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The big news this week is that The Witcher 3 is out. The other big news is that The Witcher 3 no longer looks quite as good as it did back at VGX a few years ago. This narrative - let's call it the downgrade narrative - is something we seem to be hearing quite a lot these days, so much so that something will probably have to be done about it. Vertical slices (these are carefully-prepared portions of a game that offer a sense of the ideal finished product) look amazing, but they apparently look too amazing to be viable as anything other than a vertical slice. The Witcher 3, Watch Dogs, Aliens: Colonial Marines - this list is going to keep getting longer. It's a crying shame, not least because it's easy to understand the bind that developers find themselves in when showing off a game at such an early stage. Even so, the impossible vertical slice leads to an erosion of trust, and to a situation where you approach an exciting new project warily, with a weather eye open for all the ways it will eventually disappoint you.What is easy to forget, though, is that this downgrade - the tradeshow, big reveal downgrade - is actually the second downgrade that most games receive, and it's probably the milder of the two. The first downgrade takes place in secret, and it must be truly heartbreaking for everyone involved. This is the concept art downgrade, the moment that beautiful 2D visions of a new universe are first translated into code and shaders and 3D models and maps, the moment that an idea starts to inch towards its own implementation.
I had a chance to think about this at length this week when Brandon Boyer, one of video games' fairy godmothers, put a link on Facebook to a collection of concept art for Sunset Overdrive along with the line, "i wanna play THAT game." It is hard not to agree with him. I loved Sunset Overdrive - it's that precious, video game love that only grows richer and crazier over time - and part of the reason for that is the compact, primary colour world Insomniac's game plays out in, a ditzy metropolis where cherry blossom floats beneath Jetsons superscrapers and where telephone cables are scribbled across a pure Sega-blue sky.
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