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
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'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 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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.