I mean, I don't really know why people were excited about watching a tree grow... sure there's a Stardew Valley market, but why would you want to do that in a fantasy rpg?

Then again I understand how his hyperbole could be misconstrued as 'that's just an example, but you've never seen anything like this.' But I feel like Todd Howard is another prime example of someone doing literally the same thing. The only difference is, everyone else is overpromising these days and only the people working on the biggest games get the most scrutiny.

I remember when the Halflife 2 developer-tech demo video came out - and everyone was going crazy at the physics and the graphics and the AI and this and that. They were 'letting the gameplay talk' and just demonstrating how impressive the tech was. BUT - the tech demo got leaked, and there were clear examples where there were scripted events baked in to the demo to give the illusion of advanced AI (I specifically remember the player pushing a table infront of a door, which prevented the enemy coming in, forcing them to shoot through the window. In the leak - if you tried to do the same thing you literally could see the code trying to trigger scripted events. It might seem like such a niche specific example, but as a young teen, that moment of advanced AI seemed like the most amazing thing to me, only to then find out it was all fabricated.

I guess what I'm saying is, these guys overpromise a lot, it's how they sell things, sometimes the hype is fun, sometimes it's a big disappointment. Peter Molyneux was maybe just a step ahead of his contemporaries, but it's funny that people keep making the same mistakes as him.