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The Great Digital Hype
The Escapist is running a piece looking at how over-hype can kill a game just as fast as a buggy build or bad gameplay. With certain titles, especially Massive games, the expectations of a community can become so out of step with reality that whatever is released will not live up to the image. Article author Dana Massey looks at this issue, with personal experience, through the failure of the MMOG Wish. From the article: "On January 1, 2005, we opened the doors to the 80,000-plus players who had signed up to participate in our open beta. It was during this time that the Half-Life 2 demo had released, and I remember being quite pleased when our beta dropped it down to second on the most active list over at FilePlanet. It looked like things were going well. Famous last words ..."
Umm... duh.
When a hype gets people worked up for something, they're expecting it to see that expectations met. When you promise something, people expect this to happen. When you don't deliver, people will be disappointed and, worse, they will start picking the product apart. It may be even good, hey, it may be great by "ordinary" standards, but it isn't what you promised, so it is invariably going to be received less favorable than a less hyped game would be.
People start to nitpick at the tiniest problems. For a very simple reason: They are disappointed and they want others, who maybe didn't hear about the hype and think the game is great, to understand why. If for no other reason, then for the reason of being right. You can hardly argue that a game is crap when it isn't, by objective standards, so you have to find the dirt. That dirt is dragged to the surface then, so everyone can see it. You get compared to other games that may even fall behind in other parts but in THIS part your game sucks, so it sucks in general.
If enough people repeat it, the game breaks down and is remembered as a hyped game that didn't make it. See Black and White for reference. Or Star Wars I-III.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
case and point
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
I am almost disappointed in the Wii price. For so many months now its been 220, 199, 229, that when they announced 250 I was like "That Sucks". Even though its a good deal, and I will get one its kind of a downer. And it has Wii sports even, I know. The damn hype just made me want to spooge at the 199 price that had been speculated.
I think you might be a bit confused on hype. Hype is not really a couple demos explaining things you can do in a game and then your imagination building on top of it until your out of touch with reality. Its spastic advertising tricks like pre-rendered cinematics (ps2/ps3), over indulgent terms (emotion engine, umm...something not Sony...uh...oh! Revolution!) and just general streatching the truth. Then, fans minds run away with the distorted advertised image.
I wouldn't really call Spore overhyped. I rarely see or hear anything offical about it and never saw any advertisements. All I've seen is a couple demo videos and some speeches. That's not hype.The only real hype for Spore I could find was EA's overstatement of it "taking over the world" (by being on every console.) Of course, everyone took this differently and it eventually came out to sound like it'd be a darn near simeoultaneous launch. Which of course, Will Wright never said. All he said was he wanted to bring it to lots of other platforms and thought it was feasable. And then of course, things went sour when they announced (as I expected) they were focused on bring it to the PC first. A real example of hype is Sony and their PS3, it's got the advertising and marketing storm brew, rather than just the imagination.
Just as a side point, your right, it won't feature a mix between asynchronous and synchronous multiplayer. All it'll do is upload other people's content onto a central database that your game can then pull from to get a creature that matches certain search requirements. Totally asyncronous, nothing changes on the guy that made the creatures computer except possibly having a tally of total times downloaded go up.
Demented But Determined.
The biggest let-down is that people are still pre-animating the gameplay for commercials, or otherwise using a TON of CGI that the game just could not duplicate during play. If you look back historically, games that have done well were advertised kinda like: "here's the graphics, why hide it, if you think it sucks, then screw you, the game's still good". I just want to see what it is I'm gonna be doing in the game, not a split-second clip of that and then some other random CGI B-reel from Star Wars Episode 3 or something.
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