This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Mister Six: Surely Vaporware by definition never actually comes out (ruling out Daikatana, for example)? That should be Condensationware...
Sci Vo: Apologies to the poster, but this would be an example of a different trope about unfulfilled hype. I was surprised to not find one, so I'll go YKTTW that. Pulled:
- Semi-example; while The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion didn't see any major delays in its development, its much-hyped "Radiant AI" was much less impressive than it had originally been hyped as, as the idea of programming NP Cs with aspirations and goals proved far more difficult than Bethesda was up to. (In one example documented during beta testing, one NPC was assigned to rake leaves and another to sweep, but the raker was given the broom and the sweeper the rake. Rather than trade their respective instruments, the one with the rake killed the other, looted the broom from its corpse, and began sweeping.)
Ununnilium: Taking this out because... well, just look at the paragraph I added:
- Almost all of Blizzard's games, for that matter, could fall into this category, as they tend to spend anywhere from three to five years in production and are rarely released on time.
Tanto: Vaporware is not a "genre". Pulling it.
Prfnoff: Justifying it and putting it back in.
Ununnilium: Still not enough of a justification, IMHO.
Seven Seals: Vaporware is not a genre, and the justification is painful to read. On the other hand, let's not get hung up over a category tag. We're not trying to set up a professional taxonomy here now, are we?
Prfnoff: I wonder if I could get Gannon-Banned here for perpetuating an edit war over this. (Naaah - I don't feel up to it.)
Sci Vo: Not a genre, painful explanation, etc.
Prfnoff (after The Great Crash): Removed Vaporware from Video Game Genres again, as wiki consensus would have it. I don't know how it got back in there.
Tofu: That would be my fault. Sorry.
Nezumi: Removed an entry about Bioshock being disliked by most fans of System Shock. Ultimately unnecessary, natter-ish, hostile... and, in my experience, just plain not true. System Shock fan response to Bioshock has, from my experience, been generally fairly positive. I'm a System Shock fan myself, and I like it... but I'm not representative, as I frequently like games among my fandoms that most other fans don't like.
Kalle: chopping a bit of convo in the main page (though i must admit, i agree with the frustration. oh, how i agree.)
- This troper is going to sob in the corner now for being so thoroughly neglected by Nintendo.
- Two Words: Almost finished FAN-TRANSLATION
- It's almost not even worth waiting for a translation. This troper, who doesn't know a lick of Japanese, managed to beat the game with no guides in a few weeks and managed to pick up most of the story. He's still looking forward to the translation as an excuse to play the game again, though.
- Two Words: Almost finished FAN-TRANSLATION
Master Hand: "and one group of fans is currently developing their own Ultima 9 as a mod for The Elder Scrolls Oblivion." Where can I find this project? I want to see it!
On the curse of the demo: having worked on such a game, it's not a curse per se; the problem is that the developers end up spending all their time working on the demo, rather than the game. Demos take an incredible amount of time to make - since reviewers and customers will all but judge the quality of the finished product based on the unfinished demo.
Ishntknew: Cutting all this. The initial analysis is flawed speculation/a thinly veiled Take That!, and what followed is just reactions and additions to that.
- Possibly the most important Vaporware ever when it comes to the Console Wars. Think about it: Sega releases a good 3D Sonic game around 1997-8. Even if it doesn't make it out then, if it's delayed a little rather than canceled, then it becomes the launch title for the Sega Dreamcast instead of Sonic Adventure, and another good one on that console could have followed. It could easily have been the Dreamcast's Killer App, which might have dissuaded Sony from running their "wait for the Playstation Two" ads, thus saving the Dreamcast and keeping Sega in the console race. Damn, that's depressing.
- Don't get your hopes up: I saw the trailers, and it looked like a piece of crap with TOO much emphasis on blocky platform puzzles. And what, exactly, was wrong with Sonic Adventure?
- Do you mean other than the fact that it introduced horrible gameplay "features" (the most notable one being forced to play as annoying, slow characters now referred to by gamers as "Sonic's shitty friends") that have now plagued essentially every Sonic game since and have garnered almost unanimous disdain from the fandom and gaming media alike?
- To say nothing of how the game was reportedly going to be... four levels long.
- Just to add to that, videos of the game seem to have it hitting the polygon ceiling HARD.
- Possibly the most important Vaporware ever when it comes to the Console Wars. Think about it: Sega releases a good 3D Sonic game around 1997-8. Even if it doesn't make it out then, if it's delayed a little rather than canceled, then it becomes the launch title for the Sega Dreamcast instead of Sonic Adventure, and another good one on that console could have followed. It could easily have been the Dreamcast's Killer App, which might have dissuaded Sony from running their "wait for the Playstation Two" ads, thus saving the Dreamcast and keeping Sega in the console race. Damn, that's depressing.
DaPatman: Removed this:
- Stencyl, a supposedly-when-it's-finished open source 2D game creator/editor, has been pushed back so many times it isn't even funny anymore. Save for a very simplistic physics demo exe, the site hasn't been updated in a year. It was in fact considered vapor ware long before he had even heard of it. Meanwhile, there are applications popping up like Smile and Lunar Magic that let you do just what the Stencyl team insisted their app would, to Super Metroid and Super Mario World roms respectively. Though I wish Stencyl would just get done and come out, as it would provide a quick toolset for making platformers/shooters, it simply isn't going to happen. At least not until the 22nd century....maybe.
It's now in private beta, and therefore IMO no longer vaporware. Also the description is very outdated and the entry was almost certainly added by a disgruntled former member of Stencyl's forums.
Dausuul: Removed Starcraft II and Diablo III from the list. Long development cycle does not equal vaporware, and Blizzard is notorious both for its long development cycles and for its refusal to publish a release date until the game is almost ready to go gold. Both games are making slow but definite progress, and there are none of the usual indications of a game that has "lost its way" (radical changes announced late in the development cycle, release dates being promised and then pushed back repeatedly, major upheavals in management, et cetera).
