Game development is a difficult thing, but there are constant stories about games that lack a coherent creative vision throughout their development, and many of these games then release to underwhelming reception. What do we do, as an audience, when a game is overhyped around mechanics that are either poorly implemented in the final release or entirely absent?

There have been recent rumors about the development of Atomic Heart that first appeared on DTF.ru, and how the game was poorly managed with lead developers who would constantly add in new mechanics on a whim, forced the staff to work gruelingly long crunch sessions for months on end, and, from an organizationally unethical standpoint, produced vertical footage of their games rather than genuine gameplay captured in-engine; effectively meaning that they lied about what the game looked like and how it played.

It has been a long time since stories of immensely overambitious projects got hyped up so much, and that’s probably because the king of didn’t-know-what-the-game-should-be, Peter Molyneux, has been out of the public eye for some time. However, it is from his perspective that it would easiest to understand this phenomenon of games, Atomic Heart included, that are developed around marketing hype rather than closed development.

Many studios prefer to keep their games to themselves until the games are ready to be shown, such as Rockstar and Bethesda. They will take years upon years to finally show anything to the public, and they do this because games do change during development. They change and adapt, but there should always be a central vision. You should not be adding mechanics in and then showing them off at game shows unless you know that that mechanic will be in the final product, and this is something that the Atomic Heart developers have been accused of doing.

However, while many studios do keep their development private, Peter Molyneux was known to show off and wildly speculate about what his games would do. These were immensely ambitious ideas, like the idea of planting a tree in Fable that grew over the course of the game without it being a setpiece or how his Godus game was meant to allow an actual player to be in the role of the game world’s god, but these ambitious ideas never came to light. Instead, they built up hype around his progressively mediocre games to the point where a man who was once known for some of the most ambitious games around became a walking joke.

At some point, Molyneux was gold. He had a hand in classic, ambitious games like Populous, Syndicate, and Dungeon Keeper, but then moved into games that may have been interesting but could not deliver on what they had promised, like Black & White and Fable. Games that often received good reception at first, but then saw their overall reception diminish over time as people realized how overhyped and overrated those games actually were when they released.

This all culminated in the now famous Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Peter Molyneux in which Molyneux was asked, as soon as the interview started, whether he considered himself to be a pathological liar. His media appearances gradually diminished in the following months and years to the point where he hardly ever raises his head anymore, because it turns out that telling your game’s audience all about the ideas that you want to add in, not the ideas that are in the game, just the ones that you’d theoretically want in it, isn’t a great idea.

People don’t want to see fake stories about the games they’re interested in, they want to see real footage. However, people are also fickle, because when GTA VI development footage was leaked and acknowledged, many were in an uproar because the game doesn’t look good yet. This is because games never look good during the development, they’re still being made, but this is why development is often closed. And this is why what Peter Molyneux and the Atomic Heart lead developers have done is a very bad and dangerous thing to do.

Atomic Heart is one of those games that looks absolutely amazing. It has a Bioshock type flair, but mixed with this gorgeous Soviet, retro-futuristic aesthetic that works so well, but if it turns out that all that hype was over a game that doesn’t look or play anything like the game was shown, then that is going to cause blowback in the future.

Atomic Heart is actually one of those games that’s worth looking at now already. All the footage thus far released, like the recent Gamescom footage, didn’t really show much. The trailer was mostly there to show off a style, they were not there to show coherent gameplay, but rather snippets that make you feel a certain way. It’s clever marketing, and it’s also very common marketing, as games often show off clips like this to drum up support, but it’s also easily deceptive marketing.

When it comes to practically any project under the sun, it’s best to look at it with skepticism. It’s fine to get excited about a game when you see an awesome trailer, but it’s also worth remembering that regardless of whether developers made lots of promises or made their trailers look snappy and interesting, development is messy.

Games change a lot from initial concept to finished product, and constantly showing off and/or talking about a game that’s still in active development, while necessary in this market-driven world we live in, is also something that we should all take with a pinch of salt. Becoming hyped about something that never pays off is a disappointment, just ask all the people who got super hyped for the original Watch Dogs, and then discovered that it was about an angry man in hat who runs around a grey world with far fewer features than those early trailers and gameplay reveals suggested.

We should not put much stock in a game that is showed off to us. Do your best to temper your expectations because developers are ultimately there to make money, and while overhyping your game and then releasing it to poor reception is something that may eventually lead to consumer distrust and lessening sales numbers, that doesn’t stop the game that was hyped from making a lot of money off those false promises.

This is not even taking into account the poor management and crunch situations that many of these overhyped games force their developers into that should also affect your decision to buy something but remember that it’s often best to wait for reviews and genuine gameplay before getting too excited about spending your hard-earned money on something. It could always turn out that the features we were promised turned out to be a bunch of lies.

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed