General Category > Shattered Haven
Shattered Haven Launch Trailer -- 1.0 is March 18th!
Nanashi:
Well, I didn't mean to sound completely negative about it. The story could actually be engaging and the feedback could be positive, but generally that requires people who have already made the commitment to playing the game. When relating a story premise to someone who isn't as emotionally invested, it's bound to have much less of an effect because it's like randomly telling a stranger "a baby just died of starvation in Somalia" - there's no attachment, so the response is going to be "so what?".
I've intentionally kept free of news of Shattered Haven, so the things that is most pertinent to me is that I still have absolutely no idea what the gameplay is actually about and the forums don't have an easily findable link to videos explaining how gameplay works.
Should I be expected to Google up secondhand videos - wouldn't it be nicer if the developers themselves could explain what they wanted to do and where they were going with this game? I always appreciate that. edit: I'd like to point out that I made a purchasing decision for Valley 1 primarily because (internet criticism aside since I had no prior knowledge of the rapid change of focus that went into the creation of Valley 1) you clearly stated what you wanted to do with Valley 1, which was to create a procedurally generated Metroidvania platforming experience.
I'm just bringing it up cause you mention "videos", but AFAIK the game has been under beta testing until right now, so watching them would be a pretty unfair representation of the current state of the game. Do I have to wait for someone like TotalBiscuit to do a "WTF" video review?
x4000:
The beta videos are entirely representative of the final gameplay; the gameplay was already set before beta, and it's just gotten some polish and the last of the content. Beta was only a week long! The other videos are the prior blog post to the one with the trailer, or maybe two back at most. I'm sorry you didn't like the video, but I suggest you actually look at our website if you want to get an idea what it's about. We describe it, we have multiple videos, screenshots, etc.
Nanashi:
Well, alright, I admit you do have a point. I actually bookmark directly to Arcen's forums and never actually read the main page, so it's only fair that I do due diligence.
I've watched both of the videos on the actual website for Shattered Haven - and I my points against the video still hold: I don't think the video sells the game effectively (which is the point of the trailer), it's trying to sell the story. The bullet-points on the website are also almost more informative than the actual gameplay videos themselves. Nowhere in the videos do I have an inkling that local co-op gameplay even exists, for example.
Assume I'm a relatively unbiased outsider and I know nothing about the game but well, it's your chance to interest me in the game.
I then watch a video, which involves a character running around the map and using different tools to either avoid zombies or kill them (I can't tell why there's so much running around rather than just killing them outright, and have to make an educated guess that you have to collect resources and use some kind of crafting system to get the tools to deal with the zombies).
And then there's the feature selling points, which were pretty good until I ran into:
Complete bonus objectives for higher scores and gold markers. - Whoohoo, I made an arbitrary variable larger! What's a gold marker? Why should I care? Is it dry-erase?
I never realised until now how much I appreciate the feature captions superimposed on top of trailer videos. Usually, I expect a trailer video like this to... well, just look at this. I thought it was a pretty good trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovDJn7cOzj4
edit: It might be a bit vainglorious of me, but I think this is the age of snap judgements. I don't think that a random person, who saw Shattered Haven's trailer and had no idea who Arcen was, would bother to go to the website in order to actually learn about the game if the trailer failed to capture his interest. And that's my main problem with this video. Can't you just superimpose feature captions on top of it? It'd take all of 5 minutes in Windows' Movie Maker.
x4000:
I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish. Look, the trailer is done, there's no time to change it, so are you trying to make us feel bad or rub something in? I don't think that your opinion is universal in the first place, and it's far too late for it to matter in terms of sales of the game. I've been up for 26 hours at this point, I'm tired and grumpy after having been working on getting the 1.0 of this out during that time, and what you're doing is not helpful. I understand your opinion, I don't agree, some others don't agree, some others probably do, let's move on.
Nanashi:
I'm sorry, I was under the impression it was constructive criticism, because I genuinely didn't know if I wanted to play this game or not and the trailer wasn't helping me make that decision.
But I'm definitely not a master of expressing my opinions with tact, and since nothing can be changed, if I continued to express my point on the matter, it definitely -wouldn't- be constructive and creates a situation where you have negative reactions and I feel like a jerk. Mea maxima culpa, consider this discussion over.
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