Trailer Watch – GTA V, Beyond: Two Souls and The Bureau

Every now and then I take a few hours of my time and spend it watching trailers for games. Some trailers are just awesome; others are awful but in this regular column I’ll guide you through some of the best, most interesting or worst trailers I’ve seen in the past week.

First up, the newest trailer from Quantic Dream for their game Beyond: Two Souls.

Quantic Dream (and in particular their head, David Cage) are always trying to push game narrative into new territory. 2010’s Heavy Rain was an enjoyable but flawed experience that sucked me in with its storytelling only to push me away with sometimes lackluster game-play. That being said, I cannot wait to see what this game has in store. Cage has already said publicly that he expects the game to last around ten hours for most people, which seems to be a good length to tell a long-form story (ten hours being how long each season of Game of Thrones lasts and, incidentally, how long the first season of the Following SHOULD have lasted.)

It seems as though Heavy Rain was just the beginning for this studio though, Hollywood stars are taking lead roles in this game and the trailer above was previewed at the Tribeca Film Festival. If the future of gaming lies in the story then this game is going to be one to keep an eye on.

Moving on from Beyond: Two Souls is an unusual case. Last year the XCOM franchise, long thought to be deader than a Norwegian Blue was resurrected by Firaxis Games (best known for making anything with Sid Meier’s name in front of it) with the astoundingly good Enemy Unknown. Now, 2K Marin (Bioshock 2) are having a go at the same franchise with The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

While Firaxis’ game was set in the near future, 2K have gone in a very different direction. XCOM is getting a prequel – we don’t know a lot about it considering it’s alleged August release date but what we do know is that it’s going to be dramatically different. Firstly it’s a shooter, a “tactical” shooter allegedly but I’ll wait for actual game-play footage before I remove the speech-marks. Secondly it’s set around 60 years before last years XCOM game, which isn’t a bad thing – if nothing else they won’t be easily confused.

I like the idea that XCOM has become a subtitle; The Bureau just feels like the correct name for it in the early sixties. I’m also glad of the era shift – nothing would be worse than seeing a shooter re-tread of one of the finest strategy games of this century and ruining it.

My real trepidation is that the two companies aren’t talking. If we’re going to have two XCOM franchises going at once, I hope there is at least an element of narrative consistency. I’m skeptical about this game but at the same time, that trailer was really good.

Lastly, Grand Theft Auto V. You’ve heard of it right? It’s out in September. My relationship with GTA IV was strained at best. The difficulty felt uneven, the shooting felt awful and although I love games with a good story, I find Rockstar tend to sit in an uncomfortable middle ground between realism and lunacy. The game it wanted to be did not match the story it wanted to tell and I found that dissonance quite jarring.

You’ll appreciate then, that I was not exactly hopping in my seat about GTA V. The previous game was such a success both critically and commercially that there was no way that cognitive dissonance could be resolved. Then, this week they released character trailers. I won’t describe the characters endlessly, watch and enjoy. (FYI: This video is a combination of all three character trailers – the pre-order info appears at the end of each section of the video)