Some good thoughts here for promoting, I think trailers and such definitely help. I think there are probably two different approaches that could be taken with how we advertise the game that sets it apart a little from your everyday "CoD" game and could be attractive to people and worth showing off a bit extra in trailers:
1) It's very creatively free and unlimited in gameplay styles for an FPS, not only in that the maps are huge and open to free roam on most servers (and still quite beautiful by todays graphics standards!), but also the player movement with trick jumps and the more parkour-ish approach to things. I think some cool fight sequences incorporating things like wall jumps with mid-air kills etc could look very interesting for people coming from more limited movement games, a bit like a Jedi approach or those old kung fu movies where everyones flying :D
2) Also, it's pretty hardcore. It's not just first bullet hits wins, you really have to wear down the nanosuit armor which means development of the ability to land as many bullets as possible in the shortest time, something you don't see much in other games and reasons why Crysis 2 and 3 were purposely "dumbed down" to be more like CoD because many found Crysis 1 too difficult and frustrating. This could be used as a marketing approach to where "if you really want to hone your FPS skills to the max, this is where it's at" sort of.
But anyway, however it's marketed, I think it's also very important to think about how new players are recieved once they connect. Youda brings this problem to attention a bit in his post above, and I don't think tutorials will do much by themselves without a friendly bunch of people in-game that can point the beginner to the tutorial and also offer some live help as well. Sadly a lot of self-proclaimed "pro" players will probably remember me with some annoyance because I always tried to run the MooseNest server in a beginner friendly fashion, and I would try to tell the better people to try to go easy and be helpful to the newcomers (usually with very little success).
The thing is, a big aspect of why people find a game enjoyable is that they can have a certain rate of success and get to feel good inside when they accomplish something (such as killing an opponent), this is pretty simple psychology as everybody just wants to have fun. If they on the other hand connect to a server where everybody else have been playing for many years and they get killed over and over without managing to ever win a fight, and without anybody explaining HOW to get better and being welcoming and friendly towards them, all they will feel is frustration and anger and they will never come back to the game after that first sour bite.
The standard case I observed on my server many, many times over was beginners would read "Beginner/Fun server" in the list, connect and come into a game with experienced people like wootz, quartz, plow etc and at first the hopelessly out-skilled beginner would be very friendly and humbly mock their own failures as they couldn't get any kills, usually with no conversation back from the "pros" as they are only interested in killing. Then at about 0:10 or so score, they would start becoming very frustrated and at 0:20 (or 1:20 if they were lucky) they'd start calling people cheaters in pure frustration. At this point, all these "pro" players would go into their typical "ahahahahahahaha"-mode and start insulting and mocking the beginner for calling them cheaters (instead of actually taking the time to explain how they kill so easily), eventually even getting great pleasure from making the beginner rage quit. And this was on a server that was supposed to, and very publically announced to, be focused on helping beginners into the game and be a fun soft place for them to land and slowly learn the game on.
As long as this is the attitude that beginners are met with in Crysis, it's not going to matter how the game is promoted because people will only visit once and then never come back as that visit only results in extreme frustration for them. Things might be better today than before GameSpy shut down, who knows, but I know from experience that the argument that "if they just stay and play they will become equally good" doesn't really work practically - because they absolutely will NOT stay in a game that never rewards them with any good feelings of success and where people are not being warm and helpful to them but rather only rude and mocking. They will go to another game where they can get easier kills and feel better about themselves and for every lost beginner, the game dies a little bit more.
Anyway, I will go back to running my server as a "Fun/Beginner" server and try as best as I can to introduce newcomers into the game, but I think this is something that's important to think about across the board of all servers, that we try to make newcomers feel as included and helped as possible to become a part of this game, and not just mocked for their cries of frustration like it usually was before.
I don't think this would be a big deal if it was 10 beginners on every pro player because then the beginners would feel a sense of togetherness and support from eachother, but sadly today we are at a point where there may be 1 beginner on every 10 people who have played for 5+ years and that's going to be hard on anybody who plays for their first time today, they are going to feel very alone in their uselessness and need extra support if they are going to want to stay. But like I said maybe this is better today, I just know it was a big problem for attracting new people when I last played around the time of the GameSpy shutdown and likely a big reason why there wasn't even more players around before the game "died".
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