The Dangling Carrot
I
like to keep up with what games are coming out and when, especially if I’m
considering buying them. This leads to me watching a lot of game trailers, some
good, some bad, and some just plain confusing. This is a story about how the
just plain confusing trailers have taken the industry by storm in recent years.
After
several years staying out of the gaming marketplace, Marvel has finally decided
to make their grand return to the medium, announcing games like Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, Guardians of the Galaxy by Telltale, and
Spider-Man PS4 by Insomniac. A few
weeks ago they had yet another big announcement, that being they were teaming
up with Square-Enix for a multi-game partnership, beginning with the enigmatic Avengers Project. Square released a
brief trailer for the game that was little more than a few iconic Avengers
visuals accompanied by a female voiceover.
Needless
to say, people were excited. One of the biggest franchises right now teaming up
with the publisher behind Final Fantasy,
Kingdom Hearts and Deus Ex? Yes please. But there was a
misstep. Just as the minute-long trailer was gaining traction, Square announced
they would have more to say about Avengers
Project…in 2018. That’s not a release date, by the way. That’s just when
Square decided they want to talk more about the game.
Keep
in mind that this trailer was released on January 26, 2017. That’s a full year
before there’s even a chance of
learning more about what this game is, what the gameplay is like, whether it
ties in with the movies or comics, and basically any knowledge required before
making an informed purchase.
This
is a practice I’ve come to deem as “The Dangling Carrot”, and it’s something
I’ve been noticing a lot since E3 2016. A typical Dangling Carrot trailer for a
game features at least one of the three following things: a working title, no
actual gameplay (with pre-rendered bullcrap instead), and no release date
announced. A prime example of a Dangling Carrot is the Last of Us Part II trailer we saw at last year’s PlayStation
Experience. That trailer featured no gameplay and Sony didn’t even bother dancing
around a release date. While the trailer got people excited for the game,
that’s mostly because it was riding on the coattails of the enormously
successful original game. This doesn’t pertain to games exclusively, either.
Remember the trailer for Microsoft’s Xbox One upgrade called “Project Scorpio”
from E3 2016? That one checked all three boxes to be considered a Dangling
Carrot. The previously mentioned Square Enix is the most famous user of this
tactic, with perhaps the best-known example of a Dangling Carrot game being Kingdom Hearts III, first glimpsed in
2013 and still nowhere even close to release.
So
why do these trailers exist? Why bother telling the gaming community about
these games when they’re nowhere near release? I can think of two reasons. The
first and most obvious reason is the investors. Those guys like to know what’s
brewing in the company to be released over the next few years rather than the
next few months. But I think the more common reason is something a little more
sinister, and it ties back to one of the most publicized gaming disasters in
recent years: Evolve.
If
you’ve never heard of Evolve, it was
a game that fell completely off the deep end when it came to pre-order hype
culture and microtransactions, essentially selling a barely-finished game with
more on-disc content locked away…for a
price. But what was really interesting about Evolve was how it embraced its own insidiousness right out of the
gates. The first we heard of the game was in a GameInformer cover story with a few screenshots and the like.
Almost immediately afterwards, the pre-order bonuses went live,
showing off
exclusive skins, weapons and cosmetics if you put down a few dollars to
prepurchase a game that no one had ever
seen footage of. Hell, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t even a release date at
that point!
Granted,
Evolve is one of the most disastrous
examples of a Dangling Carrot, given its quickly declining playerbase in the weeks
after launch and early death after it actually stopped having developer support
just before its second anniversary of hitting store shelves, but the signs are
still there. The developers over at Turtle Rock built hype for the game through
pre-order bonuses before any footage, pre-rendered or gameplay, had been seen
by the general public.
Sound
familiar?
As
I said before, Square-Enix has become infamous for their use of Dangling
Carrots in recent years. They’re doing it with Kingdom Hearts III, they’re doing it with the Final Fantasy VII remake, and they’re doing it again with Avengers Project. Notice that all three
of those have two factors in common: they were all announced way before their
actual release date, and they all belong to a massively popular franchise.
Square knows that there’s a ravenous group of fans waiting impatiently for the
next update on Kingdom Hearts III,
and what better way to drum up hype than to drip feed them a trailer once a
year or so before it finally gets released in 2020?
So
how should these companies avoid making their trailers a Dangling Carrot? The
answer is actually quite easy: put gameplay in the trailer. Given the
ever-changing nature of game development it’s rare to find a first trailer for
a game with a finalized release date, so it’s fine if you can’t tell us exactly
when your game is coming out. But I don’t want to see a bunch of pre-rendered
nonsense that doesn’t convey what type of game I’m looking at, I want to see
the game itself. A good example of this is the recent trailer for Super Mario Odyssey. In just under three
minutes that trailer is able to convey exactly what kind of game it will be, as
well as give us a release period of Holiday 2017. This allowed people to get
excited about Mario’s next adventure, because we knew what kind of game it was
and a vague idea of when we would have it in our hands.
And
this is where Avengers Project fails on
every single level. Because there’s nothing more than a few pre-rendered
visuals in the trailer, at this point I have no idea if the game is more than a
few scribblings on a whiteboard and maybe a storyboard or two, let alone what
the gameplay is like. At this point it might turn out to be a hybrid kart
racer-tycoon sim game and we would never know. And the fact that we have to
wait until some point in 2018 to find out what the game will be is complete and
utter bull.
Stop
dangling the carrot in front of our faces before it’s ready to eat, Square.
Next time, wait until you actually have something for us to get excited about.
Song of the Week
Simple
and Clean from Kingdom Hearts.
Despite being a huge Disney fan, I’ve actually never gotten into this series
that much. I can’t deny how nostalgic this song is for other people though, and
I really like it too.
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