with everything that's going on I cant help but feel a little bit sympathetic towards hello games considering the massive amount of hype and expectation that's been piled on them.(which is mostly sonys fault from what I hear although I don't think they helped matters much either)
how was a small team like that who's only other games are the Joe danger series which look honestly a bit basic ever going to meet that?.
I wouldn't feel too bad for them.
This short video contains a list of blatant promises made over and over again which it seems the developer had no intention of keeping. There's not being able to deliver on your features, and then there's intentional false advertising, and I think the gaming community as a whole agrees that this was the definitely a case of the latter, with some people considering legal action against them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wsFhv_Kz38
Aye, I'm already aware of that. As per the usual, I actually don't side with the community on this one.
A couple of reasons:
First of all, Sony shouldn't have let Murray speak AT ALL in the first place, the useless dolts. They take the lead programmer, an overly excited guy who is VERY clearly not used to the spotlight, and also clearly the sort that loves to talk about his projects, and put HIM on the pedestal? What? Did they not even THINK that maybe, MAYBE they should choose a bit more carefully? They're not dealing with an experienced developer here! These guys had ONE thing before this: Joe Danger. That's IT. What kind of utter blazing morons would make that decision?
Secondly: Stuff changes fast during development, and ANYTHING can go wrong. There's a very high chance that quite a lot of the stuff that was promised was, in fact, in the middle of being actually worked on.... or perhaps even completed... when it was talked about. And other things probably absolutely were intended. But then either was scrapped later. Why do I say this? Because I've DONE IT. Not on purpose, mind you. But it was something I found was.... easy to have happen. This with Starward, of course. There were a couple of times where I'd say "Well okay, this thing's going in there, yep, gonna be cool!" and then like 3 days later: "Weeeeelp. That was a dumb move, shouldn't have said that. This thing looked like it was really going well, but it isn't working at all, it turns out, it screws up this and this and this bit over here, so.... yeah, gotta cut it.". And we've seen this very thing during the development of Arcen's games without me there to screw it up. Remember TLF's RTS battle system? How that went? I know I remember that... That RTS battle system wasn't a "lie", that's for sure. It was genuinely in development, fully intended to be part of the final product, but in the end, it just plain didn't work, so out it went. EVERY developer goes through this one. ALL of them. It doesn't matter how good the dev in question is, they're GOING to have this happen sometimes. The difference is, you usually don't have some guy on a podium telling the universe about things like that while they're still in a half-complete state. Not that your typical idiot thinks of any of this, of course.
When you combine these two things together, you get the effect that happened. Overly excited developer, clearly passionate about the whole thing (but also not the brightest bulb) in a nervous position that he's NOT ready for, placed there by idiot suits who didn't bother to even remotely think of anything that might make this a bad idea, and allowed to talk about upcoming features that weren't actually finished yet, stuff that was intended but not in a position of being "set in stone", or perhaps WERE considered set in stone, but considered so by a very unexperienced developer, meaning that they judged wrong and had to scrap stuff later anyway. Something tells me this one probably happened more than a few times.
Which is one thing if you've got a huge, super-experienced 120-man dev team, they can get around that stuff and be better about judging it, but this was a new player in the market. They shouldn't have been talking about upcoming stuff AT ALL. Or at the very least, Sony should have put someone else in the spotlight, and REGULATED things. Told them "Speaking about this is OK. Speaking about this other bit is NOT at all OK, don't even think about doing it".
And really, what in the bloody hell did anyone expect? Freaking miracles? Because that's what it would have taken for a 12-person team to create what the braindead internet thought they would get. Have people seriously gotten THAT dumb when it comes to big shiny upcoming new things? ....why do I even ask that? Of course they have.
Am I saying that Hello Games isn't at fault at all? Ye gods, no. They should have thought the entire project through more... I don't mean "doing specific parts right", I mean "should we do this project AT ALL in this form". All the loopy crap from Sony should have been a massive screaming red light.... hell, Sony's entire presence should have been. They should have realized "we're not ready for this, sorry, we're not the ones for this job". I mean, really, did they think of that? Nope. But moreso, Sony, who has been in the business for a LONG time, should have seen this themselves. They all screwed up. All of them. But for the reasons already explained, and more that I'll not ramble about here (because it'd end up being 5 pages long) I don't buy into that whole "lies" bit at all.
And as always, I seriously have zero sympathy for those that bought into this and ended up believing that they didn't get what they were promised (and again, what they believed they'd get would have required a giant dev team). No sympathy at all. Were it up to me, there wouldn't be ANY refunds. At all. Just "Welp, maybe you'll learn something this time" instead, followed by a swat to the head. I personally have been absolutely fine with the game, but then I actually knew what I was getting, and it turned out I wasn't wrong.
But they wont learn anything. Just wait'll Star Citizen happens. That's going to make this look like nothing at all; that game (what little there is of it) is practically made entirely of red flags right now and nobody spots it, because they don't want to. That's not to say it'll necessarily be genuinely bad. It could actually be fairly good! But will it live up to what everyone is so completely freaking sure it will? Holy crap on a stick, no! Not even close! It's going to be a WAY bigger margin than this was.... even a huge dev team wont live up to what is already surrounding THAT mess.
Not to mention all of the problematic releases that will inevitably happen between now and then....
There, that's my "I haven't had my caffeine yet" rant for the day complete. More sparks than usual since I had to get up early. I hope nobody got hurt.