A lot of gamers have been buying into a certain trend that has caused the console war flame to stay ignited, namely this trend comes in the complex of the alpha versus gold game status. Many developers have used this method to fuel promotion for games that technically won't look any better than the day the first render appeared, yet many gamers will blindly follow the trend out of a false sense of loyalty.

Just to debunk a popular myth that a game will look vastly improved over its alpha (or beta) state, we have a few examples here at Blend Games: During the Halo 3 beta Bungie claimed that the game would look “finely tuned” in its final form after many people complained about the graphics not being much of an upgrade over Halo 2. Below, are two sets of images…one side is from the game’s late alpha stage and the other side is from the completed version of the game. I’m not going to say which one is which but can you honestly see the difference? And would it really matter?







And just to be fair, the reality is that it’s not just Bungie who got away with fooling people into thinking this marketing tactic was a foolproof way to promote the game to the doubters and naysayers. Guerrilla Games was pulled into the same tactic (but kept much quieter about the flaming involving their game) for KillZone 2. This started when people thought the graphics would magically evolve from its beta to going gold. Below are two images from the alpha and gold versions of the game and like above, I’m not going to say which one is which.



As you can see, the differences are slight if almost unnoticeable. Yet, unfortunately, many within the community will continue to get pulled into the pre-alpha versus gold graphics myth, which truly only exists for games where the development time was purposefully extended to improve the visuals (among other things).

The reality is that if a game looks good or bad in its alpha it's not going to visually change all that much by the time it's ready to launch, especially if the publishers are giving it less than a year to hit store shelves. There's going to be some subtle visual additions to enhance the gameplay experience but nothing groundbreaking. The hype surrounding the implausibility of a game having godly visuals by launch time when it wasn't sporting them in its alpha stage is just absurd.