It is like copperfish said, and if you played Blizzard games before, you would know: This is typical Blizzard. Their games always had cinematic trailers as you progressed and those always were (to me at least) a big plus in playing the single campaigns.

To me Blizzard is very successful in designing game stories and immersing the gamer in them with good dialogs, these trailers, among other things. So this ad is nothing knew, actually, but cool and catchy nevertheless.

heh, i was just thinking Starcraft 2’s ghost of the past trailer (a longer cut of the one posted earlier : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_E83GfWM-A) fits Warhammer 40000: Space Marine (a third person shooter/brawler thingy) than a Starcraft sequel

Well I’ve not been at all interested in Starcraft II because of the RTS elements. Been there, done that. That and I don’t have any hardware that runs Windows or OSX. I do remember really enjoying the cutscenes in Warcraft II and Diablo II. Maybe some retro style gaming will resonate with me.

Bullshots and pre-rendered scenes leave me cold.

That said – advertising is advertising and I guess they wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.

There was the same question asked of Bioware when they released their Marilyn Manson trailer. If I remember right, the ad was deliberately not targeted at core gamers because this market was already ‘won’. Basically, any RPG enthusiast would have bought Dragon Age regardless of commercials or trailers, so there was little point making one specifically for them. The same can be said of StarCraft 2, any RTS player will buy it without second thoughts, and these ads won’t change that because said players have been eagerly waiting for this game for years and probably already played the BETA extensively. Other players might be lured by the promise of an interesting story, or an action packed fighting against aliens, which these ads successfully hint at.

That explains the DA:O trailers that stick to cutscenes and don’t show a minute of gameplay, and try to entice gamers from other horizons by promising epic battles, blood, sex and cute goth girls. I can’t say if their plan was successful or if it backfired by pushing away some of the RPG players scared that the content of the trailer might actually reflect the content of the game.

Is this the one? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoZuN-p4gKc

What dreck. Of course you can’t play as any of those guys because either the game would be absurdly unbalanced or it would have loads of stupid & arbitrary limits.

@ jambarama:

Did you see the new DC Universe Online trailer promo? I’m at work right now so I’m not going to look for it right this second, but look it up. It was on Reddit yesterday or so.

It’s like a short movie with plot and dialog featuring prominent DC character battling each other to the death. Very cool and very impressive until you realize that its all for an MMO game in which you will not be allowed to play any of the characters you have just seen, and you will spend most of your time grinding mobs of level appropriate mooks for experience.

This is just the next step in what used to be absurd box art and “exclusive” screenshots. Virtually every broadly-applicable video game complaint I’ve had in the last 10 years, was summarized in this article. The relevant portion:

“How can there still be gamers taken in by EXCLUSIVE SCREENSHOTS [or these videos] of games that . . . have NO connection with what the actual game will look like? . . . Chances of that happening are directly proportional to whether or not you’ll stop falling for it.”

Myself? I hate them – the practice is totally scummy, but I’m sure it isn’t going to stop. Blizzard has been doing it with Diablo 3 as well.