Copied over from a topic in the members-only section of this board...Incoming rant...What... if anything... does that glitzy cinematic tell us about the actual game itself..?It doesn't tell us about the gameplay at all. Not even a little bit.
It doesn't tell us about the character creation process.
It doesn't tell us about the game world, or how good or bad it will look on the typical average PC.
It doesn't tell us about the quality (or lack thereof) of the character models, and their animations, and so forth.
It doesn't tell us about the proposed in-game economy... or how hard they will be working to prevent Chinese gold farmers from ruining it.
It doesn't tell us about the user interface and how good or bad it is going to be. Will it be responsive..? Will it be intuitive..? Can it be customized..?
Who knows..?It doesn't tell us about the development of our character, or what our goals will be, or
anything at all about the "point" of this game -- if any.
It doesn't tell us ANYTHING about the actual game whatsoever... except that it has something to do with Star Wars and that BioWare is involved and that it might have a lot of pew-pew lasers in it.
People... don't pay any attention to cinematics. Those presentations are simply heavily produced and *very* manipulative commercials. "Cinematics" usually have almost no bearing whatsoever upon how the actual game will look, or how it will be played, or how good or bad it will ultimately turn out to be. Time after time, we have seen "cinematic trailers" for various games which looked totally awsome... but the actual game itself turned out to be a major failure.
For example, here's another very glitzy and heavily produced cinematic... for a totally different game:http://www.tessmage.com/gallery/albums/video/hellgate_cinematic_exlarge.aviThat's the original promotional video for Hellgate: London... in its uncompressed AVI format. Sorry about the 200 megabyte file size... but it's worth downloading for laughs. Just right-click on that link and then select "Save target as..." from the pop-up menu. Save it to your hard drive, and then open it in Media Player or whatever to watch it.
Now then... have any of you ever played Hellgate: London..? Okay... and when you played the game, did it play *anything* like what you saw in that video..? More importantly, did that video make it clear to you that Hellgate is extremely repetitive..? Or that Hellgate was released in such a buggy and half-finished state that it was nearly un-playable for a lot of people..? Does the video show us that Hellgate is only superficially similar to what is being depicted in the promo..? Frankly, the only thing that we can learn from the glitzy Hellgate promo is that Avalon the Blademaster is a lot more kickass (and sexier) than that dorky male Guardian by her side. Other than that, it really doesn't tell us jack shit about the real nuts and bolts of Hellgate: London. The one thing that the cinematic *definitely* doesn't show us is that Hellgate turned out to be such an
overly-hyped FAILURE that its studio (Flagship) was ultimately forced into bankruptcy. And those guys had just as many credentials as *anyone* from LucasArts or BioWare.
The same is true about most "cinematic trailers" these days: THEY TELL YOU NOTHING ABOUT THE GAME THAT MATTERS. You won't learn anything at all about the actual gameplay from a "cinematic trailer." The main purpose of those "cinematic trailers" is to make you feel really cool and think "Golly gee...!!! Wow... that looks totally awsome..!!! I wanna do that, too..!!!"
And then, you'll run out and plunk down $50 for a new game sight-unseen (because remember: the cinematic shows us NOTHING about the actual game itself). And in this case, you'll also sign up for a $15/month online subscription fee to an as-yet unproven MMO.
And then you'll enter this promising new game world... and you'll take a good look around... and then ask yourself "Umm... hey... where's all the cool lightsabers and crashing spaceships 'n' stuff..? All I see is a bunch of weeds and rocks... and now some jackass NPC with really bad voice acting wants me to go and collect a dozen womp rat testicles..."
Let's see some ACTUAL IN-GAME VIDEOS from these companies, for a change. Show us the ACTUAL GAME ITSELF, including its UI and its character models and everything else in-between. Heavily produced "cinematics" are 100% WORTHLESS to anyone who is actually contemplating making a purchase.
The fact that they rarely show us an ACTUAL IN-GAME VIDEO tells us something important: it tells us that they can not sell their game to the public based upon what it actually looks and plays like. THAT'S A BIG RED FLAG, PEOPLE.Don't get sucked in by "Oooo - ahhhh" hype. Even if the game turned out to be decent, these cinematics are still just pure Madison Avenue... with no meaningful substance at all.
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