A tale of two trailers: Why Ubisoft's game trailer for The Division works, but the one for The Crew doesn't

LOS ANGELES — Ubisoft showed two game trailers back-to-back at its press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) tradeshow today. Both were well produced and tried to evoke emotion. In my opinion, one worked, and one didn’t. The contrast shows why there’s an art to creating trailers for a game that can either turn players off or get them excited.

The trailer for The Division started out with the wail of a woman, seemingly weeping for a lost child. A pandemic has spread through society via a plague that was carried by … money. The germ-infected currency kills off a lot of people and starts the apocalypse, which brings out secret agents who are tasked with restoring order. The trailer is edited so that it shows in just a couple of minutes how quickly society falls apart. The wailing of the woman and the subsequent weeping of a man who kills himself make the scene emotional, even though the images of either the woman, the man, and many others are not shown.