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Vendetta Online trailer now on Apple.com!

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Oct 23, 2009 incarnate link
http://www.apple.com/games/trailers/vendettaonline/

As far as I can tell, we're the first HD game trailer posted there.

They kinda punched up the brightness a bit too far, I think, but it looks pretty good.
Oct 23, 2009 genka link
looks sweet!
Oct 23, 2009 CrazySpence link
Nice.

There are a lot of newbs fartin around these days when I'm on in the morning. These ones however seem to be more fun and like being shot at.
Oct 23, 2009 peytros link
fanty and mingo are going to be famous
Oct 23, 2009 missioncreek2 link
How powerful a mac does it take to look this good?
Oct 23, 2009 Phish link
Better than mine.
Oct 23, 2009 incarnate link
It should look like that on any of the Intel macs with a "real" video chip (GeForce something something, not a GMA950 mini or macbook or whatever). I shot all that video on my circa-2005 PC.
Oct 24, 2009 CrazySpence link
my iMac looks better than the video
Oct 24, 2009 ShankTank link
Haha, mine looks just about the same. The page looks great!
Oct 24, 2009 Thanquol link
Site looks awesome, need to watch the trailer when I get home. Work PCs and all :( Hopefully this will generate more players.
Oct 24, 2009 blood.thirsty link
http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2004/10/vendettaonline/

Hey anyone knows where i can play this game it really sounds great!!

Though they say nothing about what the roids look like in it.. Major flaw in the article i guess

Anyway, bleed well

: )
Oct 25, 2009 LeberMac link
Looks really good, Incarnate - however you should never space-out (kern-out) Eurostile font in lowercase like you did. It's just a designer thing.

Are there a bunch of new players coming around because of this?
Oct 25, 2009 ArAsH link
hmm, sorry, just watched it but didn't like it. It's clean and all, but it misses depth and exitement. VO is a lot more emotionally than that, maybe try to get that in it.

Make a good storyboard and work that out. This looks like a "god i have one more day and i gotta make this deadline" kinda thing.
Oct 26, 2009 moldyman link
I have to agree. To be very honest, Ghost's trailer did a better job of capturing the essence of the game, despite it's very obvious slant and use of Starship Trooper's music.

Good job on getting an HD trailer on apple.com though!
Oct 26, 2009 incarnate link
Everyone arriving a month late to the trailer content discussion should see my comments made previously. Let's just hope it brings in some new people. That is the point of marketing.
Oct 26, 2009 incarnate link
It is in large part the eye candy that makes anyone show up in the first place. Some of them will zone out, others will wait until they experience the stuff they saw.

Story-driven trailers are nice and all, but they take drastically more time, especially to shoot in such a way that the same eye candy is demonstrated in the same runtime length.

I'll be happy if this brings in some people, which is the point. I did what I could with the time that I had.

And, I disagree, leebs. I think using kerned-out eurostile is better looking. The guys from Apple specifically commented that they liked the way it looked in the end card. And I'd call them pretty design-conscious.
Oct 26, 2009 Dr. Lecter link
[edit]Know what, everyone should go to Hell in their own good way.[/edit]
Oct 26, 2009 incarnate link
Yes Lecter, I get that. So what? I'm trying to attract people to the game, everything I mention in the trailer is actually there, but the game certainly has flaws in progression and so forth.

Exactly what sort of alternative do you propose that would both attract people to the game, but meet your standards of.. initial gameplay experience? Or whatever it is you're complaining about?
Oct 27, 2009 Professor Chaos link
I think Lecter is right about what is missing from the game, but wrong to complain about it. So far I and (I think) most people here have learned to trust you devs and where this game is going, and I think that if many do say "where's the cream filling?", they will, like I did/am, come back from time to time to see how the cream filling is coming along.
Oct 27, 2009 incarnate link
(in response to lecters ongoing innumerable edits)..

The point of a trailer is to show the best parts of a given product, with the hopes of attracting the consumer's attention enough to try said product. Trailers are usually composed of the best parts of the product (movie, game, whatever) for this reason.

Aside from this, any given trailer (particularly on apple.com) has to last us a long time. We don't have the time or opportunity to edit it or create new ones, and just getting it approved and uploaded to Apple's site was a huge pain in the ass (taking over a month). So it has to be worthwhile and representative, not just now, but going forward for the next 6, 12, even 24 months.

The MMO market is now very competitive. Getting anyone to pay attention to your game is now considerably more difficult. Even the Mac has WoW and EVE, but the PC (the trailer not being platform-specific) is far more densely packed, with new products coming out every few weeks.

Getting someone to try the game, and decide they don't like it, is a win for us. That may not seem logical, but compared to the relative difficulty of getting anyone to try anything now, it's worthwhile. Plus, there's the chance that they'll check back in the future, that they'll read our mailing list newsletters, and so on.

Getting any increase in people trying the game is an immediate win, not just in some sort of long-term strategic success, but literally something that makes it more likely that we'll stay in business long enough to make the game better. I don't talk about our various corporate excitement, and we're not as trivially tiny as some people are wont to pessimistically state, but it's tough for us to be here. It's never been easy, and a lot of my thinking (unfortunately) is based on making sure we're here next month.

So, again, I'm just fine with people coming in and being disappointed.. they'll be no more so from the trailer than they would have been from our screenshots and game description text. It is what it is, an imperfect game, a work in progress, but all the stuff in the trailer is in the game, and it has some bright spots. If those spots are enough to bring in some people, we'll continue to have the same turnover rate as we always have, but with the benefit of increased audience scale.

As mentioned earlier, the game is easier to change than the trailer. We all know the various issues that plague the game.
We do the best that we can with them, and the situations that we have to deal with, and if we're still here at all and improving the game in some visible way, then that is success. Existence is success. And it may seem strange, but I'm quite proud of the fact that we're here; although I'm sad that I've had to spend so much more energy on making that happen, than I've ever been able to apply to game design. Some day I'll write a book or lengthy blog post about our journey, and describe the past shitty year, but not at this time.

I get irritated ("prissy?") at you, Lecter, because you say a lot of abrasive invective crap like "I'm saying that it was a story-driven trailer for something with less plot and interactive content than Quake.", which is not true (I've played through Quake 1, 2, and 3), and you say it mostly for the purpose of effect. I don't go "this guy has no idea how hard it is to make missions".. I say "this guy has no goddamn clue how amazing it is we're an existent entity improving this game, and that I managed to get any trailer posted to Apple's site at all". From where I'm sitting in the mud, I'm grateful for any win I can possibly pull off. You guys are viewing from a different place and can be more critical, which is fine, but you don't have to be an ass about it.