.

I think this is fair for games that are a long way away but I often see games for sale now that all the videos on the steam store page are fake renders.

We as software engineers aren't great at predicting what we'll have in two weeks.

I think that's because our development is supposedly agile and we iterate a lot because we don't know what we're actually building very well (that's not a bad thing). Iteration in game development is much slower and lends itself to a waterfall approach because the developer is the client most of the time. In theory the game should look like a very close approximation of the final version years before its launch.

No, they don’t and no they shouldn’t.

> Iteration in game development is much slower and lends itself to a waterfall approach

Given that much of game development is an iterative creative process, you would hope that iteration is much faster than in other development work. Maybe not for the programmers, though.

I don't see how its any more suited to waterfall than any other industry. Sounds like something game devs tell themselves so they feel better about their bad habits, like how crunch is necessary or how automated testing is too hard.

Game devs do not tell themselves games are suited to waterfall. In fact, its the opposite. Its the opposite of the testing is hard argument, as you mentioned, which is much more common.

No, it's actually way more waterfally than in other sectors.

I assume that in the 'game as a service' kind of long going projects it's different, but I don't have that kind of experience.

Do you mean its way more waterfall in that it happens in practice, or do you mean that its much more suited to that style of development process?

If the former, then I would say a lot of large companies end up that way (they tell themselves they’re “doing agile” but in reality are really just doing some form of modified waterfall). If the latter, then I will ask: why is that?

Waterfall might make sense if you know up front exactly what you will build, which as an engine developer may well be the case, but for anybody else, I don’t see how a more agile approach short iterations and tight feedback loops wouldn’t produce better results.

> You seem to think it's a very sinister practice but imagine making a video of what the product you're working on now will look like in two years.

The solution to this is showcasing your product when it's much closer to release. I'd welcome the idea of revealing games months before release and some developers already practice this approach, like Borderlands 3.

Hell, I'd even go as far as suggesting a true announce when it's done approach: Take something like Cyberpunk 2077 - just imagine the idea of Keanu Reeves mentioning that it's available...today.

In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release.

Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it.

Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore.

Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if:

1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone;

and/or,

2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement.

So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result.

I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying?

EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.

"Lie to us" and "don't mention the game until it's done" are not the only two options. There's plenty of middle ground, including "show us a cutscene video that is obviously a cutscene video" like Cyberpunk 2077 did. Don't say "this is actual gameplay" if it's not actual gameplay. Don't show videos simulating actual gameplay if it's not actual gameplay. Don't have people on stage mimicking actual gameplay while a video plays that is not actual gameplay.

"Don't lie" is a very low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.

But... How are we supposed to lie to people, if we can't lie?

Right, but what can easily happen is you show gameplay footage at E3 with good intentions, then the game changes.

Maybe, things change because the mechanics proved to hard to learn.

Maybe, things change because to fit X number of characters on screen in level Y, you had to downgrade the main character visuals.

Either way... Is that a lie?

In the eyes of most developers no, it's just part of development.

In the eyes of consumers...yes?

Changing gameplay between the E3 demo and the final release isn’t the problem, it’s when the difference between the preview gameplay is vastly better quality than the final. In the 12-24 intervening months one would expect a project to improve in quality and focus, not to devolve.

It’s the curated experience intended to oversell the state of the the current offering (i.e. pre-release) that raises gamers’ ire.

Have you worked on a product that has had to show a vertical slice 2 years before the product is released? I've worked on a few e3/e3-like demos for games and there's a whole bunch of issues. It's not always quality - things that were considered "easy" or "we can solve that later" can come back and bite you. Things that are fun in a vertical slice demo might not actually be engaging for more than 15 minutes or so(or an hour, or three). It can be _very_ difficult to extract a 10 minute piece of gameplay that you have some context for to show people even if you have the entire game made, which means you might have to out in some temporary "features" (add a power/remove a pathway) to make the experience fit. All or these changes can have a butterfly effect. Adding X to simplify a demo can make Y seem more important than you want it to which means Z is now redundant, but you've already spoken about Z.

There had to be done realisation that things change in games over a 2 year period, (heck, things change massively in games over a 2 week period in some games) and some acceptance of that fact.

Years (decades?) ago, it was standard practice to include a watermark text that said something like "Alpha version footage, not representative of final release" in trailers, and everybody was ok with it. It was honest and straightforward.

But AAA game industry doesn't do honest anymore, they do marketing instead.

If you want a good example of what people mean, here's a comparison of the trailer of atlas, the new game from the Ark developers, and actual launch gameplay.

https://youtu.be/yzDTdBsW1GU

Atlas was so bad that they actually found menus from ark in it, i.e. it was a skin. They actually left promotional models in the production game, so at one point cheaters were attacking other pirates with ww2 fighter planes left in from a demo.

Don't use a video that promises things your players won't get.

Halo 2's E3 presentation could not possibly be turned into a real game and was built from the ground up to deceive with the intention to throw it away after

How is that good intentions? Halo 2 is not an outlier

I don't know though; I think it has to be done with a LOT of trust by the creator and the public. CD Projekt currently has that trust with the fan base; however Elder Scrolls 6 [1] last year was not a welcomed with a cinematic trailer based on how Bethesda has behaved in the past.

I think another view is how the FF7 remake has been treated for years since its initial announcement. There was hype, skepticism, and finally support.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkFdqqyI8y4

> "Don't lie" is a very low bar, and there is a lot of room to exist above it.

And E3's reputation for housing flim-flam and lies is well established: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/03

Even the ones that do have gameplay lie or exaggerate the limits of their game (looking at you, Todd Howard, Peter Molyneux, and Sean Murray).

It's simply marketing spin, gameplay or no gameplay, it's why you can never really trust such hyped up demonstrations and they can only tell you about their product, not show it. That also applies in further interviews on various news outlets.

Okay, but that means that the era of vertical gameplay slices is effectively over, more-or-less exactly as described in the article. It further means that if a lack of gameplay demonstrations at E3 has left you feeling a bit unfulfilled (and maybe it doesn't, but it's a common takeaway among players following the event), then you only really have yourself to blame.

I would certainly champion that Nintendo model. I feel like people are even willing to pay a premium for it. Nintendo is to video-games what Apple was to computers through about 2014. I seldom play video-games, but my outsider's perspective is that Nintendo is the only major company which puts serious effort into making its products appear consistently polished and professional.

The only? Have you never heard of CD Project Red?

Projekt

CD Projekt did an amazing job with Witcher 3, but the fact is that Witcher 2's E3 video is one of the more infamous examples of graphics being severely downgraded once the final product ships. Witcher 3's E3 video contains very little gameplay but the cut schenes included have noticably worse graphics in the same cut scenes in the actual game. Gwent's E3 video barely contained any gameplay at all, and it wasn't representative of the released game at all.
CD Projekt retained trust because Witcher 3 is an amazing game - not because they delivered games with graphics matching their E3 videos.

> the fact is that Witcher 2's E3 video is one of the more infamous examples of graphics being severely downgraded once the final product ships
I just watched a W2 side-by-side comparison and I really don't see it. Yes, some textures look less sharp in the release version, but only some. The rest seems to just be a colour grading thing. In any case, the two look so similar to me that I don't see what the controversy was about. Also, the enhanced edition, which everyone who bought the release version got for free some months later, included a ton of graphics improvements which make W2 IMHO surpass the E3 demo's visual quality easily.

Of course -- In most cases it's about texture quality and quality of the lightning effects, and I honestly believe many E3 shots are better because they're taken at a point where the game is done enough to show it off, but before the Q/A team started reporting stuff like bad performance on 95% of consumer hardware (or in Witcher 2's case, the Xbox 360) or that the game filled to much to fit on X discs.
I was just pointing out that CDPR retains their reputation based on the quality of their games, and not because they deliver a final product that matches gameplay videos presented at E3.

> or in Witcher 2's case, the Xbox 360
The Xbox version came out about 9 months after the PC version came out, so while they designed it with consoles in mind, I doubt too much of the "downgrade" on PC were because of the console version.
> I was just pointing out that CDPR retains their reputation based on the quality of their games
Yes, absolutely. CDPR aren't immune to criticism and get plenty of it, they just deal with it well and don't suffer from it because they've built a reputation of amazing games and of being consumer friendly. Most of us can overlook the criticism since its quite minor in the grand scheme of things.

Also like Apple, Nintendo has this reality distortion field that causes people to excuse all their shortcomings and elevate mediocre products to exalted status. It's probably their single greatest advantage over their competitors.

This is particularly relevant today where a whole group of players have decided that Pokemon Sword And Shield will have terrible graphics, based on the texture on a single E3 pre-release clip of a tree.

Random weird opinions will always exist. Remember water puddles issue in Spiderman? Most likely no, unless you actually read the reports about it. And in the end it was entirely irrelevant.

Random weird opinions, amplified using crowd-coordinated social pressure techniques, are what’s driving them to stop doing gameplay demos in the first place. Attempting to minimize the minority’s opinion when that’s literally what led to this is a bit odd.

Also copy-pasted 3d models from previous games, flying iron snakes and floating seagulls. And they didn't even bother copy-pasting all of the models from the previous games so people are really in the mood for nitpicking.

> Before online gaming, games were required to deliver a 1.0 and had no further chance to patch or improve it. They would do so in silence — like Nintendo does — and essentially work for years on things that no one even knew existed until they released their 1.0 gold master and began producing marketing material from it.
There was some pre-release publicity for many games in development before online gaming. Peter Molyneux was working the press with his famous enthusiasm before 1990: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAuvaAGnqQw . Maybe Rise of the Robots was the first real debacle of pre-release hype, but it was probably as bad as anything since: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4udiQq5gpY .

If the game does not meet Nintendo's standards they will kill a project. Even if the game is almost complete. They just killed Metroid for switch.

You don't remember Nintendo showing everyone on E3 a few years back the new Zelda game and then when it was released as Breath of the Wild it looked far inferior to that? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmLfhhgXsAMMwbp.jpg

In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like. I can't comprehend it at all. Preordering was never even a question for me even before all of the recent issues with it. I just cant understand the mindset for anything other than cult-like franchises.
I can only imagine, with contempt, the cube jockey who figured out that distributing game demos was bad for their bottom line.

> In all honesty I don't know how anyone can make 60$ purchases on games without seeing what it looks like.
It depends on the game, I'd say. While I'd like often playable demos, I try to document myself on what's available (videos - not trailers - and previews) and if it is interesting to me (but again, I don't really get most of the AAA games, although some of the ones I own may be classified as such).
Also, at least releases in Japan and in Asia have actual perks with preordering (and by actual perks I don't mean useless digital items), although that comes as an additional cost.

Some studios also are able to continue to make great (if not greatest) titles. I however think AAA games are generally too broad in scope and have a much greater probability to fail to keep their reputation and/or to live up to the expectation.

Pre-ordering was a way before digital distribution to ensure that you got the game on day 1.
I grew up in a tiny little town in Texas where the nearest, non-Walmart video game store was 45 minutes away - this is back in the tail end of the NES, the middle of the SNES, and the dawn of the PlayStation era.
The store I went to would often only get between five and ten copies (beyond what was pre-ordered) of a video game on launch day, with a typical waiting period of two to three weeks to get more copies.
I vividly remembering pre-ordering video games that sounded interesting, some for as few as $5 that could be transferred to another video game pre-order if I changed my mind. Back then (and still today for physical games in some stores), you could pay the balance when you pick up the game.
Today, aside from bullshit pre-order bonuses that the video games companies make exclusive to each retailer, there is very little reason to pre-order - Steam/Origin/GOG/Epic Game Store will not run out of copies - they can copy the bits an infinite number of times. In fact, in the case of some flops (looking at you, Fallout 76, with your nearly 50% price cut within a month of release), it makes no sense to pre-order.
The real mind-melter for me is Kickstarting games. Crowd funding is nice and helps projects that would otherwise not be funded, but why would you want to pay for a game that isn't even completely conceptualized yet?

I can relate to this, and feel the same way about hardware, like an iPad or PS4. That's why I almost exclusively buy from vendors that take returns regardless of the reason; like Amazon, Steam and Apple. Now the full product is the demo and I can't remember the last time I spent money on a product I didn't want to spend money on.

The problem there lies that there's almost zero chance that the game you see @ E3 will be the exact same game that gets released 6 months down the line. Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better. That could mean adding new mechanics or story, but sometimes you decide that a really cool thing just doesn't fit in to the story you're trying to tell, so you cut it and it's a better game for it. I feel like it's a have your cake and eat it too.
That not to mention the industry feedback you get that you could be incorporating.

Sure, you could just stop development, but then you're just wasting 6 months you could be spending making the game better.
I think if people agreed that in every case the released game was strictly better than the E3 demo, that would not be controversial.
Seems to me the problem is more when people feel the opposite is happening?

The hardcore gamers in E3s audience can and will smell BS. The problem is generally all developers have to go off of is the vertical slice, generally created right during E3 and before a lot of the games systems are in place. If you go and tell the whole truth about a game in the development stage, it’s like showing a trailer for a movie without a lot of the VFX actually completed, or even worse. The business wants to know how much hype they can build around a game, and how much money to spend on marketing. And the big titles tend to treat their audience as idiots, because the marketing department tends to treat them as such. There’s a better way, but it goes against how so many companies especially big publishers do things.

I thought Dead Island was fine from a gameplay perspective which is what I bought it on because I learned early on in life that you shouldn't buy games before reviews drop.

What? I don't feel owed gameplay demos at a trade show months or years before release. I'm fine with one a month out or not at all, they're selling me a game not nine months of anticipation.

Just wait until it is out, read reviews, and watch some YouTube videos, then make your purchasing decision. What do you need a pre-release gameplay video for?

Pre-release gameplay is primarily there to fuel the demand for pre-orders. As I mentioned in a previous comment on this article, this is a vestige of the days where limited supply of video games was more common (due to physical media shortages, unknown demand, and the desire to have a bit of word of mouth and exclusivity drive some of the marketing) - with digital distribution for practically all games, unless you want a super special limited edition, there is no reason to pre-order - wait for the game to release and watch some YouTube/Twitch of the game and make up your mind, as you have said.

> the dev's takeaway was "Don't show them any gameplay."
The average developer has almost no input into what is and isn't shown at E3. They can present some source material but E3 decisioss like these are made by a marketing company or the publisher.

One practical way gamers can respond to this is to avoid preorders. That might work.

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