Tent poling

News & General Discussion
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It’s been my observation that AAA games use a subtle technique I like to call “tent poling”. There may be other terms out there that I am unaware of, but I’m using the term “tent poling” since I’m yet to see it discussed previously to this post and it fits.

“Tent poling” is the act of using tiny slivers of gameplay to showcase certain features or graphics that are otherwise impossible with regular gameplay in the hopes of creating the illusion that the entire game shares this quality.

So let me make a real world example.

Farcry.

Farcry is the absolute KING of tent poling.

In every Farcry game since 3 there is a scene where the main villain has a monolog at the the player in which the antagonist’s model is far more polygons and texture definition than the game can ever hope to achieve in regular game play.

It’s subtle, but if you pay attention it’s clear what they do.

The background is blurred, no doubt being replaced with a pre-rendered skybox, and the villain comes into focus in an ultra high def high poly model.

They say their bit. Then the scene is cut abruptly (usually with the player being knocked unconscious) and it loads the next scene.

When the player then plays the game and going forward they subconsciously see that villain as the high poly, large texture model from the cutscene.

This is not a criticism.

It’s actually a very clever technique to prime the player to believe the game is better than it is.

Now that said, this doesn’t have to be limited to graphics.

Imagine an encounter with an enemy that showcases a very intelligent, if not cpu intensive, enemy.

Now have them run into thousands of them.

You can swap out the AI script for a significantly dumber version of them, but from the prior experience the player is primed to think all of them are as smart as the first encounter.

Not really sure where I’m going with this but it’s something I’ve noticed and have seen zero tutorials on.

Opinions?

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Do those mobile games with fake ads count?

Good example is anything published by Playrix… which pretty much runs fake gameplay in their ads while their main game is just another match-3.

At least with farcry I guess the “fake” stuff is actually IN the game.

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Yup.

This is really a thing. The idea is to give incomplete information to the viewer, so the viewer gets excited, turns on their imagination, and imagines something amazing…

However this can result in backlash and cancelled preorders.[/QUOTE]

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We have one place in the game thats fully Realtime lit, rest is baked or mixed mode.

Most of our dev logs are recorded at that place or in mixed mode places. Never only baked :stuck_out_tongue:

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It is pretty common in cutscenes to use higher quality models than in regular game play. You’ve got full control of where the camera is focused, and there isn’t the same need to hit high FPS.

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A great example of it happening is Cyberpunk which faked just about everything shown at E3.

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To be honest I’m still unsure how the heck they managed to screw up public relations so badly in this case, even though they had experience making Witcher 3.

Feels like they replaced management with incompetent people.

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Never show stuff thats not in the game

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One of the ways to do that “Tent Poling” thing described by Not_Sure is to show stuff that’s in the game, but in the way where players will “imagine the possibilities” that are not in the trailer.

In this case the people will buy the game expecting something diffeerent compared to what it really is, and that will result in a backlash.

In case of cyberpunk the “lifepath” trailer could be seen as an example of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPAEA-NxMY

Most of this stuff is in the game. But. If the viewer decides to “imagine the possibilities”, they will envision a big living world with consequences and several hours of play per lifepath, despite the player promising nothing like that.

Instead it is 30 minutes of content per choice, pretty much.

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It takes a (burning) village in Witcher 3. (Sorry :slight_smile: )

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This is the most common case. Usually, during pre-production, the Art department would create hi-res models of the characters, and then create a copy for the gameplay version, go about collapsing verts, optimizing mesh topology, and using a completely different rig.

Would this term also be applied to games like 2D JRPGs, where cut scenes have detailed “anime” looking characters, and in the actual gameplay, they look like “chibi” versions of those characters?
(i.e. Wargroove)

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