So... hi, I was wondering if y’all would be interested to hear about how gameplay trailers are often made and why - while they’re neat - they’re not the end-all to analyzing an upcoming game and why you shouldn’t take them at perfect face value? Yeah?
Let’s go then!

Gameplay trailers are often the thing players demand to help them decide whether or not a game would be for them. And I get why, but I feel like often people don’t know enough about how they are made and why they may not be as informative as you think they are.

First off: a lot of modern gameplay trailers are made over a longer period of time, often while the game is still fully in development. Making a gameplay trailer can require a whole team of pro players who perform a gameplay choreography that is recorded.

A team of pro players spends days and days on end recording gameplay footage, often guided by a trailer director and with a specific script in mind. For MP games, they need to coordinate scenes and make sure the capture looks good and epic.

Many takes have to be done over and over again like this until the recording is just right. It requires a lot of work and skill to do this job and it can be quite thankless for a lot of people who do the performance.

Now though, here’s where it gets interesting and where you should consider softening your expectations. A lot of trailers are recorded while the game is still in full development and trailer footage often comes from different versions of the game build along the timeline.

What that means is that your gameplay footage does not come from the final build that will ship.
Studios try to put their best foot forward while recording and getting as close to what a final experience will look and feel like, but it’s not the final build quite often.

Maybe the dev team has disabled some features in one of the builds along the way for testing or performance purposes. Maybe some final polish hasn’t made it in yet. Releasing a game is a mad dash and the builds are a living, breathing timeline of that.

Sometimes the trailer team can’t record or finish a scene because of bugs that crop up or something that is in the build that doesn’t make things look perfect. They work with what they’ve got and it’s a lot of magic and skill to make an in progress build look good.

So remember when you watch gameplay trailers that while studios try their best to put their best work in front of you, most trailers you see do not have the final build be played in them. There’s more bug fixing and polish that will come.

What I’m really saying here: by all means, demand gameplay trailers to inform your decisions, but remember that they are not the end-all to what you will play, both in execution as well as in look and polish of the game.

Some more advice, especially for games coming out on next gen:
If you’re watching announcement streams of next gen games and you expect it to look super crisp - it won’t. Cause it’s a stream. You’ll need to watch the trailer footage on a 4K TV to really see what you’re getting.

Also: Next gen is always super exciting and people have high expectations, but remember that games coming out with next gen at launch are likely not the peak of what a console can do. We often still need to adapt tools to new tech and it takes a little longer for its peak.

Anyways... in summary...
Trailers are good and important, but you won’t do yourself any favour by analyzing every single frame of a trailer to figure out if a game is good. I’d refrain from watching youtubers/streamers who do this as well, but that’s a personal opinion.

Trailers are a curated performance of the game you’re getting and nothing will ever beat actually getting your hands on it :)
So... meet us at conventions, get your hands on games early to get a sense for what games suit you! Trailers are good but can’t be fully representative.