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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2984454" data-attributes="member: 5171">I'm kind of in the good-riddance category as well, for the most part, although I AM bummed at the effect this has on small companies for whom E3 was the primary way to get the word out about a product.I'm not in PR, but from my discussions with the folks who demo'd Mass Effect and Jade Empire (PC), the experience was better with a small crowd in a controlled space -- they actually got to deliver the message they wanted to give, they didn't have to worry about large-crowd concerns, and so forth. They ended up thinking it was the way to go. I figure that if that's the case for a mid-size company like BioWare, the big guys probably had the same experience, and then some.Also, from within the company, watching my friends have to work crunch-hours to prepare for a demo that had very little to do with the actual game was frustrating. (I don't mean AT ALL that the Mass Effect demo isn't a good representation of the game. I mean that instead of working on making the tool to make facial animations fast and easy, they crunched in order to hand-animate facial expressions for the E3 demo. Instead of working on build issues that caused major crashes and made it really hard to test plots, people were working on an E3-specific build that incorporated everything they wanted to demo -- but which would have to be completely rewritten later to scale up for the full game.)Every game company, I believe, does this. It's frustrating as hell to have to stop making the actual game so that you can tack a shiny chrome covering over the existing engine to show off at E3. Everyone who has ever complained about a release date being pushed back, think about losing two months of development time because a product had to be shown at E3, and it had to look finished in its small focused way at E3 even though the actual product wouldn't be finished for another year.So if it helps deal with that, in some way (and nothing will deal with it all the way -- there will always have to be time spent on demos that could have been spent developing the game), I'm in favor of having E3 shrink down to a more manageable level.</blockquote>

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