* Your first trailer should not have any inventory menu screens or complicated interface mechanics.
Spreadsheet Simulator 2013!
* The best AI War trailer I saw showed a gigantic battle.
In the Ancient Shadows one, or another?
Combat is usually good trailer material, yea. For Exodus I'm not sure, as it will probably look like old-style JRPG combat (Dragon Warrior, or more recently Cthulu Saves The World, etc). The interesting part comes in that any damage you take or ammo you spend... well, that's spent. You can heal the damage (or at least some of it) using medkits (particularly if you have a good medic skill) but those are very finite too. Though there is some normal healing over days of rest. The ammo for the modern weapons is completely irreplaceable, though, so you have to choose when to go melee or use native ranged weapons to conserve. And if there's some 4 story tall animal (or hostile offworlders in powered armor) coming at you, you don't want to be stuck with longbows.
Anyway, that's just one case where what's actually going on is (imo) pretty interesting, but how on earth do you trailer that?
* The worst trailer I saw was for Shattered Haven. It was dramatic phrases in giant letters with no real inclination on what the game was.
Yea, we really went overboard on the story focus there.
* Valley trailers improved over time, eventually showing the games action sequences and less stylized animation.
Yea, with Valley2 it does seem that people are getting some of the "what this game does that you can't get anywhere else" from the trailer. At least, ongoing sales have been better than I would have expected were the trailer not accomplishing that.
* You know how people who laugh at their own joke are kind of... yeah? It's the same way with showcasing your art. It's nice when you create something beautiful, but you are showing us a game, not an art show. The art should communicate the game, not the other way around.
Yea, we'll want to have enough in there so that people will have a clear idea of what style & quality of art to expect in the game (not just the cutscenes, but the gameplay itself), because I think that's one of the good things about the game... but if what the consumer want is a pretty looking game, there are better places they can go than us. We're getting better on that, imo, but it's not our focus.
* That being said, I wasn't one of the ones complaining about the art for any of the titles. This time around, I hope that you don't cater to people complaining about graphics. It kind of appeared to your core audience that you were offended by the whole thing, tried to fix it yourselves, and then hired an art team after that to please a bunch of people who are probably better off playing call of duty and don't know anything about more intellectual titles. Not that Valley was that intellectual, but it certainly had more complex elements than the usual adventure title. These folks were never going to buy it to begin with.
The frustrating part is when it appears that no matter what we do, tons of people (and more than a few reviewers) will use the art in our games (and, by extension, the games themselves) as the conversational equivalent of restroom tissue. While accepting basically zero responsibility to be accurate, fair, rational, etc. When you realize as the producer of something that significant parts of the audience would derive more personal satisfaction from gloating over your failure than enjoying your success... that's not a pleasant thing, even without particularly high expectations going into it.
But that's probably not a solvable problem, nor a problem we absolutely have to solve. So we're trying to not let it take up a disproportionate amount of our thought processes.
In the case of Exodus, I picked the art style because it's what I personally like. I like anime a
lot. All the way back through my earliest favorite games. Frankly, very little of the art in any of our other games is a major draw to me, except perhaps the AIW icons which kind of have grown on me. Whether it was wise to pick a style for these reasons... well, we'll see.
We're also trying to avoid "getting in the way" of the art by requiring lots of animation or scaling or parallaxing or tiling or whatever. This way we can afford to produce it at a higher quality because it's not having to do as many different things or work in so many different contexts.
* Your strength is in creating titles that are complex enough for gamers to chew on for some time. Why don't you sell that as part of your marketing? Not to come at people and say, "smart people play our games (and if you don't play them, you must be simple)," but to convey that challenge, creativity, and discovery are rewarded. A great example would be Paradox. There's two things we know about paradox: they are terrible about bugs, they are amazing about complex gameplay. You should market your positive qualities as a studio.
We certainly do want to lead with the hook. Specifically for the game in question but also for us in general where it's applicable.
The big challenge I'm trying to wrestle with right now as far as the marketing is this: there's a lot of concepts in this game (including the largely Arcen-wide ones you mention) that, if we could somehow laser-beam them into the neural matrix of everyone who came to the game's store page, the game would probably do remarkably well. But how do you concisely and compellingly communicate "Every round of offworld ammunition fired, every wound sustained, every medkit or power-pack used, every reputation-change from a choice, every bit of food gathered or eaten, every day spent... every consequence is permanent to your survival and your catching up to the Core before it's too late"? I mean, I imagine that sentence is neat to some people, but if we tried to lead a trailer with it (verbatim, I mean)... well, I don't think that would work out very well. So what do we say? We're tossing around ideas internally, but feedback from you (and the rest of the folks here) is certainly welcome. Though of course that will be easier when you can play the actual game.
And more generally the same problem exists when trying to communicate that we make thought-provoking games that reward creativity, discovery, etc. Communicating that-we-do-that concisely and compellingly and (as you mention) non-condescendingly is actually in some ways more difficult than actually doing it
Suggestions welcome.
