Before I ever worked in this industry I was a fan of video games. An ardent fan. By that I mean I spent many hours per week on websites like this and gaming sites like Gamespot trying to find out all I could about games I was stoked for. Often times, for games I was particularly stoked about, I could never understand why the heck they wouldn't release more information. PLEASE ONE GAMEPLAY SCREENSHOT OR VIDEO OF HALF-LIFE 2, YOU ARE KILLING ME!
Of course, now, I am starting to learn a little bit more about why things are held off, what gets said when, the whole PR machine. Despite popular belief, video games aren't really a whole lot like movies. After you shoot some film and develop it you have something usable. You can take a frame of it and put it out on AICN or Variety or a short snippet of video on E! within about 24 hours.
It doesn't really work like that in video games. The whole process of making a video game means that what the game looks like 6 months before going Gold is very rarely a good representation of the final product. Features that might appear in the demo, vids, or screenshots might become vaporware when the dev team realizes it wasn't really going to work out (for a variety of reasons from not enough time to overall design flaw). Character models go through an enormous amount of changes from changing the resolution to changing the style to last minute cuts for the purposes of optimization. HUDs change, gameplay changes, backgrounds change, thematic elements get overhauled, it is insane.
The earlier in the process the more likely it is that what you are seeing is a "rough draft." If it is anything previous to beta everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.
There is so much to this game that we want to talk about. We are stoked about Rock Band, and just getting people involved to not accidentally leak stuff is a full-time job in itself. Everyone here would (were they allowed) be happy to sit down with just about anyone and talk about the list of things they are excited about. Then where is all the info? What is taking so long?
We're very conscious of not letting anything out before it is ready. We don't want to be previewing something that might not be there, art that isn't finished, and gameplay elements that could be further smoothed or changed outright to something better.
If you see something of ours we want to feel really comfortable in knowing that it is as close to representing the final product as we reasonably can (nothing is ever 100%; beta is a crazy time after all) so that when the game comes out you aren't disappointed buying a different product than you were led to believe. In the coming months we will be releasing stuff as it is finalized and ready to be seen and I hope you get twice as stoked knowing how carefully we are trying to treat that info.
