Gw2 F2p trailer

[Palador.2170]

Just watched all the videos. The only problem I have is with the Black Citadel one.

I had to think about it for a while, and my final conclusion is that it's too fast and visually cluttered. It also misses almost everything about the "feel" of the Black Citadel.

Watch the one for The Grove. Plants everywhere is obvious, even if you don't know what "the Mother Tree" is. The slower pacing of the voice and visuals along with the brighter colors conveys the feel of the place rather nicely. Now imagine the Citadel one with the same voice, but talking a bit slower. "The Black Citadel was not built. It was forged with Iron, Ash, and Blood. Come and witness the results of a true Industrial Revolution!"

I think that would convey a lot more about the charr as a whole, and the feel of their city. And on that point, don't forget the racial intro cinematics. Someone linked the norn one above, but they're all good. They're a solid hook to catch people's interest in the game, and you already have them.

[Cragga the Eighty Third.60]

That 'Heist' video would totally have made me want to check out the crazies who make this game. =)

But...you posted the Grove tourism twice by mistake, and no Rata Sum video. Please?

[Mike Silbowitz.1827]

@"Cragga the Eighty Third.6015" said:That 'Heist' video would totally have made me want to check out the crazies who make this game. =)

But...you posted the Grove tourism twice by mistake, and no Rata Sum video. Please?

[Trise.2865]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

You might check the typo(s) before mass release. (Mega-battlesand)

You've never felt the power of the Mega-battlesand? the sand enchanted and stained with the blood and fighting spirit of thousands of warriors and gladiators?

[De Bourgogne.9642]

Lions Arch, Divinity's Reach or I'm killing Taimi.

[Ayakaru.6583]

The trailer does seem to enforce that the point of the game is to become a discoball..All the while people have been saying that gw2 has become too shiny right from the start.Magic used to be subtle in gw1, and now its all a competion to see who’s the mst dazzling rainbow

While its been going on for years.. its still kind of sad to see that its not something that happened, but was actually intended.

[AgentMoore.9453]

I appreciate the effort on these ads, and I am always excited to see more GW2 content, and that is precisely why I need to critique it:

• Most of the 'everyone's been summoned!' ads look like they're saying 'Guild Wars 2: There's literally no one here despite our best efforts.'I get an intensely lonely impression at the end of each one despite the comedic angle you might have been going for.

• The tourism ads, by themselves, seem too short/disjointed.They might be more effective as a single ad that displays all of the main racial cities to maximize the potential interest garnered among potential new players.

• The CGI ad is solid enough, but some of the character models are going to haunt me for the rest of my life (Looking at you, revived Asura).

Outside of this, I'd suggest releasing shorts like you did many moons ago with the Commando Class gag video. That thing still gets passed around to this day and was an effective conveyance of ArenaNet's wit and humor. Shorts could include main story characters like Canach and Rytlock and range from being simple 10 second clips where Canach slaps the ArenaNet/GW2 logo and the other end of it smacks Rytlock in the head all the way up to minute-long short stories involving world bosses, meta events, or displays of the various character abilities and weapons available in the game as seen through the lens of a handful of characters (players!) working together.

[Terter.4125]

Cannot wait to see the Welcome to Divinity's Reach video ! HYPE ! <3

[Mike Silbowitz.1827]

@"McPero.3287" said:Lions Arch, Divinity's Reach or I'm killing Taimi.

Don’t you dare kill Taimi!

[De Bourgogne.9642]

@Mike Silbowitz.1827 said:

@"McPero.3287" said:Lions Arch, Divinity's Reach or I'm killing Taimi.

Don’t you dare kill Taimi!

I lied. She's already dead.

How about an ingame trailer contest for gems or something even better (unique item)?

[Redponey.8352]

This trailer look like a Jedi fight xD

[Tiny Doom.4380]

@sarkysek.1085 said:

@"Mike Silbowitz.1827" said:Ok. Lets' play it safe first. I'm showing you a tourism ad.

What do you think?

I like it. But I think it's a little bit too short and doesn't show enough to capture the interest of someone not familiar with GW2.

Black Citadel is an amazing city but that trailer really doesn't begin to do it justice. The voiceover is off, too. "Smelteuuuurrrrhhh" What?

I find it hard to see who that trailer is designed to appeal to.

Edit: Posted that before I'd watched the rest of the Tourism videos. Black Citadel is the weakest by far, mainly because the voiceover is very hard to understand and the Great Smelter is quite possibly the least interesting sight in the entire city. The general idea of the series is good and I understand why they need to be so very short but even as short as they are they could all be tighter. The voiceovers certainly could do with being punched up. The Grove one is probably the best, which is ironic since The Grove is my least favorite starting city.

The really interesting part, though, is that you're doing the ad campaign in the first place. I've been playing MMORPGs for twenty years and it's pretty unusual in my experience for any MMO as old as GW2 now is to get this kind of push when nothing is actually going on to support it in terms of, for example, a new expansion or a change in payment model.

[DragonFury.6243]

@"Mike Silbowitz.1827" said:i know we are not the target audience but

one of the coolest fight in open world is Legendary Ley-Line Anomaly for me at leasti love to see a video show case that fight while the Legendary Ley-Line Anomaly is running and followed by many players on mountsbut again the video should be short so may be that is supper hard

i love to see a video show case racing in tyriabut may be after we get all the 10 mounts

i love to see a video show case elite specialization not DPS and fight scene only , may be some thing like your friends are in danger(a "dragon" shoot a fire ball on them may be ) and a scourge from a distance cast a sand shade and apply barrier to them the fire eat the sand and your friend are safe

[Dami.5046]

I loved the first Guild Wars Trailer I saw, and i'm talking about the Guild Wars one trailer which had Devona talking about being a young girl and her father being in the Guildwars. It's the same with the CGI you see now on telly which states under it 'not actual game footage' and it's kind of disappointing. I would of loved the original game to have been like that first trailer, and I like trailers to show me what i'll actually get- unless when i rezz someone i will be able to pull them up now too., rather than a wonderfully looking computer generated version that is nowhere near the game itself.However I do like the tourist trailers. They show the real game.

[zealex.9410]

@Ayakaru.6583 said:The trailer does seem to enforce that the point of the game is to become a discoball..All the while people have been saying that gw2 has become too shiny right from the start.Magic used to be subtle in gw1, and now its all a competion to see who’s the mst dazzling rainbow

While its been going on for years.. its still kind of sad to see that its not something that happened, but was actually intended.

My biggest complain of the trailer and the game, there's just too much shiny !@#$

[Klipso.8653]

This looks a whole lot like it was made for a different game and then repurposed for GW2.

Was there going to be a mobile version of guild wars that was scrapped?

[Randulf.7614]

@zealex.9410 said:

@Ayakaru.6583 said:The trailer does seem to enforce that the point of the game is to become a discoball..All the while people have been saying that gw2 has become too shiny right from the start.Magic used to be subtle in gw1, and now its all a competion to see who’s the mst dazzling rainbow

While its been going on for years.. its still kind of sad to see that its not something that happened, but was actually intended.

My biggest complain of the trailer and the game, there's just too much shiny !@#$

Indeed. Given how that has got worse contrary to feedback and now advertising it as a significant trailer worthy part of the game, at least we know the dev teams wholly disagree on the issue.

[Blocki.4931]

@Klipso.8653 said:This looks a whole lot like it was made for a different game and then repurposed for GW2.

Was there going to be a mobile version of guild wars that was scrapped?

Nope.

Check one of the earlier red posts on page 1

[TheQuickFox.3826]

If you want to introduce new players to GW2, this is still the best vid:

[Klipso.8653]

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Klipso.8653 said:This looks a whole lot like it was made for a different game and then repurposed for GW2.

Was there going to be a mobile version of guild wars that was scrapped?

Nope.

Check one of the earlier red posts on page 1

I wonder why they chose to not use the watercolor style that the whole game uses.

[Turkeyspit.3965]

Y'know what, I love them. Yes, if you compared them to the cinematics released for WoW or ESO, they don't hold a candle to them - but then, they don' t have to. GW2 doesn't compete against ESO or WoW on their terms, but on what makes GW2 different and refreshing from typical MMOs.

What would be the point in producing a video that viewers would say "nah, the teaser for BFA looked better". Play to your strengths, and one of those are that GW2 doesn't try to be a WoW killer, but seeks to create its own space in the MMO genre and offer players a choice of different game style and design philosophy.

:+1:

[Urud.4925]

@"TheQuickFox.3826" said:If you want to introduce new players to GW2, this is still the best vid:

This is a good review that I watched some months ago. Although when I want to introduce GW2 to someone I usually use the following one:

There are too many flashy effects for my tastes, but it shows a bit of the community and the dynamic gameplay, which are the best selling points for me. The other is ArenaNet itself, the best developer/publisher I found so far, by far. But unfortunately this cannot be shown with a short video.

It depends on the target: if they are ppl who already play MMOs, there's no need to show fake CG (although I know it's the trend. Take the trailers of Revelation Online: cool they are cool, like a movie. But the game is a completely different "movie"). I would show something different, because GW2 IS different. If I didn't know GW2, I don't think I would search for more videos on youtube after watching the very first video posted on this thread. It's quite generic, very colourful weapons, idk. Not bad, but common.

On the other hand, for very casual players, that maybe abandoned MMOs years ago, the short videos might be a good idea. But... they have no content. Why someone should be interested in GW2 after watching 5 seconds of Ascalon? They are good videos for us probably, but for completely strangers... idk.I would have probably used some very short dialogue/pun between NPCs. Take 2 random Asura NPCs (or Sylvari) and show a couple of lines. It would still be short (<15 seconds) and it would offer something that other boring MMOs heavily text-based don't have: humor, and a live world.

[castlemanic.3198]

I really like the ads. I've generally cringed at live action advertisements for video games, but those weren't trying to create a live action representation of the game and the end result is amazing for that. the tourism ads are an interesting take, but I feel like they may have been too fast paced to really get anything out of them, though I understand that the intention for them is probably youtube advertising which makes sense. the first ad from the OP is really well done, i'm glad we're getting more CG stuff. It does make me wish that the path of fire trailer was CG as well.

Overall, I approve of these advertisements, I think that there'll be a lot of good coming out of these ads and hopefully we'll see new people checking out the game soon.

[Danikat.8537]

@Mike Silbowitz.1827 said:

@"Blaeys.3102" said:The 11 million strong ad works - it reflects your brand and shows how tightly the game is tied to its community. This is the direction you want to continue to take - emphasizing that GW2 really knows what the "massively multiplayer" in MMO should really mean.

The Black Citadel tourism ad - not as much. It feels like it could be about any MMO - and quite frankly, the locations you "brag" about in the ad don't really add any enticing flavor or content to the game.

Your brand differentiator - the thing that sets you apart from your competitors - is how well the game brings 100+ strangers together on a map to face down a foe. People can play hundreds of thousands of single player games. There are tons of coop games (and other MMOs that are more focused on group content) that bring together small groups (2-10 players) to face a challenge. GW2 shines in the large open world (in both PVE and WVW) where there are 100 or more other players - and I cant think of any other game (including other MMOs) that can rival you there.

Center your marketing around that message (which you do very well in the 11 million strong ad) and you have something worth the effort.

Thank you. A reward for your feedback:

That would interest me far more than the first one. You see some big groups of interesting characters facing off against some huge and interesting looking monsters, and some sort of siege (I know it's WvW of course, but I'm thinking in terms of what a non-players would know). Considering the charr were one of the things which first attracted me to GW1 that's much more likely to get me interested. And it's using in-game graphics too, which gives me some idea of what the game is actually like.

Honestly though I'm not sure I'm the target audience for any of these adverts, not because I already play GW2 but because I can't remember the last time I bought a game because of it's advertising. The nearest to that was when I saw an advert for beta sign-ups for Elder Scrolls Online and immediately went looking for more information, but that was because I already knew about the Elder Scrolls series and knew if there was a new game it would be worth checking out, and even then I wanted to read about the game to find out if it was worth my time before even signing up for the beta.

Usually it's word of mouth which gets me interested, people and to a lesser extent publications whose opinions I trust telling me about a game. I'm not sure there's a way to get the kind of information I'd be looking for into an advert and until I know that information it doesn't really matter how pretty it looks. As an example when I first discovered GW1 seeing the charr (a totally unfamiliar kind of monster to me) was enough to get me to ask my brother what he's playing but it was when he said it's an MMO without a subscription fee and with a low level/item cap and very little focus on levelling up vs. customising your character that I actually got interested.

[Naxos.2503]

I quite liked most of the video, I was a bit confused by the "summoned" videos at first too, it seems I wasn't the only one, but I understood the message on the second one I saw.

The tourism ads seems a bit short, they dont convey enough information on their own, but I assume the short lenght is to bypass Youtube's "5 seconds before you can skip ad" measure, in which case it was a smart decision. May I suggest lenghtier versions that showcase the areas a bit more ? Hoelbrak in particular deserves a lot more attention, it's one of the most beautifully designed homecity, with it's giant ice sculptures, and roaming animals. It also has a few NPCs that share some lore or just tell stories. It shows how much life there is within the world itself, aside from players, and that's a big selling point of Guild wars 2 in my opinion : the World feels Alive and organic. You could also show the Southsun Resort : now That's tourism, (add in a caption that any karka related death, maiming, distress is not accounted for by the consortium)

I think it's a good decision to rake in some new players, I would also showcase, as others mentionned, gameplay elements : World Bosses, Large scale Metas, potentially raids as well as new maps with the mechanics (gliders/mounts) for Expansion Ads.

Another thing you could do for the free game as well as the expansion, are class videos. Nowadays, most videos on YouTube are Creators made content that showcase various classes and their skills, but you can also show the classes off, including the core classes and their mechanics.