Thursday 28 September 2017

FMV Trailers Are Bullshit

I don't watch a lot of trailers anymore.  I can't think of a game with the exception of Persona 5 that I bothered to check out any of the pre release material for.  Even a game that I was excited for as Nier Automata I didn't bother to look at trailers for.

So while I was browsing Facebook a trailer for an upcoming game called Extinction appeared on my feed.  It was a FMV trailer of a man with a strange choice of wardrobe parkouring through a city killing monsters in a rather bloody and ruthless fashion.  Think God of War meets Prince of Persia but the main character looks like Connor McGreggor watched a few too many fantasy movies.  What really wound me up that the post and the comments were like "OH MY GOD THIS GAME LOOKS SO COOL!" 

It's fine to get excited, it was pretty bombastic but what people seem to forget about watching trailers like this is that they don't actually tell you anything about the game.  The trailer looks cool but information about the game is minimal.  Nothing about the game play, the most important part of any video GAME, is present.  Just a little bit of story and a cool action sequence with a big ogre thing being chopped into little bits.

If you took the time to go and look further into it you'd find that there is in fact some game play footage.  Now I'll give you that it's pre alpha so the developers have a lot of time to make it not awful but right now the game looks fucking awful.  The kind of thing you'd expect to find at the bottom of a cardboard barrel in a place like CEX along side stuff like Bullet Witch and Asura's Wrath.  To me the game play trailer looked a bit like that Attack on Titan game on PS4 just a lot less interesting and combat that's trying really hard to be intricate but really isn't.

I'm not gonna say the game is going to be shit or that trailers aren't worth watching.  Just keep in mind that when you do find a trailer and it's entirely an FMV with no information on the actual game, maybe you should take a minute to think about what you just watched before getting all excited.  Get excited for the game, not a glorified cutscene.

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