And the fact that you feel you’ve been screwed. Here are the rules if you want to buy a good game:
– Do not trust screenshots, ever. They are more tweaked and photoshopped than models in FHM. During the 90s they were writing in small “arcade version” to sell a shitty Atari ST/Amiga/PC port over graphics. What a shame.
– Do not fall for concept art. Concept art is no game, it’s fantasy, it’s projection, it’s nothing that is going to be playable. Pre-ordering on virtual promises is nuts.
– Do not fall for trailers like you all did with Dead Island. Actually I think trailers somehow should not exist. It’s totally killing movies (Inception for me) and it kills game too. They are very powerful I know, but they are also very dangerous.
– Do not fall on tech demo. Yes it is OMG real time but in game development there’s real time and then, there’s real time. Everything will look fluid and beautiful for example because there’s no input or AI. Add them and your beautiful game engine stutters all of sudden. If nobody is playing with the real time footage you see, you can forget it. It’s bogus man.
– Do not fall on in-game footage where a developer is playing in an empty world. Again, add AI, NPC states and a whole other bunch of stuff the computer has to deal with while you are moving your sticks or mouse, and the game will be absolutely not as smooth as you think it is.
The only way to have a real taste of how good a game is is to try it out at your friends, at a conference or download a demo on your machine. Period.
You see, this is where I think that the awful term “videogame” created a focus on video/graphic in a bad way. People didn’t read about games but just looked at pictures in magazines back in the 90s. Today they watch Youtube videos. People are getting sold on that superficial shit whereas a game, a computer game, is so not about visuals. It’s not about video. It’s about games, systems, patterns, feelings, flow.
Dead Island I hope, will remind you of that.