A Serious Discussion About Demos

[Rapture]

My problem with video previews is the same as my problem with movie trailers: half the time, they're not representative of the game/movie.

If you watch a movie trailer and it's full of funny moments, even odds are that those are the only (or at least the funniest) funny moments in the movie, and the rest is filler.

The same goes for video game previews, in my experience. You get several clips of really cool scenes and grand vistas, showing off the amazing engine and the creative ways to interact with the environment (and of course the obligatory awesome fight scene, which involves either someone jumping out sideways from behind something while shooting, leaping at something/someone with a sword, or firing a giant explosive at something else - but the scene cuts away just as the explosion should happen), and then when you actually play the game, you find out that there are only two grand vistas (one of which is in the first level/map/chapter/etc and the other of which you don't have time to stop and admire because you're fighting/running/something for your life at the time) and the "creative interaction" bits are focused on a few areas separated by long stretches of run-of-the-mill shooter content or exploration. In the worst cases, you end up with what Ben Croshaw described as (paraphrased) "rubbing everything against every other thing until you discover the one single combination that the developers intended for you to progress".

Personally, I like to see firsthand what a developer is capable of. If the demo is mediocre or unoriginal, or doesn't have much of whatever their big selling point of the game was supposed to be, it's usually a good indicator that the finished product isn't going to be spectacular either. For a recent classic example, see the Duke Nukem Forever demo. Thousands of people were turned off of buying that game after trying the demo, whereas they might've been fooled by a video preview.

Uh huh... Umm... They have about 30seconds - 2 minutes to show off their movie. If their competitor shows a awesome trailer that gets everyone hyped up about their "thing". They will have to do it to too.

And I think the point ChaoticMonki is making is that he doesn't like demos because their unfinished released stories that will never be finished!