Marketing for story-based mediums like films, TV, and games can be challenging, and some studios resort to lying and misleading their audiences to keep their biggest secrets and story beats hidden. This practice has become more common over the years, with studios using tactics like placing characters in scenes they don’t appear in, showing pre-rendered footage as “gameplay,” and recording complete scenes and lines of dialogue specifically for trailers that never appear in the finished product.
These changes can result from games’ long development schedules, with creative teams changing their plans mid-production, or to make a game look its best at any cost. While studios are now obligated to put a “subject to change” or “not actual gameplay footage” disclaimer on their trailers, some argue that this message could be plastered on any game prior to it receiving a Gold status and being in a shippable state.
While controversial, this tactic is understandable from a developer’s perspective. For example, if Joel had hardly any presence in the game’s trailers, many would have been asking where the fan-favorite character was and could have guessed the twist prior to the game’s release, as was the case with Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II.
Similarly, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty advertised Solid Snake as the main character of the game, but players soon realized that the main protagonist was actually a young rookie agent named Raiden. Story events that had been advertised in trailers still occurred, but it’s clear when watching the promotional footage after playing the game that the character models had been swapped.
Another example is the reveal trailer for Dead Island, which made the game look like a more story-oriented, emotional franchise with a heartbreaking, cinematic short film that told the last moments of a family on a zombie-infested holiday resort. However, the rest of the game’s tone was quite clearly different, and it was mainly an action-packed zombie-killing RPG.
2023-05-14 20:30:04
Article from screenrant.com