Devs - Talk about games in development or no?

[mid_gen]

With No Man's Sky continuing the trend of recent years of kicking off a major poopstorm because something the developers mentioned during development may or may not be in the final product....question:

Should we go back to the old days, where there was usually zero said by a developer prior to the release of a game where the first exposure the gaming community got to a game was a magazine review after it went gold?

Should we embrace the Star Citizen model, where development is completely transparent?

The current model where developers frequently talk about a game while it is in development seems to be a recipe for disaster in the age of Reddit etc. It just doesn't seem to work.

As a developer, I don't think you can *ever* talk about *anything* in a game that's in development and be 100% sure it's going to end up like that in the final product, or even be there at all. There are too many things that can change. It's not just "we ran out of time" either. Sometimes it's a technical problem that can't be overcome. Sometimes it just turned out to not work well once implemented. Sometimes it unbalanced the game too much. Sometimes the early test feedback was terrible. Sometimes it just didn't 'fit' once it was in the game.

Any time this happens, it's now a 'lie' and the community goes nuts. So...say nothing? Say Everything?

 

[mid_gen]

Okay, third option :

Devs should just ignore the portion of the gaming community that appears to be just outright hostile to the people that create the games they play? There are going to be people that rage on you no matter what you do?

 

[mid_gen]

So pretty much like I expected...say everything or say nothing?

Which is a shame, because I quite like hearing about development of a game, and I don't mind if things do or don't work out exactly as was originally intended. Aren't there more people that fit in this category?

I guess middle ground (that we are taking more) is to put the game in player's hands during development in the form of public tests. But even that doesn't placate the raging minority....

 

[mid_gen]

Have to bring this up again....I'm still genuinely amazed at the number of people that that somehow got it into their heads that No Man's Sky was something it clearly isn't. Hello Games have delivered exactly the game I expected, and I followed it since it's announcement, watched all the videos and interviews.

I can only assume it's this crowd that whenever a game release comes around start all their breathless OMG THIS GAME IS SO OVERHYPED BUT I CAN'T STOP TALKING ABOUT IT AND MUST READ EVERY ARTICLE WRITTEN ON IT AND WATCH VIDEOS ANALYSING EVERY INTERVIEW AND TRAILER FRAME BY FRAME SO I CAN FIND SOMETHING TO BE OUTRAGED ABOUT OMG OVERHYPE.

I miss the old days. If Half Life came out today it would suffer the same toxic internet storm. This vocal minority of people seem to have forgotten how to enjoy games for what they are and take some perverse pleasure in being outraged by what they aren't.