Backstory Doesn't Belong in a Game Trailer
Video game story trailers are my absolute favorite type of trailer to make, especially when there's dialogue to edit with. But what pains me the most are story trailers which are incredibly boring and seemingly in love with their own backstory and lore. I call these "Lore Dump trailers" which spend the entire trailer explaining mostly events long past within the game's story. Basically, just a lot of setup and backstory.
Why don’t these work when movie trailers do this all the time? Because story and backstory is all that movie trailer viewers want; it’s what they’re looking for. But for a game, people want to know how to play the game and who we will BE in the game; that’s their primary concern. Through video games we get to be people and things we either cannot be in real life (or maybe we just never tried). So when we're watching a game trailer, we want to know who or what we're going to inhabit and play as in the game, and the story is secondary.
Watch this trailer for Grow: Song of the Evertree
This trailer goes for nearly an entire minute before it even mentions someone who might be the player character. Everything before that is voiceover about things that happened in the past. It basically says: The world was beautiful, then it started dying, and now there's someone who will make it beautiful again. This story trailer at least lands somewhere we can have a very basic understanding of gameplay, but there are lot of story trailers which don't even get that far.
When making a video game story trailer, check your script to see how much of it corresponds to the actual game people will be playing, versus the backstory and lore of what happened before the player character showed up. The problem with a backstory focused voiceover is there're often few (if any) visuals from the game to match to it because the events described happened in the past, and game likely takes place in the present. This is precisely the problem this Redfall Story Trailer tries to tackle, but it’s not terribly compelling because since none of the actions in the past can be filmed in the present, it’s all slow camera moves through the environment or looking at characters.
This is why oftentimes lore dump trailers rely on cutscenes, or motion graphics to fill the space. For example, this trailer for Mineko’s Night Market which is actually labeled “Lore Trailer.” I think that is a great way to do it, because it’s very specific about what the trailer shows. This is a problem because the trailer is for a game, not a motion comic, animated show, or movie. Backstory and lore dumps can just feel like another way to either stall, or play coy with the gameplay which might not look or sound as cool. Take a look at this trailer for Celestial Tear: Demon's Revenge.
Again, about 45 seconds of talking and backstory before showing any gameplay, and even then, the text describing the gameplay is poorly positioned on the bottom of the screen where the YouTube play controls will block it. As a side note, it sounds like they got the narrator who does "Honest Trailers" which at this point is probably more likely to make people NOT take your trailer seriously since the voice is more associated with humor and comedy now.
This all might sound a bitter pill to swallow for people who spent a lot of time on their game's backstory and history, but the trailer is not the place to show it off. Again, people want to know who they play, what they do in the game, and how they affect the story. Even in games with tons and tons of lore, it's usually completely optional in the form of books, item descriptions, audio logs, etc. The premise of the world has to be really really interesting and unique for it to be strong enough to hold attention in a game trailer people are watching just to find out what genre of game it is. And even if the premise is unique, it's probably better to just see it through gameplay.
For a great in-depth analysis of lore, this is a massive essay by game designer and writer Doc Burford called “lore is a trap and will kill your story if you let it. So what can we do about it?” In it, he describes story as the steak, and lore as the salt. You still need the salt to give flavor to the steak, but if you eat salt in equal amounts of steak, you will die. An example he gives is that people only read the Simarillion AFTER reading Lord of the Rings because after reading that STORY they wanted to fill in the blanks with lore.
This is me shouting out to the world, don't dump your lore on us in your game's story trailer. If we like the game's active story, plot, and characters, we might want to know more about how it came to be. But front loading the trailer with that information is like selling us a flavor before we've had a taste of the food. Actually, it's more like describing how the food got to your plate when we have no context for what sort of food it is.
