Those with a firmer, stronger grip on their joysticks might not have even noticed this development, but personally, I would rather like to know whatever happened to old-fashioned, mouse-powered gameplay demonstrations for first-person shooters? Over the past few years, I’ve found myself increasingly irritated with various PR departments’ keen intent on demonstrating their games on consoles and/or with gamepads only.
The key to successful gameplay exhibition, after all, is authentic exposition. While the generic idea of the trailer is to lure the player in, convince him or her of the game’s meritorious mechanisms, gameplay trailers are not as disconnected from actual gameplay as it would seem on the outset; Think of competitive play, for example, wherein even the most infinitesimal intricacies matter: DPI, polling rate, sensitivity, inversion, crosshairs, macros, bindings, et cetera et cetera. My primary question is, then, why are we not seeing these features in trailers?
A very recent example – one I’m sure most of you have seen by now – can be found in the form of the latest BioShock 2 multiplayer trailer, found below:
The footage above has been clearly recorded with the questionable aid of the gamepad: The first-person camera movement looks imprecise and tardy; most of the third-person action on display, then, consists of arrow-straight movement, sluggish posturing and general standing-about. Two more gameplay video analyses, of Resistance 2 and Singularity, after the jump.