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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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

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.

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.

> "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

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

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

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