mjq jazz bar wrote:i mostly agree with you, and I find it particularly odd people are convincing themselves the team released "bad footage" intentionally. No sane publisher or developer would do that with a game like this. That said, the game is still a ways off, so I think we need to worry more about this stuff closer to the game's release date.
It was a misjudgement to include the rougher portions of the video for public consumption, but YSnet's explanation of the situation is fair enough considering the context.
It was a rock and a hard place. Go another 6 or more months without much footage and let people like Waves in the KS comments bubble further into madness (that was spreading elsewhere), or just put out a WIP teaser that'll look much better the next time footage is released and get people like Waves off their backs for the meanwhile.
I don't think YSnet were expecting an incredibly warm reception considering the amount Yu pointed out was WIP in the interviews, along with the unseen test footage shown to certain press to prove they were aiming higher with models and animations.
I mean, this quote from Hideaki Morishita in Switch's translation of the Game*Spark interview says it all:
I think the showing of the teaser this time, even in a promotional sense, was a little premature of us.
For an extremely long time, since the project was launched in 2015, we hadn't released a video publicly. Now, since a publishing contract with Deep Silver had been reached, we wanted to make an announcement that encompassed a sense of "The project development is moving forward under a new structure; please be reassured, everybody." Discussing among ourselves, there was a general agreement that such an announcement wouldn't work without images, and so our decision came about to release a video now.
It might sound a bit like making excuses, but even though there were parts that have a long way to go and that we're not fully satisfied with, it was a case of "we can't release nothing, so let's go ahead and release it".
It was naive of them to think people would read the video description, and again, the video itself could have been clipped to hide the flaws better, but if things pan out as they plan this was short term pain for long term gain.