Enough With The 'Real Gameplay' BS Footage Already
Epic Games released a REAL-TIME GAMEPLAY TRAILER of a demo designed to showcase the new Unreal Engine V, and the footage admittedly does look sick. The clip features a young, super-powered woman gliding over a massive valley as she dodges and slides through the crumbling architecture of the ruins that lay before her with the fluidity of Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan. We can see the definition of every rock and every stitch in her leather satchel as the sun's rays ... hell, just watch the clip below before I work myself into a nerd coma.
The visuals are great, but doesn't it also feel like we've been through this before? Oh, right, we have. It's every single goddamn time, a new console is released. Here's the ACTUAL GAMEPLAY trailer of Destiny that was shown at e3 in 2013. The PS4 was just announced, and hoo boy the graphics, baby!
Except here's a clip of the actual, actual gameplay from some dude playing on multiplayer.
See the difference? Both are fine. Both have good graphics. But in the first video, everything is rendering is much more crisply, and despite being labeled as gameplay footage, it's much more cinematic. Compare that to the second video where you can see how walls are just painted on, the colors look duller, and it's just a different experience overall.
That said, it's not a big deal to me. I'm not much of a graphic junky and, based on Nintendo historically outselling the crap out of Sony and Microsoft despite being a step behind graphically, I'd imagine that most other people also aren't overly worried about them either. It's a wonder then why we're told every year "OMG, check out this footage, it will blow the hair clean off your asshole," only for us to play the game at launch and the graphics to be just good.
You want to promote your games. We get it. But if you're going to go for a marketing gimmick, then go all out. Hire a guy to pretend to confuse his wife for a character in the game because the graphics are so good. Make him canny for the uncanny valley. Heck, make him pretend he thinks the visuals are so believable that he bumps his head trying to walk into the screen like Wile E. Coyote trying to walk into a tunnel painted on to a cliff. Or you can just show us footage of gamers playing the game and call it a day.
Dan is on Twitter and will talk about life with you in lieu of getting a therapist and he also hosts The Bachelor Zone Podcast, where you can hear him give a sports-style breakdown of all things happening on The Bachelor.
Top Image: Epic Games
