Alex79uk wrote:Thanks, I'll have a look at that (although I'm now worried it might spoil my memory of the game!)
Incidentally, what did you think of the Mass Effect 3 ending? I really liked that too, so I may well be a lost cause, haha.
NOOO!!!!
I haven't played Uncharted 4 yet and I'm really looking forward to it (I love the PS3 trilogy), so when I saw your all's disagreement, my thought was "I seem to have similar tastes to Alex, I'm sure I'll enjoy Uncharted 4's story!"
The Mass Effect 3 ending calls all of that into question
Alex79uk wrote:Incidentally, what did you think of the Mass Effect 3 ending? I really liked that too, so I may well be a lost cause, haha.
Flabyo wrote:I like the ending to Mass Effect 3. I even prefer the version before they changed it.
The world has gone topsy turvy on me!
Playing through the Mass Effect trilogy was probably the highlight of the entire previous generation for me. That universe is soooooo good, the games are awesome and I even read three of the novels.
But man, I hate that ending. Not to the levels that some scumbags went in terms of doxxing and threatening developers, but I was deeply disappointed by it.
Any other hot, trending 2012 stories we can talk about?
The best way to approach Mass Effect is to enjoy the journey. There's no way the ending was going to satisfy everyone, but wow, it really is a great trilogy and a great adventure. Dragon Age Origins (the only game in that series I've played so far) is also all in the journey. The endings... alright, but most of my memories are the interactions with other characters, just like Mass Effect.
Alex79uk wrote:Thanks, I'll have a look at that (although I'm now worried it might spoil my memory of the game!)
Incidentally, what did you think of the Mass Effect 3 ending? I really liked that too, so I may well be a lost cause, haha.
I didn't like the ending, but I also thought the popular reaction to it was absurdly overblown. A science-fiction series with a disappointing ending? That has literally never happened before! (/sarcasm)
AndrewBrown wrote:I didn't like the ending, but I also thought the popular reaction to it was absurdly overblown. A science-fiction series with a disappointing ending? That has literally never happened before! (/sarcasm)
I have no dog in the fight when it comes to Mass Effect, but to my knowledge, the reasoning behind the critical reaction was less about the ending being merely disappointing and more about the developer's broken promises. Which makes a bit more sense to me. If someone buys a product based on specific marketing informations but the product turns out to contradict those outright, then it doesn't seem fair to me to classify the reaction to that as mere temper tantrum.
Fair enough, but there should be a modicum of trust between sellers and buyers. And I wasn't talking about a fancy trailer sewn together by publishers, but developer interviews which should be more reliable. What's the point of having them otherwise?
We don't intentionally lie about our games. If we're asked a question, and there's no PR to tell us not to answer, we'll say what the current thinking is. We'll be excited about the things that currently excite us, because being a creative has to be like that or what we create will have no soul.
But things change. Budgets change. Staff change. You discover that things you wanted to do will actually set the project back 6 months, so they get cut. You discover that your favourite cool feature idea is about as fun as drinking sour milk, so out it comes. The publisher wants to change a voice actor. Your company's 'geo political issues' lawyer tells you that a whole section of your game has to go cause it'll never fly in the US. Or in China. (These are all things that have happened to games I've worked on)
The culture that seems to have built up where anything anyone says is taken as gospel truth and any deviation should be punished by actions up to and including death threats does not result in better games. It results in developers not wanting to talk to the public anymore. At all. And I don't think people really want that.
Edit: I don't think it should lead to harassment or anything like that, of course. But how often are these changes made public? It sort of changes the rules of the game if the consumer is given all of the positive stuff without any of the down-to-earth addenda, no?
Edit#2: Sorry Flabyo, I wrote my initial post before reading yours.
Okay: My point is that the playing field should be fair to everyone. You seem concerned about well-intentioned developers being raked over the coals on account of not everything they talk about early during production making it into the final game. And sure, you should have some leeway in the way you express yourself as long as the intention isn't to mislead. That sounds reasonable to me. On the other hand, it would only be fair if it was later made known to the public that certain publicized elements wouldn't be a part of the product they'll end up buying. A simple down-to-earth Q&A a month before release would go a long way towards mitigating the potential fallout. Now what about extended gameplay demos which showcase features that never appear in the finished product? These take quite some time to put together, so I don't think the explanation of developers being overly enthusiastic about their product applies here. The TLoU demo that was displayed only 6 months before release and showed completely different AI patterns and such would be a good example of what I'm talking about. I can't believe that the game could have regressed that much in such a period of time. So, why does it happen? Cui bono?
I just think there is a healthy middle ground to be found between protecting both the well-intentioned developers who are excited about the product they're making and the trusting consumers who get excited about the product they want to buy. The way things are now, the balance of power seems to weigh heavily in favor of devs and publishers, and of course with it come the shady aspects of corporate culture (if we can make money from this and we can get away with it, why not?), which in turn causes the overreaction on the part of the consumers who feel cheated. Sometimes rightfully so. This does not seem like a sustainable system to me, more like a vicious cycle of distrust and suspicion.
To dismiss all of this by saying "it's your own fault for believing that stuff" seems biased and callous to me.
Yeah, I get where you're coming from now. I think if there have been substantial changes in a games scope then it would be fair to reposition it with another set of promotional work. It's a fine line though, the current climate is pretty toxic and my gut is that even a well intentioned 'we've had to remove this thing' article would attract just as much violent reaction as not saying anything would.
I am, however, old and cynical. Been making games for the best part of two decades and I'm very jaded.
With Mass Effect specifically I don't think we'll ever know the reasons for why they changed their scope. My gut is simply cost, that they ran over budget and they had to wrap it up. I've heard creative differences cited, as in, the original writers intent was dropped due to staff changes. Game development isn't immune to internal politics sadly, and I've seen the kind of 'clean house' that can happen when a writer is dropped in favour of another first hand.
The Last of Us example is a little more clean cut. Demos are scripted, mainly because we often don't have complete sections of game at the required polish level that far out from launch, but also because they have to be repeatable to journalist after journalist in a predictable manner. Sometimes that results in something that isn't representative of the actual game, and that's not ideal. So I don't think they cut anything back after that demo, I think it's more likely the game was never actually doing what it looked like it was doing at that point. (as a game AI coder I have some real issues with the AI in that game, but that's for a whole other day). Also, 6 months before launch may not sound like much but in terms of a normal development cycle that's as much as a third of the total development time. Games can change radically in way less time than that.
As an aside, I find it interesting that a game that differs from earlier showings but where the final game is awesome anyway tends to have that aspect overlooked. For example, for all the complaints thrown at Bioshock Infinite, it's very rare for people to bring up just how many game mechanics and ideas from the games early showings are nowhere to be seen in the final game. See also the glowing worm enemy in the early half life 2 videos.
I agree that the current way we promote games is backing developers into a corner, where the blame lies for us even having to talk about our projects so early is hard to pin down to one thing. Retail want to know what's going to be hot with enough time to decide to stock, they don't like surprise announcements days before launch. Publishers want to know public levels of interest to help decide where their marketing push should go. It's possible that the more digital takes over from physical sales this need to promote early will reduce.
KSubzero1000 wrote:I just think there is a healthy middle ground to be found between protecting both the well-intentioned developers who are excited about the product they're making and the trusting consumers who get excited about the product they want to buy.
But that middle ground already exists. It's "Don't preorder the game." Wait a few days, read the reviews or watch some Let's Plays and then decide if you want to spend money on the released product. I remember a lot of the reviews of The Last of Us were very glowing, but they also mentioned that the AI patterns were different than they had been in the demo. There were dozens (if not hundreds) of reviews of No Man's Sky that explained EXACTLY what that game was. But people still lost their minds about it. I think it's a bit disingenuous to act like the only access that consumers have to a game is the marketing materials released by the publisher.
As an intellectual argument, I understand where you're coming from KSubzero and it doesn't feel nice when it seems like a publisher is trying to trick you. But on a practical level, in the year 2016, it's really easy to reach an informed decision about whether or not to buy a game. It seems to me that people who get really hyped for a game, preorder it and then are disappointed in the final product could avoid that whole cycle by literally just waiting two days before buying it.
Flabyo wrote:Your company's 'geo political issues' lawyer tells you that a whole section of your game has to go cause it'll never fly in the US. Or in China. (These are all things that have happened to games I've worked on)
This has been a huge problem for entertainment media of all sorts in recent years. For decades, actually, in the US, if Wal-Mart wouldn't stock your product, then your publisher wouldn't produce it for you, because Wal-Mart is where the $$$ was at. Now increasingly artists have to deal with what will sell in China, too, which has an entire ministry of culture that judges these types of things that's even more conservative than Wal-Mart. This is why you may have noticed in recent Hollywood movies, China usually plays a big part in the plot, and often there's entire characters and subplots that feature China which mysteriously only end up in the Chinese cut of the movie. This is where digital distribution has become a big deal, as in some markets with especially conservative laws about what may or may not be sold, digital distribution is (sometimes--again, not in China) a way around those restrictions.
Having lived in China for a number of years, I'm surprised that publishers take it into account, given that I can't imagine more than 0.1% of games are legitimately purchased.
The world has gone topsy turvy on me! 
