Elden Ring Trailer Campaign Review
The long anticipated FROM SOFTWARE game Elden Ring is finally out to rave reviews and it seems everyone in the game industry is talking about it. Let's look at the trailer campaign to see how they did (Most, if not all of the trailers were made by the game trailer house gnet). I wanted to take a close look at the trailers because I found it noteworthy how little I knew about the game's hooks and design pillars until relatively late in the campaign. Mainly, that Elden Ring has an open world structure. While the previous games' levels were known for being intricate and labyrinthian, open world structure is a HUGE departure from their previous games: Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.
Based on the handful of hours I've played of Elden Ring and coverage I've read, the key selling points seem to be:
Open world game
World created in collaboration with Game of Thrones Author George R.R. Martin
A big talking point has also been this is a more approachable game because more generous checkpoints lead to less lost progress and replaying of difficult sections (but this feels more like an incremental quality-of-life improvement rather than a game hook).
Otherwise, all the other things fans love about FROM SOFTWARE's games seem to be present:
Dark fantasy setting with deep and unique world building
Tough, but fair combat which rewards mastery and persistence
Somewhat obtuse RPG game systems with lots of customization
Excellent art & animation
Interesting character designs for NPCs, enemies, and bosses
Storytelling which does not follow traditional rules of informing the audience via exposition, character building, etc.
All in all, Elden Ring seems like a smart way to iterate on the formula FROM SOFTWARE has worked within for many years now. It's more of the same, but different enough to feel fresh. This is why I find it fascinating how long it took for me to know Elden Ring's differentiators (other than it being another Dark Souls-style game in a new setting). As has become typical with FROM SOFTWARE game trailers, its reveal was a cinematic trailer shown during E3 in June 2019. To date this trailer has received over 2 million views.
People say they hate CG trailers, but they make exceptions for things they already like :P
This trailer smartly opens with a title card citing a new world by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R.R. Martin, which is a great hook because of the pedigree of both creators, Miyazaki for game design and Martin for his Game of Thrones novels. The rest of the trailer doesn't tell us much more than there is some sort of powerful artifact called the Elden Ring which was shattered. The only other thing we can really glean is the game is in some sort of medieval setting as evidenced by use of the traditional anvil and hammer. Frankly, all FROM SOFTWARE needed to get its fans excited is say Miyazaki is making a new game, but this is certainly a good start to the campaign. Next up is the first Gameplay Trailer which came out two years later in June 2021 and to date has about 526,000 views.
"Gameplay Trailer" has different implications in the AAA space than indie, because most indie games don't have the budget to have many (if any) non-gameplay portions.
This trailer is a mix of both story and gameplay. A "real gameplay" trailer is an important milestone for AAA games which typically reveal with pre-rendered CG cinematic trailers; people want to know what the actual game looks like when it's being played. There's very little in here which actually looks like it's captured using the in-game camera angles; most of it is captured in cinematic camera angles made possible by the debug camera tools.
As with most FROM SOFTWARE games, it's difficult to parse the story. This is largely due to the fact most of the dialogue refers to unfamiliar proper names (something I typically recommend against for the sake of clarity) The only story I can glean is:
Something called The Tarnished is returning
Something called The Golden Order is corrupt
The Tarnished is in search of the Elden Ring and they'll fight and die a lot
A champion or lord will be born
The voice challenges the Tarnished to brandish The Elden Ring
The problem with leaning on proper nouns in trailers is names alone usually don't indicate who the characters are, their roles, or their relationships. For example, we don't know whether or not The Tarnished or The Golden Order are protagonists or antagonists. The story could go either way really, especially since it's not entirely clear how much we should assume the voiceover's words directly connect and reference the visuals.
As far as what the trailer communicates, most of the visuals feel like they're just emphasizing the core Dark Souls-style gameplay, which is the player fighting epic bosses and enemies. Other than the setting, the main new game mechanic seems to be the horse, which is only featured in a small handful of shots and doesn't explicitly make it look like an open world game. While it's true that horses tend to mostly exist in open world games, only a small handful of the commenters speculate it's an open world game.
While the cinematic capture is absolutely excellent, the medium to medium wide camera angles make the shots feel intimate and not differentiated from the previous games. That said, the commenters are all HYPED AS HELL, so the trailer is clearly working, but I wonder how much MORE hyped they might've been been if the trailer more clearly established the open world hook. As it is, this looks like another fantastic entry in the FROM SOFTWARE catalog, but the trailer doesn't focus on differentiators. Next up came a 20 minute Gameplay Preview, which released in November 2021 and to date has over 445,000 views.
This has the juice, but since it's 20 min, only the hardcore and press are likely to watch it.
This extended look at the game firmly cements Elden Ring as an open world game complete with more "raw" gameplay. The trailer looks at things like the world map, which is something new to FROM SOFTWARE games, and a clear indicator of it being an open world game. At nearly 20 minutes, this is made for the hardcore fans dying to know every little bit they can about the game before it releases. Though, because it's 20 minutes long that means the more casual audience might still be missing out on one of the core messages that this is an open world game. Generally, the longer the trailer, the fewer people will watch it, because people don't give ample amounts of their time to something they're only sort of interested. A video that long is more like mid-funnel content rather than top of the funnel. This look covers quite a lot about the gameplay and design. Next is the Story Trailer released in December 2021, which has received 229,000 views.
Only FROM SOFTWARE can sort of evade my usual story trailer critique just because their stories really do feel this fragmented and opaque.
This is another pre-rendered CG cinematic trailer which feels like it could be the intro of the game. It's somewhat similar to the introduction to The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring's narrated by Cate Blanchett, but without context for who is who, their roles, and relationships to each other. We know some people are killed, The Elden Ring is broken, there's a war, and a big character fights a character with flowing red hair. It all looks very pretty, but the voiceover and the way it uses proper names makes it difficult to take anything away from it.
It should be noted that in the games, this style of opaque storytelling is a deliberate choice by the director. In an interview (which I sadly couldn't find in time for this newsletter) he talked about how when he first read Lord of the Rings, it wasn't a version translated into Japanese. This meant he had to do his best to piece together the story from the English he knew. He wanted to recreate this experience of piecing together a story through fragments and proper names. So in this way, this style of storytelling in the trailers is being true to the source material. That said, I still think making the story clear and understandable would still overall be a better call when marketing. Since this is a cinematic story trailer, there are no gameplay hooks discussed, but we get another good look at them in the Overview Trailer, released in February 19, 2022, which to date has received about 168,000 views.
A really nice summation of the gameplay design!
Again, this trailer does a good job of showing the gameplay in a cinematic fashion, but in a shorter, 6.5 minute trailer. It recaps a lot of story and gameplay ideas from previous trailers, but in a much more stylish package. It takes about three minutes before they clearly highlight the open world format. Though there's still not much time spent discussing how and why the open world setting changes up the gameplay compared to the previous FROM SOFTWARE games. Most of this trailer still feels like it could've been describing any of their other games' features like in how you do quests for characters, can play different character classes, build up your character, and play with friends. Shortly after this trailer they released the launch trailer on February 22nd, 2022. To date, this has received about 146,000 views.
This trailer feels the most like a lot of Japanese game trailers, in how fragmented and oddly paced it feels.
This final trailer is again a mix of story and cinematic gameplay capture. Its structure is a little odd. The story is still pretty opaque, but because the dialogue in the first half only comes from a couple characters, something about it feels every so slightly more easy to parse. Though, the only thing I can glean is that both characters seem to be addressing the protagonist, and seem to just be saying: "Go for it!." The trailer up through 1:25 feels like it goes from intro to climax before cutting to black. After it returns from black it reveals a grotesque monster and then there's a disjointed montage of dialogue and visuals. It's a pretty confusing series of images and dialogue, and were the visuals and music not so impressive, it would not be nearly as interesting to watch.
Again, not much in this trailer emphasizes the open world-ness of the game. There are a couple shots on horse, but the capture feels similar to previous trailers with the cool, intimate angles which frame the player and enemies nicely. This trailer doesn't feel like it does much different from the previous ones. It's more of the same (albeit still with a high level of technical and artistic skill).
This looks phenomenal, but to fresh eyes, you might as well tell me this is from Demon's Souls or one of the Dark Souls games.
After rewatching all of these trailers I feel like more could've been done to explore the hook of Elden Ring beyond the pedigree of its creators and the new story. It's a cliché in the games industry to compare something to Dark Souls, but Elden Ring'selevator pitch really is "It's Dark Souls, but in an open world." It's rather baffling to me that its trailers didn't make this abundantly clear at every single moment.
As someone who is not super great at playing these games, the open world design allows me to play Elden Ring in ways I couldn't play the previous ones, because when I bump into a difficult section, it's easy to find something less difficult to do, or just enjoy exploring. Reviews have described it as more accessible than the previous ones for this reason alone that you don't have to bash your head against the same encounter over and over in order to advance.
The hardcore FROM SOFTWARE fans didn't need convincing to buy the game; they would be on board no matter what. You can see from their comments that as long as it's a new FROM SOFTWARE game, they're in. The marketing opportunities were for bringing in the less hardcore players like myself whose ears perk up when they hear the game might be a modicum more approachable. So long as the trailers communicated to the hardcore fans that it's still a very difficult game, there wouldn't have been much harm in addressing the concerns of everyone else who'd might've bounced off the previous games, or only heard about them from other people.
This is the most "open world" of the official screenshots from the Steam store page, but most of the rest just look like what we already expect from FROM SOFTWARE.
Elden Ring has so far been a smashing success, so I'd still be tremendously proud if I were anyone who worked on the trailer campaign. They're still incredibly well made trailers, and I'd feel a great sense of pride to be able to take credit for even a fraction of one of them. That said, I still find it an odd choice to not highlight the key differentiator for the game more in the trailers. This point is somewhat moot because due to the volume of coverage, I'm sure most people know it's an open world game at this point.
Though, even the Steam Store page doesn't emphasize that point much either. Whomever has the power to adjust the Steam Store page tags doesn't seem to be in a hurry to make sure "Open World" is one of the top three tags for the game. If I were running the page, I'd probably make the top three tags: Open World, Souls-like, and maybe either Dark Fantasy, Action RPG, or Third-Person.
Currently, the Steam store page tags notably have Open World as one of the last tags. I'm not sure just how much it matters for a game of this size and scale, but I would move that to the top three tags as soon as possible (read more about tags here and here).
AAA game trailers work in a very different space than indie game trailers because oftentimes their production value and pedigree can be enough to sell a game. When put in the hands of talented capture artists and trailer makers you can make incredibly epic and exciting trailers like these. But I still think highlighting key differentiators (especially in well entrenched genres) makes for stronger trailers and better messaging!
