New Trailer For Fable: The Journey – What Were They Thinking?

Remember when I made an article about the Guild Wars 2 trailer and I said how utterly ridiculous it is? Well, Microsoft decided they wanted to contend for worst trailer of 2012 with this little masterpiece. They seem to have taken an entirely different approach however.

You see, the marketing team has done a good job of listening to people’s concerns about the Kinect being “too casual”. However, they seem to have overdone it spectacularly in this trailer. One of the first thing’s mentioned in the trailer is “I’m a core gamer” which is obviously a point that needs to be made. A lot of the gamers in the trailer talk about how much they love video games and how much they doubt the Kinect can provide a true gaming experience. This stuff is important because in a minute’s time, these same people are going to turn around and tell you how much they absolutely LOVE the Kinect now and how massively they anticipate the release of this title.

You see this is so typical of Microsoft. Their marketing team has always been incredibly blunt about putting out their product. Even now, when they seem to actually be listening to gamers instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting about how great the Kinect is, they’re still so far from the point it’s hilarious. In your face pandering isn’t going to achieve anything with the core gamer crowd- at least not a great deal. As well as that, Fable was never a hardcore game, it’s always been a casual RPG experience. Not to mention the shoe-horning of popular Xbox 360 games which are deemed as core by Microsoft themselves. If you were to ask a lot of core gamers, Halo, Gears of War, Skyrim and Fable wouldn’t be what they would call a typical hardcore crowd game.

I myself am not for labelling games as “hardcore” but it’s like they didn’t even try with this trailer. Hell, as sickening as it would be to see, they didn’t even throw in a mention of Dark Souls. The game itself is what it is, too early to comment on it as a whole. That being said, I’m certainly not impressed by this ham-fisted attempt at selling it to the core crowd.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTindUKAcmg]

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4 comments

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aspro www.thevgpress.com

I think it was a problem of this hitting the wrong target. This promotion, as appalling as it is to us, is likely targeted at the "aspirational" hardcore gamer. The company that put it out though should know that in the gaming world there is no promotional item distributed that does not get examined in detail by the gaming community as a whole.

Chris Langner

Interesting way to look at it. The trailer would really work in that regard. I really got the vibe that it was trying to sell the hardcore on Kinect though.

Yeah, this is pretty transparent. An accurate camera seems like it could improve gaming, but Microsoft cheaped out on Kinect at the last minute and removed the internal processor. So there's an obvious amount of input lag present in pretty much every game. We'll have to wait until the next iteration for that to be fixed, I guess.

Wheresmymonkey

I played the demo of This the other night. and it works most of the time, and generally it was a fun experience and it was quite a good idea to have the configuration for the controller made in game. But the problem with kinect is that it demands too much accuracy in movement and when it doesn't it spazes out. This is where the wii really beats the competition. It's brilliant at approximating your movements so even if you don't do it correctly it still gives you the same desired effect. It also means you don't need to have a big empty living room to use it.