First of all, watch this:
Repeat if necessary.
Now, as you've undoubtedly put together, this is the debut trailer for Irrational Games' Bioshock Infinite.
And it is quite the trailer at that.
It starts out by turning the whole "dramatically revealing an underwater city with a sweeping shot over a submerged hill" thing that the Bioshock made famous on its head. After doing that, it proceeds to turn several more things on their heads, while also shaking them up and sending them for a loop.
UPDATE: We also have reports that a script may have been flipped at some point during the trailer. We are looking to substantiate this.
The trailer is crazy. That is the point I'm trying to get across here.
Unfortunately, it is only a trailer. Thus begets my qualm. Forewarning: Qualming is about to commence. There will be much qualming in the following paragraphs.
The pre-rendered trailer (or cutscene) has long been a staple of video games. It harkens back to a time when games did not have the graphical capacity to properly convey the drama or emotion that the gameplay was meant to induce, and developers were forced to turn to either filmed scenes (FMV FTW!!!) or computer-generated scenes to advance a game's story.
FMV, or full motion video, fell out of favor, mostly because it is an expensive and time intensive process (but also because it was officially decreed to be "lame as fuck" in late 1997) and CG cutscenes became the way to go.
Unfortunately, there was such a disparity of visual quality between the gameplay and the cutscenes that the effect of the game pausing to show the player a crisp, CG cutscene was a jarring one. It was for this reason alone that I have never been fond of them.
Luckily, games have advanced so far graphically that they are now capable of rendering (skidoosh) the pre-rendered cutscene (or trailer!) obsolete, as gameplay can now convey the proper dramatic effect that a story requires.
Unfortunately, almost every game developer still uses pre-rendered trailers. (Boo ya, three paragraphs in a row started with adverbs.)
Enter Bioshock. Easily one of my favorite games of all time, Bioshock was a worldview-denting tour of an underwater city overrun by mutants and Ayn Rand aficionados. But its release was preceded by an incredible pre-rendered trailer that contained such awesome things as the player character being impaled by a massive drill, and... oh hell. Just watch it for yourself:
Sweet, right? Exactly. The problem lies in the fact that the actual gameplay of Bioshock was nothing like what was shown in the trailer. I take particular exception to Bioshock's (and now Bioshock Infinite's) trailer, as it depicts the same first person perspective as seen in the game. Just with much cooler stuff happening.
In both trailers above, all sorts of crazy action unfolds; from falling off a sky fortress and climbing for your life to unsuccessfully fighting a dive suit-clad behemoth. In the actual game, you circle strafe and shoot things.
So while the graphical gap between gameplay and trailer may have been significantly lessened, the unfulfilled promises made by the onscreen action in trailers are now that much more apparent.
I am sure that at some point during playing Bioshock Infinite I will cause my character to fall to their death, as I tend to do whenever a game supplies me with suspended platforms, but I doubt very much that I will be able to desperately claw at a strip of canvas, in a futile attempt at preventing me from a very splattery death.
I will circle strafe the shit out of some Ayn Rand fans though.
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