I can blame the customer for for thinking it means "there is nothing at all reused from the previous game".
I can also blame the developers for not taking the foolishness of their playerbase into account and coming up with a stupid marketing phrase that would make angry gamers angrier when it turns out "from the ground up" doesn't mean "we threw out all of our past progress".
Where's your line on what would be acceptable to reuse? Xbox 360 models? Xbox One models? FM7 models? FH5 models? Would it be unacceptable if they had used perfectly good FH5 models, because they're not "built from the ground up" for this game? Their line of acceptability is "improved and iterated models from our entire history", which most cars are absolutely good enough, but a few are so inaccurate enough that I would call them unacceptable.
The FM3 models don't look out of place. You need to scrutinize and nitpick to find issues with them. Xbox One era models are perfectly fine. In my opinion, the FM1 models needed to be checked more before reuse. They are mostly fine at this point, with the work that has gone into them since. It is only a few that get talked about over and over.
The line is „don’t use car models that are obviously out of date (and out of proportions) fir a long time“. We can agree that reusing car models isn’t a inexcusable sacrilege, but using car models that were already outdated in its 7 year old predecessor, especially in a game that gets marketed again and again with the phrase „built from the ground up“, is just bs. If the point is reached where it has to be redone, than it has to be redone, or leave it out of the game till it’s ready. I mean what „progress“ do you mean? These car models ain’t „progress“ anymore, they are the opposite.
You defend bs-tactics here. Lying is lying, I don’t know what’s discuss there.
You seem to view the average customer as someone who is well informed and knows how game development works. That is obviously not the case, and it’s not the customer’s duty to Analyse the marketing talk of these developers. You can critize it, but being naive is not an invitation to be lied upon, so I really don’t understand why you feel the need to point this out instead of this bs attitude of Turn10 and Microsoft..
There’s a area were false promises and so on are acceptable to some degree, even understandable in some way and forgiven.
But there’s also games like No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077 and FM8 too imo. These were clearly falsely advertised consciously, it hits a different level for me (especially when a multi billion dollar publisher sits behind it), I mean it even looks worse than it’s predecessor in several situations.
You could in some part also put GT7 in this category, but they at least deliver in terms of quality and are really dedicated to bring the driving game genre forward, the game is more future proofed, you can be more optimistic about future generations imo. And i think having to put it on PS4 when this originally wasn’t planned, also did it’s part. But that is another story.