E3 Demos often look phenomenal, action pouring from the screen, mouth-watering visuals drawing
players to shops to pre-order the revolutionary game of their dreams.
And then it comes out, and it looks like this.
It's not always the case, but it happens with almost every game shown to us for the
past few years.
These demos don't just look better because of superior textures and lighting but the
small details that make them look so alive and tempting.
Ranging from little interactions between NPCs and the player to fluid animations that look
like they deserve their own cutscene and better AI in combat dynamically reacting to the players
actions like it's a scene from an action movie.
All that perfectly choreographed in order to create something called a "vertical slice",
a vertical slice is a practice used by developers of large games to show off to the players
and publishers how the game will work, look and feel before the development really takes
off, and as a result E3 Demos end up looking like this
that lets the publishers decide whether to fund the project or not, developers can
build upon it and use it as a sort of template and goal of what they want to achieve at the
end, it's usually a 10 to 40 minute gameplay demo shown at conventions.
These vertical slices can lead to games looking completely different after release without
the developer's intention of that ever happening, whether it's sudden engine limitations or
a change in design.
Unfortunately some companies use vertical slices as a marketing device to deceive players
into believing that what they see is what they get.
And I think everyone is tired of it.
This of course doesn't have to be pure manipulation, Developers oftentimes overestimate how much
resources they can put into a game without making it a badly optimized mess and are forced
to drastically reduce the quality of visuals and even remove features after showing us
the demo resulting in player's outrage because of an honest mistake.
Sadly oftentimes it's not a mistake at all but an elaborate trick designed to make players
feel like they are finally going to play something fresh and new.
Game needs to sell and developers have to show it in the best light possible.
But a noticeable downgrade doesn't equal bad game and
a great example of this is Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, made by Ubisoft which back
in that time wasn't AS notorious for it's deceiving tactics with game demos, the biggest
being Far Cry 3 which didn't receive much backlash, considering how great the game did
back then despite the obvious visual downgrade compared to it's E3 Demo in 2011.
With Black Flag it wasn't very different, It was a new installment of the Assassin's
Creed franchise released on October 29th, 2013 and was successful and loved by fans,
but despite the success it was still a devastating change from what we saw at E3, 4 months before
the game's release.
That makes it a good representation of how these demos affect not just the quality of
textures, shadows and lighting but gameplay itself.
So let's see that gameplay.
In the first scene there isn't much of a change in the quality of textures and character
detail, just lighting and how the cutscene turns out, not much of a difference, right?.
Well the biggest change we see from the gameplay is THIS.
An impressive, busy crowd full of people which smoothly merge together into a believable
community is replaced by a few NPCs rarely ever even looking at each other, just going
through their own separate animations that are supposed to simulate a party celebrating,
and it fails miserably.
Look at our character here, he's blending in on a bench flirting with this lady hiding
from his target.
Instead in the game he just sits there staring at the ground.
Take a look at these two guys - One is helping the other stand up as they flail away from
the screen, next we get a gathering around the campfire, everyone is doing their own
thing but still you feel like they know of each other's existence, it makes this place
believable, letting you forget that these guys are just animated scripts.
And instead of that.. we get a couple moving props almost not making any sounds.
All this and the interaction between Edward and the crowd gone.
We are left with our hero standing awkwardly next to people somehow not blowing his cover
when his target looks at him.
Hiding in plain sight amidst a crowd is of course still apparent in the final release,
but getting rid of those little details makes the system so much more flat and not evolving
at all from what we saw before in previous installments of the series.
There is one exception in the ENTIRE game, Edward can interact with these guys here automatically
crouching next to them like in the demo, so why were all the other interactions removed
and are nowhere to be seen in the final product if the mechanic is still there?
All this is just a tiny aspect of the downgrade, but definitely the most glaring and has the
biggest impact on the entire experience considering how much of a focus the crowd is in Assassin's
Creed games and how useful it is in cities.
Imagine the whole game being like that demo letting you experience that crowd and interaction
in almost every populated city like Havana or Kingston, something that the demo is suggesting
you will be able to do, but never actually will.
We haven't even mentioned the visual side: vegetation, lush jungles replaced by the same
exact boring bushes everywhere, all the cinematic effects, fires, fog.
Small little technicalities, but when removed all together it destroys a lot of the feeling
and depth.
So was this all a mistake made by Ubisoft who didn't know that they will have to reduce
the game's quality for better performance and only realized it after they showed us
the gameplay?
I don't think so.
As I said the gameplay we saw was presented only 4 months prior to the game's release
which means the game was in a very advanced state already, considering that it began its
development back in 2011 when Revelations was about to be finished, It was simultaneously
developed to be released on all consoles, last gen, next gen and PC by 8 different studios.
There is no way Ubisoft after two years of development didn't know that last gen consoles
couldn't deal with that kind of firepower like we see on the demo.
Not to say that the game is bad because of it, it's not.
Despite the downgrade it has a great story, exciting naval combat and a very simple and
repetitive fighting system but still satisfying and it made you feel like a badass, making
it one of my favorite Assassin's Creed games, regardless without the downgrade it could
have been so much better and more atmospheric.
In no way does it justify Ubisoft's obvious lying to sell more copies.
This is of course not the only game suffering from its reduced attention to detail, but
as I said before, not all games have better looking trailers because of greed so let's
move on to something different.
An award winning excellent RPG and my favorite game of all time.
But still somewhat disappointing..
The Witcher 3, game which doesn't really need any introduction, but for the sake of being clear it's the third installment of
CD Projekt RED's Action-RPG series The Witcher and was released on May 19th 2015.
But let's back up a little, to June 19th 2013 to be exact.
Game was just announced at E3 and it couldn't have chosen a better time to show up, fans
were waiting for a next game for 2 years now after Witcher 2's cliffhanger ending and
those who weren't waiting after watching that trailer definitely took some interest.
And it looked great, it showed us a vast open world, unusal intruging setting and dynamic
combat with a variety of enemies.
It was breathtaking, some shots did look unfinished and rough like this one, but the game was
probably at very early stages back then.
Now let's take a look at the trailer shown at the VGX awards show, few months later in
December.
And to this day for many the best looking trailer in the game's marketing campaign.
A 1 minute gameplay demo beginning with big letters on a black screen forming magical
words "IN–GAME FOOTAGE".
There are some clips in it that were there in the first trailer, which lets us compare
the progress CD Projekt has made since then.
Geralt got a nice facelift, the fire and shadows definitely look a lot better.
Overall it looks more finished.
Obviously what we saw in the trailer is not how the game turned out, which made a large
part of the community mad.
Take a look at this this scene from earlier for example and see for yourself.
Two different games, right?
I don't think we want to even talk about that.
And yes, this is the same exact scene.
It's not the only shot that looks completely contrary to what we got in 2015.
Hell, the whole trailer looks like it has been pre-rendered.
Except it's not, the developers did not lie about the "IN-GAME FOOTAGE" thing.
All of this is real.
So why wasn't the final product like this?
In an interview for Eurogamer after the game's release CD Projekt's co-founder Marcin Iwinski
and the head of the studio Adam Badowski discussed the downgrade and confirmed that the Reveal
and VGX trailer were in fact real footage quote " "we do a certain build for a tradeshow
and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing.
And you are extremely far away from completing the game.
Then you put it in the open-world, regardless of the platform, and it's like 'oh shit, it
doesn't really work'.
We've already showed it, now we have to make it work.
And then we try to make it work on a huge scale.
This is the nature of games development."
"It was captured PC footage, not pre-rendered, but a lot had to change."
If the game was supposed to work on consoles developers had to remove a lot of the effects.
After VGX they changed game's rendering system to a completely new one for better
performance and to better suit different weather at time and day.
Even though the trailer's visuals were real, it was staged, Geralt walking in the wilds
or in a village is heavily scripted and combat is obviously just a well-designed animation
that's only supposed to simulate real gameplay, not to manipulate the players into believing
it's the real thing , but to show how it's gonna work if the
developers pulled it off, and they did pull it off, combat is still fun and pretty close
to what we've seen.
Despite the obvious staging it's still in-game footage, just full of professionally staged
cutscenes.
The visuals were stunning but they wouldn't work so well in different environments in
the game without frying our computers, like that beautiful fire in the Eredin scene.
It's just that back then, developers didn't know it wouldn't work.
Which makes me remember the Sword of Destiny trailer shown few months later in 2014.
Iwinski said that they did change the rendering system after VGX and it was true, game looked
way closer to what we got, still way better than the final version but closer.
Except for the fact that in the trailer we can still see these two scenes from VGX 2013,
not altered in any way making it look like it's still part of the game.
Why?
Did the game still look EXACT same as in VGX in that shot even though they changed the
way things work and look in every other scene?
Well, let's not dwell on that any longer, it was just two short shots, but I thought
it's worth to mention them, game did turned out great despite being a downgrade compared
to the trailers and gameplays.
Yes, the visuals did suffer and we lost some features, but I'm willing to live with that,
it's not like the game looks bad, it looks great even now in 2018.
But for me personally it lost some of the magic with each trailer.
Thanks to Witcher's modding community I was able to get some of that magic back.
Seriously, there's a ton of E3 and VGX mods that try to recapture what we saw, go check
em out.
As a result of this my game full of mods looks as follows instead of like this, making my
downgrade obsession less painful.
Thanks modders.
We can come to a conclusion that it doesn't matter if the enhanced visuals and false promises
of "E3 demos" are intentional or not.
The players do notice and through their disappointment more and more learn not to trust these presentations.
And if they do, they are not hesitant to show their rage.
Countless numbers of comparisons between demos and retail or complaining gamers leaving bad
reviews and refunding the game on Steam because they felt cheated are sure to bring some controversy.
Obviously that didn't have such an impact on Black Flag and The Witcher, I mean it did,
but not in such a gigantic scale like for example No Man's Sky that completely didn't
deliver on it's promises and outright lied to players about features like multiplayer,
but bad games hiding under good marketing wasn't really the focus of this video.
What I wanted to talk about is even though the game is still good after the downgrade,
it leaves you wondering.
"What if it turned out differently?"
"What if they had more budget to keep it this way?" or "What if the game was released
5 years from now?", presentations like these raise these questions in my head all the time.
These "what might have been" thoughts don't necessarily ruin my fun and enjoyment
of a game but it does leave a sour taste in my mouth making me want to strangle the developers,
but just a little.
A downgrade doesn't mean a game necessarily loses it's value, at most some of it, and
definitely affects the way we feel about it when we know what we lost.
Seriously, I replayed Witcher 3 5 times now and I can't look at the Eredin scene without
clenching my fists.
And no, I will never get over it, OK?
JUST LOOK AT IT.
Nevertheless it seems that game developers are starting to slowly move away from this
method of marketing and keeping outrageous vertical slices to themselves.
Such a king of downgrades like Ubisoft is even making their new gameplays look more
like the final release or even better in some aspects which is great, although still not
Ideal I hope it stays this way and only gets improved.
We can see the REAL DEAL without false advertisement and staging.
Trailers are more true to what we get, but they can also be way less exciting and feel
less alive compared to all these fake scripted events in some demos from the past that made
it look so atmospheric.
Which lately makes me feel like some developers today rather than to try to make something
that can surpass the quality of demos instead pull back a bit and show us a more composed
and restrained showcases to keep us from being disappointed.
Don't worry I'm not complaining, I'm glad it made them more honest in some way,
I just really wish I could play THIS version of No Man's Sky or these Watch Dogs already.
I still feel like we didn't reach the level of detail and depth of pre-release demo presentations,
but I believe we are getting there with exceptions like Naughty Dog and Uncharted 4 for example,
still improving on their game compared to the amazing unbelievable demo we saw and not
just going easy on it in order to be safe from controversy like Ubisoft, but that's
Naughty Dog, they rarely disappoint in that factor.
It looks like the deceiving art of game demos is slowly dying down and It's a good thing,
We can just hope the "art" part of it stays within the final product.
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