No Man's Sky

[Zixinus]

There is the notion that what the developer chooses to show in development videos and such are stuff they have planned for the final game. It's something other developers have been careful about, precisely to prevent false expectation.
There will always be idiot fanboys that blow everything out of proportion but is the developer really 100% innocent in this case of making the hype out of control? Or would even be this the first case of a developer assuming to be able to do far more than they actually can?

[Vendetta]

There is the notion that what the developer chooses to show in development videos and such are stuff they have planned for the final game. It's something other developers have been careful about, precisely to prevent false expectation.
There will always be idiot fanboys that blow everything out of proportion but is the developer really 100% innocent in this case of making the hype out of control? Or would even be this the first case of a developer assuming to be able to do far more than they actually can?

Man, previews containing features or content not in the final game has happened since the dawn of fucking videogames. That's why people should have learned by now.

And really, you can tell in all the actual interviews that Sean Murray was trying to play down the hype, he was really cagey about features on shows like conan, or in interviews when asked about multi, but that didn't help at all, people ignored it.

If you fall for "hype" it's your own stupid fault, especially when the hype doesn't even have a basis in what the dev said about the game but in what other idiots on Reddit decided would be in it.

[TheFeniX]

"I was really excited about this game back in the mid-90s. Back then it was called Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Now I don't get excited about games."

I think I can say I nailed it.

A Derek Smart reference in 2016. Solid. To be fair though, Smart was a pretty dedicated Snake Oil salesman. Murray really comes off as an artsy-fartsy with a heart of gold kind of guy who wanted his game to deliver and Sony thrust him into the spot-light when that's just really not where he needs to be.

If you read most of that with the brain of a thinking human being not a gamer, you realise that the "promised features" are actually "things we are experimenting with", like him saying "right now you can land on asteroids", which is interpreted by fuckwits as "you will definitely be able to land on asteroids in the finished game I promise" but is clearly just a feature under test that got taken out because maybe it just wasn't fun to do.

Clearly? I'm sure you can point me to some kind of evidence the developer or Sony let it's potential consumer base know all the shit they cut.

They didn't do that. They showed us a Lambo and we were sold a Fiero with a body kit... for the price of a Lambo and which would explode every 3 minutes.. Yea, it's not illegal, but it's just another set of assholes looking to gouge money out of an industry. They do not deserve respect or to be defended for this. I dump most of this on Sony since, like I said, Murray seems like the kind of guy who got way in over his head when Sony came knocking and wanted cameras in his face 24/7.

Y'see, every single videogame (and board/tabletop game) has loads of features that get tested during development and get removed, and this has always been the case but people now get much more visibility of the development process,

No they don't. Transparency was a much bigger deal in the past. Now, we're lucky to see anything but choice cuts given to us by the developer. God damn, even Beth could be bothered to only show us 99% of what made it into launch for the massively dissapointing Fallout 4. I didn't see CDP cutting out huge swaths of what they showed for Witcher 3 hype videos. Sure, the game had a graphics downgrade, though not as much as fatnerds like to think, but the game still offered what they were showing. Demos are dead. And access to pre-release stuff is generally restricted more so since publishers know the more info you have, the better informed your decision to possibly NOT purchase. So, they build on hype, not information.

The only REAL difference today is that there exists a whole group of consumers who will, for free, brow beat you for asking "why is all the shit you showed us not in the final product with no warning?"

but don't have the mental filters required to process the small slices of current builds they're seeing talked about as being part of an inherently experimental development process, so they think absolutely everything a developer ever tries is definitely a feature that will be in the game, and so we get these aggrieved lists of "promised features" that were never anything of the sort.

The problem is that those fucking videos we're used to build up huge amounts of hype for a game everyone would have otherwise would have been likely to pass over as another Spore or BC3000.

If you can honestly sit here and claim that videos designed specificially to push units, to showcase what a game has to offer, somehow shouldn't be scrutiized and, without the developer telling us what has been cut, to not be viewed as a promise then I have to ask: what do you view as a promise?

Did the Alien: CM promo videos not count as a promise? Do they get a pass because they didn't have a lawyer say "we promise the game will look like this" and otherwise we need to fuck-off? Spore did the same thing. They SHOWED us all this gameplay and a massive amount of it was just cut.

The sad part is, you're really taking shots at the people who bought NMS. Not fatnerds. Fatnerds didn't buy the game because they could smell the bullshit from a mile away.

[Vendetta]

They didn't do that. They showed us a Lambo and we were sold a Fiero with a body kit... for the price of a Lambo and which would explode every 3 minutes.. Yea, it's not illegal, but it's just another set of assholes looking to gouge money out of an industry. They do not deserve respect or to be defended for this. I dump most of this on Sony since, like I said, Murray seems like the kind of guy who got way in over his head when Sony came knocking and wanted cameras in his face 24/7.

Then how did I correctly predict from the videos what No Man's Sky would be actually like? Oh wait, it's because I know how this shit works.

No they don't. Transparency was a much bigger deal in the past.

Oh my sweet summer child...

Games media in the past had a much narrower and easier to control channel of communication, because it was all print magazines and then specialist websites with limited column space, you didn't find out about the cut features of 99% of games because the preview was maybe half a column of text and one screenshot.

I mean some games even completely changed the whole game during development. The Legend of Zelda was originally an asynchronous two player game where one player built dungeons for the other to play through.

And you think games having features removed is rare and new...

The sad part is, you're really taking shots at the people who bought NMS. Not fatnerds. Fatnerds didn't buy the game because they could smell the bullshit from a mile away.

No, I'm taking shots at people who are really sad about NMS because they couldn't tell what was going to be in it before they bought it. I bought NMS, I bought it with the expectation that it was going to be basically what it is, and I don't feel sad about that because that's what I was buying it for.

I saw the same previews, interviews, and videos as other people but I'm clever and it is not my first go on the previews-to-reality merry go round so my expectations were realistic.

[TheFeniX]

"Lieing is ok because I can spot liars."

That's your whole argument.

[Vendetta]

No, my argument is that developers talking about works in progress should not be interpreted as talking about finished products or accused of lying when the finished product has changed from the work in progress.

Stop being a fuckwit.

[Vendetta]

Hey look! Actual videogame developer confirms that talking about a feature is not promising that feature!

[Zixinus]

Man, previews containing features or content not in the final game has happened since the dawn of fucking videogames. That's why people should have learned by now.

So is making prerendered, scripted or otherwise prearranged footage and implying (but not outright stating) that is what the final game would be like. Deliberately. Just because it is tradition doesn't mean you aren't misleading.

[TheFeniX]

No, my argument is that developers talking about works in progress should not be interpreted as talking about finished products or accused of lying when the finished product has changed from the work in progress.

There was not just talking. Had there been, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Murray and other people directly involved in development were showing us actual in-game gameplay, controlled by themselves, of aspects of the game they were touting. There was no talk of "oh, this might get cut." As far as many of the videos showed: these aspects were functional. Aspects that never made it into the game.

Hey look! Actual videogame developer confirms that talking about a feature is not promising that feature!

Even if I accept that a developers word is law: "talking" about something is different than showing it in multiple videos. Saying shit like "right now, I can get involved in this faction war, choose sides" while PLAYING THE GAME is a far cry from "we're working on a faction battle system. Stay tuned."

Like I said before, fatnerds do dive into their own self-created hype. But this isn't a case of that: the developer was releasing enough hype on their own. Then they didn't deliver. Even still, after all that, I doubt there would be half the ruckus there is if the game wasn't a crash-happy shit-heap of code.

[Vendetta]

No, my argument is that developers talking about works in progress should not be interpreted as talking about finished products or accused of lying when the finished product has changed from the work in progress.

There was not just talking. Had there been, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Murray and other people directly involved in development were showing us actual in-game gameplay, controlled by themselves, of aspects of the game they were touting. There was no talk of "oh, this might get cut." As far as many of the videos showed: these aspects were functional. Aspects that never made it into the game.

You're obviously not paying attention when it's explained to you that cutting things that appear functional is an amazingly common occurrance in game design. And no, showing a video of a current build is still not the same as promising those features for the final build, because projects still in development are subject to change.

It''s not fucking hard to understand.

[TheFeniX]

I know, right? All these game hype videos I've seen over the years. And all those games featuring half the content shown.

Fable, Spore, Alien:CM. Man, what a staggering list of GOTY material right there. But hey, those games couldn't CTD as much as NMS, so I guess it's up for GOTYAY.

I remember how all that physics crap from HL2 got cut. Or how Left 4 Dead ended up as a single-player game. Unit stacking cut from Starcraft 2 even though they were going to have to break the engine to make it work. Wait a sec, something is off here...... you're trying to trick me! It seems like only shit-heads and conmen bother with what you're talking about.

But it's good to know people like you will fight tooth and nail against truthful advertising. After all, as long as we don't use the word "promise" but just show you tons of video showing off what we're (NOT) offering, we can not only count on your $60, but also for you to brow-beat anyone who complains.

[Vendetta]

Because literally every word a developer ever says in public about a videogame is advertising, riiiight.

Stop being a fuckwit.

[Esquire]

This is interesting to me, because I missed effectively all of the Spore publicity and actually rather enjoyed the game as shipped, particularly the animal and tribal stages. What was promised implied that wasn't delivered?

[Cykeisme]

Because literally every word a developer ever says in public about a videogame is advertising, riiiight.

Stop being a fuckwit.

It's not even relevant whether it's advertising or not, or whether it's "promises" or not.

When a man says something, and it's not true, and he knows it's not true, it's a lie.
That developer dude is a liar.
Simple as that.

All the ranting in the world about other game developers lying, or his statements in interviews not being legally binding, or whatever, are irrelevant.
The point is, he lied repeatedly about a great many things, all of them indicating that his game would be great.

I know a lot of people pre-ordered the game and are defending it to death with all sorts of crazy rationalizations, and that's fine.
Almost all also repeatedly start insulting anyone who disagrees. Also fine.

But look, he lied! A lot!

[bilateralrope]

When a man says something, and it's not true, and he knows it's not true, it's a lie.
That developer dude is a liar.
Simple as that.

How many of those statements were known to be false at the time ?

How many were features he thought they could implement, but later had to drop when they were found to be too difficult ?

When the public gets a major misconception about the features in a game, the dev/publisher has two choices:
- Correct the public quickly. See preorders get cancelled.
- Do nothing. Take money from the public. Then deal with the backlash when the truth comes out.

The first option shows honesty. The second option looks like lying to me, as a lie by omission is still a lie. Especially when the misconceptions are caused by something the developers have said.


Then there is the matter of paid DLC which shows that Murray has serious problems making up his mind about things.
9 August 2016 interview

One thing you won't see however, is the studio exploiting that with micro-transactions. Murray is adamant on this point. "We do want to add a ton of features, like we've just discussed: Freighters, bases, these type of things. But we want to do it for free. You've paid for the game, so you should get this stuff without paying even more money. So no, there will be no paid DLC, just patches."

15th August article

Talking to Daily Star Online, Murray told us he was "perhaps naive" for suggesting he wants No Man's Sky to have nothing but free updates.

As part of this promise it would see "new content and new features" added continuously to the game, in the hope of building a community of players who would plough 300/400+ hours into the space-adventure for years ahead.

Already, Murray has teased fans by suggesting that the games next update would add " the ability to build bases and own giant space freighters".

But when pushed on whether the game will always remain free, Murray couldn't categorically rule out paid for DLC further down the line, explaining that it could happen if "Maybe in the future there’s some reason why we just couldn’t possibly afford to do a certain feature without charging for it".

6 days to backtrack on his 'no paid DLC' comment. But at least he's being honest this time.

[TheFeniX]

When the public gets a major misconception about the features in a game, the dev/publisher has two choices:
- Correct the public quickly. See preorders get cancelled.
- Do nothing. Take money from the public. Then deal with the backlash when the truth comes out.

The first option shows honesty. The second option looks like lying to me, as a lie by omission is still a lie. Especially when the misconceptions are caused by something the developers have said.

CDP released insane Screenshots for Witcher 3. Said that the hardware was available to run it (it actually was, just WAY out there). Then the graphics downgrade came. They were up front about it and released more screenshots and more gameplay. Game still looked great, just not as great.

Normal people got on with their lives.
Fatnerds (and likely Beth fans) went ballistic.

Because literally every word a developer ever says in public about a videogame is advertising, riiiight.

Stop being a fuckwit.

That any sane human could watch those videos and think they aren't advertising is either sad or laughable. You pick. They did those videos with an interviewer and showed us all that gameplay because Murray gets bored a lot?

I know you aren't an idiot, I've read enough of your posts, so I have to ask: Do you have friends or family that work for Hello Games? I don't know what they did to earn your loyalty, but they are lucky to have it.

You can nitpick what "advertising" and "promise" are all day. Fact is, people are pissed. They're pissed at a level beyond your average AAA cock-up. They are pissed at the levels of Spore and beyond. So, either a whole shit-ton of people are morons and you're the only sane man on Earth or maybe you should re-watch those videos, especially damning for me are the ones about factions, and think maybe MAYBE they tried to show us way more than they could offer, then just quietly cut a bunch of stuff from the game to make release, to the point where it's dishonest.

Either way, I'm fucking done because I don't believe you're being reasonable at this point. If you want to argue another point or just trade insults, let me know.

[Vendetta]

That any sane human could watch those videos and think they aren't advertising is either sad or laughable. You pick. They did those videos with an interviewer and showed us all that gameplay because Murray gets bored a lot?

I know you aren't an idiot, I've read enough of your posts, so I have to ask: Do you have friends or family that work for Hello Games? I don't know what they did to earn your loyalty, but they are lucky to have it.

Advertising is a specific thing. It has an actual legal definition and legal restrictions on what it can or cannot contain. Interviews with people about works still in progress and subject to change are not, and have never been, regarded as advertising by any sane measure.

Everyone fucking knows that interviews about a work in progress are about a work in progress and that they are not making specific claims about the finished product. That's what advertising is, specific intentional claims about a finished product with the intent to sell that product. Interviews about a product months or years from release are not and cannot be advertising.

Gamers, and you apparently, just appear to have lost sight of this fact because they are incapable of dealing with the idea of a work in progress changing before release, even if it has always happened like that. Game developer and streamer Day[9] covered it in one of his recent dailies. Most people are really bad at game development so they don't understand that this process of adding testing and removing features is game development.

You can nitpick what "advertising" and "promise" are all day. Fact is, people are pissed. They're pissed at a level beyond your average AAA cock-up. They are pissed at the levels of Spore and beyond. So, either a whole shit-ton of people are morons and you're the only sane man on Earth or maybe you should re-watch those videos, especially damning for me are the ones about factions, and think maybe MAYBE they tried to show us way more than they could offer, then just quietly cut a bunch of stuff from the game to make release, to the point where it's dishonest.

People are obviously pissed, but their reason for being pissed is fucking stupid, because they're pissed at a thing which is absolutely fucking normal for game development but which they've only very recently gotten any visibility on at all because until a very very short time ago all of this stuff happened with absolutely none of it being talked about outside the studio because there was no way to communicate it on any reasonable scale through specialist print media or websites.

If people paid fucking attention to how games are developed and how many have changed over time, back throughout the history of game development, they wouldn't have ridiculous expectations because their response to a preview interview months before the game is final won't be "that is definitely a thing that will be in this game he promised" it would be "it will be nice if they can make that happen let's see".

And let's face it there's also a side order within the gaming community of just being categorically unable to deal with shit. The "new games media" on Youtube runs mostly on hyperbole in both directions, almost nothing can be regarded as just "okay" any more, everything has to be either praised or more usually denounced in the most ridiculously contrived terms possible. The intellectual offspring of characters like the AVGN are unable to deal with intermediate states of being, everything must be either the best or worst thing ever, and if you mildly dislike something you have to perform like a trained monkey, flinging poo at it for everyone else on Reddit to read and subsequently exaggerate. That's why Jim Sterling had his website DDoSed for posting a lukewarm review of NMS, and why these people feel so aggrieved and "lied to", because they aren't able to process the intermediate state of "man said thing ages ago, it didn't happen because of absolutely normal reasons" it must have been "zomg he lied LIED to trick us into buying this thing!".

We are talking about a community that collectively shits the bed every time a woman has an opinion, after all. A game being merely "okay" is obviously not something they're mentally equipped to deal with.

[TheFeniX]

As said, I'm done nitpicking definitions. But leaning on the legal definition to defend something as ethical? I mean, SEGA had no legal recourse against Gearbox, so what they did with Alien: CM was A-ok, right?

People are obviously pissed, but their reason for being pissed is fucking stupid, because they're pissed at a thing which is absolutely fucking normal for game development but which they've only very recently gotten any visibility on at all because until a very very short time ago all of this stuff happened with absolutely none of it being talked about outside the studio because there was no way to communicate it on any reasonable scale through specialist print media or websites.

Spore was 8 years ago.
Fable was 12 years ago.
E3 started 21 years ago.

You know the Internet is way beyond "porn and pirating" right? And it's been that way for over 20 years? The only difference is the amount of people buying games. With that kind of exposure comes more good and bad.

I've downloaded old "hype" videos back on 56k, taking hours just to see some extremely low-resolution shit.

If people paid fucking attention to how games are developed and how many have changed over time, back throughout the history of game development, they wouldn't have ridiculous expectations because their response to a preview interview months before the game is final won't be "that is definitely a thing that will be in this game he promised" it would be "it will be nice if they can make that happen let's see".

What's ridiculous when so many other game developers don't rely on selling units via cut content? What's ridiculous about expecting to get what you're been shown? You keep talking about how content gets cut: yea, sure it does. But showing what could be and passing it off as what is, is bullshit.

So many developers don't bother with that kind of bullshit because they understand people don't like snake-oil salesmen. There's a reason NMS is such a blow-out shit-fest and many other mediocre or bad games pass without incident and it's not because gamurs are too quick to overreact.

The intellectual offspring of characters like the AVGN are unable to deal with intermediate states of being, everything must be either the best or worst thing ever, and if you mildly dislike something you have to perform like a trained monkey, flinging poo at it for everyone else on Reddit to read and subsequently exaggerate. That's why Jim Sterling had his website DDoSed for posting a lukewarm review of NMS, and why these people feel so aggrieved and "lied to", because they aren't able to process the intermediate state of "man said thing ages ago, it didn't happen because of absolutely normal reasons" it must have been "zomg he lied LIED to trick us into buying this thing!".

Which is why we have a NMS, Spore, Alien: CM blow-out every fucking week, right? Or is it more likely that an innumerable numbers of games are released without incident or huge cock-ups? People can barely even be bothered to get riled up about popular games that don't work half the time, such as AssCreed Unity. But no, NMS is a case-study in how gamurs suck, right?

We are talking about a community that collectively shits the bed every time a woman has an opinion, after all. A game being merely "okay" is obviously not something they're mentally equipped to deal with.

By "community," you mean "society?" I love how people still assume gaming is the primary source of sexist asshats. You'd think reading anything about the current election would have FINALLY put that to bed.

You keep trying to put the community on trial here, but fact is Murray was the fucking face of Hello Games. He said things, he showed things. In 2016, if you honestly think people aren't going to take what you're saying seriously when you're in a position of authority like that: get the fuck out of here.

And that's Hello Games biggest mistake: Murray is not a faceman. CliffyB did a number of hype videos, at Microsoft's behest, for Gears of War. They showed a whole lot of everything about the game. And I can't think of anything that got cut, much less on the level of NMS. Had, say, after all the talk up about Chainsaw bayonets, they were cut without explanation: yea, there'd be hell to pay from purchasers.

[Vendetta]

As said, I'm done nitpicking definitions. But leaning on the legal definition to defend something as ethical? I mean, SEGA had no legal recourse against Gearbox, so what they did with Alien: CM was A-ok, right?

Fuck's sake, you're still equating an interview about a current build of a work in progress with a deliberate marketing video. When that type of interview is conducted, the features in the game are not final. When they talked about landing on asteroids or factions they did not know that those things would not be in the final build, they were testing them. It's not fucking hard to understand that.

How in the living name of fuck could they possibly be construed to be deliberately misleading people when they don't even fucking know themselves?

Do you get it? Is it sinking the fuck in yet? That's why there's a difference, because the things you are talking about are examples of someone talking about a work in progress, a thing which might change, but he doesn't actually know how it's going to change yet because that's the fucking point of what he's doing testing it!

Spore was 8 years ago.
Fable was 12 years ago.
E3 started 21 years ago.

You know the Internet is way beyond "porn and pirating" right? And it's been that way for over 20 years? The only difference is the amount of people buying games. With that kind of exposure comes more good and bad.

You think E3, a once a year show, is remotely comparable to the vastly wider and always on channels of communication that are Twitter and Youtube? No, you're just talking shit because you can't be bothered to think about the differences and you're still making false equivalence between a piece of sales advertising and a developer diary/preview. And yeah, Youtube technically existed when Spore came out, but it didn't have its hard takeoff until a couple of years afterwards.

What's ridiculous when so many other game developers don't rely on selling units via cut content? What's ridiculous about expecting to get what you're been shown? You keep talking about how content gets cut: yea, sure it does. But showing what could be and passing it off as what is, is bullshit.

Games have changed since the previews since time immemorial. When PC Gamer previewed System Shock 2 and talked about the immersive illness system they were planning nobody was surprised when it was a bar that drained your health in the final product because we weren't as fucking stupid in those days.

Which is why we have a NMS, Spore, Alien: CM blow-out every fucking week, right? Or is it more likely that an innumerable numbers of games are released without incident or huge cock-ups? People can barely even be bothered to get riled up about popular games that don't work half the time, such as AssCreed Unity. But no, NMS is a case-study in how gamurs suck, right?

NMS is absolutely a case study in how gamers are immature little pissbabies. I mean this is the game where people sent death threats to a journo for reporting that it would be delayed and then to the lead developer when it actually was. And no, these internet blowups aren't particularly rare, and they're more common in gaming than other media, there's one every couple of months about some shit or other that no functioning adult should care that much about, whether it's a game not being what people thought it was or a videogame character showing her ass a bit less than they'd like.

You keep trying to put the community on trial here, but fact is Murray was the fucking face of Hello Games. He said things, he showed things. In 2016, if you honestly think people aren't going to take what you're saying seriously when you're in a position of authority like that: get the fuck out of here.

Yeah, he showed preview builds, as often happens they didn't represent the final product, but, and here's the bit you don't seem to want to understand, nobody said they did. Sure, people assumed they did, but that's because people are often really fucking stupid. Donald Trump is one of your fucking presidential candidates this year that's how fucking stupid people are.

[TheFeniX]

Fuck's sake, you're still equating an interview about a current build of a work in progress with a deliberate marketing video. When that type of interview is conducted, the features in the game are not final. When they talked about landing on asteroids or factions they did not know that those things would not be in the final build, they were testing them. It's not fucking hard to understand that.

Dude, seriously. LISTEN to yourself: "An interview"? These "interviews" were performed with a fucking controller in hand and gameplay being demonstrated. Just like Gears and CliffyB but without all the weird close-ups of Cliffy's face. And there are so damn many of them, just like with CliffyB, to make it nearly impossible to not consider them an ad campaign.

EDIT: Guess what helped sell a shitload of GoW copies. CliffyBs weird face. Oh yea, and all those videos.

How in the living name of fuck could they possibly be construed to be deliberately misleading people when they don't even fucking know themselves?

Because we don't live in fucking fantasy land. Where hopes and dreams are all you need to get people to buy your stuff.

Pull all the videos, and you've just got another indie title. NMS hype and "success" is tied directly to those promo videos. So to say I should treat them as some type of internal monologue means you are the one who doesn't know how business works.

You keep talking about how we SHOULD take these videos. Let's just say you're right on this for a moment: How would Sony and Murray THINK we would take them? Exactly: we'd buy the hype and buy the game. So kudos to Hello Games for being the low budget EA Games. Lie lie and lie some more, but not REALLY lieing, so no one can sue you. Remember, if it's legal, it's ethical.

You think E3, a once a year show, is remotely comparable to the vastly wider and always on channels of communication that are Twitter and Youtube? No, you're just talking shit because you can't be bothered to think about the differences and you're still making false equivalence between a piece of sales advertising and a developer diary/preview. And yeah, Youtube technically existed when Spore came out, but it didn't have its hard takeoff until a couple of years afterwards.

Of course, focus on one example to support your delusion. Ignoring that E3 showed developers and publishers they could pander directly to the consumer if they wanted to. And they damn sure wanted to and did.

One company alone shits all over your idea that gamurs haven't been in the loop about development: valve. HL2, Portal, Portal 2, L4Dead, TF2, Counter-Strike. The devs constantly deluged us with interviews and videos of touted features, even some that were functional and cut because they were dumb (like a commander mode for TF2 a la Battlefield 2). Just because EA, Activision, and Ubishit hide behind a wall to push pre-orders DOES NOT mean the gaming consumer base has been kept in the dark and is not ready to see the ins and outs of the system. We've been seeing it for YEARS.

Even god damn id, back when it was relevant, was doing shit like this in the 90s. Epic, Blizzard (even being part of Activision), valve, id: so many of them can do what Hello Games/Sony did with NMS but because they aren't building hype based on a mountain of bulshit.

Games have changed since the previews since time immemorial. When PC Gamer previewed System Shock 2 and talked about the immersive illness system they were planning nobody was surprised when it was a bar that drained your health in the final product because we weren't as fucking stupid in those days.

So, I assume they showed it in gameplay, and it was just totally gone when the game was released?

Remember how Trespasser had dino AI with actual life cycles, physics based weapon usage, and all that other cool shit they had? Then all of it got cut? Remember how Trespasser was going to change the face of gaming, something original and AWESOME? Trespasser: everyone loved that game, right?

Oh wait. But... they didn't "promise" any of that, just showed it in magazines and interviews. And people were pissed and the game sold like shit. Good thing everyone was so fucking smart back then. But reacting the same way in 2016 means people are dumb because it fits my argument.

See, I'm old too. I remember shit.

NMS is absolutely a case study in how gamers are immature little pissbabies. I mean this is the game where people sent death threats to a journo for reporting that it would be delayed and then to the lead developer when it actually was. And no, these internet blowups aren't particularly rare, and they're more common in gaming than other media, there's one every couple of months about some shit or other that no functioning adult should care that much about, whether it's a game not being what people thought it was or a videogame character showing her ass a bit less than they'd like.

Ebert got death threats as a matter of course. Michael Bay talked about getting them constantly. I'm not impressed.

Yeah, he showed preview builds, as often happens they didn't represent the final product, but, and here's the bit you don't seem to want to understand, nobody said they did. Sure, people assumed they did, but that's because people are often really fucking stupid. Donald Trump is one of your fucking presidential candidates this year that's how fucking stupid people are.

Trump would probably like NMS: game's as full of shit as he is. Me, I'm going to stick with games/developers that don't have to lean on bullshit, then fall back on "b-b-b-b-b-but we didn't PROMISE anything" for my gaming money.

Other developers, in the exact same position as Hello Games have both come out on top (Epic) or gave in and bought their own bullshit (Maxis). There's a reason Maxis became a huge fucking joke and at the least Epic delivers. To be fair to Maxis, you're obviously full of shit when EA has their hand up your ass.

[Vendetta]

Dude, seriously. LISTEN to yourself: "An interview"? These "interviews" were performed with a fucking controller in hand and gameplay being demonstrated. Just like Gears and CliffyB but without all the weird close-ups of Cliffy's face. And there are so damn many of them, just like with CliffyB, to make it nearly impossible to not consider them an ad campaign.

It's also impossible to consider them representative of the final product when the product wasn't finished yet when they were made.

That's literally the crux of this.

They showed gameplay of a thing that wasn't finished, and it changed later.

That's all that happened. You're making it out to be something way different to what it was because you're butthurt you bought a thing you didn't like. That's all there is to say about this any more.

[Civil War Man]

I haven't bought NMS, and in fact hadn't even heard of it until last week or so, so I don't exactly have a horse in this race, but I just thought I'd weigh in on a couple general points in the conversation.

Because literally every word a developer ever says in public about a videogame is advertising, riiiight.

Stop being a fuckwit.

Actually, in a sense, anything that a developer says in public about a game that they are developing, in their official capacity as a developer, is a form of advertising. It depends on how nitpicky you want to be in differentiating between advertising specifically and marketing in general.

The purpose of advertising/marketing, whether it's through interviews, demos, trailers, TV ads, or the multitude of other forms it takes, is to raise awareness of the product being sold and make people want to buy it. Since the purpose is to raise awareness of the product, the topics covered creates an expectation regarding the product itself. When Nike has athletes sell their shoes, they aren't necessarily saying, "These shoes will make you athletic," but they are getting viewers to associate Nike shoes with athleticism, which creates the expectation that Nike shoes are a good choice for people when they want to play sports or exercise. In the same sense, a game developer talking about, say, open world gameplay in an interview about a game is, intentionally or not, creating the expectation that the game they are talking about will have open world gameplay in it. And unless they specifically take the time to issue a disclaimer that the feature is unfinished or a work in progress, they are, intentionally or not, creating the expectation that the feature will be there when the game is released.

I'm not going to comment on whether or not the NMS developers did that, since I haven't taken the time to look at the marketing stuff they did, but I wanted to offer a rebuttal to the idea that an interview somehow doesn't count as marketing for the subject of the interview.

In a sense, it seems like you are having a different conversation than other people in this thread. You seem to be focused more on how things are versus how things should be. You seem to be arguing that since marketing for video games has worked this way for years, then it is unfair to single out NMS as being somehow more dishonest in their marketing than other games. Others are arguing that video game marketing should not work that way, and that the fact it's always been done that way doesn't justify continuing to do it that way, and are latching on to what they view as misleading marketing of NMS as the latest example of why they feel the system is broken.

NMS is absolutely a case study in how gamers are immature little pissbabies. I mean this is the game where people sent death threats to a journo for reporting that it would be delayed and then to the lead developer when it actually was. And no, these internet blowups aren't particularly rare, and they're more common in gaming than other media, there's one every couple of months about some shit or other that no functioning adult should care that much about, whether it's a game not being what people thought it was or a videogame character showing her ass a bit less than they'd like.

Ebert got death threats as a matter of course. Michael Bay talked about getting them constantly. I'm not impressed.

On the topic of this, I think it's rather interesting that video games are fairly unique when it comes to what happens when a major release flops. It's one of the few forms of entertainment where I regularly see people blame the fans for not liking it. When, for example, the latest Fantastic 4 movie was about as well-received as someone shitting in the punch bowl, everyone agreed that the people who made the movie fucked up (though there was some disagreement over how exactly to divvy up the blame). But when Blizzard botched Diablo III's release so badly that it prevented people from playing World of Warcraft because D3's launch crashed the login servers, the gaming media went on and on about how the people who complained about it were entitled whiners because they expected to be able to play a game on the day that the developers made the game available to play.

[Vendetta]

In a sense, it seems like you are having a different conversation than other people in this thread. You seem to be focused more on how things are versus how things should be. You seem to be arguing that since marketing for video games has worked this way for years, then it is unfair to single out NMS as being somehow more dishonest in their marketing than other games. Others are arguing that video game marketing should not work that way, and that the fact it's always been done that way doesn't justify continuing to do it that way, and are latching on to what they view as misleading marketing of NMS as the latest example of why they feel the system is broken.

The reason is that I am not ignorant about how game development works. I know that features are liable to be changed and removed, and so I don't regard preview information as fact, because it isn't. Adding features, testing them, and then if they don't work (and that doesn't just mean technically, sometimes they don't work because they aren't fun, or because they distract from or interrupt the intended flow of the gameplay) removing them is fundamental to game development.

The fact that previews have always been this way should have taught other people this, it hasn't. Expecting every feature that ever gets previewed to be in a finished videogame is cripplingly naive, and games have been around long enough now that people should be aware of this.

And it literally cannot be changed except by not talking about a game until it's already at final master, the amount of communications bandwidth about videogames even five years ago was much smaller than it is now, Youtube has exploded in usage, everyone's on twitter, and if you want anyone to know about your game you have to keep them engaged for far longer until it comes out.

The problem is that people need to realise that talking about a feature that doesn't make it into a game is not the same as being dishonest, it's making a prediction about the future that turns out to be wrong, no more. When those first videos of Witcher 3 came out they predicted a level of graphical detail that couldn't be sustained when they decided to make it an open world game, so it changed. CD Projekt weren't "dishonest" showing those videos, they just changed something else in the design that made them wrong.

Grown ass adults should be able to deal with this information.

[TheFeniX]

It's also impossible to consider them representative of the final product when the product wasn't finished yet when they were made.

I do not in any way expect that to be the final product. I do however expect some form of what's being shown to make it in there. If the dev tells me (for just one example), "there's multiplayer. The chance is low, but if you run into someone: you can interact with them a a simple level" then I expect that. The reason I expect that is because there's nothing special about what Hello Games has done here. They showcased gameplay to build hype at the behest of a major distributor (in this instance: Sony).

Other devs have delivered in this regard.
Other devs have not delivered in this regard.

I have good examples, I don't need to waste my time making excuses for the bad ones.

They showed gameplay of a thing that wasn't finished, and it changed later.

By "changed", you mean "removed." Removed without giving us more videos showing "Hey guys, all that stuff we talked about was kind of WAAAAAY outside our skillset. Sorry." There are good games that have had tons of features cut. Fable was actually pretty good. But all the bullshit hype Microsoft and Lionshead built up to it marred an otherwise good game. But just because they released something playable does not excuse their actions.

Had they just been fucking upfront and honest, they could have avoided all the blowback. But even then, that game sold AND got 2 sequels. That's probably because at least it didn't crash non-stop. I bet the same thing would have applied to NMS because normal people honestly care less about features and more about playing their $60 heaps of code.

That's all that happened. You're making it out to be something way different to what it was because you're butthurt you bought a thing you didn't like. That's all there is to say about this any more.

I don't spend $60 on Indie games from developers I don't know and I haven't pre-ordered a game since Brink.

On the topic of this, I think it's rather interesting that video games are fairly unique when it comes to what happens when a major release flops. It's one of the few forms of entertainment where I regularly see people blame the fans for not liking it.

I want to talk about his. But I need to get out of here, so I'll rant on a bit later.

[Cykeisme]

Look, I don't think anyone is going to argue that the developers (actually just the lead developer guy) deliberately attempted to deceive.

The early awesome-looking pre-rendered videos are STILL being used to advertise the $60 game, despite them having nothing to do with the laughable skeleton product that's worth probably $15 - $20, but only if the bugs were fixed.

Those videos are actually very good, btw.


As long as we establish these facts:
- The developer lied, in public, in interviews
- Deception was deliberately used to market a product

..then we can go ahead and refer people who "fall for it" as:
- thinking as human beings instead of gamers
- fuckwits
- not "grown ass adults"
- cripplingly naive

The saintly dev did nothing wrong!
Only a "fuckwit" who "thinks as a gamer instead of a human being", who is certainly not a "grown ass adult", would preorder that game based on all the features the dev described as though they were implemented, when in fact they were never completed at any point.

I avoided wasting money on this because I don't preorder games.
However, I'm just finding this Murray guy's lying in live face-to-face interviews to be entertaining.. almost as entertaining as the hilarious rationalizations people come up with to defend it. People who act like they've been personally insulted by anyone who dares suggest the devs weren't faultless developers of a wonderful product.

Just checking, have we covered rationalizations for this one, yet?
"Sean Murray lying about multiplayer for No Man's Sky"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE0nuW-mQ8A