Trailer Trash
When I got back from my visitations, the latest copy of PC Zone was waiting for me. I’m always on the verge of cancelling my magazine subscriptions, seeing as there are perfectly good websites out there for games and hardware news, but there’s still something about a physical magazine that has merit, if only that it’s easier to read a magazine in the bathroom.
This issue’s cover DVD had a load of E3 movies on it, so I spent some time seeing what the future has in store. I’m struck by a few things:
QuickTime
It’s PC Zone, right? So these are clips of PC games, of interest to PC owners and they are going to be played on a PC and 99% likely a Windows PC. So why are half the videos provided in QuickTime, a format that forces us to use a player that is buggy (several of the videos wouldn’t play properly at all on my laptop with an up-to-date copy of QuickTime), that won’t display full-screen and isn’t standard on Windows? RealPlayer used to be the bane of my media-playing life with its habit of sticking crap in the taskbar and stealing file-type associations, but QuickTime exceeds RealPlayer by a long shot in this area now. I’m sure it’s ideal on a Mac, but it stinks on PC and I resent being forced to use it.
Making an example of Webzen
I last heard of Webzen from some forum link to their title “Wiki” pointing out its potentially infringing visual similarity to Zelda. On the DVD were two trailers from Webzen, one for a game called “APB” and one for a game called “Huxley” which I’d guess are the same as can be downloaded here. They’re only remarkable in that they represent a whole group of trailers quite well.
Let’s get the “foreign” business out of the way. Yes, I see that Webzen are Korean, and I see that Huxley is being developed by some Eastern Europeans. Some people seem to think this means that we have to view everything as if “shit” = “cultural quirk” and we should applaud any and all efforts from the “un-West”, no matter how fumbling they are, as if we’re doting parent at an infant nativity. I’d rather be mean than be patronising (although covering both is good too), and besides, APB is from a British developer so they have no excuse.
My first problem with the trailers are that they are entirely unoriginal and between them they pretty much cover the set of lego-like gaming stereotypes that almost every game at E3 was built from. Massive guns — check, chicks in tight leather/rubber — check, “urban” style — check, some form of somersaulting while fighting — check, stealing/modding cars — check. There’s nothing wrong with the elements themselves, but they are put together in such a plodding and lifeless manner that I couldn’t help but feel like I was back being served school cafeteria food by a fifty year-old sack of female resentment with a menopausal moustache. These things I’m being shown are games in the same way the lumpy grey potato that was smashed onto my plate was food.
Secondly, neither of these trailers show gameplay. APB is just an out and out rendering package production, with some of the worst pseudo-game overlays I’ve seen in a while — we see some guys breaking into a car and are shown progress bars ticking across for exciting actions like “pick lock” and “silence alarm”. They then hare off in the car, are chased by a copper, some shots are fired, just so we know there will be guns in the game, and they eventually escape by driving into a garage and emerging with a different paint-job (I think). At no point do we really understand anything about how we would play this game.
Huxley takes a different route and shows us “real-time” footage. They are apparently using the Unreal3 engine, and it all looks great, but there is something about the very fact that it is real-time and they make a fuss about it that strikes me as somewhat dishonest. Why? Because it’s still a movie in that it doesn’t show real gameplay or even anything that could be real gameplay from a different camera view. Nice engine, nice models, nice scripted animations. Now where’s the game?
Scepticism is even higher when you consider that these are meant to be MMOs. We know what MMOs are like. We know how they work, and we know how they don’t work. Unless the Internet fundamentally changes by the time these games are out, they cannot be anything like what these trailers are showing us. When you look at the release dates, you can only assume that the only point of showing these fantasies is to generate cash investment in some way, but for some reason most of the games press takes these things fairly seriously, even something as obviously vapour as APB.
Again, these two aren’t the only examples of this stuff, I could name others that are equally guilty — Hellgate: London is all pretty movie with a female character that the artist obviously designed one-handed, 25 to Life is pointless hip-hop violence and “street” stylings. Even the usually dependably straight-forward world of the strategy game produced less than informative trailers and one trailer in particular — Pacific Storm — that seemed to threaten to cross the line between history-buff interest in realism and slightly ghoulish fascination that was every bit as disturbing as the romanticising of gang-violence. At first I thought that the game was actually Japanese, which was exceptionally uncomfortable, but even after finding out that the developer is Russian, I’m not sure what to make of a game that apparently includes the ability to carpet-bomb Japanese civilians. Then again, you could do it in Civ, so perhaps it’s not so odd and perhaps it will make sense in the final product.
