Quote Originally Posted by Abriael View Post
The good marketing practice, when you blunder, is to admit it and make amends instead of sweeping it under the rug. It tends to avoid hard feelings, and there are a lot of those around due to this mistake.



ALL of that can be conveyed with gameplay videos, which is in fact what they're doing promotion-wise.

Videos allow to show all the "good" things in the alpha to the general public, and in the meanwhile to hide the incompleteness, the lack of content, the glitches, how small the world is and so forth.
Isn't that the whole point of releasing a vid containing footage from an Alpha build? To show fans/media the good side of the game, what to "expect" when the game is officially released? If you would see a vid from an Alpha build, full of bugs, glitches, lack of content, etc... Would you be interested, as a customer, in the end product?

An Alpha build usually contains the "bare" minimum so that testers can test the core mechanics and the general feel/atmosphere of the game. These builds usually have only a small part of the actual game implemented, because they are still developing, bugfixing, testing a lot of the mechanics, area's, content, etc internally. A lot of the things we've seen in vids can be changed dramatically.

A good example would be the new Character Creator they've introduced during the Beta phase from 1.0, or the introduction of the Stamina bar and the way XP was gathered.

A Beta version is basically a version of the game where all mechanics, area's and content have been added, but still needs to be tested thoroughly and thus are susceptible to change before the game is released officially.

An Alpha vid, screenshot, etc is a good reference point of what kind of (basic/core) things you can expect. An Beta vid, screenshot, etc is more of a reference to what game should be when it's released. And the vids, screenshots, etc from the official release build are used to show everyone what the game has become.