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'Misleading' COD2 Ads Pulled From UK
GamesIndustry.biz reports that Activision has been ordered not to air Call of Duty 2 ads in the U.K. that use pre-rendered imagery to sell the game. Three Television viewers apparently complained to that country's Advertising Standards Authority that the imagery constituted misleading advertising. From the article: "The adjudication is likely to send shockwaves through the industry as it focuses on the question of whether pre-rendered footage is an acceptable representation of a computer game - in its defence, Activision didn't argue that it was, but rather that using pre-rendered footage was "common practice"."
Who hasn't played a game that features photos or footage that is not representative of actual gameplay? I feel like only the most inexperienced of people could be so easily fooled by such "deceptive" advertising. There are playable demos for just about every game, as well as images and/or disclaimers on the box.
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Those ads ran in the states with the words "Actual Game Footage" on the screen.
:/
Well, it was an "actual" cut-scene from the game.
It would be nice to see the end of this practice.... not only because it will make the ads more honest, but it will mean game devs might finally stop filling up disks with little video clips in lieu of playable content.
Personally, I thought the little cut-scenes in Ms. Pac-Man were too long. If I ever gotta sit through the opening scenes of GTA:SA again, I'm going to pop a gasket.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I remember when I first saw the ads here in the States that they were terribly misleading. It was obviously pre-rendered material, but I don't remember them ever stating clearly that it was pre-rendered and didn't represent actual gameplay. Of course Sony set the bar for pre-rendered material with all the PS3 "games" (none of which were running on real PS3 hardware) they showed at E3, so I guess it's an industry trend. Lie, and hope nobody notices.
The only time I get suspicious of a game if the content on the box is drawn art with no screenshots. I bought a few Atari 2600 games back in the day that had cool illustrations on the outside but the games were terrible looking when played. No wonder video game market crashed in the early 1980s.
I was one of the people responsible for the UK's PCWorld having to remove their advert for a Centrino laptop that promised "the internet wherever you are"
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/asa_pcworld_haha.ti
It is in our hands as knowledgable people to notice such rip-offs and report them :
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Bloody right an' all. For ages I've been cursing ad's for not showing what the game actually looks like. Even the use of in-game cutscenes is misleading to the uninitiated as they might believe that all the game was that pretty. What's to stop me producing a game that's text-only and then including a 20-minute MPEG cutscene halfway through it which was made by some major CGI studio? The cutscenes are NOT representative of the game as a whole and therefore should not be allowed to be used in a 30-second advert.
I actually noticed the initial adverts for Call of Duty 2 and had this exact concern. I don't buy games any more (nothing worth buying, nothing decent enough to play them on, no way I'm paying that amount just for a game) but it was obvious to me that there was no way the game could be anything like the adverts showed, even though they looked like they *could* be to the average parent/new gamer.
I'm glad this has been upheld and hopefully this will make companies spend more time making the entire game look and play better rather than just spending the money on pre-rendered cutscenes.
So wait... When McDonalds shoots photos of their giant delicious burgers, they don't just grab the next big mac off the line and snap a shot? They grill a prime patty to perfection with delicately sliced tomatos and onions and put it together like it was "staged" or something!? BOO!
Pre-rending/simulated screens are everywhere in ads shown in the US. Take a look at the text at the bottom of the next TV/game/cell phone ad (which you will probably need a 32" tv to read). It is very rare anymore to see actual screen images.
Any non-solid in food advertising (hamburger ketchup, cereal milk) is actually glue.
And see what Sony will put forward for the PS3 next E3 Seriously, wouldn't it be a good idea to have this type of advertising banned? I can imagine the average consumer being disapointed with there purchase after viewing such advertisement.
We're fast reaching a point in gaming where real-time rendering can feasably match the quality of pre-rendered graphics. It's not like the days of the Playstation, where characters in FFVII have a few polygons in-game, but are smooth and (somewhat) realistic in the FMV's.
I'm sure most people here have seen trailers for Killzone 2 on the PS3. Even knowledgable people could be led to believe that this can be replicated on a PC game, and it's quite possible on the current-gen XBox 360.
I talked a bit about this kind of thing in the blog the /. edition of Carnival of Games linked to:
i mas-future-and-games.html
http://www.muproductionsonline.com/2006/01/machin
I think the use of pre-rendered CG is unnecessary, and costly.
Surly this was dealt with eons ago (in computer terms). All the old CPC tape covers had a very tiny disclaimer on the bottom saying that the screen shots were taken form a C64 or some other computer with better graphics.
be honest and represent it 'as is'. I'm sick and tired of hearing hype (e.g. "NextGame consoles will deliver cinematic gaming") that I as a technology user know industry cannot deliver on.
The box cover was a picture that claimed to be an actual screen shot from the game. They made a big deal about it, as few games had graphics worth sticking on a box at the time. Buit it wasn't actual game graphics. There were weapons and ships on the HUD that didn't exist in the game. There were also asteroids featured prominently in the shot, and they were much more detailed than the asteroids in the game. It's about time the ad monkeys got called on their BS.
Look at the "solutions" to deceptive advertisement regulators have come up with, though. Now every time I connect my DS to a hotspot to play MarioKart, I get a little flash message saying "Warning: Game experience may change during online play"... I'd certainly $*%&ing hope so! Why else would I bother going online?
All's true that is mistrusted
This is good. Since the beginnings of Atari the industry has been showing us boxes and elusive screenshots that are nothing like the game play. It was less important in the Atari age because everyone knew that there was no way the gameplay could look like that. As the technology gets better and its starting to become more plausable for the gameplay to look photo realistic, or even direct artist translations(no digitizing and loss of details), that line gets blurred to the consumer.
When I see what looks like screenshots on the box, or clips from the website and TV. I expect that the gameplay looks like that.
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I remember seeing those ads here in Canada. What pissed me off the most was that they showed a review snippet that said something along the lines of, "visually breathtaking." I kept wondering, if the graphics are so great, why don't they just show them in the commercial?
Still, ask any Playstation owner about graphics and they'll swear on their life that Final Fantasy 7 had much better graphics than, say, Mario 64, as they gesture wildly at screenshots of FF7's (admittedly amazing) prerendered cutscenes. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
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Reminds me of when I was a kid buying C64 games, they ALL had screen shots from the Amiga version. I fell for it once with some car game.. I remember my buddy and I taking turns playing it to the end thinking we were going to be rewarded with the "better graphics". I was sorely dissapointed. At least back then you could return opened software to EB.
-Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat-
It appears as though the journalist is not exactly clear on the meaning of "pre-rendered footage" and, as such, it is difficult to discern the actual implications of the article. Is the issue here the pre-rendered footage or the fact that it was pre-rendered footage not present in the game?
From the article:
"The ASA noted that the ads did not include any indication that the images shown did not reflect the quality of graphics of the games. While the scenes used communicated the themes of the game, they were not accurate representations of the graphics in the games themselves. We considered that this was misleading."
It has been common practice to use FMV footage as cut scenes for years now and, more often than not, the ads contain a disproportionate amount of such. Despite being annoying, it was never really much of an issue before. I somehow doubt that these particular ads are being pulled now for something that has been going on for years.
It seems to me that the actual issue here is using new scenes created separately from the game for the sole purpose of advertising. If so, this is an entirely different animal than the article would lead you to believe.
The main problem with these cutscenes is that they were created with the intention of being used for ads. It's bad design to put in cutscenes that look more fun than the game actually is, because the player is disappointed by the game they're playing. That's why you rarely get gameplay-styled CG cutscenes (in-engine cutscenes yes, because that's actual gameplay). But contrary to that rule of thumb, these cutscenes look like they're gameplay straight out of a next-gen army game that the PS2 can't hope to live up to. If the cutscenes aren't being designed to improve the user experience, then they're being designed for something else. So when they're used in ads that confuse the viewer into thinking it's actual gameplay, then it's pretty clear that from the beginning they were ads, not cutscenes. And at that point it's false advertising.
Games with high resolutions, and high frame counts almost always look like crap on a TV commercial with its lower-fps and lower resolution. I don't mind a game commercial cleaning up the images of game play footage, so that the game looks pretty on a TV screen.
It's one thing to release footage that is grossly misleading as to what the game will eventually turn out to look like (like the Killzone 2 trailer or those cutscene-only ads for final fantasy games), but as long as the image isn't misleading, I don't mind that commercials alter game-footage to prevent broadcast Television from making them look ugly.
I've seen those commercials here in the US. They do bother me, but not because it's false, but because in my opinion that pre-rendered crap sells the game short. I prefer the natural graphics.
The Call of Duty Series has a large and very dedicated base of players, a great many of whom feel that they have been short-changed by Call Of Duty 2. For those who aren't aware of the issues, or the level of complaints are welcome to examine the Call of Duty 2 forums at IWNation. http://www.iwnation.com/Forums/
c =19875
A large amount of the active mapper/modders, server admins, clans, clan members and gaming leagues are all seeing this lawsuit as yet another shot against what they feel is unjust treatment. There is some speculation that this lawsuit was prompted by members of this dedicated community - and that this will serve as an advance "warning", as class-action suits may soon follow.
In the usual glitz and hype, Activision and IW promised that the game would be "totally new", with a "completely new" engine and immersive play. From coding examples culled from the game itself (PC Version) it appears that the only substantive changes were to parts of the rendering engine - the scripting and underlying Quake3 Engine technology have not changed at all! There are bugs present in the current CoD2 game that were not only identified, but patched and fixed in the original Call of Duty. If the engine is "new", why are bugs that only affected the original game present in this one?
While the single-player aspect of this game is for the most part a great game, the multiplayer was not only neglected but outright "consoled" to death. In fact, it appears that the game was essentially rushed to market in order to make it a launch title for the Microsoft Xbox360 - other snippets of code reveal that some of the bugfix code (CoD1.4, 1.51) is embedded in the game but not being implemented. They have reduced the max_gamestate to 16K from 32K in the original (which limits the amount of objects and actors that can be present). The XBox360 version had a horrible save-game bug that destroyed all progress in the single-player campaign and the multiplayer is (from what I've seen) the worst XBox Live game implementation ever made.
There is even a grassroots backlash against ACTV/IW by a group known as CoD Community Action (CCA), their latest grievances are located here:
http://www.iwnation.com/Forums/index.php?showtopi
There was a weekend-long server shutdown back in December by the "CCA" and its supporters (the first server shutdown of its kind in Internet history). The only response was a hasty "there is a patch in the works!" The silence from Activision and IW is deafening. A lot of people are going to do their best to see that if this game and the community relations from ACTV/IW are not repaired, that any attempt at Call of Duty 3 will be subject to boycotts.
A great many of the long-time CoD players feel that this is just desserts for a company that spits in the face of its greatest fans on a regular and consistant basis. All most of the players want is some simple, regular and consistant communication from IW - and all they normally receive is silence. EA and Epic and Valve all understand the importance of keeping their customers happy but it appears Activision and Infinity Ward (IW) do not.
I'm gonna so sue Atari. Their pacman game of 2600 showed pacman jumping out as 3D.
I suppose game designers will now include one 'breathtaking' scene in each game just to qualify putting it on the cover. So expect the framerate of one special stage in each game to be real choppy.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Any non-solid in food advertising (hamburger ketchup, cereal milk) is actually glue.
Advertisers are much more creative than that actually. Cereal milk is often glue but there are far more diverse and creative techniques out there for food ads. Ice cream is usually a concoction derived from potato flakes (though not quite made into the same mashed potatoes tha the manufacturer intended). Bread is rarely if ever real fresh bread--it is usually shellacked with a "tasty" varnish and has the consistency of croutons (except more durable--artsy-crafty folks are probably familiar with that sort of modelling dough used to make those ornaments that look like real pastries...). Actual use of real food is pretty commonplace however it is generally room temperature and sometimes horribly altered. As a rule, anything that LOOKS good and can stand up to studio lighting and sit for extended periods is what goes. That is why most "fragile" food is totally fake.
Other industries are "extra flattering" as well...show me an automobile ad that showcases the base model during normal use--it is always the one equipped with the handsome upgraded appearance package and driven by a "professional driver on a closed course". Clothing companies use fashion models that are far from the average physique, and you are kidding yourselves if you think that every one of them is wearing a regular size right off the rack in a store--in a lot of cases the clothes are tailored to fit the specific model. I'd say that the more expensive the clothing label, the more likely clothes have been specially altered to fit the model for the ads.
The video game industry has operated this way since the beginning and I remember in the early 80s that there was a fracas about the use of "artist's renditions" in print ads. Some companies relented and pit in very fine print somewhere in the ad "artist's rendition - actual appearance may vary". One company (Parker Brothers? The publisher of the Popeye and Frogger games for home systems) took out a series of full page ads that showed the same screenshot for ALL the systems (so you'd see variances bewteen the Atari 2600, 5200, Colecovision, Commodore, Apple, etc)--implicitly boasting that they weren't ashamed of their graphics and suggesting that they made an honest effort in developing for ALL platforms while some other game makers did not.
I think the practice was somewhat dishonest but understandable back in the day, since the hardware wasn't capable of making very exciting visuals on its own, and the market was fragmented amongst more platforms with a greater range of capabilities (bigger titles that were published for many platforms would have to resort to full page ads as described above to be completely truthful in their marketing). Today, however, such practice is inexcusable--it is plain dishonesty. Video displays do not melt like ice cream under studio lights, consoles are powerful enough to render great graphics, and the differences in contemporary platforms are pretty much NEVER evident in screenshots or quick flashes of action in ads. By relying on pre-rendered footage and artist renditions modern game publishers are just playing a crooked game of bait and switch. Old habits die hard though--much harder than the justifications for those habits.
....If we don't bullshit people, how will we get them to give us money for crap!?
May the Maths Be with you!
On the back of the Mario 3 box there was a shot from a level prominently showing Para Beetles in the clouds. This level was not in the game. It made me so angry. fast forward ten years and I get a rom of the "lost levels of mario 3". and there it was. ...And the level sucked.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
This practice was onlined in the penny-arcade comic:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12
While it might be misleading Activision is right in asserting that using pre-rendered footage is common practice.
At the very least, its FFT.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
I'm absolutely sick and tired of seeing super high quality video in TV ad after TV ad for 3G phones, knowing full well what they are capable of. The audio is almost certainly fake as well, but at least that's within the realm of possibility.
I was recently browsing through the various games, and found that many of them had "screenshots" that were 90% pre-rendered cutscenes. Graphics don't always count for much in my book, but it would be nice if I could at least see what the actual game was supposed to look like.
The practice of advertising with pre-rendered cutscenes and/or graphics is worse. The cutscenes are semi-understandable as the are part of the game, but using a rendered to make the game graphics far beyond what you'll see during gameplay on an actual PC is just evil.
I've seen that COD2 commercial thats constantly on the air in North America and I keep asking myself if its actual gameplay or not. They kind of make it ambiguous. And really, how should I know? I don't own a 360. It just came out and it's supposedly got amazing graphics right? So who would know if the commercial is showing actual gameplay or not? Looks like it.
Listen, listen, there isn't a big beef about this simply because they used pre-rendered footage. They're claiming "common practice" because we're used to the game publishers making commercials out of pre-rendered footage. We should be able to see their attempt to change the problem.
The problem lies in the fact that the footage is clearly developed to have that in-game look. The commercials in question are just-shy of having a HUD, they're presented in first person with the gun sticking out of the corner of the screen and all.
The problem isn't that it's pre-rendered. It doesn't even matter if the pre-rendered stuff appears in game or not. Who cares? That's not the important part. The important part is that it is "shot" (camera angling, viewpoint, &c) in such a way as to give a viewer the distinct impression of "in-game".
Any gamer with a brain can tell a cut-scene from actual in-game. The marketers who put this together clearly started out with the idea that they could mask the fact that it's pre-rendered by completely removing the typical positive "film-style" effects afforded to cut-scenes. You see it, your mind immediately parses the way the camera is moving and the first-person viewpoint and say "holy shit, it's in-game!" and then go wild about how fantastic it looks and go out and buy it.
It's reprehensible, is what it is.
If companies were required to show actual in-game footage, we wouldn't have to ask if the PS3 footage was real or not. Remember the next-gen Madden footage versus what actually came out? THAT was misleading.
The UK regulators have also taken action on the issue of misleading 3G phone adverts:b lications/complaints_reports/advertising_complaint s/show_complaint.asp-ad_complaint_id=882.html
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/itc/itc_pu
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Nintendo doesn't do this? They've hyped up The Legend of Zelda :Twilight Princess by showing mostly in-game footage none of this pre-rendered CGI nonsense. As they say Sony is responsible for this with FF VIII
That game was nothing but pre-rendered scenes with a cursor over them.
If you are sold something which is not as advertised, you can complain and should expect:
1) An apology
2) A refund
3) A commitment to correct it (the product or the advert or both)
If that doesn't work at the time, then there are institutions set up which will attempt to enforce satisfaction for you.. Sounds good so far, doesn't it?
The only thing which can ruin this system is people NOT complaining when something is not as advertised. As an example, if you ordered a meal with a full, fresh salad in a restaurant (from a photo), and got only 1 soggy lettuce leaf, you would expect them to apologise, take it back, do it again properly, and maybe even not charge you, since they failed to serve what they said (and showed) they would serve.
Macdonalds is of the few restaurants where this is not considered normal, and I can't see why. I complain about the mis-nomer 'fast food' in these places - loudly, to the 'manager'. I get 2 reactions - distaste (usually from people who think that MacD is some kind of food shrine to be worshipped on a daily basis), and grudging consent (by people who came for quick food, and either can't be arsed or don't have the time to bother themselves).
MacDonalds in particular has fostered this culture of acceptance to the extent that while 5 or so years ago I would have got an apology, nowadays I am treated as a loon, by other customers and staff. They seem to think that because it is unusual to complain, there is nothing wrong with handing you a late, cold, damp shadow of what you ordered, often with relish when I specifically asked for none.
You wouldn't accept it anywhere else: why is it normal in a 'fast food' place?
Oh yes, and back to the games industry - too bloody right. By all means show it in a nice light (or even some lovelies holding the box in provacative stances), but lying about the content itself is unnaceptable. Fraud, to be precise. They can lie all they like about the 'lifestyle image' of a product, but correct representation of the actual content is a legal requirement that we would be fools not to enforce.
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I have no sig yet I must scream.
All fast food ads shows a burger that is a half a foot tall with perfectly ripe vegitables and toppings that can't be contained by the bun. When was the last time you got a Whopper that looked like this?
I guess if they remove the COD2 ad they need to remove fast food ads as well.
I dont know about you guys, but Im tired of "bullshots", slice it any way you want, but if a sale is based on photos of a product and then you can prove those photos were faked or they didnt showed the product at all, it is misleading Advertising and the sale could be considered fraud in a court of law. How many fans are still waiting for PS3 games to look like the Killzone 2, Motorstorm trailers? probably already saving the rumored $700-$800 to get the system? no game system is even NEAR to render that kind of complexity in realtime. (It has been proved both were fake, motorsports won a CGI award actually) and dont expect Gears of War or MGS4 Actual Gameplay Footage to look like their REALTIME DEMOS either.
Go ahead MOD my day!
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I don't think of the ads as deceptive, just done poorly. Whenever I see all pre-rendered gameplay on a commercial I just figure the game sucks too much to show you actual footage. As a gamer, I've learned the hard way over the years not to trust how cool a pre-rendered video sequence looks. Its like seeing an ad for the latest movie tie in game like the Fantastic 4 one that kept showing up in the theaters. Come on now, you know that it was going to suck before you bought it!
even so, I still want to see a few parts of pre-rendered cut-scenes - games Namco's Ace Combat series are totally awesome, but that style of gameplay just generally doesnt allow for much ingame story telling (sure theres radio chatter, but I like to see people talking to each other and get punched/bitch slapped every now and then) - which is why when I'm playing games, I look forward to pre-rendered cut-scenes, it lets you take a break from the game and watch something nice, and not have to worry about a low polygon count if you have graphics turned down for your system (or if the console version has em turned down because it cant handle the average PC level of graphics)
My favorites were always the SSI rpg/war/sim games from the 80s. You'd see these exciting covers, like Roadwar Europa. Take it home, load it up, and you get this!
To someone with gaming experience and knowledge of systems the ads are immediately recognisable as being pre-rendered shots. Out of curiousity I sought the game (PS2 COD2:Big Red One) out in Australian EB's, and guess what? No in-game shots on the box either. I hate pre-rendered ads/packaging/etc. I also note that most multi-platform releases use the same high-quality PC/Xbox screenshots for all platform packaging, regardless of the system. This is unrepresentative of the actual product, and irritating. Reminds me of the old ads for games avilable on spectrum, trs80, and commodore64 - they show the tasty graphics, but no way you get that on the 64!