A New Standard
The transition into 2017 has brought, for the video game industry, a new standard for advertising. For the nearly 100 billion dollar video game industry, consumers are particularly hard to please. While other markets usually advertise a few main points -function, quality, integrity-, the video game industry has several things to advertise: concept, graphics, gameplay, connectivity and mechanics. While -in traditional product advertising-, suppliers may experience blowback from consumers over the quality, construction, or purpose of a product; video game developers see blowback from consumers over numerous issues. Gameplay may not be as fluid and well-processed as advertised, the graphics quality may have been reduced (usually to help processing speed) since the ad was produced, or certain advertised in-game features are dumbed down, nonfunctional, or nonexistent. Several recent instances of this are games like Watch Dogs and No Man's Sky. Their "over-hyped" advertising and subsequent consumer disappointment has led to the coining of new terms for gamers: "Watch Dogs Syndrome" and "The No Man's Sky Effect."
Watch Dogs Syndrome
The Watch Dogs reveal at E3 2012 was received with great applause, with audience members marveling at the game's crisp, hi-resolution graphics showcased through a club scene and dynamic rain, intelligent and numerous NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) and awe-inspiring game mechanics, like hacking the city's infrastructure to cause massive car crashes by changing street lights, or over-pressuring steam pipes. The reveal showed a promising launch title for the PS4, with graphics and mechanics previously thought to be unattainable on the present hardware; however, upon it's retail release consumers discovered that graphics for the game had been downgraded and in-game events like exploding gas stations and player-triggered vehicle collisions were lackluster compared to their E3 previews. Additionally, in the months prior to launch Ubisoft mentioned that all of the game's NPCs would be completely unique, each with their own name, bio, income, and occupation. However, Ubisoft had to lower their number of uniquely rendered NPCs along with several other minor graphic details for prev-gen consoles.
Watch Dogs' over-hype and player disappointment was a milestone in game development, and an important lesson for Ubisoft (one they haven't learned from, as several other Ubisoft games advertised with high graphic content have wound up similarly dumbed down, like Tom Clancy's The Division and Far Cry 3). However, Watch Dogs is primarily an example of developers not delivering what was promised graphically. Mechanically, the game only removed or re-purposed a few minor elements. For undelivered advertised mechanics, we look to indie developer HelloGames' mammoth flop of a title, "No Man's Sky."
No Man's Sky is a huge procedurally generated game with more than a billion unique and fully explorable worlds. Gamers can gather resources on one planet, refuel their ship, launch into the sky, break orbit, travel to another planet, enter the atmosphere, and land, all without a single loading screen. It's gameplay mechanics, much like Minecraft, called for gamers to gather resources from nature by mining and scavenging certain elements to improve your personal space ship and equipment. It showed much promise at E3, with lead developer Sean Murray showcasing the mining elements, space travel, combat, trading, and more. Aspects of the game that really caught the public eye were procedurally generated environments and animals -with millions of unique species and subspecies on each planet to be discovered-, large-scale space battles that the gamer can opt in to to defend or attack for rewards, the possibility of multiplayer -with a game as massive as this and no matchmaking element, the possibility of seeing another live player in the game is miniscule if not coordinated properly- and the complete lack of a single loading screen beyond the boot screen.
Upon release, gamers were appalled to discover that loading screens do exist, when "warping" from one solar system to another, the procedurally generated animals seemed less realistic than what was shown at E3, and beyond what they were shown that you can do in the game -explore, trade, pirate, hunt- you really had no true direction in the game, which put many traditional gamers off right from the start. Additionally, the raging space battles we had seen had been reduced to the occasional pirate raiding you after warping into a new area. This dramatically changed how the public viewed the game, even leading to an investigation for false advertisement. Through all the player complaints as well as the investigation, HelloGames remained calm and quiet, finally releasing The Foundation Update, a massive update that added new game mechanics like resource farming, home bases, purchasable freighters, and much more.
With video game developers being forced to put as much content into their games as quickly as possible to meet deadlines, as well as make the game function properly at release but look good at reveal, the challenges are compounding, and developers simply don't have the time to optimize entire games to run smoothly and quickly while maintaining satisfying graphic output. Only time -and stronger hardware- will get us there.
Ref: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/the-no-mans-sky-effect-2a8720c1a1c6#.wbklcblmr
Watch Dogs' over-hype and player disappointment was a milestone in game development, and an important lesson for Ubisoft (one they haven't learned from, as several other Ubisoft games advertised with high graphic content have wound up similarly dumbed down, like Tom Clancy's The Division and Far Cry 3). However, Watch Dogs is primarily an example of developers not delivering what was promised graphically. Mechanically, the game only removed or re-purposed a few minor elements. For undelivered advertised mechanics, we look to indie developer HelloGames' mammoth flop of a title, "No Man's Sky."
No Man's Sky is a huge procedurally generated game with more than a billion unique and fully explorable worlds. Gamers can gather resources on one planet, refuel their ship, launch into the sky, break orbit, travel to another planet, enter the atmosphere, and land, all without a single loading screen. It's gameplay mechanics, much like Minecraft, called for gamers to gather resources from nature by mining and scavenging certain elements to improve your personal space ship and equipment. It showed much promise at E3, with lead developer Sean Murray showcasing the mining elements, space travel, combat, trading, and more. Aspects of the game that really caught the public eye were procedurally generated environments and animals -with millions of unique species and subspecies on each planet to be discovered-, large-scale space battles that the gamer can opt in to to defend or attack for rewards, the possibility of multiplayer -with a game as massive as this and no matchmaking element, the possibility of seeing another live player in the game is miniscule if not coordinated properly- and the complete lack of a single loading screen beyond the boot screen.
Upon release, gamers were appalled to discover that loading screens do exist, when "warping" from one solar system to another, the procedurally generated animals seemed less realistic than what was shown at E3, and beyond what they were shown that you can do in the game -explore, trade, pirate, hunt- you really had no true direction in the game, which put many traditional gamers off right from the start. Additionally, the raging space battles we had seen had been reduced to the occasional pirate raiding you after warping into a new area. This dramatically changed how the public viewed the game, even leading to an investigation for false advertisement. Through all the player complaints as well as the investigation, HelloGames remained calm and quiet, finally releasing The Foundation Update, a massive update that added new game mechanics like resource farming, home bases, purchasable freighters, and much more.
With video game developers being forced to put as much content into their games as quickly as possible to meet deadlines, as well as make the game function properly at release but look good at reveal, the challenges are compounding, and developers simply don't have the time to optimize entire games to run smoothly and quickly while maintaining satisfying graphic output. Only time -and stronger hardware- will get us there.
Ref: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/the-no-mans-sky-effect-2a8720c1a1c6#.wbklcblmr
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