I just wanted to say I absolutely agree with this. E3 trailers ALWAYS do this. Frankly, I think it's often pretty detrimental to the game in question (whatever it is). I never find these impressive, they usually just anger me.
Reminds me of when I tore into Sony's latest E3 presentation. The person I was talking to was all like "wow, this is a good time to be a gamer, Sony's conference was the bomb!" And I replied with, "Huh? No it wasn't" and pointed out a few things. Mind, I got a few things wrong because it was three days later and I mis-remembered a few things, but seriously compare
this to
this. You can tell, in that second shot of the applause, even the audience
in the room has been unimpressed and confused by the previous trailer.
Anyway, the reason I bring it up was because of the "we're going to play [some brown zombie shooter] for you live, right here on stage."
It looked. So. Fake.
https://youtu.be/GwofRzkROo4?t=5894Not to mention that the segment they decided to show off started with a short cutscene, with another cutscene a couple of minutes later (the intervening gameplay consisted of the player riding a motorcycle through some light woods, looting a crate, then a truck and then climbing on top of a barn chasing his brother, oh and another short cutscene).
If the "loot stuff" parts had been skipped you would have been hard pressed to tell me it
wasn't 10 minutes of cutscene where
almost nothing happened. Then we get the zombie hoards and the player running away from them and being an absolute twat about tactics (4000 zombies, seriously are chasing him, he stops every 100 feet to turn around and shoot at them rather than booking it: I don't care if each bullet kills 5 zombies and every shot hits, you don't have the ammo capacity to deal with that many zombies). Anyway, the main character ends up cornered at the roof of this building and the camera seamlessly transitions into a panorama cutscene again, pulling out up into the sky showing just how fucked the character is. Oh, and the
metal door getting blown open looked like ass: that's not how metal works.
If that "gameplay" hadn't been faked, baked, and played back as a video with clever shots of someone using a controller* I would be shocked. Absolutely
shocked.
Oh, also,
have a dinosaur humping a spaceship.
*In watching this again, the guy makes some serious control manipulation during the potions that I most strongly consider "cutscene" and virtually none when I feel the player would actually have the most agency. e.g. in the "dude reaches into the truck to pull out the oil filter and attach it to his pistol" (because that totally just works) the guy on stage is making tons of controller input motions. Ditto when he gets jumped by a zombie in the middle of trying to yell at the NPC and punches it off his face (you aren't going to seriously tell me that there's controls for that, are you?). Jumping up piles of stuff, tooling around on a motocycle, wandering around the deserted camp? Virtually no movement in his fingers at all: not even when he goes around a sharp corner.
