This is the rain in question. What do you think?Gif: Game Informer / Capcom / Kotaku
First, there was Spider-Man’s infamous Puddlegate. Then there were the not-so-watery streets of Cyberpunk 2077. Now it seems video game fans’ next watery, pre-release controversy involves the heavy rain seen in some early gameplay of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Some think it looks as bad as the awful-looking rain the GTA Trilogy remasters. Others are convinced it’s just video compression. And remember: None of them have actually played the game yet.
Rumored for some time, Resident Evil 4 was officially announced by Capcom back in June 2022. This new remake will update the game’s controls and combat, while keeping the same basic story and characters. Once again players will play as Leon as he travels to a rural part of Western Europe to save the President’s daughter and gets caught up in a whole lotta campy, horrific shenanigans. But based on newly released gameplay by Game Informer, some Resident Evil fans seem to think Leon’s biggest threat won’t be giant monsters or infected villagers, but lackluster rain.
Across Reddit and Twitter, you can find many players who think the in-game rain looks awful in the upcoming remake. While I’m not sure who was the first person to share these concerns online, they’ve quickly spread around the community. Some have even suggested the rain looks as bad as the infamously horrendous rain seen in the critically thrashed Grand Theft Auto Trilogy: Definitive Edition. That rain was so bad looking that it made the game nearly unplayable during storms and was eventually improved by the devs via a post-release patch.
Anyway, here’s the remade RE4’s rain that’s causing such a kerfuffle:
Capcom / Game Informer
I’ll fully admit that I watched this footage twice when Game Informer first posted the video and didn’t think anything of the rain. But even in the comments on YouTube, you can find people worried about how intense and distracting it is.
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Kotaku has contacted Capcom about the weather in the upcoming remake.
Others think people are being too nitpicky and suggest that the real problem isn’t the rain but YouTube’s awful video compression. I’m inclined to think YouTube’s compression is definitely not helping this rain look good, but I can also see how some might find the large and distinct white drops of water to be too much.
Of course, this being the internet and gamers, some people are going too far and suggesting the devs are lazy or that this is a sign the entire game will be a giant, rushed “cash grab.” That is completely silly and asinine. Remember: None of us have played the game, which isn’t even finished yet.
Resident Evil 4 is due out March 24, 2023 on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Maybe it should include a rain intensity slider.
Leon can, in fact, block Chainsaw Man (Capcom edition)‘s overhead. Sadly, it comes at a price.Screenshot: Capcom / Kotaku
In a new Game Informer cover story, Capcom detailed some of the changes that the hotly anticipated remake of Resident Evil 4 is making to the original, hugely influential horror game.
One of the major changes coming to the RE4 remake revolves around how Ashley Graham (not the supermodel) works in scenes when protagonist Leon S. Kennedy must escort and protect her. In the original RE4, players had to keep a watchful eye over Ashley’s health bar and ensure enemies didn’t carry her away. Ashley desperately, and frequently, screams out Leon’s name the instant players fail to do any of the aforementioned tasks.
In the remake, Ashley no longer has a health bar. Should President Graham’s Dumbo-eared daughter take too much damage while Leon attempts to escort her safely away from Las Plagas, she’ll enter a downed state and need to be revived, IGN reports.
According to a Capcom representative, this change to Ashley’s gameplay mechanic was made to make her “feel more like a natural companion and less like a second health bar to babysit.”
Read More:All The Changes We Spotted In The New Resident Evil 4 Remake Trailers
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Another change coming to RE4’sremake is weapon durability, specifically for Leon’s combat knife. As seen at the end of last October’s extendedgameplay trailer, Leon’s trusty knife being capable of parrying a chainsaw comes at a hefty cost. Instead of toting around “ol’ reliable” throughout the entirety of the RE4 remake to open wooden boxes, chip away at zombies, and conserve ammo, Leon’s knife will deteriorate over time, but players can have multiple knives in their inventory, which still takes the form of Leon’s iconic attache case.
Read More:Someone Finally Made The Inventory Briefcase From Resident Evil 4 A Puzzle Game
Side-quests are also making their way to the RE4 remake. According to IGN, blue flyers scattered about the game let you acquire optional tasks you can complete as side-quests. Lastly, the Game Informer cover story mentions that quick-time events, a frequent element of the original RE4, have effectively been removed, though this aspect of the remake had been mentioned in earlier interviews as well.
“I’d say there are ‘barely any’ QTEs. Different people have different definitions of what a QTE is, so while I can’t tell you that there aren’t any at all, I can say that there aren’t prompts to press buttons mid-cutscene,” producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi told IGN in a prior interview.
Resident Evil 4 (Remake)is slated to release on March 24 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S.
Feeling excited, I wait for my PlayStation 5 to flicker on so I can go somewhere I haven’t before, the USG Ishimura, splattered with fresh blood by Motive Studio for its Dead Space remake, released January 27. The mining ship has always been the gray spinal cord to trigger-happy horror Dead Space, originally released in 2008 and made by the since-shuttered Visceral Games, and I’ve gleaned as a newbie (I was 10 in 2008) that it’s one of the best horror games of all time. But after I see the ship—and the atrocities that populate it, indicated by graffiti (“Fuck this ship, it’s a shitty capitalist organization,” one on-the-nose scrawl says) and hallways sticky with organic goo—I wonder if that’s still the case.
The USG Ishimuraitself, at least, lives up to my expectations. As engineer Isaac Clarke, a formerly non-speaking character now imbued with Dead Space 2 and 3 actor Gunner Wright’s cool voice of reason, I crash-land onto it along with my bickering crewmates, including Chief Security Officer Hammond and computer specialist Kendra Daniels. I’m immediately impressed by the ship’s engulfing shadows, the only extra dimension, really, to the lightless spine I spend around 16 hours running across and around.
It’s glued together by a speedy tram system, which was cut up by loading screens in the original game, but, in this Dead Space, travels smoothly without interruption. Though I often press my controller’s right stick to prompt a glowing blue line to guide me to my next location, the tram system makes Ishimura’s smallness obvious and more suffocating. This feeling doubles when I re-enter an area I was recently in, not thinking about the bodies I already wasted until noticing, there they are, still piled up.
Fuck this ship, it’s a shitty capitalist organization.Screenshot: Motive Studio / Kotaku
Those bodies, with their taut, twisted skin, lumpy intestines poking through—like when you stick your thumb into an orange to break it open—belong to Isaac’s main opponent, the necromorphs.
The remake adds rooms you can access with an added security clearance system (you earn Level 1, 2, and 3 clearance naturally as you progress through the game), which sustains exploration even after Ishimura’s halls become familiar, and optional side quests for added context and background on characters. But, other than that, Dead Space 2023 doesn’t build on Dead Space 2008’s unconvincing story of crazed Unitologist cult members infecting people with their Red Marker in their quest for ascension, and so necromorphs continue to be yowling, sour victims of the Marker, and you need to hack their limbs off.
There are options for how you’d like to accomplish this. Maybe you prefer the Plasma Cutter, Pulse Rifle, or the Ripper, which shoots saw blades. I’ve become attached to the Force Gun, a Dead Space 2 acquisition, which uses the game’s gravity manipulation module, Kinesis, to blast away necromorphs until they become piles of rattled bones.
I do that a lot. I blast away babies with tendrils unfurling from their back while they spit some green acid at my Isaac, who ejects a low groan or a gravelly scream in response. I can hear his pulse racing when he’s quiet.
I blast away necromorphs that look like overgrown bats and necromorphs that look like praying mantises while a “boss” necromorph lumbers toward me like an intimidating, headless bear. I pause it with Stasis, another gravity manipulation that you can recharge to put enemies in slow-mo—it goes down disappointingly easily with a few hits to the yellow pustules around its joints.
I start associating my disappointment with these fluid-filled bulbs. I’m confused by what the Dead Space remake chooses to keep and what it changes.
Its light and graphics get an objective improvement, the type that 15 years allow.
And this isn’t a change, but it’s also worth noting that Dead Space’s gameplay on PS5 is clean—aside from a minor irritation where starting the game back up after saving at a checkpoint immobilized Issac, so I had to close and restart the game on a few occasions— which annoyingly feels like a rarity for new releases.
I’m happy that a game runs like it’s supposed to. But Dead Space’s visual improvement isn’t as noticeable as Demon’s Soulsin 2020, and whether or not you like its tweaks and additions will come down to preference.
I might have preferred if Isaac never spoke. He was, before, an empty bowl for players to place their own fears, their anxieties—mine grew insistently the longer I spent hearing muffled moans reverberating throughout Ishimura.
In the remake, Isaac speaks, but he never gives me anything to identify with or root for. He’s following orders, and he wants to go home. Great, the same was true for nearly everyone else on Ishimura, and I’ve been mindlessly chopping them into pieces. Why should I care if Isaac, in particular, lives or dies? When he takes off his mask, I don’t even feel like I recognize him.
Hi, Isaac, who are you?Screenshot: Motive Studio / Kotaku
The game’s boss fights, as I mentioned, retain the boring, methodical process of the original. Hit the yellow boils until they pop. Move to the left if a tendril is about to hit you. Then to the right.
When I fight a boss in one of the game’s “zero gravity” environments, I use my jetpack (on loan from Dead Space 2), to help me execute a similar strategy, zooming away from tendrils and floating versions of those exploding yellow sacs while I awkwardly try to steer an Asteroid Defense System cannon into a weak point. I win. Yay. What am I fighting for again?
For love, maybe. Isaac wants to reunite with his girlfriend Nicole, a medical officer aboard the Ishimura who barely exists unless you pursue her optional side quest. But no, just as in 2008’s Dead Space, the first letters of the game’s chapter titles spell out N I C O L E I S D E A D, and love was never an option. In the game, it’s a token, something developers put in just so you’d be scared when you realized it wasn’t actually there.
It is, however, effective. I’m scared while playing Dead Space, though that feeling alternates with a droopy sense that I’m missing something, most likely the magic of 2008. I’m missing out on a PC to run those sooty, grainy graphics in someone’s dark dorm room.
15 years later, we have more compelling protagonists to choose from, and even more interesting space zombies, like those in Dead Space creator Glen Schofield’s The Callisto Protocol, which is also mired by repetitive bosses, but at least looks and sounds incredible. The Dead Space remake accomplishes what it set out to do, it makes an old game compatible for modern consoles. But that’s all it does. 2008’s lightning stays in its bottle.
Each day, I walk down the path of blue-lit internet highways, through Instagram rabbit holes to nowhere, across Wikipedia pages I don’t remember why I was scanning, my face painted a clinical white by my favorite Google question, “Do I have a UTI?”
I do not have a UTI, at least not until I Google the question again tonight, but the daily fascination and shame of being an internet explorer is perhaps why a popular Twitter thread asking users to provide their best “useless” animation knowledge was deleted by its creator. But it’s hard to kill the internet bug once you got it, and people keep sharing animation knowledge that would quench even the most insatiable god’s thirst anyway. Drink up, here’s some of the best of it.
“In Toy Story, Woody was originally supposed to look concerned after he removes Buzz Lightyear’s helmet and Buzz starts choking,” one popular tweet said. “But the model of him during the scene looked bored and unamused, which was funnier so they did that instead.” Accidental sociopathy is a good message to send to children, I think.
Similarly, apparently, in “Invader Zim this walk was supposed to be menacing but when the animation team was done with this, the staff thought Peepi was dancing so they added the music.” And in The Proud Family Movie, Oscar Proud was meant to have a slow-mo running scene, but “when the animation came back from overseas, it looked like this. The crew found it funny and kept it that way.”
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But I’m really thirsty—I need more useless animation facts. These eight tweets about Shrek certainly help.
Oh, OK, that’s a lot of facts. I think I’m ready to reintegrate into society now.
Look, everyone wants to play Spider-Man. It’s perhaps any actor’s most sought-after role behind Hamlet and The Joker. To prove yourself as a young Hollywood A-lister, you better start learning the phrase, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
One actor who would love to play Spider-Man is Tobey Maguire, an actor who has played Spider-Man four times. After playing Spider-Man throughout the 2000s, he donned the mask one more time for 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. For those counting at home, we have now said the name “Spider-Man” five times in this article.
“When they called initially, I was like, finally!” Maguire said in an interview with, ahem, Marvel. “I got the call and was immediately open about coming to do this. Not without nerves–you know, ‘What will this look like, and what will the experience be?’ But to get to show up with beautiful, talented, creative people and play together? It’s just like, ‘Yes!’ It’s fun and exciting.”
“I love these films, and I love all of the different series. If these guys called me and said, ‘Would you show up tonight to hang out and goof around?’ or ‘Would you show up to do this movie or read a scene or do a Spider-Man thing?’ It would be a ‘yes!’ Because why wouldn’t I want to do that?”
Maguire doesn’t appear on screen much these days, outside of going pure goblin mode in Babylon. Seeing as that movie didn’t do so hot; it makes sense that he’d tell Marvel that, yes, he’d love another job, especially if he has to “read a scene” or “do a Spider-Man thing” or simply hang out in the background of scenes until the other Spider-Men are ready for a hug. Fellow Spider-Man Andrew Garfield is also open to more, so we look forward to the Marvel Cinematic Universe becoming even more unwieldy, confusing, and laden with crossovers. Excelsior!
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Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft has at least two new Far Cry experiences coming down the road. One will effectively be Far Cry 7, the next mainline game in the hit first-person shooter series. The other is a standalone multiplayer spin-off and likely the company’s latest attempt to create a live-service money-maker around one of its most successful franchises.
Insider Gaming reported on Thursday that the next single-player game in the Far Cry series is internally known as Project Blackbird and that the standalone multiplayer component is internally called Project Maverick. It also says that both were originally born of a single game that was previously under the supervision of Dan Hay, the franchise’s former overseer at Ubisoft Montreal. He left Ubisoft in 2021 and is now working at Blizzard on its unannounced survival game.
While Kotaku can’t corroborate the projects’ origins, it can confirm that Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot referenced both of these games in an internal company update last week, according to sources present. Far Cry has often included both co-op and competitive multiplayer, but this would be the first time in the franchise’s history that online multiplayer was packaged into a standalone title. Kotaku can’t yet confirm exactly what it will include, or whether it will have overlap with the story campaign of Far Cry 7.
According to three current and former Ubisoft developers, however, the next mainline game in the series will be switching from its existing Dunia engine to Snowdrop, the engine used for The Division 2 and Ubisoft’s upcoming open-world Star Wars game. They considered this an improvement over the legacy engine, which originally grew out of the CryEngine belonging to Crytek, the studio behind 2004’s very first Far Cry.
Ubisoft has been trying to make a fully multiplayer Far Cry game for many years now, sources have told Kotaku. Those efforts were often either canceled or morphed into other projects, including the single-player-driven Far Cry games that were eventually released. It’s possible the current split is yet another compromise of that nature.
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But the appeal of a robust live-service Far Cry game for Ubisoft is clear. 2015’s Rainbow Six Siege continues to be a huge money maker for the publisher. Meanwhile, Far Cry 5’s arcade content creator never really took off, and Far Cry 6 lacked a competitive mode entirely. The series’ post-launch DLC has also fallen flat compared to the multi-year seasons in Assassin’s Creed.
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Ubisoft told Kotaku,“We don’t comment on rumors or speculation.”
And to finish, here’s the least likely Ubisoft game to see released in 2023, or perhaps, ever. Which is incredibly sad.
The original 2003 Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was revelatory. An exceptional game that reinvented how all third-person action games should be played, with its astonishing rewinding time mechanic, and fabulous 3D platforming. Sadly, no one else ever had the sense to copy it, and 20 years later we remain stuck in a mire of action games that endlessly kill us, rather than let us keep going. Oh, and there was that Jake Gyllenyhaal film to rub salt in the wound.
A remake was announced in 2020, with the ambitious release date of January, 2021. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen, and it was maybe for the best, given just how awful it looked in the trailer above. It was then rather optimistically delayed until just March ‘21, before they seemingly admitted to themselves that it looked like a PS3 game, and kicked it down the road. Later that year Ubisoft said it’d appear in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, then took it from Indian developers Ubisoft Mumbai and gave it to Ubisoft Montreal, before announcing yet another delay last May, without even guessing at a fiscal year.
Come last November, things looked even worse when Ubisoft cancelled all pre-orders and returned everyone’s money. Perhaps a useful lesson on why you probably shouldn’t pre-order games that don’t exist yet. The publisher insists the game isn’t cancelled, but has yet to suggest a new release date, meaning this is unlikely perhaps even in 2024.
But hey, it’ll still probably come out before Beyond Good & Evil 2.
There are few studios out there on top of their respective games like Mimimi are. From Shadow Tactics to Desperadoes 3, they’ve proven themselves the master of the modern stealth tactics game, and in 2023 they’re back with an all-new game, this time about pirates.
This is Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which is due out towards the end of the year. It won’t take long in the trailers below to see some familiar sights: the mix of real-time action combined with stealth tactics and special powers is one Mimimi have been perfecting over the past decade, and after dabbling with some magic in their last game they’re fully committed to it now.
Here’s the game’s reveal trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – Cinematic Reveal Trailer
And, more helpfully, here’s the game’s debut gameplay trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – First Gameplay Trailer
Aside from the obvious thematic shift, from one colourful era of history to another, this will all look very familiar to fans of Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes 3. Which, let’s be clear, is a very good thing. Those two games have come about as close as games can come to perfecting a genre, so Shadow Gambit will be messing with things around the edges of the Mimimi experience, not making wholesale changes.
Shadow Gambit will be out at the end of 2023 on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. And if you think I’ve been more hyperbolic than usual in talking about these games, know that I have good reason. Here’s how I wrapped up my impressions of Desperadoes 3:
I can’t speak highly enough of Desperados 3. It’s almost the perfect stealth experience, tense but not terrifying, empowering but not easy (it actually gets really tough in parts), and if this is the pedigree that Mimimi are building for themselves in this space, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
When Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden were released on new platforms last week, much was made of the fact that for the first time ever the latter was going to feature French, Italian, German and Spanish subtitles. That was great news for European fans, but the people most responsible for this achievement aren’t getting the dues they deserve.
Last week Katrina Leonoudakis, a former localization coordinator at Sega who left the company in 2022 (and now works in TV), sounded the alarm that the FIGS (French, Italian, German & Spanish) translation team she had worked with had not been fully credited for their work on the games.
Those teams were not directly employed at publishers Sega; instead they were contractors and employees at Keywords Studios, an outsourcing company that handled the games’ localisation duties. In the credits for the games only the most senior staff at Keywords, and not the actual workers responsible for the localisation, are included.
“The people left out are the translators, editors, and other localization professionals who created the French, Italian, German, and Spanish localizations of the ports of P3P and P4G”, Leonoudakis tells me. “These people were employees and/or contractors of Keywords Studios, a language service provider that SEGA of America hired to produce the FIGS localization. I was the Localization Coordinator on this title at SEGA from 2021 through my departure in July 2022; part of my job included staying in contact with the FIGS teams, answering their localization-related questions about the project and passing on any questions/concerns to the Japanese developers”.
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She says this isn’t an issue with Sega, who to their credit make “internal steps during credit creation to ensure anyone who’s touched a title is represented in the credits, even reaching out to every individual to make sure their name is spelled right”. Rather, she says the blame here lies with Keywords themselves. “Keywords has a ‘policy’ not to credit any contractors or localizers that work on a project, preferring to be credited as ‘Localization produced by Keywords Studios’, Leonoudakis says. “Unless SEGA’s producer, or Japanese developers, tell Keywords specifically that they MUST credit their contractors, they will not pass that information along.”
These are the only people credited for Persona 4 Golden’s Italian localisation, even though it took a whole team to actually translate and re-write the dialogueScreenshot: Persona 4
“I’ve been told by contractors who work at Keywords that they have been ‘forbidden to speak out about crediting’ and ‘low-key threatened’ about it”, she says. “They do sometimes credit their Project Managers, but not the contractors who actually write the text FIGS players read to play and enjoy the game. Given that Persona is an extremely dialogue and narrative-heavy game, the localization is crucial to the game experience for FIGS players.”
Keywords has not responded to a request for comment on these policies and omissions,.
Leonoudakis chose this moment to speak up because she’s fed up with what has become a pattern in the AAA games industry. “Localization teams may work on these games for months or years, often being paid very little, to zero credit”, she says. “Not only is it morally wrong, but it makes it harder for translators and localization professionals to find work later. If you can’t prove you did all the translation for a triple-A game, how can you put it on your resume?”.
This is the same argument being made across the industry, and something we’ve written about extensively. People crucial to a big video game’s release are left out of its credits all the time, for a variety of reasons, from petty power plays to administrative oversights. Whatever the excuse, the result is the same: people who have spent years of their lives working to bring you a game are missing out on the public thanks (and professional recognition) they deserve.
“Unfortunately, translators are still pretty invisible”, Leonoudakis says. “A good translation is seamless, and doesn’t read like a translation at all to the reader. This is why it’s all the more important to credit the translators, writers, and localization staff that create the localizations of games. If game developers want to profit from the regions they’re localizing their games for, the least they can do is credit the people who made all that profit possible.”
Everything about the leadup to the release of Forspoken, Square Enix’s big new open-world action RPG, has been alowkeymess. But you wouldn’t know that from the launch trailer which stays upbeat on the modern-day magical adventure by taking a bunch of words out of context and spinning them into deceitful accolades.
“This Forspoken launch trailer is kind of telling us that the game might not actually be that good and here’s how I know,” trailer editing aficionado Derek Lieu said in a TikTok video that blew up over the weekend. “The biggest red flag are these quotes which are either one word long or two words long.”
He proceeded to go through each phrase flashed on screen during it, found the original source it was from, and read the larger context aloud. In almost every instance the meaning was very different from the way the words were presented in the trailer, and not intended to be taken as unambiguous praise.
In one example, Square Enix lifted the word “Beautiful” from a December preview published over at Distractify. In context, however, the quote wasn’t saying that Forspoken was beautiful but that it had the “potential” to be a “beautiful story-driven game that will pull at your heartstrings with each new chapter.” It was, after all, a preview and not a review of the final game, though the site’s editor said she didn’t take issue with how the word was used.
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“Square Enix did ask for permission to use the quote, and we did approve,” Distractify gaming editor, Sara Belcher, told Kotaku in an email. “In our actual review, I do refer to the game as ‘beautiful’ (that was my opinion of the game’s world since the preview, which is why I didn’t personally feel the quote felt out of context). We do not charge for the use of quotes in promotional materials.”
In another example, the Final Fantasy maker quotes the word “impressive” from Game Informer. The only problem is that the word in question doesn’t even come from a hands-on preview, but from a news write-up of a gameplay trailer from a Sony State of Play. “Frey’s traversal abilities are impressive, allowing for fast movement in and out of combat, both in aerial and aquatic situations,” it reads.
To recap then, Forspoken’s newest trailer included a truncated quote of someone describing one of its older trailers. Game Informer’s actual review gave the game a 7.5 out of 10. It did not include the word impressive, instead describing main protagonist Frey’s overall adventure as “[not] without its highlights.”
Game Informer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lieu told Kotaku that the intent of the video wasn’t to claim that he thinks the game is or will be bad, but rather that the misleading framing heavily implies that Square Enix wasn’t confident enough in the game to let it stand on its own without the bogus accolades.
“They could be entirely wrong taking this approach and the game is actually good, or has merits they could be focusing on instead of looking for quotes,” he said. “So I think it says more about the people in charge of marketing the game than it does the game itself.”
Companies relying on misleading quotes from critics and review outlets is nothing new. Sometimes they remove the original context. Sometimes they just search for any source, whether it’s reputable or not, that says your game is awesome. Almost always the accolades themselves are in giant fonts while the publications they’re pulled from are too small to read unless you’re taking time to analyze them in a TikTok video like Lieu.
As a point of comparison, he also shared two Forpsoken trailers that make the game look appealing without resorting to lies. The first was a trailer for the demo released last month. The second was a recut of an existing social media trailer that was repeatedly roasted online for its Joss Whedon-style fourth-wall-breaking dialogue.
“The real problem isn’t the narration at all, it’s that they don’t lean hard enough into the tone the narration should be selling and i know that because i proved it just now to be sure,” wrote Twitter user spellbang who took the same ingredients but remixed them in a way that looked much cooler while retaining the sensibility of the original.
The artistry behind making a good video game trailer aside, lying is bad and companies shouldn’t do that. It’s bad enough when a trailer full of pre-baked footage masks, say, how poorly a game actually runs. It’s even worse, though, when companies go out of their way to try and rope independent media outlets into their deceit. Publishers are supposed to get permission before using other people’s quotes in their marketing, and to be transparent about how they will be used.
Square Enixdid not immediately respond to requests for comment.