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.
Winterblink 
Oh wow so true. So true.
LikeLike
I agree.
And quite honestly, I find that EVE usually looks better than the CGI renders CCP have been mixing in lately. It’s sharper, and doesn’t suffer from Intensely Creative Camerawork, aka shakyvision.
LikeLike
Well I kinda agree with you on that, however I’m a real sucker for pretty moving pictures and multicolored blinkenlights.
Some of the Empyrean Age trailers would have been really dull and really hard to execute – if they’d used in-game footage (though I have to say suiciding ships bouncing off the station has a certain feel of slapstick comedy to it).
The 3HQC-6 system is just couple of jumps off what used to be my old home system in OR and I’ve been carebearing there more than I like to think of – I know it doesn’t quite look like it did in the trailer and I’m quite sure Planet 6 is still there as well – but I have to say seeing it explode in the trailer didn’t make me go “hey that’s not possible!” – if anything it made me go “oh cool”
So I’m not especially bothered about the “this is not possible to do in the game”-factor, especially if it’s used to tell a story. However my biggest gripe about this trailer is the very thin (or short) story in it – it didn’t really tell much, it was more of a new feature showcase.
LikeLike
This needs to be sent to CCP.
However, having said that:
After reading EVE: The Empyrean Age, I was seriously impressed with the trailers for that expansion and to how they tied in with the story. Perhaps they could have been done with in-game footage, but as they were, I found them effective. I understand that was probably a small market segment that they didn’t need to market to.
LikeLike
I think the trailers they make are terrible because they are a mix between in-game content, and non-ingame content. Particularly, if they are going to say titans can blow up stations left and right like the graphics lead you to believe in games like World of Warcraft, they can go way out more with CG effects and such.
But yeah, I totally agree that good music, dialog, and pvp fights are what really sell the game alot more than some guy in the background saying “the gallente are fighting the amarr, the amarr are fighting the minmatar” etc.. It sounds crummy. Even the dev interviews are more interesting than the in-game graphic scenes they have with non-realistic stuff going on.
LikeLike