Seems like a dodge to me actually. While plausible it seems like a way of engaging in a bit of less damning self-flagellation to try and sidestep the accusation that they intentionally engaged in deception and produced a piece of shovelware they were trying to pass off as an actual game.
The bottom line of all the hemming and hawing, other than to try and deflect accusations onto The Publisher, seems to be that they are claiming that the demo they showed wasn't created as a lie, but was an "as per instructions" game conception going back however many years.
The problem with the claims here as I see it is that nothing they showed in the demo really isn't possible for the current level of technology. The Demo was cool, in part because it was believable and wasn't promising anything that can't be done with current tech and performed stabilly, it was basically applying all of the bells and whistles we expect from current technology and have seen elsewhere to a franchise people wanted to see treated that way. This is also not a case where a few things were stripped.
It also raises questions as to why the game was using 5 year old game and art assets and not supporting anything newer, what your looking at isn't some last minute downsizing, but the appearance that they basically took the fasted and cheapest toolbox availible and decided to churn out a game. I don't disbelieve the 9 month dev cycle, I just disbelieve that this was unintended from the beginning.
Such are my thoughts, and I know many will disagree with me. To me this smacks of an evasion of sorts, a differant style than we normally see, but an evasion none the less. "We screwed up" to this extent is rare for the game industry to admit, but it's better than what has otherwise been flying about A:CM... and really this not being intentional and planned out in more detail seems unlikely.
