Heavily edited pre-release screen shots

Relentless81

Relentless81

Relentless81

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I follow a lot of devs such as EA on Facebook as I find its a good way to get up to date information. One thing i've noticed over the years is how on earth is it legal for them to get away with the heavily edited screen shots

Go back to before Bad Company 2 was released and the hype train was gathering speed, the screen shots shown on Facebook were eye wateringly good, very exciting stuff. The game comes out its finally here and you buy it forgetting all about the hype and yeah the graphics are quality, but go back to those creen shots and sorry they are not as good as that, they are especially not as good as that on a console.

Now if anyones following Crysis 2 on there they have uploaded some MP shots, the comments are along the lines of "wow, amazing graphics" etc etc and they do look amazing but the final product even on a high end PC will not look like that and on the console which they will sell most of their product to, it especially will not look like that

Going way back to 2005, remember the CGI videos that Sony released for some of the games that they had planned, Kill Zone was one of them I bet the vids are still on youtube, they look nothing like the product that eventually followed

Car games is another, advertising usually shows bumped up replay footage when the actual gameplay footage looks nothing like it, this isnt so true anymore as they do tend to be a lot better these days especially on PC but Forza and Project Gotham on the 360 were really bad for this way back when the xbox was due to be released

How do they get away with this?
 
codemasters were the first and masters of it, look at some of there pre release photorealistic screenshots, its like they sent someone out with a dslr camera
 
Heres another, Medal Of Honour, the first footage released was the Tier 1 folk busting into a room and saving a guy strapped to a chair and it looked fantastic, fast forward to the console ported game and the actual scene that appeared in the game in the finished product
 
To be fair - having done some game development - often the in development version does look like that at a certain point (tho more often than not the screenshots are mocked up by importing the game assets into maya) - but towards the end of development they end up having to cut a lot of stuff back to get decent performance on a range of hardware. For instance I played a version of ETQW pre-release that had DX10 quality shaders on a lot of stuff (Think this was the version they showed off at quakecon or E3 can't remember rightly), most of the meshes had 2-3x the detail of the shipped game and the lighting was fantastic... it also ran about 9fps on my 7950GX2 which at the time was bleeding edge hardware.
 
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To be fair, this was been going on since the beginning of the games industry.

For example, using Amiga screenshots on the back of Spectrum game box covers :D

It's the ultimate deception.
 
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But how on earth is it legal?

I'd prefer them to sell the game with these limitations removed, but with options to use them if you can't run the game at that stage.
Just like an extra grpahics quality setting...above ultra.
 
Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising has to be one of my more notable memories of just outright lying. The game didn't just fall short of the mark, it may as well have been a completely different game.
 
Adrianr said:
Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising has to be one of my more notable memories of just outright lying. The game didn't just fall short of the mark, it may as well have been a completely different game.
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codemasters enough said..

dig up some of the old grid and other toca series screenshots, i remember one where they had a compare to ray tracing lol
 
And you're surprised at any company that is trying to sell their product by making it look better then what it actually is? Just look at TV commercials over the past @25 years, there is hardly a single commercial that shows/speaks 100% truth about its product, yet people still buy their crap.
 
Well if you make your assumptions based on early CGI footage you get what you deserve. Its like going into the world of Final Fantasy and complaining that the opening movie isn't indicative of the rest of the game. Theres no reason to trust anything but gameplay and by gameplay i mean footage from near release day, not 5 months back when they're probably showcasing an enhanced area of the game.
 
Evilsod said:
Well if you make your assumptions based on early CGI footage you get what you deserve. Its like going into the world of Final Fantasy and complaining that the opening movie isn't indicative of the rest of the game. Theres no reason to trust anything but gameplay and by gameplay i mean footage from near release day, not 5 months back when they're probably showcasing an enhanced area of the game.
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It's not assumptions based on CGI..... developers photoshop their pre-release images. Look at all those signs and ariels: They weren't in battlefield 2. They haven't even been drawn on very well, yet this was an official pre-release image.

http://battlefield2.filefront.com/info/BF2_Screenshots

screenshot_10.jpg
 
Remember the day of Amiga box art. You'd walk into a computer store and pick up say Monkey Island II and the box screenshots would be from the PC version using 256 colours etc...

The Amiga version looked nothing like it. But, technically the game 'could' look like that if you had the kit.

Codemasters and their F1 2010 spring to mind though. some of the released shots were a bit erm... Well touched up. The PC version looks quite tidy but the PS3 version would have a hard time matching the screens they released.

Its happened for as long as I can remember gaming. It will continue to happen as well. Its not too much of an issue to me for PC games, as eventually you get the hardware to run the game maxed and it does tend to then match the box art etc.. Half Life 2 was like this. But console gaming, no excuse. What you see in released screenshots and the box art should match 100% what you see on screen when you fire the game up.

Still, its happened for years. And I can't see it changing anytime soon. Publishers want to entice you into buying their product. What I do now have a pet hate with though is console screen tearing.. But thats another issue.:p
 
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