A puddle removed from upcoming Spiderman game, graphic warriors shriek in bereavement

[Pseudonym]

Secondly, don't gamers understand just a little bit about how games are developed? When a dev gives a vertical slice of an open world game, things are going to change from reveal to release. In an open world game, even if that section you're seeing is done, not everything else is done. Since it's open world, that means not everything that will have to be rendered is being rendered in the reveal because not everything is done and thus it can't all be rendered. Plus probably all the game systems aren't online and running completely. So when all the systems are online and the world is complete, the look of the game is going to change from when that stuff wasn't up and running.

I get that, but maybe that would be a reason not to say or show too much of/about the game until you can show something you know to be fairly representative of the final product. I get that you want to advertise your product and want years of slowly built up hype, but at this point there is no reason to trust trailers and non-playable demo's at all anymore. The fact that gaming advertisement and advertisement generally gets away but being so free of any care for accuracy and truth is still a bad thing even if it is normal. I know a couple of boring blog posts or empty trailers don't get as much attention but honestly, I'd much prefer if games were just released without years of pointless fanfare.

Not that this thing with some downgrades should be a major controversy, but more because it misses the larger and systemic point than because we aren't being mislead.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Ok, am not one to bother getting involved in graphics hysteria seeing as there's a thousand things more worrying right now including how much toxicity a body can willfully consume before it finally gives in, but if there's one thing I trust less than E3 promotion videos, it's unsourced, badly compressed images manufacturing gamer rage through social media, because let's face it; it doesn't take much to get their knickers in a twist. The images here look even more heavily compressed than the original twitter one, which was already a visibly lower resolution within the same comparison shot.

Have tried looking for any hint of video to confirm these screenshotss and have come up with nothing. Insomniac games have been responding adamantly that there has been only changes to environment art and time of day, with no downgrade. Every video from this year shows no evidence of any downgrade and what would an established developer with a long-term positive reputation have to gain by lying about something that would easily be disproven within a couple of weeks? The hit to the reputation would be way worse than any short term gain, they're not behemoth publishers that can tank it.

The puddle stuff is being mocked because it was the only thing there was a consensus on. And the response of the dev to it being; "It?s just a change in the puddle size, there?s no downgrade at all," responded the studio's Twitter account. Continuing, Insomniac added that Spider-Man still has "plenty of other places with tons of puddles."
And "I am telling you I talked to the technical and engineering and art staff, and looked at the live code of this from the final build," responded Stevenson. "There was NO DOWNGRADE."

It's shit like this that makes me sure I'll never self-identify as a "gamer."

Adding gameplay vids from this year, showing, amongst other graphical tomfoolery, plenty of puddles!


[small](Am prepared to be wrong of course, and have no plans to get the game on release or any investment in its' success, but so far it's all rather coming off as petty gamer hysteria from terribly flimsy data that people just accept as fact. Only time will tell.)[/small]

 

[wizzy555]

So misleading headlines again.

Puddles are prime examples of "sophisticated" shader work requiring graphics power. So you know....

 

[meiam]

It's obviously more than just reflective puddles that are missing but you know, keep doing the damage control for a multibillion-dollar company.

Developers are blaming it on ''different time of day'', then I'd really like to see a comparison where it's the same time of day.

The time of day things seems like a strange excuse, the shadow of the building on the other building in background is in the exact same place and shape (juts less detailed), shouldn't it be different if it really was a different time of day?

I don't really care about graphic that much (I don't have a rig that could ever run smoothly at max details), but I don't think it's fair to just dismiss people who do care about that.

 

[Zeraki]

And this is why I've always taken E3 trailers/demos with a grain of salt ever since Halo 2.

Stuff like this really makes me wonder how games like Ghost of Tsushima are really going to end up looking like. I can't imagine base model PS4's will be able to run that game as well and thus it'll have to be toned down visually to compensate.

The game still looks fine anyway despite the downgrades. It's not like we've got an Aliens: Colonial Marines situation on our hands. Once the game comes out people will forget about it and move onto whatever the next controversy of the month is.

 

[Mcgeezaks]

When a dev reveals a game, not everything is working yet so they do cheat on that to show you what they're hoping the final product to look like.

Which they shouldn't do because it'll only disappoint people, show what the game actually looks like and tell people watching that the game will improve during development. If they have to lie and cheat to show the game, then just don't show the game at all, it's easy.

good. i hope they shriek more.

But...why?

Because fuck graphics whores. That's Why.

You fail to see the point of the issue, maybe you like to be lied to but plenty of others don't.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I would guess what happens is the devs create an E3 branch, plan what they want to showcase, create a tiny scene, add 10 billion dynamic lights, add some scripted bullshit, crank up the engine's post-process settings, and almost max the ram and vram on their dev console. Worse, they might even be using a PC.

Spoiler

[/spoiler]

Then when E3 is done, they merge it and turn down the post-process settings, and then they clean it all up so the game isn't a crashing and stuttering mess when you have to load that particular cell. Then, Crowbcat makes a video about it.

It seems like gamers are willing to defend these publishers if you make it about angry whiny gamers, or PC elitists, even though it was Kotaku who delivered it to you, and framed it in such away that is anger inducing, not because these gamers showed up to bother you.

I've always suspected that games journalism was the industry's dirt cheap advertising firm, and this article doesn't change my opinion.[/QUOTE]
If you're lighting system isn't done yet, what's the problem in just cheating a bit and implementing some static lighting just for the scene? What's the problem with doing some scripted stuff as long as that stuff is theoretically possible in the game? In Watch Dogs, I got to play the exact missions shown in the E3 walkthroughs with all the gameplay mechanics shown in the final game. Who didn't think Watch Dogs was running on a high-end PC, we were still in last-gen at that point. What's so bad about showing the PC game off? You obviously wanna show off your best looking version and you only demo one version of the game because it's a waste to make demos for every platform. The only 2 games that I found overly scripted in a "lying" manner were Colonial Marines and The Last of Us (that enemy AI in the final game was definitely nothing like the demo). The final releases can almost always be played in even a much better looking manner than E3 reveals, any StealthGamerBR vid looks at least 10x better than E3 game footage for example. Games are a work in progress, they change over development, especially open world games so that's why you see bigger differences in them vs linear games. Not to mention, you get to see what the final product does look like before the game comes out as our friendly neighborhood bear posted an hour of footage from 2018 Spiderman (you can see for yourself what it looks like) just like Ubisoft did with Watch Dogs before release as well. These graphical downgrades aren't how these evil publishers/developers are getting you, why don't you look up what Bungie (not Activision) has been doing with Destiny 2 because of how horribly designed Destiny is from a technical standpoint?

And, games journalism is just advertising, reviews are just advertisements. I watch the full mission walkthroughs only paying attention to gameplay and that's far more than enough info for me to decide whether I wanna play the game or not. I have yet to be screwed over by the evil pubs/devs.

[QUOTE=Pseudonym]I get that, but maybe that would be a reason not to say or show too much of/about the game until you can show something you know to be fairly representative of the final product. I get that you want to advertise your product and want years of slowly built up hype, but at this point there is no reason to trust trailers and non-playable demo's at all anymore.[/QUOTE]
I say Spiderman was [i]fairly[/i] representative of the final product, the fact that the same exact section is being compared and in the final game sorta proves that. Even Watch Dogs was, it was exactly what I expected the game to be based off the demos. It still looked really good. A trailer, in a sense, is never trustworthy, you can make anything look good via a trailer. Movies have scenes in trailers that aren't in the movie, nobody throws a tantrum over that.

[QUOTE=Zeraki]Stuff like this really makes me wonder how games like Ghost of Tsushima are [i]really[/i] going to end up looking like. I can't imagine base model PS4's will be able to run that game as well and thus it'll have to be toned down visually to compensate.[/QUOTE]
Well, Horizon looks amazing on base PS4s. Ghost of Tsushima is open world but it's not a busting modern city with loads of cars/NPCs and advanced geometry to render sorta like Horizon in that sense. You can always expect a bit of a downgrade in open world games, it's just the nature of how they're developed. Tsushima looks mainly great due to aesthetics IMO vs fidelity.

[QUOTE=BabyfartsMcgeezaks][QUOTE=Phoenixmgs] When a dev reveals a game, not everything is working yet so they do cheat on that to show you what they're hoping the final product to look like.[/QUOTE]Which they shouldn't do because it'll only disappoint people, show what the game actually looks like and tell people watching that the game will improve during development. If they have to lie and cheat to show the game, then just don't show the game at all, it's easy.[/quote]
I personally really only care about cheating via gameplay vs graphics. At this point in the gen, what every system is capable of graphically is pretty well known.

 

[CaitSeith]

Welp! At least they didn't need to wait for their pre-orders to see the drop in graphics quality this time.

Seriously though, they need a chill pill. If people reacted the same way about the downgrade of McDonald burgers from the advertisements to their plate, we would have unending McRiots all around the world.

Spoiler: When graphic warriors eat out...

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Ah, "Bullshots". I really like that word, we don't get to use it nearly enough. The last time a developer was in trouble for bullshots was....Watchdogs? I want to say Watchdogs...so I will go with that.

In fairness, lots of games get great looking, rendered trailers but massive downgrades on release. I think Witcher 2 had it and was still well received. Alien: Colonial Marines also had it, but turned out to be so much worse that even bullshot marketing shots/footage barely made the list of all the issues it had.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

It's obviously more than just reflective puddles that are missing but you know, keep doing the damage control for a multibillion-dollar company.

Hmm, obviously the two images look different...but does the 2017 one really look better than the 2018 one? Maybe its just how the image has been taken but Spidey himself looks pixelly as hell as does that blue crate thing to the right, a lot of stuff is actually harder to see (like the left-most gangster dude) and stuff like the debris by the windows actually seems like its better definition. There are a few things that I'd say the 2017 image does better, like the yellow floor markings in the foreground, but overall they don't seem that different in quality

 

[I can't enter my old name]

If you're lighting system isn't done yet, what's the problem in just cheating a bit and implementing some static lighting just for the scene?

You can make something look photoreal by using static lights with engines like Unreal. Once you make everything dynamic and create a day night cycle, it looks like shit. You can also add a lot of dynamic lights to a static scene to make it moody and not look like an uninteractible museum display case. Once you take them out, everything looks like, well, an uninteractible museum display case.

It's not genuine, they're using graphics to sell a game, and the average gamer loves graphics, taking pretty graphics over 60fps.

What's the problem with doing some scripted stuff as long as that stuff is theoretically possible in the game?

Average gamer sees game (keep in mind this guy voluntarily gets fooled by E3 every year), and is amazed by the spectacular scripted gameplay demo. They buy the game out of hype, and they realize it's no different from any game they played in the last 10 years.

What's so bad about showing the PC game off? You obviously wanna show off your best looking version and you only demo one version of the game because it's a waste to make demos for every platform.

When Microsoft or Sony shows PC footage in their conference, that sucks. When they don't mention it's on an Xbone X, which no one wants or can afford, and the Xbone version is god awful, that also sucks. These guys are trying to peddle you consoles, especially Microsoft, who will sell you a shite machine on lies and games that will never come. Then they buy out studios because they have no exclusives, and won't pull out because they don't want to abandon their share of the market. Xbone should have died in 2015, but it didn't, because they fooled a bunch of gamers.

I have yet to be screwed over by the evil pubs/devs.

Me neither, but I hate being lied to. It works even better when I hate these companies and the games they make.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

good. i hope they shriek more.

But...why?

Because fuck graphics whores. That's Why.

I second this motion. It's why I can't stand channels like Digital Foundry nitpicking everything to death. It just reduces things to numbers that most people don't care about.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

When a dev reveals a game, not everything is working yet so they do cheat on that to show you what they're hoping the final product to look like.

Which they shouldn't do because it'll only disappoint people, show what the game actually looks like and tell people watching that the game will improve during development. If they have to lie and cheat to show the game, then just don't show the game at all, it's easy.

good. i hope they shriek more.

But...why?

Because fuck graphics whores. That's Why.

You fail to see the point of the issue, maybe you like to be lied to but plenty of others don't.

Pretty much exactly this.

Instead of creating an environment of initial hype and then disappointment where the game can't deliver the visuals advertised why not start out showing what the game ACTUALLY looks like in Alpha and then continuously build more hype every time you show it off looking and running better and better as the game gets further in development?

And honestly, I don't really care about the graphics downgrade that much. As a PC gamer usually the first thing I do when I boot up a game is turn off motion blur and turn down the lighting effects to boot the frame rate. What I don't like is misleading advertising and being lied to, and I find it really sad that people are so willing to defend big companies lying to their customers.

 

[Yoshi178]

When a dev reveals a game, not everything is working yet so they do cheat on that to show you what they're hoping the final product to look like.

Which they shouldn't do because it'll only disappoint people, show what the game actually looks like and tell people watching that the game will improve during development. If they have to lie and cheat to show the game, then just don't show the game at all, it's easy.

good. i hope they shriek more.

But...why?

Because fuck graphics whores. That's Why.

You fail to see the point of the issue, maybe you like to be lied to but plenty of others don't.

Pretty much exactly this.

Instead of creating an environment of initial hype and then disappointment where the game can't deliver the visuals advertised why not start out showing what the game ACTUALLY looks like in Alpha and then continuously build more hype every time you show it off looking and running better and better as the game gets further in development?

If the game turns out to be good and it's an overall fun and awesome game to play, who gives a shit how pretty it looks?

Why do you think i didn't give a shit when Zelda Breath of the Wild didn't end up looking EXACTLY like it did in its initial reveal video? because its still a great game. so great that the video game industry even awarded it the official GOTY award last year ( i don't think it came close to deserving GOTY but alot of other people and the media do apparently).


i don't care about the new Spiderman game at all. but it's you guys that don't seem to "get it". Why did you overhype the game in the first place just because of how "Pretty" it looked?. bullshots aren't a new thing at all and have literally been happening in the industry for years now. you should now this instead getting upset when yet ANOTHER publisher does it.

if you're going to hype up a game, why not hype it up because of the actual gameplay content rather than just the graphics?

 

[Drathnoxis]

Let me get this straight, there's a collective of morons freaking out over a puddle? Well that's a new level of petty.

Could be, or it could also be another group reading misrepresentative headlines and failing to research the issue at all before forming their opinions and concluding that the complaints are as utterly baseless and petty and the people making them are idiots. Hard to say.

I find it fascinating that in every other industry, doctored photos and videos is standard marketing practice. It's considered on the consumer to treat it with skepticism and expect to see the actual product cant measure up to idealized marketing promos. But videogames? In videogames its a scandal!

Maybe the issue is that people have normalized false marketing in other industries? If something doesn't function as it was advertised, that seems like it should be a problem to me.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

When a dev reveals a game, not everything is working yet so they do cheat on that to show you what they're hoping the final product to look like.

Which they shouldn't do because it'll only disappoint people, show what the game actually looks like and tell people watching that the game will improve during development. If they have to lie and cheat to show the game, then just don't show the game at all, it's easy.

good. i hope they shriek more.

But...why?

Because fuck graphics whores. That's Why.

You fail to see the point of the issue, maybe you like to be lied to but plenty of others don't.

Pretty much exactly this.

Instead of creating an environment of initial hype and then disappointment where the game can't deliver the visuals advertised why not start out showing what the game ACTUALLY looks like in Alpha and then continuously build more hype every time you show it off looking and running better and better as the game gets further in development?

If the game turns out to be good and it's an overall fun and awesome game to play, who gives a shit how pretty it looks?

Why do you think i didn't give a shit when Zelda Breath of the Wild didn't end up looking EXACTLY like it did in its initial reveal video? because its still a great game. so great that the video game industry even awarded it the official GOTY award last year ( i don't think it came close to deserving GOTY but alot of other people and the media do apparently).


i don't care about the new Spiderman game at all. but it's you guys that don't seem to "get it". Why did you overhype the game in the first place just because of how "Pretty" it looked?. bullshots aren't a new thing at all and have literally been happening in the industry for years now. you should now this instead getting upset when yet ANOTHER publisher does it.

if you're going to hype up a game, why not hype it up because of the actual gameplay content rather than just the graphics?

Because gameplay content doesn't come across very well in video game trailers. You can't feel how the game plays, or figure out game balance, or understand any of the other nuanced things that make certain games play better than certain other games in the same genre. The main thing that you can get from trailers is how the game will look, everything else requires getting an actual hands on experience with the game.

So yeah, the look of the game is really important when the only promotional material you have to work with is trailers and there's no demo available to you, something that has become increasingly more and more common in the industry. Bullshots undermine this to the point where none of us are able to trust these trailers either, so what's left?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I say Spiderman was fairly representative of the final product, the fact that the same exact section is being compared and in the final game sorta proves that. Even Watch Dogs was, it was exactly what I expected the game to be based off the demos. It still looked really good. A trailer, in a sense, is never trustworthy, you can make anything look good via a trailer. Movies have scenes in trailers that aren't in the movie, nobody throws a tantrum over that.

I distinctly remember quite a large tantrum when half the scenes from the Suicide Squad trailer weren't in the movie and 80% of the Joker scenes got cut, and that was for quite a mediocre movie.

Quite a large tantrum over Justice League not looking like the Zack Synder trailers after the reshoots.

A much smaller but still present tantrum over scenes from trailer of Avengers Infinity War not being present in the final cut of the movie.

Sounds like someone just hasn't been paying attention.

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

I find it fascinating that in every other industry, doctored photos and videos is standard marketing practice. It's considered on the consumer to treat it with skepticism and expect to see the actual product cant measure up to idealized marketing promos. But videogames? In videogames its a scandal!

One time I ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut because the commercial made their pizza look good. Then when I got it, the toppings were slightly uneven, the cheese didn't go all the way to the edge, there was this big bubble in the crust, and it was cut imperfectly. It didn't look exactly like the commercial said it would!

So I got on the internet and said the owners of Pizza Hut were dirty whores and told them to die in a fire.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I find it fascinating that in every other industry, doctored photos and videos is standard marketing practice. It's considered on the consumer to treat it with skepticism and expect to see the actual product cant measure up to idealized marketing promos. But videogames? In videogames its a scandal!

One time I ordered a pizza from Pizza Hut because the commercial made their pizza look good. Then when I got it, the toppings were slightly uneven, the cheese didn't go all the way to the edge, there was this big bubble in the crust, and it was cut imperfectly. It didn't look exactly like the commercial said it would!

So I got on the internet and said the owners of Pizza Hut were dirty whores and told them to die in a fire.

One time I ordered Pizza Hut because the commercial made their pizza look good.

Then I got it, and it was a greasy mess that was more orange grease and cardboard like crust than an actual pizza. It didn't look anything like the commercial, or taste the way that the commercial made me think it would. I chose to never order pizza hut again because their advertising lied and their pizza was quite terrible.

See, the analogy here is that the taste of the pizza is like the gameplay in a video game. It's the important part, but it's also the part you can't really judge from a commercial, just like you can't really judge gameplay without actually playing a game.

Pizza Hut is the Aliens Colonial Marines of pizza.

 

[Saelune]

Ok so, a few things:

Companies should not lie, especially intentionally. Just because we expect them to, doesn't mean we should actually condone it.

Game devs should be more mindful of their marketing, they should not promise more than they can deliver.

The internet is not a uniform entity and we need to stop acting like it is. The internet did not get outraged, parts of it did, and parts of the internet got outraged at that outrage. And some of it was hyperbolic, since I am sure plenty just said "Hey, that's not what was promised". And parts of the internet were looking at cat videos.

People are allowed to be upset by stuff.

I also don't actually think as many people were 'outraged' by this, and honestly suspect someone wanted to get people mad so they SAID other people got mad. Maybe, maybe not, but it is not unheard of for this stuff to happen.

If the game turns out to be good, then great, most people who wanted to buy it will still buy it, and some people complaining were never going to buy it anyways.