Often that’s not what happens. Devs say “Oh, hey, talking cubes are cool, maybe we will integrate one” people will accuse them of breaking their promise (which is nonsensical) if they don’t include a talking cube.
But this doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s likely that people who dig up that “promise” had an axe to grind anyway, so it’s about scoring points based on spin and lies.
Can you name any large controversies around something as small as that? As I understood it the large ones like No Man’s Sky or Anthem even doctored gameplay footage during their presentations in addition to promising the moon and more. However when it was just "We might do this", then almost nobody blames them, a small minority might be angry or upset, but most don't care and many steps in to defend the devs in those cases.
I think No Man's Sky went the wrong way when they started to promise whatever fans were begging them to promise...
If they had stuck with their seemly original plan, that was make a modern copy of the game Noctis, with no base building and a stronger focus on exploration of precedural worlds... things would have went better.
As soon they tried to mix it with minecraft they introduced incompatible elements on the game and ruined it, they made stuff they already had not work, and promised stuff that in the new game they were making made no sense.
I didn't played the current heavily patched version, but read about it, seemly the game shifted genre completely and is nothing like the original intention.
Meanwhile I wait for someone to make a cool noctis clone... or maybe have the original author finish Noctis 5.
> As I understood it the large ones like No Man’s Sky or Anthem even doctored gameplay footage during their presentations
You're talking about vertical slices created years in advance of any realistic release date, for the sake of demonstrating to players a game that largely doesn't exist yet. Of course they're doctored. If they could show off natural gameplay, they'd have a near-releasable game and there'd be no need for the vertical slice.
> However when it was just "We might do this", then almost nobody blames them, a small minority might be angry or upset, but most don't care and many steps in to defend the devs in those cases.
When you start trying to make assertions about how "most players" responded, it becomes difficult to sort fact from fiction. "Most players" don't follow the games enthusiast press cycle -- whatever the perceived reaction to the press cycle for a game is, it's largely determined by the people who are the most engaged and the most vocal about the game in question, and it may be gauged differently depending on what slice of the reaction you were exposed to. That makes it pretty difficult to reach agreement as to what the temperament of the overall reaction was.
I also take a bit of issue with the expectation that designers should couch unconfirmed ideas with words like "might". It seems like an attempt to determine the validity of a wave of hysteria via a process of nitty-gritty word-lawyering that I don't think is very practical. Designers aren't always the best or most cautious of public speakers, so an idea that's in the "maybe" or "I hope" pile might not receive proper couching in suitable disclaimers when the designer speaks about it publicly. Further, players often don't remember the full context of words that are spoken about a game, and even are likely to want to read the most enticing thing possible out of the words written or spoken about a game they're intentionally following. Insisting that words that are publically spoken about a game in production are lawyerable like this just encourages studios to clamp down and stop speaking to the public about their craft, and leaves us with sterile messaging that's been carefully crafted by PR experts.
With that said, I'd counter that there's a pretty lengthy history of players misinterpreting the exploratory words of designers about possibilities for their in-production games as promises about what the final product would contain, and then later raking them over the coals for breaking those promises. On the spot I think that's going to be a tricky view to corroborate without going through a messy and time-consuming process of picking apart a bunch of case studies, though.
But this doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s likely that people who dig up that “promise” had an axe to grind anyway, so it’s about scoring points based on spin and lies.