The apologists I call them
Is unrealistic pre-release game footage harmful?
- Thread starter zilla.exe
- Start date
L. Scofield
Veteran
As the Dark Souls 2 downgrade fiasco shows, you can't trust any pre-release media, not trailers, not gameplay walkthroughs, not even public demos as late as a month before release.
i think devs need to clearly state that the pre-alpha footage are not representation of final game.
game from japan mostly squaresoft/enix, have very different thing between pre-alpha and final. FF X that was full 13, FF 13 that was shown running in HD then actually running in low res, FF 15 that... i no longer can find approriate word to describe... --> http://www.gamexeon.com/artikel/59893/final-fantasy-xv-ps4-vs-ps3
compared to those, things that happen in watch dogs is subtle.
EDIT:
bah.. the most important pictures on the website i linked above are broken. But one set of images showing the hero face can be seen. The one with almost red face is PS4, the one that have better shading is PS3.
game from japan mostly squaresoft/enix, have very different thing between pre-alpha and final. FF X that was full 13, FF 13 that was shown running in HD then actually running in low res, FF 15 that... i no longer can find approriate word to describe... --> http://www.gamexeon.com/artikel/59893/final-fantasy-xv-ps4-vs-ps3
compared to those, things that happen in watch dogs is subtle.
EDIT:
bah.. the most important pictures on the website i linked above are broken. But one set of images showing the hero face can be seen. The one with almost red face is PS4, the one that have better shading is PS3.
2x 680's apparently. Given the framerate looked good it should certainly have been playable (perhaps at a slightely reduced resolution) on todays top end single GPU's. I can only assume those settings were stripped out of the PC version to prevent the console versions from looking bad.
Colonial Marines ads can be considered as false advertisement (I believe Gearbox and SEGA were even sued) since they purposely misrepresented the product they were going to sell but Ubi never said that the first E3 footage was "final game" and AFAIK didn't use it to advertise WD.
Ubi "unwisely" showed more than it could deliver, showed a target render that they didn't' met, but they never were legally bound to deliver those visuals. even if some gamers believe it.
VideoGamerTV "What the hell happened to A:CM"
This video compares the two, it went deeper than a few effects being ripped out, entire level geometry had to be ripped out (note the 'view' over Hadley's Hope from the control room in particular). The enemy AI may also have been faked or too CPU intensive, in the tunnel fight you can see the Aliens climbing between crates to get through a barrier but in final they do the Doom Shuffle straight towards the player. Ugh such a wasted opportunity
Even worse when I heard the 'Brothers in Arms' developer was doing an Aliens game it sounded great, that series really pushed squad combat rather than the usual FPS Super Soldier nonsense.I'm so OT at this stage but goddammit Gearbox!
Yeah WD and A:CM are not the same thing at all, one thing you cannot accuse Ubisoft of is releasing unrepresentative videos before release. They've released a lot of footage of what WD is in it's release form and are taking the flak for undershooting their target unlike Gearbox/Sega.
'Optimistic' pre-release or announcement trailers are as old as videogames but I do wonder if the length of the last console cycle has meant more people are just not used to it? I mean the PS2 had those daft 'Emotion Engine' bullshot videos, last gen we had the EA Madden 'target' videos, the Killzone 2 trailer, Lair, etc.
The current PC version is killing pretty much everything out there right now (4GB vram for ultra textures etc). Maybe the stories of torrented versions having bitcoin miners stashed in the code have some truth but it was actually Ubi who put them there to chew through all the extra cpu cycles
The current PC version is killing pretty much everything out there right now (4GB vram for ultra textures etc). Maybe the stories of torrented versions having bitcoin miners stashed in the code have some truth but it was actually Ubi who put them there to chew through all the extra cpu cycles
That may not even be that far from the truth. Obviously not bitcoin miners but the game sounds like it performs well enough at console settings (high, 900p, 30fps). Ultra settings - as with many other games - are just performance sink holes put in place to make high end hardware owners fool themselves into thinking the game is taking advantage of their hardware. WD is the perfect example of that since we've actually seen in real time what the same levels of hardware performance can achieve in properly implemented code.
There are a few things about this whole WD issue that seem to be quite obvious - at least to me...
Ubisoft did not expect this reaction to the first demo. The lack of info about a lot of things - story, main character, even the actual scope and goals of the game, and possibly even the setting itself - have boosted expectations way above anything they counted on. I imagine this must have resulted in some significant changes, like budget and staff or attention from the upper management.
The game was in a very, very early stage, so the lack of info probably was because those things weren't flashed out enough, maybe in some cases not at all, at the time of the demo. But everything there was not pre-rendered, it was a demo, and they most likely had nothing else at all in place at the time. So they had some rough estimations of what the requirements will end up to be, what trade-offs they'll necessitate, and in many cases they've probably ended up with meeting some serious limitations.
Many of these limitations had to do with the game being cross-gen; if it was PS4/X1 only, I imagine a lot more of the original concept would have remained. But the required changes to the core architecture must have become restricting for the nextgen versions in the end.
Also, the most important lesson is that the game was revealed far too early. Almost every other game I can recall has only seen 1 major E3 on-stage demo, and many are also released within a year (like any COD, or the current AC - and I don't expect to see anything from Halo 5 either). Most other publishers seem to take more care about not to build up expectations that they're not sure to be able to deliver upon.
Why Ubi decided to present such an early version may never be known, but again, they probably never dreamed to become the most interesting E3 2012 reveal.
Also, internet forum people can really be pretty big trolls.
Ubisoft did not expect this reaction to the first demo. The lack of info about a lot of things - story, main character, even the actual scope and goals of the game, and possibly even the setting itself - have boosted expectations way above anything they counted on. I imagine this must have resulted in some significant changes, like budget and staff or attention from the upper management.
The game was in a very, very early stage, so the lack of info probably was because those things weren't flashed out enough, maybe in some cases not at all, at the time of the demo. But everything there was not pre-rendered, it was a demo, and they most likely had nothing else at all in place at the time. So they had some rough estimations of what the requirements will end up to be, what trade-offs they'll necessitate, and in many cases they've probably ended up with meeting some serious limitations.
Many of these limitations had to do with the game being cross-gen; if it was PS4/X1 only, I imagine a lot more of the original concept would have remained. But the required changes to the core architecture must have become restricting for the nextgen versions in the end.
Also, the most important lesson is that the game was revealed far too early. Almost every other game I can recall has only seen 1 major E3 on-stage demo, and many are also released within a year (like any COD, or the current AC - and I don't expect to see anything from Halo 5 either). Most other publishers seem to take more care about not to build up expectations that they're not sure to be able to deliver upon.
Why Ubi decided to present such an early version may never be known, but again, they probably never dreamed to become the most interesting E3 2012 reveal.
Also, internet forum people can really be pretty big trolls.
I still think that this is more about the core architecture of the game not being suited enough for the high-end platforms. It seems to be full of inefficiencies that don't matter on PS3/X360 but can hold the stronger hardware back.
There's been some discussion about this with some good info from sebbi but I'm not sure which thread it is...
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Or the assets could have ended up so large at the original quality that it would have required multiple BluRay discs or hundreds of GBs of download/HDD space.
Or what you said. Who knows at this point?
VideoGamerTV "What the hell happened to A:CM"
This video compares the two, it went deeper than a few effects being ripped out, entire level geometry had to be ripped out (note the 'view' over Hadley's Hope from the control room in particular). The enemy AI may also have been faked or too CPU intensive, in the tunnel fight you can see the Aliens climbing between crates to get through a barrier but in final they do the Doom Shuffle straight towards the player. Ugh such a wasted opportunity
I'm so OT at this stage but goddammit Gearbox!
Welcome to the world of a game that originally started development on PC (by Gearbox), was then handed over to a developer (TimeGate Studios) who had to prioritize the X360/PS3 version in order to get it finished in time to ship, and then PC gamers basically getting the X360/PS3 version because no more effort had been put into a proper PC version (that SEGA deadline for game development) which the game started out as.
Yes, it was a mess. You can thank X360/PS3 for that as well as the whole lack of communication between SEGA (set the development deadline and budget), Gearbox (started it on PC then handed off development to TimeGate) and TimeGate Studios (had to focus on console version and abandon PC centric development to meet deadline/budget). Perhaps with more communication and collaboration between those 3, the original PC quality could have been preserved (more budget and extended deadline by SEGA, more collaboration between Gearbox and TimeGate) as well as finishing a game that was playable on X360/PS3, but as it turns out when there's little to no communication, bad things can happen.
Regards,
SB
Oh I agree with you that PS360 are a cause of problems. It's nothing new. PS360's limitations have been a thorn in the PC's side for years. Ubisoft aren't willing to just leave that huge audience behind or count on them being willing to upgrade to the new machines.
But hey it sounds like WD has some amazing stuff going on regardless of being ball-n-chained by 2005 hardware.
People buy dreams and expectations, if they didn't they wouldn't purchase a game before playing a demo, therefore I don't think it really hurts to show something that's different from what the game really looks, although I'd prefer it if it was clearly labelled as such...
Sigfried1977
Legend
I think that's nonsense. They probably just built a tiny snippet of gameplay to a really high visual standard for demonstration purposes and nothing more.
D