Videogame Trailers and what they should stop doing

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Lulcielid

Warrior of Light
Oct 9, 2014
3,826
2,826
28
Argentina
#1
What´s a trailer? The traditional definition of a trailer (film) is as follows (from wikipedia):

Trailers consist of a series selected shots from the film being advertised. Since the purpose of the trailer is to attract an audience to the film, these excerpts are usually drawn from the most exciting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy parts of the film but in abbreviated form and usually without producing spoilers. For this purpose the scenes are not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the film.

What´s a videogame trailer? Definition provided by wikipedia:
The content and production process is similar to that for movies, complicated by the need to convey the way the game plays.

With that out of the way let´s begin this thread topic.

Over the years I have been noticing a trend (of varying degrees) of making trailers that show little/zero gameplay, that needs to stop.

Let´s take a look back at the definition of videogame trailer:

The content and production process is similar to that for movies, complicated by the need to convey the way the game plays.

Videogames are not movies/cinematographic experiences, they are interactive experiences. Gameplay is the way this products convey their interactivite and it´s really starting to bug me how this element is being replaced by non-gameplay stuff like cutscenes/CGI/Animation/vague words on black screens/whatever.

Showing gameplay for at least 50% of its run should be considered the minimum requierement for a trailer to be consider at the very least "good" (7/10, the remaining 3 point would be filled by the standard trailer stuff like editing, music and interest/hype).
 
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#2
From my p.o.v., trailers are really there to show off the visuals and maybe some aspects of the gameplay. Beyond that, a game should - ideally - have a demo. As you pointed out, games are interactive experiences, but, interactivity isn't exactly a one-way street. There are parts of immediate interaction that an individual cannot gauge from simply watching a trailer - control comfort (sth. I find pretty important), mental stress from interaction, possibilities of (self-) discovery, to name some - or the heavily scripted gameplay presented at trade shows.
 

Lulcielid

Warrior of Light
Oct 9, 2014
3,826
2,826
28
Argentina
#3
From my p.o.v., trailers are really there to show off the visuals and maybe some aspects of the gameplay. Beyond that, a game should - ideally - have a demo. As you pointed out, games are interactive experiences, but, interactivity isn't exactly a one-way street. There are parts of immediate interaction that an individual cannot gauge from simply watching a trailer - control comfort (sth. I find pretty important), mental stress from interaction, possibilities of (self-) discovery, to name some - or the heavily scripted gameplay presented at trade shows.
I agree that a demo would be the most ideal thing to show a game to the public but point is, if you´re going to show your game to the public in video format make sure said video is mostly composed of gameplay (even if video format does not present all the nuances of the gameplay like the examples you listed).
 

SilverGlyph

Balamb Garden Freshman
Feb 27, 2016
16
16
28
#4
I was talking with my boyfriend about the Persona 5 announcement trailer. While most people loved it, he didn't like it because he couldn't tell what was going on. He didn't know what was gameplay and what wasn't, and that might've been due to any number of things, like speedy transitions and an overly-gaudy UI interface.

He knew nothing about Persona before or after the trailer. I had to explain to him that Persona is a JRPG with dungeon-crawling and visual novel elements. Some of the confusion might also have been due to the fact that the trailer was in Japanese, so he didn't get any of the story elements of it either.

So in addition to gameplay over cinematics, trailers should also try to be as...simple as they can be. If you still have to ask "what do you do in this game?" even after snippets of gameplay have been shown in your trailer, well, then it could be a better trailer.
 
Likes: Lulcielid

Ash_of_Gods

Stiltzkin's Apprentice
Jan 9, 2017
11
0
#5
Topic-starter is right, trailers without or with small amount of gameplay are really one of the worst things that you could ever imagine.