Edit: OF COURSE the post above me would be above me after I've written this. *heh*





Previews have always been a weird thing, because as many people have pointed out over time, it is very easy to have them end up sounding like little more than sales pitches.



I won't sit here and say that EGM doesn't do standard previews at timeswe dobut we also try to do some different things, either through what I've tried to enact or what we've come up with as a team to do.



A few examples.



Print

One of the things I tried to do when I took over was move us away from doing "standard" previews. For our bigger previews, we have to talk to members of the development team, and instead of just going in asking what the game's about or what it's going to be, we try to instead focus on the story of the game's creation, the reason the team are doing what they're doing, and so on. For example, with my Saints Row IV preview, I focused on what custom characters meant to the game, why they were doing the things they were doing in terms of player empowerment, what the ramifications of their decisions in SRIV might mean for a future game, etc.



Obviously, at some point, you're still relying on what a person making the game tells youand they could be feeding you a bunch of BS, fake promises, whatever. I think, though, if you try to focus on elements of the gamenot just a "what is this game approach"and try to get to the more human/development/process side of those elements, you can do some interesting things. One example, back when it was being put together, was that I wanted to do a preview on The King of Fighters XII that focused on nothing but how they were making the sprites. I think if people want to know what KOFXII is about, they could find that anywhere, so going much deeper into previewing key aspects of a game can get you to something nobody else is covering.



Does it always work? No, but I'd like to think our big previews in print are more interesting as a result. Then, we give each main editor their own page where they can pick a few games they're looking forward to and do little write-ups on what the game is and why they're interested. Again, bring in a more personal element, this time being things we're honestly excited for and why.



Online

As much as possible, we like to do DoubleTakes, where is where two editors go back and forth on a game they've had hands-on time with. This lets us offer up two different viewpoints on the same game, and lets us give honest opinions, excitement, or concerns about how the game is at that point.



E3

For the last two years, any and all previews we did at the show were basically "here's what we played, here's the basic idea, here's our real opinion of what we thought". We gave everything a rating between four choices: Awesome, Solid, Boring, Barf. (These were a take on some E3 stuff EGM previously did in the past.)





Again, I'm not saying we're geniuses or anything, that we're doing everything right, or whatever. I do think that, if you can break out of the mentality that a preview should be a rundown of what you played and some middle-of-the-road commentary on it.



Of course, it can be really tough to do that across the board. Companies, for understandable reasons, get very protective of showing off or talking about games when they're early. And if you're playing something where it's obvious that something is early, is it fair to call that out in a preview? But if you overlook it, is that right?



And, as others have pointed out in this thread, let's also be fair about something else: people like previews. People like hearing moment-by-moment accounts of what someone saw in a game, because it gives a mental picture of what playing will be like to those who haven't been able to go hands-on yet. People like factoids, even if it's exactly what you could get from a press release.



People like information, in any and all forms. For those concerned with the quality and content of games writing, there are clear and obvious problems with the default way of doing previews, and we should strive to try new things and hope to make our previews better. At the same time, we shouldn't just rally to rid ourselves of previews completely, because then we're denying that content from the readers who do like them.