Will Star Wars Battlefront actually look as good as that trailer?

Last week DICE and EA released a trailer for the latest Star Wars Battlefront game, smartly (and obviously) timed to cash in on the yearly 'Celebration' event and accompanying Episode VII hype. Predictably, it worked as intended, causing a lot of people to get very excited indeed about the possibility of a new Battlefront, and an utterly beautiful one at that.

In fairness, it does look great, what with all that foliage and Hoth and Boba Fett flying around and waves of Stormtroopers and perfectly-composed CHICKEN WALKERS. The problem, as ever, is that the game will probably not look anything like that, nor probably play like it. (There doesn't appear to be a single instance of spawncamping, prone-diving, or noob-tubing in the entire thing, and everyone isn't always running for vehicles.)

All bonfire-pissing aside, Battlefront is being developed for new-gen and PC. The latter could potentially hit (some of) the heights shown in trailer, or at least get close. The Xbox One, on the other hand, currently struggles to run anything above 900p. I mean, it's a console that couldn't even get backgrounds running on its dashboard for years. How can anyone think it is capable of that?

By now you're probably racing to the comments, screaming something regarding the trailer's claims about it being 'game engine footage'. EA also doesn't specify in the trailer which platform said footage is from. But every time I see marketing like this it makes me roll my eyes so hard they look like nav balls from an eight-year-old's attempt to recreate Apollo 13 in Kerbal Space Program. DICE has an exceptional pedigree when it comes to visuals, and may well achieve some of the goals set forth here, in what appears at best to be target footage. But it's still hard to get behind it as a concept, because if it doesn't look as good as what's been shown, there will be a backlash.

In fact, there may already be one brewing, with commenters decrying it as misrepresentative. The 'game-engine footage' stuff may at first glance appear to be a boast, but it actually works to cover EA as well. It's a tactic that the firm has used before, hyping next-gen editions of Need for Speed and Madden on PS3 with 'target renders' that were so laughably far from reality that people still talk about them now. But some will still think that Battlefront actually looks this good, including those in the much-vaunted real life, and it all seems rather disingenuous.

The counter argument is that these reveals are meant to sum up the mood and themes of the game more so than the actual, final look, and that assets and the like are still being worked on. Both of these things are true – although you could sum up the mood and themes of Star Wars by printing 'Hoth', 'Endor', and 'John Williams music' on a black background – but the Battlefront trailer is so obviously built to appear to be as in-game as possible it can't help but stick in the craw.

More so than other reveal trailers, like this one for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is directed in such a way that it's fairly obvious it's more about mood, and probably not representative of the level of graphical fidelity you'll be seeing should you buy the game. (CGI trailers of all stripes are still a bit weak, however.)

Reveal trailers such as this one aren't uncommon, nor are they new. Using higher-res, higher quality images to sell games has been a staple of the industry since the Spectrum days. Things came to a head with the infamous Killzone 2 trailer that debuted at E3 2005, and adverts for Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 2: Big Red One in 2006 which were so misleading the Advertising Standards Agency smacked them down.

For its part, DICE seems confident it will deliver: the lead level designer recently stated on Twitter "Yes, that is actually what the game looks like". If that's the case, though, why aren't we seeing the actual game, and not a choreographed trailer from (the rather woolly-sounding) 'game engine footage'? A build was shown at the event, so why not to everyone? And if it does look that good in reality, why is DICE executive producer Patrick Bach saying, while noting DICE doesn't "want to trick anyone", that some of the elements in the trailer are "cinematic things we're doing that [are] hard to play?"

If Battlefront does, in fact, end up looking that good, then this whole thing will mostly be forgotten. If it doesn't look like that, however, then expect people to be as annoyed as they were initially excited. Again.