What i dont understand with these kind of downgrades is 'why?'. I mean its one thing with a early gen game, that may of started life on unfinished dev kits, or not even devkits at all and were first shown on PC's, but this is coming at the end of the gen when Sucker Punch have final dev kits, so why would there need to be downgrades to this level?. Is it all about building hype and fooling gamers?.
I don't know if it's about "fooling gamers" as such but it's still not a good thing for developers to do.
Truth is though if you are showing off a game in 2017 and the thing won't be ready for release in 2020 then how can anyone really know how the final product will compare?
Like if you've only fully created a small section of game and you are going to show it off to the public then you will have a big focus on how it looks.
Once you're dealing with the full open world and all the other elements maybe the graphics and performance needs to be dialled back a bit.
I don't know.
I suppose it's like when you see a photo of some restaurants food taken in perfect controlled conditions with the goal of enticing customers. Then the reality is not quite so good.
I would tend to prioritise gameplay over graphics myself so if I still enjoy the actual game then I'd not be too bothered they their early stuff looked better graphically.
Its very much a gaming thing and it seems to come from the fact that a lot of gamers do fixate on how something looks rather than how it plays. Probably why we get loads of cinematic trailers long before we get to see gameplay in action.
Quite difficult to 100% honestly market a game when you think about it since you can't show everything in the game in the trailer. The trailer is kind of designed as a "best impression" for the potential customer.
I don't think the difference is large enough to call it deception but this does seem to be a common thing. I think there was a similar thing with Spider-man and puddles/water.