We Need To Stop Judging Games Based On The Earliest Of Trailers

This industry has a habit of making up their minds about games far too quickly.

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Being in the games industry is exhausting sometimes. People have a habit of being needlessly toxic, judgmental, and leaping to conclusions based on the smallest amount of evidence. We see this time and time again with the latest blockbusters, many of which became popular to demonise or laud hatred upon purely because they don’t live up to inflated expectations or present something that isn’t exactly what we might have hoped for.

In a medium that is constantly shifting with the times and advancing technology, it can be easy to judge something before you’ve had a chance to see, or in this case, play it for yourself. Pre-rendered trailers can decide the fate of a game years before its release, whether this be positively or negatively. This month’s PlayStation Showcase brought this realisation home, with reactions to certain games eliciting either rapturous amounts of applause or sudden silence compounded by ridicule.

There was seldom any middle ground and each and every time I notice this state of affairs it never fails to exhaust me. God of War Ragnarok was one particular example that stood out. Provided we’d seen little more than a logo until this point, the presentation was filled with gameplay footage, story details, and new characters we’d never seen before. It was a comprehensive amount of new information and a groundbreaking example of the medium’s artistry, yet some trolls on Twitter immediately noticed the boat animation was the same as before and labelled the game a failure.

I know this account was an idiot trying to drum up arguments with other players, but the fact these issues are highlighted in the first place speaks to a wider problem in the industry. Ragnarok will have the same formula as its predecessor, mixing together combat and exploration alongside a story you play a huge role in unfolding. I’m not expecting it to break new ground, and doing so would be foolish, but concluding the game is a failure because it builds upon past successes is sheer ignorance. I’ve got some bad news for Johnny Gamer, assets are reused all the time to increase workflow, and God of War Ragnarok will be filled with such things and still emerge as a critical and commercial darling.

Like any profession, game developers will make trivial things easier for themselves while pushing the medium forward in unexpected new ways. To a greater extent than film and music, there’s a huge detachment between the audience of games and those that make them, which perhaps speaks to why gamers can often be so demanding and overstep the mark by harassing developers if things don’t go their way. It has proven in the past that making a stink can work, just look at Mass Effect 3’s changed ending, so why stop when there’s a chance things can change? While some games are dragged through the mud prior to their eventual reveal, the opposite is also true in how audiences can develop a culture of expectation around a game years before its eventual release.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the perfect case study for this, a project first revealed when CD Projekt Red was on top of the gaming world. The studio had created an identity defined by fostering consumer goodwill and labelling itself as a company that wasn’t like all of the others. It was cool, hip, and wasn’t trying to milk you dry like EA or Activision. Two years later, it launched The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and solidified this reputation. I still believe that ethos is there, and we fed into it prior to Cyberpunk’s release with fawning previews and untold amounts of hype which meant it would never live up to expectations. It didn’t, it tumbled down the stairs like Jason Derulo at the Met Gala and is yet to recover. The next-gen ports could claw back some ground, but the damage is done and no fanciful free upgrades of Geralt’s swansong will fix that.

There’s also Mass Effect: Andromeda, Kingdom Hearts 3, Final Fantasy 15, Destiny, Watch Dogs, No Man’s Sky and so many others that we fell head over heels for long before realising how much reality might be. We can’t blame ourselves for this, trailers and marketing campaigns are designed to be alluring, to excite us for specific parts of the game that might not be representative of the full experience. I guarantee the people making memes of Cyberpunk 2077 and irritating jabs at CDPR on Twitter right now are the same people who were endlessly excited for it only a few years ago. It’s hypocritical, and I’ve been one of those individuals in the past, and want to better myself and encourage others to do the same.

I suppose the way in which we push ourselves into a corner over reception to a trailer or screenshots is a sign of how immature this medium still is, and how far we have to travel in order to stand alongside film, music, and literature in being a legitimate art form. Praising a trailer to high heaven or demonising a game years before it releases is only going to foster toxicity in an industry already wrought with it, so I think it’s important to take a step back and check ourselves every once in a while. Or not, as the next big online presentation is likely to prove. I’ll cross my fingers and hope that isn’t the case.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/early-game-trailers-hype/