"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Projekt