Never Trust a Trailer/Video Games: Difference between revisions

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* Generally speaking, many developers like to take a screenshot of the game that was generated over the course of several minutes by a supercomputer and imply that it will look just as good at home with a smooth frame-rate. Such screenshots have been dubbed [[Portmanteau|Bullshots]] by [[Penny Arcade]].

* The new trailer for [[Runescape]]. It shows a warrior, an archer, and a mage having an epic duel with a villian. Once the villian has been killed, they fight off a skeletal horde followed by an intimidating skeletal dragon eating the camera. The armor the heroes wear? Not available in the game. The evil villain? Never mentioned. The skeletal horde? Not a quest. The skeletal dragon? Not an enemy.

* In [[Dragon Age]] II's "Destiny" trailer Hawke gets [[Red Eyes, Take Warning|red eyes]] before kicking the Arishock's ass. Hawke never gets red eyes at any point in the game. The trailer also made it look like the Qunari would be the main antagonists.

* [[World of Warcraft]] has had a few, mostly due to content being cut at the last minute.

** "New dances" for the players were cut from Wrath, yet still played in the early advertisements.

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** You can't even trust the back of the box, in terms of the collector's edition, which also gears you up to save Earth from an alien invasion.

** ''Halo 3'' seemed to be going this route, but you actually did spend nearly half the game fighting the Covenant invasion on Earth and [[Genre Savvy|most fans knew]] the game would take place on the Ark in some fashion.

** Played ''gloriously'' straight with the cutscene showing opening of the Voi portal: the first ever Halo 3 trailer showed Master chief looking at the structure from a cliff, while a huge Covenant fleet flies over his head and moves into position around it as the gateway fires up. If the actual game, the same scene is re-enacted with Master Chief looking from the cliff, while a ''human'' bomber wing flies to blast the hell out of the Prophet's ship as Lord Hood calls in an attack with several starships' MAC guns... [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|awesome]]!

* In the trailers for the video game ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' they have a scene were the player has to outrun a crushing ceiling with spikes next to a pit full of flames. This scene does not actually appear in the game. There is a third-party add in, however, that does include it as a separate game from the regular game of Portal. It's a level add-on called ''Portal: The Flash Game Map Pack for Portal'', available from http://wecreatestuff.com

** Please see [[Descending Ceiling]] for another fan-made pack that includes this in its entirety (''with spikes'').

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* Trailers for the second episode of ''[[Tales of Monkey Island]]'', ''Siege of Spinner Cay'', explicitly show a scene with Elaine commenting on Guybrush's clearly infected hand. This is only half-true: she ''does'' comment on Guybrush's hand, but {{spoiler|she's commenting on his complete and total '''lack''' of a hand, as he instead has a hook there - the hand gets chopped off in the first two minutes of play. Presumably Telltale deliberately lied to keep this twist as a shock}}.

* Trailers for ''[[World in Conflict]]'' show Pine Valley, Washington DC, and some random airbase getting nuked. Looking at the aftermath of one of said nukes a nurse states "We're seeing the same situation all over the West coast." The truth is {{spoiler|that only one nuke is used throughout the entire game, in Cascade Falls, launched by the Americans, Pine Valley gets retaken (somewhat) intact, the Russians never nuke Washington DC and in fact never move past the Washington state border.}}

* ''[[Modern Warfare|Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2]]'' has a bit of this. Quite a few qoutes from the Infamy Trailer are never heard in the game(Too bad, considering how cool they are) and while Makarov is focused on the trailor, he has very little face time in the actual game("No Russian" being the most).

* The ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series has several examples

** ''[[Final Fantasy VI|Final Fantasy VI / III]]'': A [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb4Nxhss-3c claymation ad from the 90s] had Mog as a casting director interviewing monsters auditioning and getting zapped (and implicitly rejected) by an increasingly frustrated Mog. Most of the monsters are in the game (although the ghost is actually a temporary party member), and while Mog can learn lightning spells, it's not really his signature move.

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*** A lot of small scenes in the trailer are in the game but don't go the way they appear: Thane's debut is close but is much more cinematic in the trailer, and Grunt never kills a Thresher from inside its mouth.

*** The Illusive Man's holographic/haptic displays are extremely detailed, but in-game, none of these displays ever shows actual information and act as placeholders so the characters have computer screens to look at.

*** Finally, the trailer shows Shepard tackling Horizon with Thane and Grunt. While it originally would have been possible to do this, the final game doesn't let you recruit Thane before Horizon.

* One of the trailers for ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'' showed Shepard manning a turret on a Geth craft to shoot down a Reaper Destroyer. This plays out a bit differently in-game: {{spoiler|Shepard jumps off the hovercraft, grabs a targeting laser, and goes head to head with the Reaper}}.

* ''[[Haze]]'', we were told of Shane being born in an anarchist hell where one of the highlights involve the olympics being bombed. Turns out he was living comfortably with both parents alive and was dropping out of College to join Mantel

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** ''LEGO Indiana Jones 2'''s trailer said the game featured the four Indy movies and a [[Level Editor]], and that was true, but the trailer also stated the game was for PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS, and it didn't make clear that the Nintendo DS version didn't feature the classic adventures (''Raiders'', ''Doom'' and ''Crusade'') nor the level editor.

* The [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es-L9Z4qA4U trailer] for [http://www.howardglitch.com/ Howard Glitch], which goes out of its way to introduce all of the passengers on the ship as well as the pilot, could easily be mistaken as a trailer for the [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHwmjM36WIA YouTube game] and not the project as a whole. The game itself is actually about escaping reality in the midst of a hopeless situation, and the only character you get you interact with in any path is the pilot. {{spoiler|[[Mind Screw|Only not really.]]}} However, the characters do hint at the various endings of the game.

* Subverted with ''[[Command ~~and~~ Conquer]] Generals: Zero Hour''. The box art shows an American aircraft carrier being destroyed by a [[Kill Sat|particle cannon]]. Cool? Yes. But completely implausible, as the Americans are the only ones with particle cannons in game. {{spoiler|In fact, a GLA mission has you take control of an American particle cannon and destroy it in the game.}}

* Subverted with ''[[Command & Conquer]] Generals: Zero Hour''. The box art shows an American aircraft carrier being destroyed by a [[Kill Sat|particle cannon]]. Cool? Yes. But completely implausible, as the Americans are the only ones with particle cannons in game. {{spoiler|In fact, a GLA mission has you take control of an American particle cannon and destroy it in the game.}}

* The opening cinematic in ''[[Left 4 Dead]] 2'' probably counts, as it plays out much more like a trailer than its predecessor's, showing played-up versions of scenes from the campaign. (Oddly enough, unlike the original's, it is not available on Steam's trailers section.) It features a scene in a mall with the Survivors descending an elevator into a massive flood of zombies. That elevator ''is'' in the game, but the flood of zombies is not. They're also shown getting caught in the middle of a bridge bombing; in the game, they call it off at the beginning of the chapter.

** The trailer also shows a piecemeal account of how the first campaign begins with the survivors on top of a hotel having missed the rescue, with the characters seeming to have already been travelling together with enough familiarity between them to make jokes, share supplies and so on. Yet in the game it's presented that the survivors just met, not even knowing eachothers' names, and the gradual trust and familiarity that gets built up over the campaigns was to be a major gameplay element.

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* The CGI trailer for the first ''[[Assassin's Creed (video game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' game had Altair using a crossbow to dispatch a crusader. The crossbow would not appear in the series until [[Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood|two games (or 309 years) later]].

** The launch trailer for ''[[Assassin's Creed II]]''. While none of the visual content is missing from the final game, the trailer is narrated by a much older Ezio with a rather different voice. Even after two additional games of Ezio getting older and [[Vocal Evolution]], we've yet to hear him sound anything like that.

* The "Blue Moon" trailer for [[Fallout: New Vegas]] featured a gorgeous view of New Vegas itself in the background of the scene. The city is completely illuminated, giving the impression that the game would include a completely intact pre-war setting which had survived any decay or damage from the apocalypse. In the actual game, however, only four buildings in the entire city are lit up, and the rest are in the same lack of repair as anything you would find in Fallout 3. It is revealed that the city, while surviving the nukes, went through hundreds of years without any maintenance until very recently when the casinos were fixed up and made pretty again.

* Castlevaina: Dawn of Sorrow trailer could be slightly counted as this. Most notably the area that you face one boss is changed, as well as other enemies in odd areas. It does stay away from showing any area that wasn't in the game.

* ''Blood Omen: [[Legacy of Kain]]'': [[Subverted]] in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF0ilULgn7M this] trailer. {{spoiler|The trailer makes it look like Mortanius is stabbing Kain in the back when he's actually pulling the sword out of him. [[Foreshadowing|But it turns out he's the one who arranged for him to murdered in the first place]].}}

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* Trailers for ''[[Kid Icarus: Uprising|Kid Icarus Uprising]]'' seemed to imply that the game's story could be compared to ''Zelda'' or other such series, featuring scenes such as Magnus and Gaol's confrontation. Instead the game is filled with [[Leaning on the Fourth Wall]] and [[Casual Danger Dialog]]. [[Tropes Are Not Bad|Not that that's a problem, mind you]].

** Additionally, the trailers made it look like {{spoiler|Medusa would be the game's [[Big Bad]]. Before the game is even two-fifths finished, it's revealed that [[The Man Behind the Man|Hades is the real]] [[Big Bad]].}}

*** This particular lie is continued by ''the game itself'', which even rolls credits before the revelation.

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2j2NdUFaJ8 Early trailers] for ''[[The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess|The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess]]'' featured a ton of content that was either removed or heavy altered in the final game. These include enemies, locations, scenes, and even a boss nowhere to be seen in later versions. In fact if you count aesthetic changes as well, it isn't an exaggeration to say that every scene in the first two trailers contained at least one thing not in the finished product.

* The US TV Commercial for ''[[Metroid: Other M]]'' briefly retells Samus's backstory, including a part where a younger Samus is being attacked by Ridley, implying that the game would explore the K2L incident in more detail. This doesn't show up anywhere, even scenes where it would make the most sense.

* Early Nintendo Power ads showed Wes, the protagonist of ''[[Pokémon Colosseum]]'' to be an outright villain. He's actually an [[Anti-Hero]].