Well said.
To anyone still thinking that we're overreacting and just not playing the game, read this! No one's denying the game is great. Yes, people are having fun; great fun, even. Everybody's saying the game still could have been that slight bit greater and that nobody had any idea up until release (this bears repeating) that it would be different, because it was advertised with non-retail-like footage right until the game hit the stores. That is flat-out misleading, no matter how you try to justify it. It was most likely done for performance reasons, but the game's framerate still regularly nosedives, as well as having really crass tearing issues on the Xbox 360. This just leads me to question their development competence. They supposedly built a new engine to counter these problems. They also said they'd prepared for the next generation of hardware as well, which I can only translate as meaning to build an extremely well scalable engine (think Source). Yet somehow, despite these goals, somewhere close to the finishing line, they just suddenly realised their performance was not up to snuff? What kind of planning is that? By the way, the supposedly new engine (I reckon it's just an upgrade of the old one with a lot of systems left intact or at least copied over) still has a lot of the same quirks the old one did--case in point: the low-framerate animations for mobs in distant LODs. At the very least, this smells of overzealous and unrealistic planning, probably after they saw how much money Bamco was throwing their way.
And for the last time, this thread is not just about the lighting engine. We are talking about major gameplay mechanics whose ghosts still echo very clearly in the level design as things that could have been, which indicates it must have been a decision made very late into the development cycle. We are talking about major redesigns of areas with not only merely artistic differences (which by themselves even can be enormous; many areas are, e.g., now filled with a bright grey fog-like appearance), but with fundamentally simpler geometries. We are talking about much, much simpler texture work, a lot less environmental detail, far fewer instances of ambient occlusion, specular shader and normal map usage. We are talking about shadowing effects that now simply seem to vanish as soon as hand-held torches light ambient sconces.
The game is very, very good. There is no denying that and no one of the so-called 'crazies' here really thinks that. The game is actively being enjoyed by nearly all its players. But that is not the point. The point is not even that the game can indeed be gorgeous. It is, in fact, quite schizophrenic in its look. The point is that all of the above adds up to a change in atmosphere that differs very drastically from the original vision that was, again, presented and advertised to us right up until release. So does the false advertising charge just not hold up because the game is not actually bad like Aliens: Colonial Marines was? No, of course not, and it is intellectually dishonest to think that.
All we want are straight answers by now. It feels wrong to be deceived like this, but I doubt anyone takes it as seriously as if this were a bad game, so I wouldn't bet on any real boycott or, heck, class-actions forming. So, for now, we're content with answers and maybe, just maybe, a PC/next-gen port with at least some of the content re-introduced.
