Trailers!

Who doesn’t love a good show? Trailers give us a window into the world of a game before we have the game in our hands. Companies use them to drum up excitement in their product, and sometimes (rarely) to show us actual gameplay.

More often than not, though, trailers are a PR thing. They’re like little movies that are used to set the scene. Since they’re not giving us actual information on how the game plays, trailers are used for emotional punch. Remember the Gears of War “Mad World” trailer?

How about the Star Wars: The Old Republic’s “Hope” trailer:

But let’s face it: so many games rely on adjectives like “gritty” or “visceral” to describe their gameplay, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s a lot of the same adjectives shared between the two trailers above, and amongst a lot of other similar games available today. These trailers are trying to impart feelings to potential players: you’re alone. The odds are stacked against you. You’re fighting for the Future of All Humanity (or whatever race you’re a member of). You’re warding off extinction. The weight is on your shoulders, grunt. Get out there and give em hell.

Then we have Wildstar.

And, as I discovered today, Wakfu

These last two are quite different from the trailers we usually see. They’re funny! They’re stylish! A lot of production value went into these trailers…which isn’t to say that the others were created on a half-assed shoe-string budget over the course of a weekend, but for me, the last two trailers really make me want to play those games. Maybe it’s because we’re so inundated with these wartime games like Gears of War, Assassin’s Creed or Call of Battlefield Infinity that the trailers rarely register as anything other than an appraisal of their production values. I appreciate the humor of both the Wildstar and Wakfu trailers because they didn’t just go with gameplay and a guitar-grinding soundtrack, or a bunch of flying text and the sounds of slamming metal. They were fun to watch, which — true or not — makes me associate those games with “fun”.

Sadly, I don’t think a game like Gears of War could field a trailer based on humor, but then again we have Red vs. Blue which managed to turn Halo into a comedy show (if you appreciate that brand of lowbrow humor, I suppose), so it’s not impossible. But I also think that the Wildstar and Wakfu trailers didn’t take that frat house humor route.