12 Video Games That Drastically Changed Between Reveal And Release

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Woah there, I love The Witcher 3 - but the graphical clout it showed off in 2013 was nowhere near representative of the final product.

Instead, although what CD Projekt RED released was still an outstanding achievement in every respect, they still caught hell for the difference between the two. However, CO Marcin Iwinski's comments on the matter were very important, as he very frankly outlined precisely what happens between trade show and release:

"We do a certain build for a tradeshow and you pack it, it works, it looks amazing. And you are extremely far away from completing the game. Then you put it in the open-world, regardless of the platform, and it's like 'oh poop, it doesn't really work'. We've already showed it, now we have to make it work. And then we try to make it work on a huge scale. This is the nature of games development."

"Maybe we shouldn't have shown that [trailer], I don't know, but we didn't know that it wasn't going to work, so it's not a lie or a bad will - that's why we didn't comment actively. We don't agree there is a downgrade but it's our opinion, and gamers' feeling can be different.

You can't get more honest than that: The 'nature' of video game development is to unrealistically wow you up front, with the team then doing their damnedest to hit goals and benchmarks that were born from the state of a game in a completely different context.

Iwinski has a point, in that when a game is optimised for performance, is it still a 'downgrade' overall?

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Such things continue to be huge talking points amongst gamers and marketers I'm sure, so let me know your thoughts on how the industry as evolved over the years, in the comments below!