Those are exceptionally well done. My problem is that the mood and tone of the videos doesn't seem to be that of the game. I actually wish the emotional impact and tone of these promo pieces was prevalent in the actual game.
I was just thinking about that earlier, when I first saw these. I'm not too crazy about them, but they're rather all right. However, I really,
really wish that Microsoft would stop advertising their games with basically misleading campaigns. I guess it all started with the success of the Mad World ad that everyone vent gaga over, and it continued with the Halo 3's Believe campaign. Halo 5 was the worst offender so far. Not only was there the Hunt the Truth series (which was otherwise wonderful, but completely unrelated to the game's actual plot and themes), but the whole campaign was emphasizing the conflict between Chief and Locke, and in the end you could feel very little of that in the actual game. Then there was the Locke armor pre-order trailer that showed Locke as this incredibly agile and explosive fighter, but that was also at odds with how he played in the game. Then the incredible introductory Team Osiris cutscene that the gameplay could never live up to, juxtaposed with the Blue Team introductory cutscene in order to demonstrate the stark difference in their approaches - but in the game they played
exactly the same, minus the Locke's barely useful scanning device. It was a master class in mismanaging expectations.
Sea of Thieves also saw a bit of that, with the E3 2016 cinematic trailer that made the game look more like a traditional adventure, and featured some things that were not really there at launch (hints at undersea mermen encounters, for instance). The Phantom Dust reboot trailer? What about ReCore and its announcement CG trailer? And even the later marketing material (including the game's cover art) that featured a Corebot that was only added to the game a year later? And now this. I love State of Decay, and it's definitely a game series that takes itself seriously, but the tone of these videos seems to be at odds with what I've experienced in the first game, and what I've seen in all the video demonstrations of the second one. I wish that Microsoft's marketing team would just stop doing that. The actual games they put out are not bad at all - I'm finding many of them great, in fact - but they build up these strangely unfitting expectations, and then people end up being disappointed.