ME3 + ES5 = ?

You’ve got 60 seconds to promote your new video game in an announcement trailer. What are you going to include?  Do you include in-game footage, or leave that for an upcoming talk show appearance?  Perhaps you disclose your new gameplay mechanic and hope rival developers don’t notice.

Alternatively you could reach for the book titled “Putting Together A 60 Second Announcement Trailer” and just use that.  It lays out the simple recipe for the your trailer, listing the required ingredients  and the order to add them:

  1. Show developer logo.
  2. Fade in to stark, almost mono-chromatic rendered vista.
  3. Sprinkle with cinematic voice-over describing world gone to Hell.
  4. Reveal unstoppable force responsible for said Hellish situation.
  5. Introduce ray of hope – There is one who can save us…
  6. Fade out.
  7. Show game title.
  8. Show target release date.
  9. Leave gamers wanting more.

It is such and simple and reliable recipe the book is used as a reference by many developers.  How else can we explain just how well the audio track from the announcement trailer for Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim fits when played over the video for BioWare’s Mass Effect 3?

Amazingly good fit isn’t it?

Via: Kotaku

14 Comments

  1. Ha that is brilliant…

  2. Hah classic. Who edited this?

    • YouTube user Solgineer. You can just click through the video to find out.

      • That would have required me to not be lazy which on Tuesdays, is unheard of. Cheers for being the unlazy one when you could have told me to get off my ass. ;)

  3. Oh gawd that was great! A lot of the dialogue fitted perfectly to the cinematography and on screen actions

  4. I really doubt ME3 will have the return of space dragons

  5. Someone HAS to do one for TSA as a mock up, I can provide the cinematic voice-over if needed.

  6. Haha brilliant, good find!

  7. Oh this is the funniest thing I’ve seen all week :)

    Mind you I sat through the whole VGAs streamed, so things had to get funnier from there (jeez!).

    Watchful, this would have been a perfect article except you called Uncharted 3 out for not showing gameplay when it was actually one of two games at the VGA to show ANY gameplay in trailers (the other was Resistance 3).

    Lots of threequels lately.

    • Yes, a very few seconds worth, but it was well known and publicised that they were saving the big gameplay reveal for Jimmy Fallon. The gameplay was not a big feature of their announcement trailer, though the water did look good.

  8. lawks o’ lordy

    Them students have really took London to pieces

  9. haha brilliant!

  10. Excellent!

    But in fairness, it works so well! nothing gets you as excited as a massively epic trailer!

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