What’s Real, and What is Not

eve

So the new trailer for Apocrypha is out now, and you can go and download hit here.  It certainly is a pretty trailer, but it’s been a recent trend in EVE trailers to deliberately avoid what they used to do: showcase the fact that 100% of the footage is from in game.

Planets don’t explode in EVE.  Fleets don’t fly in formation doing 50 m/s during combat, NPCs don’t do slow methodical turns.  Most importantly, when I turn on the EVE client it’s not showing me a lavish production of CG, it’s a game.  And a damn impressive one at that, one which doesn’t actually need a ton of fakery to show the epic scale of itself.

Apocrypha is a huge expansion in EVE, and the trailer does not convey that.  There’s no dialogue, nothing to explain to the audience of people who aren’t playing EVE what the big deal is.  It doesn’t explain a single solitary thing about the game at all actually, much less about the expansion.  How is this marketing anything?

If CCP is trying to show us it can produce gorgeous trailers, they’ve been doing that since day one.  We get that, the world gets that.  But the impressive nature of those trailers was due, in large part, to the fact that they were showing things happening in the actual game client.  Remember the Empyrean Age trailer showing Jamyl Sarum’s fleet decimating a Minmatar capital fleet with a single shot?  It looked great, but you can’t ever do that in the game, and knowing that it takes a lot out of the trailer.

The most impressive trailers to date, CCP or player created, have been with cunning use of the in game camera to capture incredible moments in gameplay.  There are dozens of such efforts which far surpass anything done recently by CCP’s marketing department.

Things need to be brought back to a time when we can be proud to show a trailer that starts with “The Footage You Are About to See is 100% In Game”, because that is *real* marketing.  It’s something that no other game can do as impressively as EVE, and CCP is really selling itself short by not taking advantage of their best assets.

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Published:
03.07.09 / 11am
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