Over-Promising Isn't The Problem, Molyneux

17 Feb 2010 at 00:00:00 by Tim McDonald

A couple of days ago, Peter Molyneux – famed for Bullfrog, Lionhead, and putting his foot in his mouth regarding game features – came out and said, via Twitter, “I definitely have learnt my lesson about over promising.”

Considering past mentions of, say, being able to zoom into an apple to see a worm crawling out of it and then zooming out to view the entire level map, or planting an acorn in Fable and seeing it grow into an oak tree over the course of a game, it's good that this has been said. When it comes to over-promising being bad, the man's not wrong. He's not right, though.

The big problem isn't over-promising. It's a problem, certainly, particularly if your name is Peter and you like to make bold, sweeping claims that either won't be included or sound impressive but have no impact on the game itself, but I think the problem is just promising.

It's the one thing I personally hate about writing previews: inevitably, whatever I mention spoils something for someone. At times, it can't be helped. I mean, shit, people read previews to find out about the game; details must be put in there. There's a fine line between something tantalising and a complete giveaway, though, and it's a symptom of the dance between marketing and development. The game needs to be impressive and it needs to have a few “that's so cool” moments to be a truly phenomenal game, but it needs to give a little away pre-release to make people sit up and pay attention. The problem comes when marketing blows the game's metaphorical wad before release and tells everyone all of the brilliant things in the game, so players don't discover anything for themselves, and there are no surprises.

Because I've got a reputation for a love-love relationship with BioWare (I love the games as much as I love picking on the team, apparently) let's take Mass Effect 2 as an example. Back at E3, we were told that depending on your decisions throughout the game, your team – and even protagonist Shepard – could die. Not in a “game over” way, but in an actual, final, proper-ending-sequence “You've won but at the cost of your lives” kind of way. Brilliant idea that certainly slapped a lot of people awake, and in the end, the deaths of a few of my crew members left me feeling slightly numb. That said, I really, really wish I could've discovered that for myself rather than having heard about it first-hand, written about it (with spoiler warnings, at least) and read it in every other preview on the internet. I can only imagine the shock and emotional impact that the final death of some of my favourite teammates would've had, if I'd had no idea what was coming.

Solution? There isn't one, really. It's marketing's job to make sure the game is sold and if that involves ruining all of a game's surprises, it can't be helped, and as journalists we need to report on it. I do think that journalists can be more careful, though. I'd like to see warnings becoming a bit more prevalent when it comes to this sort of thing, because I genuinely feel it can adversely impact the enjoyment of a game; one or two Heavy Rain reviews I've seen gave away the opening hours, which I know would've made playing those sections less gripping and less shocking had I read them prior to release. (Our review, incidentally, is spoiler free.)

As ever, there's the possibility it's just me, but I know what it's like to gleefully hoover up every last crumb of information about a game, although if anything I've always found that tends to make the game a little more disappointing when I finally play it because my expectations are ramped up so high. There always were and always will be gamers who want to know everything about a game before playing it; there are plenty who don't really care; and there are those of us who genuinely love gaming as our primary entertainment form, who want to see games at their best, and we're the ones who really need to be careful as to what we let ourselves find out. Oddly enough, I think this one's entirely up to us as fans of the art form.

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