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Thyroid

Live action game trailers

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As noted by RPS today, what is up with those damn live action trailers anyways? Why bother? They're stupid and embarrassing.

For instance, this is stupid.

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This is not stupid. This is impressive CGI work in a trailer that shows all the new stuff you can do in Assassin's Creed II.

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So why bother with the stupid shit and not just stick to advertising games as games and not as cheap, embarrassing fanmade bullshit?

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When they are done right they are brilliant. In particular the Halo ones.

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To be fair, Lineage is a tie-in short film and not technically a trailer.

Anyways, I don't think that it can't be done well, i think it's probably more that people in the games business are better suited to creating one over the other. (Or that the people they're hiring to do it for them just don't care/are equally unable to produce something in live action that isn't complete shit.)

There have been a lot of these lately, though. There were a bunch of ARG-ish Deus Ex promos, and also that Prey 2 teaser that was inexplicably just footage of people on a plane for a couple minutes. If we're also going to count webisodes and short-films, there were also okay-ish web things for Alan Wake and MK9, and a magnificently awful Dead Rising tie-in film directed by Keiji Inafune. (Not long before he bailed on Capcom.)

Edit: Oh shit, i forgot about those Halo ads, those are amazing. Microsoft has done great things with the marketing for that series.

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Loved the ODST trailer.

There's a few others, and a ton of ARG things too.

Also, that Landfall one was directed by Neil Blomkamp as a kind of proof of concept before the Halo movie deal fell apart and he went on to make District 9 instead.

More Edit:

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Edited by Sno

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Personally hate live action trailers, but all of the Halo ones I've seen have been great. I did dig the Fable 2 one as well, it reminded me of old Nintendo commercials :)

The ODST one especially sold me as well as it, I don't think the games particularly pull off the fascist military theme as well as that trailer did.(Not like that's the point of Halo at all, but I from an outside standpoint such as mine, I always equate Halos roots in Starship Troopers the book for whatever wrong reasons I have)

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Don't forget the inexplicable Mass Effect 3 live action trailer.

They're trying to infuse their game with a sense of realism and perhaps appeal to a non-gaming public. But, yeah, I think you could best stay within the graphic style of the game.

I have another gripe with cinematics by the way. Recently there have been mulitple instances of games that had the most GORGEOUS cinematics created by studio Blur, for instance for Mass Effect 2 and Arham City. But for a reason I don't fully understand, these trailers aren't included in the game itself. Why? Why would they not do that? Why spend thousands of dollars on getting a company to make a gorgeous ode to your game and then only plonk it on Youtube and GameTrailers? It makes zero sense.

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I have another gripe with cinematics by the way. Recently there have been mulitple instances of games that had the most GORGEOUS cinematics created by studio Blur, for instance for Mass Effect 2 and Arham City. But for a reason I don't fully understand, these trailers aren't included in the game itself. Why? Why would they not do that? Why spend thousands of dollars on getting a company to make a gorgeous ode to your game and then only plonk it on Youtube and GameTrailers? It makes zero sense.

Thousands? My understanding is that trailers like that are millions of dollars per minute.

I mean, and i'd imagine the main thing keeping fancier launch/reveal trailers out of their respective games is disc space limitations, because the current generation is hitting up against that hard on the 360.

Though I definitely have played games that threw the trailer in as an attract mode on the title screen or as a bonus in a sub-menu.

Edit: Of course, that's that's not what you meant, is it? I think i know what you're getting at. It did really bug me that Square did all those really, really incredibly pretty trailers for Human Revolution, and then the pre-rendered cinemas actually used in-game are kind of fucking ugly.

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Thousands? Millions, actually. Pretty sure I overheard some higher ups say Blur trailers start at 1 mil when we needed some work done for a game.

It might have something to do with blurs contract, like if it was included in the game it the publisher may have to pay royalties? Sounds weird, but wouldn't be surprised.

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There was a live action ME3 trailer? ew. Im pretty much ignoring every bit of news from that game and that thought justifies it, hehe.

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I also read in an interview with a Blur studio guy that work on these trailers begins when a game is in really early development. He said it takes them almost as long to make 1 trailer as it takes the whole Video game it's for. I'm sure creation time varies on complexity and length too, but damn, that's still a lot of work for a few minutes.

I can appreciate live action commercials as a stand alone thing (if they're good). I really liked the live action Halo trailers, but I have a really hard time to connect a live action trailer to the actual game. If I see a good live action trailer, I think "That'd make a cool movie" and not "I'd like to play that game".

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I also read in an interview with a Blur studio guy that work on these trailers begins when a game is in really early development. He said it takes them almost as long to make 1 trailer as it takes the whole Video game it's for. I'm sure creation time varies on complexity and length too, but damn, that's still a lot of work for a few minutes.

Continuing on from my earlier comments, I would believe that this is a large component of what led to Human Revolution not really taking advantage of the animation studio Eidos Montreal clearly had access to.

That game changed a lot over its development, those Square trailers are wildly inconsistent with the released game. Given how long it takes to make CG with that level of detail, it probably wasn't feasible to do have done such cinemas for the configuration DX3 eventually shipped in.

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That one Dragon Age: Origins CG trailer is an excellent example of this. Most characters in that trailer look completely different from their eventual video game counterparts. :D

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I will say that the Halo ODST trailer, even in only the funerary portion, made me more interested in Halo than I had been since the first one. Still haven't played it, but it grabbed my interest.

I also actually liked Lineage (the ACII short film), but I seem to be rather alone in that camp.

On the note of Blur studios, they're probably responsible for more video game hype then the companies themselves in the last couple of years. I'll point you to the SW:TOR trailers as proof of that.

I don't hate live-action stuff, provided it's done well. The Skyrim trailer that released today is pretty decent since it doesn't try to do anything overly complex.

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I will say that the Halo ODST trailer, even in only the funerary portion, made me more interested in Halo than I had been since the first one. Still haven't played it, but it grabbed my interest.

Well that trailer is definitely not at all indicative of the game, but i think ODST is well worth playing. I'd go so far as to say that it was my favorite campaign experience in the series.

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Well that trailer is definitely not at all indicative of the game, but i think ODST is well worth playing. I'd go so far as to say that it was my favorite campaign experience in the series.

Oh well naturally. But it peaked my interest a lot more than the infinite circle jerk of One Man Vs Alien Hordes did for 2 and 3. The Halo universe has never been particularly interesting to me, but ODST, again, caught my eye. I'll still probably never play it, since I'll probably never own a 360, but hey, it's nice that they veered away for a short while.

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