My thoughts on the Inside Xbox : xbox

Hi,

I saw that a lot of people are angry or disappointed about the Inside Xbox that was broadcasted today so I felt like that I need to express my feelings about some people reactions that I felt were quite resonating around the community.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gameplay trailer outrage

I would say that the main topic that people talk about is the situation about the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gameplay trailer. I looked in the some trailers that Ubisoft made in the past and found out that it’s more the issue with the term “gameplay”. Most people think of gameplay as someone is playing segment of the game. But some companies think of gameplay as an in-game footage and then they make difference between “Gameplay trailer” and “Gameplay demo/walkthrough” (of course there are some exceptions even by Ubisoft). But for example Ubisoft is using this term for the same trailers in the almost whole Assassin’s Creed series as they did for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla gameplay trailer, for about 10 years.

Here are examples:

Assassin’s Creed II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a12e3iKzqlw

Assassin’s Creed IV Black flag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6rwCyP1LLg

Assassin’s Creed Rogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRl6D2Febg8

Assassin’s Creed Unity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6-S4s7j4sw

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V1ACDxC6d4

Assassin’s Creed Origins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUuKIpCM2o0

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgUtoX7ue7Q

Also it’s quite interesting that when you look at the like/dislike ratio, it seems to be an issue only on the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which seems kinda strange.

There was no gameplay shown

I would like to address people who are saying there was not gameplay shown for other games, so I have collected parts of trailers that could count as gameplay in these trailers:

Bright Memory Infinite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtwPMBdgPGE (whole trailer)

Dirt 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWqWXlS2NxM (e.g. 0:36 – 0:38)

CHORUS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnRy-waJBjA (e.g. 0:18 – 0:22)

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MzIbWbMFi0&t=37s (e.g. 1:20 – 1:30)

Call of the Sea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lq25iJbmMY (whole trailer)

The Ascent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32gaWV-5hXg (0:50 till end)

SCARLET NEXUS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyCdiZ10Tgc (e.g. 1:10 – 1:25)

Second Extinction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAOPaSTteak (again almost whole trailer)

This makes 8 out of 12 games showcased having some sort of “gameplay” in the trailers which I would call decent and saying that there was no gameplay is quite an overestimation. Also I feel like that some people would like to 6+ minutes long gameplay demos shown which in my opinion is definitely not that great idea for developers because they can’t reveal new games by showing 6 minutes long video from same location. They can do it after like 2 or 3 trailers but definitely not when announcing the game. Also I feel that if they would do 7 games in 45 minutes long show people would call it boring and that Microsoft didn’t show any games.

Showing gameplay

Also as I said the definition of gameplay is not that simple. Main issue is that the games often are not finished when they are showing them, so they are often showing how the studio would like the game to look.

Again here for example I have the Kingdom Come: Deliverance (which is awesome game but you can say that it’s almost completely different game in the end but I definitely recommend to play it):

Kingdom Come: Deliverance reveal trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A2qcJxkmXk

Kingdom Come: Deliverance final trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cn4Hg6q9XU

In this situation the reveal trailer looked like proper gameplay trailer, even the text “Actual ingame footage” is shown, but from what I heard from some presentations and interviews with the game director Daniel Vávra, they had not anything out of this trailer working as a real game and they wanted to show how the game is supposed to look and because of that they had to “fake it”.

Also there are gameplay trailers like No Man’s Sky or Watch Dogs which differentiate quite a lot from the final products. I honestly don’t have the will to dig deeper on this issues currently but I think you can make the picture out of this.

This presentation did more harm than good

This feels kinda weird to me that some people think that because I can’t see how it can be bad to showcase the smaller but interesting games like The Medium or the Call of the Sea when we know that the more big games are coming and also we know that Microsoft wants to make similar shows every month so they can’t only some big bangers like Halo or Gears of War. Also this Inside Xbox was presented from start as “Only third party games are going to be shown” and a lot of them will be also on other platforms so I think that this is more like the appetizer for the presentations that are coming. Also people that are saying that these games look like games for current gen, maybe it’s like that because most of these game are developed and released for current gen and only optimized for Xbox series X (4k 60/120fps)?

Also for people that hate that they show these smaller games, I honestly rather have good smaller games like Ori and the Will of The Wisps or Life is Strange than bad big games like Crackdown 3 or Just Cause 4.

Thank you for reading my thoughts and sorry for some mistakes in the text, I wrote it quite fast and English is not my first language.

Also as a disclaimer I don’t want to make this sound like that people don’t have rights for their own opinion and I definitely think that Microsoft and Ubisoft could handle it better but I just felt that some people make such a big deal out of this that is not even necessary.