Kinda like, when they show gameplay footage they put "Work in progress - does not represent the final look of the game" or when the narrative at 0:19 tells the viewer that what are they about to see is all subject to change?
Yeah... they did all that, they literally spelled it all out for people that nothing there is finalized and anything might be scrapped or changed. And guess what... people are still coming back with "but, but... in that one video it was there!!!!"
SMH
CDPR can emphasize all they want about features being tested... to many, development cycle is black magic, and games just happen. I'd love for all the naysayers to create their own game dev studio, and make a game with all the features they want... lol
Not with a tiny font that barely visible. Not to mention it says "Does not represent the final look of the product" which people will take to mean "the game might not look so nice graphically".
The message needs to be clear both literally (not in an ignorable transparent font) and semantically ("Does not represent the final look of the game nor is shown gameplay guaranteed to be in the final product.")
Ya, it will water down the hype a bit since … the video would basically be "saying nothing". But "saying nothing" is exactly what they should be doing if they can't promise anything. Only show what you can guarantee will be delivered.
Anyway, as I said before, with or without disclaimer, you are showing customers a vision of the the future that they will not be getting. You put in their head the idea of what could be done, the ideal game - just because you can't do it is irrelevant. It just makes the final product you produce disappointing in comparison.
You don't want to blow people away with a trailer. You want to blow people away with the game - when they launch it and play it; having players think "it's not as good as the hypothetical game showed in the trailer" is bad.
Edit:
IMHO, people need to do marketing more like Apple.
Their product announcements are almost "last minute", even for their new products, and they make their announcements "big". In their heyday, Jobs would come on, demo the product - "you can do all this stuff" - followed by "it's available next month" then a metaphorical mic drop.
Over the month, through word of mouth and the news cycle, people will hype themselves into a frenzy. It's long enough to build hype but not so long that people lose interest or start getting "imaginative". When they get the product, they are blown away. Holy @#$%, it works
exactly as Jobs said it would - then they would discover small features that Jobs couldn't squeeze into the demo and hype it even further - i.e. Apple overdelivered. Never is there a single moment (for most people) where they thought "it could have this feature but it doesn't" - they are too busy digesting the demo followed by exploring the product, surprised every step of the way, to be "imaginative" and start nitpicking.