5 ms·

In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release.

In software development, 1.0 is the version number you assign to what's ready at the end of the last day you are permitted to continue working on your release. 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. Nintendo continues to follow this policy today — we get demos when they've finalized the game, and not before — and Nintendo refuses to market games until they've finished them, so we get years of "will there ever be another Super Smash Bros" and "OMG TELL US WHAT'S COMING" which they silently ignore. Now you declare openly that game developers who tell us what's coming while it's not yet finished will be punished if: 1) What's not yet finished doesn't match what's finished on 1.0 day in any way that is personally meaningful to you and/or anyone; and/or, 2) What's announced is announced only with a complete finished 1.0 product from which marketing materials are exclusively developed and provided immediately upon announcement. So, you're championing the Nintendo model, which is fine — we will hear nothing about any upcoming games until they're ready to be released, and if that means years of silence from the owners of properties such as Halo, GTA, Pokemon, and so on — then that's completely acceptable and we should expect to hear no complaint from the gaming community as a result. I am not led to believe by your response that "we will hear no complaint" is the outcome that will occur if and when the entire gaming industry complies with your demands by stopping all pre-release announcements altogether, which leaves me wondering: How, precisely, do you expect a valid outcome to occur from your requirements that both satisfies your demands without triggering complaint over the lack of updates over time from studios who are busy complying? EDIT: To pre-address the most obvious reply — "they should only demo what's done" — I guarantee that nothing is ever done until the final day of development, as critical features can be cut literally hours before gold master if there's an undiscovered flaw that QA discovers at the last minute — so since "nothing" is ever done until the final 1.0 release, "they should only demo nothing until the final 1.0 release is done", and we're back to the above question.

freehunter 7y ago
"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.
- philipov 7y ago
  But... How are we supposed to lie to people, if we can't lie?
- copenja 7y ago
  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?
  - Mtinie 7y ago
    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.
    - maccard 7y ago
      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.
mises 7y ago
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.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  The only? Have you never heard of CD Project Red?
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    Projekt
  - ahje 7y ago
    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.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      > 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.
Nition 7y ago
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.
- viraptor 7y ago
  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.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ulucs 7y ago
  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.
leoc 7y ago
> 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4udiQq5gpY .
wil421 7y ago
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.
Kaiyou 7y ago
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 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmLfhhgXsAMMwbp.jpg

freehunter 7y ago

"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.

philipov 7y ago
But... How are we supposed to lie to people, if we can't lie?
copenja 7y ago
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?
- Mtinie 7y ago
  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.
  - maccard 7y ago
    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.

mises 7y ago

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.

ekianjo 7y ago
The only? Have you never heard of CD Project Red?
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  Projekt
- ahje 7y ago
  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.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    > 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.

Nition 7y ago

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.

viraptor 7y ago
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.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ulucs 7y ago
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.

leoc 7y ago

> 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4udiQq5gpY .

wil421 7y ago

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.

Kaiyou 7y ago

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 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmLfhhgXsAMMwbp.jpg