Nowhere is it written that a video game trailer must accurately depict the entirety of the game it’s advertising. Still, it’s funny to see trailers like the very exciting (!) and action-packed (!) new trailer for Elite: Dangerous, considering that the actual game is much more slow-paced.
I definitely prefer this remixed, “honest” version of the trailer by Jaguar Skills (via RPS), mostly because it uses actual in-game footage:
When I play Elite, I spend more of my time carefully plotting approach vectors than I do engaging in exciting hard-rock dogfights where enemy ships explode after a couple of hits. The good news is, that’s still fun. It’s all fun, really — the boring bits, the actual in-game dogfighting, the docking stations, the tedium, the space-beauty, and, yes, the trailer, silly and untrue to the game though it may be.
While we’re here, side notes on the game itself: I’ve been playing more and more of the gamma build lately, as the recent announcement that beta progress will carry over to the retail game has made it worthwhile to play ahead of launch. (The final retail version is out next week on the 16th.)
It’s still really cool, and feels closer to a finished product than ever. Some small changes to the galaxy map have made it much easier to plan trips across multiple systems, meaning that these four cartons of fish in my cargo hold will get to Heisenberg Colony on time. Frontier has also recently gotten the game working much more smoothly and head-trackingly with the Oculus Rift, making it even easier to treat the game as an immersive space-pilot simulator.
Closing thought on that trailer: When I play Elite, I usually put on a classic rock playlist in the background. Which, in its way, makes the game feel like the trailer, even if it looks like I’m carefully adjusting my throttle as I fly in a straight line.
Comments
10 responses to “An ‘Honest’ Elite: Dangerous Trailer That’s Closer To The Actual Game”
“Nowhere is it written that a video game trailer must accurately depict the entirety of the game it’s advertising”
Well, there should be. That ‘cinematic’ trailer is intentionally misleading and disingenuous. It’s a lie, and it is only legal because it tells you (in small text) that it is a lie, but it doesn’t tell you how much of a lie it is (90% of that cinematic trailer is garbage).
No one is arguing that trailers shouldn’t represent the actual game. What the part of the article you quoted is saying is that they don’t have to represent everything in the game.
So for example, most people wouldn’t have a problem with a Skyrim trailer that showed you fighting dragons but failed to also show that you could pick flowers in the game. It becomes a problem when the stuff in the trailer doesn’t reflect any of the game.
“cinematic trailer” it says in the name, cinematic as in all cinematics. its the gameplay trailer that depicts gameplay.
Do you really need a constant internet connection to play, i.e. does the game stop the moment your internet disconnects, or does it keep going for a while?
There are going to be some pissed of people, coupling the ‘dangerous’ tagline with that game trailer is seriously misleading. Why not advertise the game as, you know, what the game actually is?
That is absolute gold, it’s times like these I love the internet. When I was 15 I used to get hyped as hell for games because of crap like that and waste hours salivating over so called ‘bullshots’. I’m older and wiser now, I’ll wait for reviews/community opinion before I get psyched up and buy anything.
Just BTW, someone needs to make the game that the trailer would be accurate for.
Star Citizen – The Space Sim with 66 Million dollars crowdfunded.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/
Haha, that was great. Well skewered.
They probably would have had a better trailer if it was just highlights of fun stuff ingame spliced in with some camera work. The trailer is nothing more then a HypeTrain which will cause allot of bad feedback when people get in the game and spend the first 50hours of gameplay slowly limping around doing practically nothing.
I was so disappointed when watching the amazing Blur Studio trailers for SWOTR, because, you know, it did not represent actual game play. A shame that game trailers designed to get you excited for a game turns a bunch of people into what seems … dare I say it? Whingers. “this trailer don’t do this, this trailer don’t do that.” and so on.