Look. Let me explain something to you: Marketing is the act of telling people what your product is, and why you should buy the game.
I know how marketing works. Don't patronize me.
DmC's original trailer told us nothing. Capcom just went into TGS10, dropped the trailer, and waited.
It was an announcement trailer, nearly every trailer announcing a game is literally just telling you that it's coming at some point. Some games don't get much more than a few seconds to their announcement to flash the title. However, DmC had a trailer that showed enough to imply what it was going to be like - more grounded, with an emphatic story, in a different universe, but still the same old action where we kick demons straight in their Hershey's squirters. Not sure how you got
nothing out of all that >_>
They also...didn't "wait"? Not sure where you got that idea. They unveiled the trailer and then had Tameem Antoniades and Alex Jones (not that one) taking interviews to further inform on the direction the installment was taking. They told everyone that it wasn't in the main canon, it was telling a different origin of the character, in a city out to get you, in a world where demons infest authority. They told us that Dante was a scrapper, hence why there was key art of him all roughed up. They told us he loves to fight, and smokes in victory like a post-coital ritual. They told us Capcom came to them to develop a version of DMC that was like a western movie, with a focus on telling a story as much as the action.
There was no backstory for this particular version of Dante.
No backstory? That's sort of jumping the gun, isn't it? They told us it'd be an origin story, and gave us a few key points, but what? You expected them to just spill all the beans? Why would they emphasize the story as a key element to the game, and then tell you everything so you don't have to buy it to find out the story? I thought you understood marketing?
Nobody understood why Dante is looking like this beat up, bruised teenage has-been.
We knew that the same day the trailer dropped. It was a different Dante, and he liked getting into fights, particularly picking fights with authority that he knew were demons.
A lot of people called him the drug addict, punk Dante because he looks emo. Something from the 2000's, there was a time when being emo was popular, but by the time DmC was revealed, this boat has sailed, it's was a fad. It's a fad. Not just because of his hair, but the fact that his character model looks like he hurt himself many times.
Gotta love callin' him "emo!" It's such an easy go-to with absolutely zero basis for explanation. And what...? "the fact that his character model looks like he hurt himself many times"? You're uh...gonna need to explain that one. That's a massive, and laughable, leap in logic.
Also, like, that's massively ****ing insulting to people who suffer from instabilities that cause cutting. Please, chummer, elucidate me on what someone who hurts themself looks like.
The first image shows him in jail, with a sort of "I just logged into jail, man." People started asking questions, "What is this?" Then the trailer dropped, people got mad, ****ed off because the trailer show nothing but Dante doing what he does best: Kicking ass.
So, you say that it showed nothing but Dante kicking ass, but then you mention the other elements of the trailer...
There's a problem, though: Other scenes show a background (a sort of a jail cell, looks like a bathroom in a jail) full of splattered blood, and his mug being in jail. No story, no compelling reason why this character got this drastic change from the grey-haired sarcastic mofo with a sword... None. Okay?
How...is that no story? That's a massive set-up for a story. Those other scenes compel the interested viewer to wonder - why was Dante being tortured? Why is he so angry at the demons? What could possibly be going on in this world? Then of course, we got more information from the devs about it.
That's not how you present a new version of a beloved character. That's not how you "reboot" a character like Dante, especially when Dante didn't need to be "rebooted."
Whether he needed a reboot is a moot point, but how do you present a new version of a beloved character? There's no guidelines of what to do, you just...do it. Or, perhaps this is based off you thinking that they just dropped the trailer with no information, despite that being factually untrue. I watched and read those interviews, because I wanted to know what was up.
It's also not up to you, or even me, to decide how a character like Dante is rebooted, it's up to the developers given what they're going for.
If the original trailer had a story behind it, then I think people would react a bit receptive than they did. But the trailer did nothing. Didn't tell us anything.
It did, with enough of the hints of the story as what you'd expect from a product where the story is an important element. They aren't going to throw out everything and spoil the story. What do you want, a movie trailer from 2015 with all the best parts in it?
Whoever did this trailer was stupid.
Hahaha, no.
Didn't even understand what made Dante popular in the first place. Dante had a cool story from the minute it (DMC1) was revealed. People had no idea who Dante was, but he was cool enough to be careless, against hordes of enemies tougher than him. So, he got the reputation of a "badass."
Aaaaand in creating a brand new version in a different canon, they can't bank off of what Dante was in the classic series. How do they accentuate the character in his own rights, in his own element, if you're demanding that the character somehow constantly throwback to who he is not? They accentuated the core feature of the game - the action. The characters? The world? You'd have to wait to find out more. If you didn't care, well...that's not really their fault, everyone has their own tastes. Lots of people didn't like classic DMC, I met a lot of them in my time trying to sell it.
DmC's marketing was more misguided than malicious. Its more that they underestimated how big of deal this was. One poster on the NT forums explained it as "fans were being too sensitive but capcom/nt weren't sensitive enough".
Still the fact that DmC was a noncanon spinoff with an "unappealing" premise made it a lost cause.
The problem ends up that Ninja Theory was just doing a job, and they took far too much flak for it. I'd say they could have tried to assure people more, but like...what more could they have done that they didn't already do? We had countless interviews where they explained pretty much the same thing because there's only so much a dev can talk about at any given point; Gregaman played the hell outta DmC at every possible moment to show off how fun it was, and how much like any other DMC it was. How sensitive are they to be if they're trying to focus on this new product, instead of constantly reminding people of the past work? They didn't go out of their way to **** on the classic series or anything, but they have every right, and really, every responsibility, to push DmC. There's only so much they can do when they've got fans bawling at their feet about the classic series. What are they s'posed to do? Cancel the game halfway through its development, burn up millions of dollars in dev time? Their options are...kinda limited.
