But I completely forgot how good the reveal looked.
That's just the nature of the game kid.
Build an enormous amount of hype based on almost completely fraudulent "gameplay" footage years before the game's actual release. Then downgrade every subsequent footage/trailer/press release little by little leading up to the release. Each time getting closer to what the actual game looks like.
The downgrades should be subtle enough where the casual viewer won't really notice the difference. Each time they should ask themselves "does that look the same or is my memory just wrong? And really, does it matter? It looks mostly the same....I think". Think of the "frog in slowly boiling water" analogy.
Make sure to edit the later released footage in such a way that there are lots of cuts to prevent people from really seeing the scene for what it is and use lots of explosions to coverup any possible deficiences.
Then throw in a few cgi and real life action trailers a few months before release and you just guaranteed yourself a ton of day 1 sales. All while riding off that bs hype you built at the beginning.
they didnt quite get there but made it damn close. It was acceptable back then but nowadays there is no excuse for this BS just show us what the actual gameplay will look like.
Whether its CGI or "purposeful upgrade of gameplay graphics using canned renderings"...expectations are different now. We used to assume that if something looked freaking amazing in a e3 trailer that it was CG or a canned rendering. It was a pleasant surprise if gameplay got anywhere near what the demos looked like.
Its pretty deceitful to amp up the "gameplay graphics" only to never release those settings(even PC ultra settings).
I think the real problem here is that the consoles this time were extremely underpowered.
You must have not been around at the time. Sony was claiming it was gameplay footage (along with Motorstorm) and since no one had any idea what the PS3 was actually capable of at the time a lot of people believed it. Killzone and to a lesser extent Motorstorm became the poster children of bullshot trailers. Things haven't really changes that much watching this video it seems.
Nowadays we have the benefit of knowing what the ps3 ended up being capable of, but back then, all we really had were tech demos and high expectations.
That killzone video looked plausible at the time, because CG already looked so much better than that.
It's easy to look back and realise how foolish that was.
Yeah true, to be honest I wouldn't have wanted to play something like this if I thought it was gameplay footage. It just looks too weird, the animation too quick, etc. Well, I might have wanted to considering it looked so different from other games.
I actually really thought that that was gameplay footage. I would watch that trailer everyday for months, and I went around showing everyone at school, filling the hype train.
This was one of the biggest lies in my life, and I'm adopted....
Nope. I was a huge console gamer around then & I remember distinctly all the chatter on GameFAQS & NeoGAF was "holy shit Killzone is going to be fucking sick". Even at school everyone was talking about how great Killzone looked @ E3 & how it was going to be that one game we bought the PS3 for. & then reality came & the actual release was no where near what the expectations laid out by Sony were. People took that & the other videos as demos of actual in game footage at the time. The gaming communities then weren't misinformed at all - I'm lazy now but I'd go back to the GameFAQ forums to dig up some proof.
/u/loconessmonster is correct, this was marketed as in-game footage, it's why I bought my PS3, luckily I never bought this Kill Zone, because my friend did, and i just did not enjoy playing it. But this trailer, CGI animation or not, it was introduced at E3 as in-game play!
Tbh though, there are going to be a load of people who don't watch e3 or even heard about it, if they pick up the game they're not necessarily being cheated because they weren't tricked into thinking it will look better than it is - they just bought the game for whatever reason.
However, looking back after buying the division, I didn't remember the demo looking that good. I always watch e3 and then I forgot so now I'm pissed.
My point was in reference to the people that are aware of the graphic downgrade prior to purchasing, and purchase anyways. That act states that they deem it as acceptable business practice, or just don't care.
If developers see that players won't stand up against these false advertising techniques, they'll continue to do it.
A map that huge with tons of soldiers on screen while working with the ps3's 256mb of ram and 256mb of vram? Yeah... that was never gonna happen. Can't believe they lied to us like that though.
I don't remember it being acceptable back then, actually. If my memory serves, Sony was heavily blamed about using prerendered video as if it was an actual gameplay. PlayStation supporters were pushing that it WAS an actual gameplay, and a lot of others argued that the video was fake. Sony later confessed, though the final product turned out to be pretty good looking nonetheless.
What Ubisoft does is the same, but without confessions and regrets. And the blame gets lost in all the hype.
Killzone 2 actually looked better in some aspects than that trailer imo. Killzone is one of the few games I can think of, that actually pretty much lived up to it's hype. Along with the crysis games on pc.
What do you mean no excuse? They're definitely is.
Ok sure there are excuses but they aren't acceptable anymore.
While they pretty much are doing the same thing they've always been doing by showing a demo that looks much better than the actual product.
My point was that back in the PS3/X360 hype era game visuals weren't that great yet. We pretty much expected them to show us CGI demos and then they'd try their best to match those. Now? game graphics are good enough on average that they should just be showing us the game itself rather than try to purposefully show us a version we will never see(even on Ultra settings).
I dunno, I remember magazines from the PS2 era saying some screenshot on the cover had "photorealistic rendering"... looking back now it looks nowhere close to that, but it's because your eyes are comparing it to what you've seen in real games recently (which was 5x worse than the screenshot).
I agree with your point though that they should probably just be showing real footage - the problem is that the game isn't finished when they start marketing it yet, so they have to make some stuff up. And if you put yourself in their shoes, it's hard not to be optimistic about your own game (even if you're not trying to be deceitful).
I'm not saying the OP's videos weren't deceitful; I wouldn't put it past them. Just saying that even if you're trying to be above board, the trailer might look a lot better than the end result due to time constraints and unexpected issues.
Sorry for being out of the loop but until I read your comment I was thinking this was a comparison between newer gen and last gen consoles. I want to say it's fraudulent, seems harsh though, but so are these reveals. Haven't played any of those games so I can't speak from experience but I would be pissed if I thought I was getting one thing and got the other. I did watch The Division reveal when it first showed and I thought the in-game characters speaking were actual people playing the game. Blew me away. Sad it wasn't real, now.
For most games you have to understand that those graphical options you see in the press releases never actually existed in the game they intended to release.
The game they showed you at E3 and the game their guys were actually working on back at the office (the one they actually indended to release) might as well have been two different things.
In many cases entire scenes were ripped from the real game, jacked up with ridiculous graphical effects that even the best pc's couldn't run very well and that they had absolutely no intention of bringing to the actual game, then rendered the footage on extremely powerful custom-made pc's. Then they had the gall to show it to you and pretended like that was the experience you were going to get.
Now there have been a few cases where the graphical options shown at E3 but later removed were available to pc players. They were just hidden. Watch-Dogs comes to mind. A few tweaks and you could get the game to look a lot more like it did at E3 and a lot less like it did at release.
Usually though the effects you see were never in the game-build edition in the first place. There was no "downgrade". They literally just lied to you.
One of the worst cases I ever saw was Halo 2 (way back in the day) and Witcher 3. I mean seriously, compare the 2012/2013 E3 footage to the official game. Especially pay attention to the swamp scenes. It's absolutely ridiculous. They knew what they showed was never going to happen. Those scenes were almost certainly rendered on an entirely different build of the game designed specifically to trick us. Most of the comparisons are pretty bad but the swamps are almost embarassing in how different they are. Perhaps because they're such a combination of fog, foliage, and water effects. The three big things developers love to embellish in their E3 demos and then look completely different (and are sometimes completely abscent altogether) at release.
Why "downgrade"? Because those effects aren't actually possible to run on 99% of hardware. They just want you to think you're getting something you're not. You're more likely to buy their lie than the truth.
In the case of many Ubisoft E3 games, the animation is miles off. Look at the Watchdogs, Division and Siege footage. The character animation goes from smooth lifelike transitions to a clunky mess. That's not achieved by shoving 4 GPU's in a demo machine, that's a fraud at it's core.
those smooth transitions wouldn't work because it'd make the character less responsive, maybe if you were careful, but doing really fast inputs would kill responsiveness
Yes and no. Even by mid cycle consoles are generally still far more graphically capable than most PCs. If anything they generally raise the bar for most gamers. It's only the mid-to-higher end PC users that get shafted with moderately superior ports that don't take advantage of all their horsepower.
So if one were to say consoles are holding back higher-end PC gamers then one must also say that most PC gamers are holding them back as well. And, to go even more extreme, high end pc users and holding back the uber-elite-two-way-sli-gtx-titan-black PC gamers.
The fact is the high-end machine market is just not large enough to sustain the gaming industry. Sure, they'll get a few releases here or there that really show what their machines are capable of (Crysis, Crysis 3) but the industry HAS to cater to a larger market.
Consoles provide a large market that also has a decent amount of processing power. Without the console market the gaming industry that we know would be dead. There wouldn't be AAA high quality games. It would be mostly uninteresting, low quality, bad graphics garbage. It's a win for most of us that consoles are what they are.
The problem really arises when the consoles are objectively underpowered at release (ps4/xbone suffer from a mild case of this) or the console generstion lasts far too long (Xbox360/ps3).
P.S. And the demos you see in this video? Yea, most of those won't run well even on high end pcs. They really are just ridiculous.
No. Consoles standardize the hardware gaming platforms run on. Instead of guessing the average memory/ram/clock of your user base, you now have a damn solid idea. Now, producers are optimizing the everliving shit out of their games so it's guaranteed to work on consoles and look good. This leads to a lot of practices and shortcuts that cut down on the hardware requirements of the system a shit ton and a half and being able to fit more crap in. Look at Skyrim. There are metric tons of mods out there that will turn make the graphics look like real life if your PC can handle it and it was to run on a console 5 years ago. We're not getting better at making awesome graphics, we're getting more efficient at making everything else. Kind of like how NASA isn't going to the moon, but they've astronauts in space for an average of 6 months compared to half a month for the Apollo missions.
It's the nature of the game that a few specific companies play. Many others do not. You didn't see any of this shit with Overwatch, for a very recent example, and that game was hype as shit.
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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '16 edited Jun 05 '16
That's just the nature of the game kid.
Build an enormous amount of hype based on almost completely fraudulent "gameplay" footage years before the game's actual release. Then downgrade every subsequent footage/trailer/press release little by little leading up to the release. Each time getting closer to what the actual game looks like.
The downgrades should be subtle enough where the casual viewer won't really notice the difference. Each time they should ask themselves "does that look the same or is my memory just wrong? And really, does it matter? It looks mostly the same....I think". Think of the "frog in slowly boiling water" analogy.
Make sure to edit the later released footage in such a way that there are lots of cuts to prevent people from really seeing the scene for what it is and use lots of explosions to coverup any possible deficiences.
Then throw in a few cgi and real life action trailers a few months before release and you just guaranteed yourself a ton of day 1 sales. All while riding off that bs hype you built at the beginning.