I’ve called out Eve-Online for bullshit and vaporware for years. These days you can see the result of chasing after bullshit, with CCP firing hundreds of people. Why? Because instead of sticking to what they knew (an online space simulator) they started wasting money on all sort of idiotic sidetracks: characters walking in stations, first person shooters, brand new MMORPGs without a vision.

But in 2014 vaporware is now the absolute norm, considered perfectly normal if only slightly subtler and used to fool the players. After having seen almost all conferences my conclusion is that this E3 celebrated a new standard of total shamelessness: around 90% of the games shown, that offered “gameplay”, are absolutely vaporware in the form that what you’ll actually get on the system being publicized will look NOTHING like what was shown during those videos. And this doesn’t simply includes graphic downgrades, but also fake animations and scripted AI scenes.

Instead of making great games, the budget nowadays goes first and foremost into presentation. I can’t even imagine how many dollars and man hours have been wasted on CG trailers and game presentations that will never be featured in the final game.

The ad is the game. You open the box, and you find nothing like what you saw in the ad.

It was a show of scripted scenes, including fake “player” voiceovers. And The Division should absolutely win a prize for being the one game in the whole show to have put EVERYTHING together in one gameplay video that is probably MORE fake than the maximum shamelessness up to this day: Killzone 2.

Either players start a riot against this trend of fake advertizing, or this is only the very beginning.

(TotalBisquit, one of the few worthy critics left, seems to agree.)