It's to hide how slow the pvp is, seriously (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, August 09, 2017, 09:16 (2751 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Destiny PvP is not a fast paced all action pvp like CoD. But the strategy and positioning of destiny's gameplay makes for a poor 30 second ad. So how do you hide that? With lots of fast cuts and vastly overblown music. Personally, I thought the music was awful. While I enjoyed seeing the new guns and emotes, there was no real gameplay shown. That trailer gave us basically no information about the pvp at all. I wouldn't even have known that it was supposed to be competitive if the words "Competitive Multiplayer" hadn't been shown at the start, because every fight in that trailer looked like a one-sided affair.

It's hard to show someone just how tense the pvp in destiny can be in a trailer. I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about it and I do this sort of thing for a living (okay, I'd probably show a 30 second Trials match where three enemies go down right away, and the last enemy drops the protagonist's allies one by one over the course of the next 20 seconds. Then you have 5 seconds of "holy shit he could be anywhere" and a quick super to dodge to counter super to shotgun melee and the match is won. Shaxx VO: Well done! Now do that four more times, guardian. tag line: Destiny. Become Legend. All night long.). Anyway, my point is that this is hard to convey in such a short time, and I get why they did what they did. I don't like it, because I feel like a trailer should teach you something about the product rather than simply being a lot of flash, but I'm also not in charge.

The problem is that people want to see variety, and they want to see it quick. Often it does give you a false expectation of what the actual game is like (see: Bullshots), but if they showed off what the game was like 90% of the time that you aren't running into ridiculously fortunate situations, people unfamiliar with your product don't get excited.

Look at multiplayer trailers for games like R6: Siege or The Last of Us. Two of the tensest, most methodical games on the market; each multiplayer match can be over with less than 50 bullets fired... And yet, the trailers show heated firefights, people sprinting back and forth, etc. It's exciting to watch, yeah, but doing things like you see in the trailer will get you dropped instantly in the actual game. Would you prefer to watch an actual match of R6 Siege in a trailer, where a person walks around a house slowly, and then the round ends with them never having seen an enemy player? That's like 50% of the matches in R6: Siege, and that's assuming that you don't get shot in the the head two seconds after you breach your first door.

It's a tough balance between showcasing the variety in your game and the actual experience of playing the game, so most studios just opt for the "fast music and faster gameplay" route, with optional "Ubisoft player commentary" thrown in (see: Anthem). Fortunately, some games, like Titanfall 2, don't exaggerate too much, but these days, it's mostly all smoke and mirrors.