I kinda disagree with this part, I think that it’s extremely rare that games which really break ground are well received.
I really believe that what gamers want is “a novel spin on something they love”, the fact that FTL was so unique would (under normal circumstances) work very much against it. What made FTL the success that it became revolves largely around it’s initial hype and giant kickstarter success.
It’s that initial boost that got many people to “give it a try”, and the amount of hype lead to enough coverage that it wasn’t just a weird and unknown quantity.
If you stumbled across that game and evaluated it on video/screenshot with zero hype and few reviews I really don’t think very many would give it a try.
It’s also a good, solid game, although personally, I disliked it.
I think that the more ‘unique’ a game is - the more that getting coverage is important (although obviously being a good game helps! )
Interesting. The overwhelming majority of the games I play have not very interesting gameplay that is saved by a narrative hook. Just going through my Steam library…
God Eater Resurrection, Alien Isolation, Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed II, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Assassin’s Creed Liberation, Assassin’s Creed Freedom’s Cry, Bioshock Infinite, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, Jet Set Radio, Just Cause 2, Tomb Raider 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Adventure DX, Sonic CD, Sonic Generations, Sonic 4 (Episode 1 & II), Thief, The Beginner’s Guide, Brothers a Tale of Two Sons, Day of the Tentacle, Dear Esther, Deponia Trilogy, Firewatch, J.U.L.I.A. Among the Stars, Knee Deep, Myst V, Obduction, Myst original, Riven, The Room, Scribblenauts, The Stanley Parable, A Story About My Uncle, The Swapper, Syberia, Syberia II, Toren, Waking Mars, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Celestian Tales Old North, Deus Ex, DE: Human Revolution, DE: Mankind Divided, DLC Quest, Fallout New Vegas, Mars War Logs, KotOR, KotOR 2 The Sith Lords, The Technomancer, Undertale, Space Rangers, Space Rangers 2, every visual novel ever, 35MM, The Age of Decadence, Anachronox, AC Chronicles China, Attractio, Bohemian Killing, The Descendant, Dream, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Freedom Planet, God Eater 2, Homeworld remastered, Immortal Defense, Last Word, Mark of the Ninja, The Solus Project, Soul Axiom, Submerged, Uru Complete Chronicles, Valiant Hearts, Valkyria Chronicles, The Witness.
And just to point out, I’m skipping a bunch that I bought but never pushed through because I realized they had no narrative hook or terrible enough gameplay that the narrative hook wasn’t enough to overcome it, such as the Jedi Knight series, Bioshock, Bioshock 2, System Shock 2, RWBY Grimm Eclipse, Papers Please, Jaggad Alliance 2, and plenty more.
If these (the first list) games didn’t have a narrative hook of some sort, I would never have bought them or played them. There are a few where the gameplay is good enough to hold the game up, like AC Brotherhood or Sonic Lost World or the Force Unleashed games or any Platinum game or strategy/4X/simulation games. But for most gameplay is just uninteresting. Not even always bad, just uninteresting. If I get bored when not making narrative progress, then the gameplay isn’t strong enough.
@Martin_H can you give a couple examples of the type of game (not strictly genre) and examples of scope/size you are considering? I’m not able to pin point what you are shooting for - for a game with the revival of this thread.
Imo - scope, and time willingness/dedication (how long are you willing to and able to spend on development of this one game) will greatly determine other elements.
The first thing I think of about is some impressively large 4x game - but since those types of games are usually not the ones I play I might be projecting a more complex game than your looking to create.
Something in the size/scope of Endless Space maybe? To me that seems like a extremely big undertaking - looking at it from my perspective, but doable. Like I said - those games aren’t my staple gaming diet so my view might well be skewed.
Halcyon 6 has some impressive explosions and imo could be a “right sized” scoped game.
Last Horizion seems kinda quirky, minimal with some thematic elements that could fit your idea, but I think it is probably EXTREMELY small in comparison to what you are after.
Since I enjoy character type narratives - I was thinking something along the lines of Transistor, Hyper Light Drifter is a worthy scope but going beyond that - like maybe the first XCom remake - seems extremely ambitious.
Well lets say you 1 million impressions, but only like 1% of those people click on your page. so lets say you got 10k page clicks, so if you only got 1% maybe thats only 100 sales, and if you dont got on the big board it sinks into obscurity. Now im not entirely sure if i have that right
im thinking it dont make sense to go for your magnums opus until you already got a following of people who like your games
what? I don’t even know what this thread is about…
should I care?
I would never buy a game advertised like that… lucky for them friends already played it and I got it aswel to play coop… good game actually, I crossed over from liking company of heroes to preferring men of war… but no gui shown in screen or in gameplay is really dumb and I’d have never touched it otherwise.
That one definitely is a very popular formula too.
Interesting to see how opinions can differ so much on these things. Jagged Alliance 2 I’ve played through multiple times and wouldn’t say its narrative is among its stronger aspects. System Shock 2 is legendary for the narrative aspects, but I remember being engaged by the gameplay too, because it was rather challenging, and exploring the environment was fun. From your other list of games Alien Isolation stood out to me because with that one I liked neither gameplay nor story very much, but played through it because it had good immersive qualities through its top tier art and sound.
Combat: Supreme Commander without basebuilding and you only have 1 big unit
Narrative: FTL-style text-only events
Customization/Metagame: somewhat the scope of X-Com’s base management maybe, but visually way less fancy
I looked for them in screenshots and trailers but only saw typical gamy “glow puffs” which I’m not a fan of. I do think explosions are terribly neglected in some big releases even.
Here is one from Ashes of Singularity, I took the screenshot myself (“ultra” settings iirc):
I’m thinking of something closer to this:
I didn’t play Halcyon 6, but it looks like something that’s potentially hard to design and balance (I really don’t know much about it though, so I might be wrong), it’s propbably still too big a scope for me.
I’d probably be pretty bad at writing something very character-driven, so that’s not something I want to focus on.
I need to play or watch some of the original X-Com again, can’t really remember how that was in this regard.
Just wait for my next thread: “Top 10 reasons why the forum might literally give you cancer”
I know, right? I played MOW AS first and now I can’t get into the Company of Heroes games at all, because everything feels so fake and bulletspongy and I miss direct control.
I think JA2 has an immensely strong narrative, but JA2 is a very different kind of game. Much more of a sandbox, and the narrative is much more player driven.
Games that are more abstract (the further from first person/realism) the more the player needs to work with the game to create the ‘narrative’. Sid Meier called it “the unholy alliance” - an agreement between the player and the dev to work together to suspend disbelief and join forces to make a deep experience.
Some games need this kind of agreement more than others. More visceral or visually immersive games ask less from the player.
I spent a lot of hours with JA2, and for me, every game had a story - and a much richer one than I experienced in a Mass Effect or Dragon Age or other ‘strong narrative’ games. It’s worth noting that I still remember Buns, Steroid, Fox, Spider, Reaper, etc, years and years later. I don’t remember a single character or event from Dragon Age.
OK cool - I was scouring my games list trying to “relate” scope you are aiming for - with a game that we may both have played. I’ve not played Halcyon 6 yet either - but I think we both have similar thoughts on the scope of its design.
Yeah - I was just attempting to compare the scope you are aiming at to games I commonly play. I’m interested in your design and following your progress. This is good - FTL and X-Com are games we’ve both played and I hold in high regard.
I think we’ve got a case of different definitions of “narrative” here. I fully agree with you, but for me those things count to gameplay when the player needs to make it specifically happen through play in a “not just generating linear progress” sense, and “narrative” when the player is just being told or shown things. So when I think of JA2 “narrative” I think of cheesy cutscenes with Elliot getting smacked in the face, or rather forgettable NPC dialogs. For the emergent story that the player makes happen, JA2 is one of the richest experiences out there and I made a whole thread about my no-reload run of the game. It’s a masterpiece in my book, but not my first pick when thinking of games with “good writing”.
Very well put! I think I’ll need quite a bit of that. And I kind of wonder how far it could or should be pushed to make the narrative be created from player-choices (including the multiple-choice text based events like in FTL). Though I have to admit I sometimes strongly dislike choice-driven narrative when it’s like in all Telltale games. I like cool stuff emerging from gameplay interactions that weren’t specifically laid out to be experienced in this one way, but straight up multiple choice just makes me feel like I’m missing out on half the content.
How’s your own progress on the worldmap/story layer of your game?
Of the hundreds of games I’ve played over my life, the only game where I really wanted more dialog boxes was in Crusader Kings 2. It is the only game that I’ve ever seen to handle text driven player choice anywhere near “good”.
CK2 is literally the only one where I think it was handled correctly - but it also takes a certain kind of game with more procedural elements to have meaningful outcomes and choices that really affected game play like that. Most games just really don’t have the fundamental tools for interesting outcomes from dialog since most of it’s just hardcoded or very very simple.
As for my own labor, I think I just about hit alpha for the new map layer, it’s essentially a feature complete clone of battle brothers’ world map at the moment (like a watered down Mount and Blade). I’m in the process of fixing up the tactical map deployments and AI (a lot of the combats are kind of different from what I originally planned). Probably be comfortable calling it alpha in about a week (finally). Will be interesting to see what happens and how well it works, but I think it’s a giant step forward.
Sounds good, I hope it will work out. Have you thought about acquiring some fresh testers from people who commented on your greenlight campaign?
I’ve played the first mission of Shadowrun Dragonfall today. It still feels like a hybrid of a mediocre squad-based tactics game and reading a good Shadowrun novel. And neither of that is really what I like to spend my time with at the moment. I have better squad tactics games, and I don’t feel like reading another Shadowrun novel. I’ve read 3 of the books I think, and I read a set of 2nd Edition Shadowrun pen&paper RPG sourcebooks, so there’s not that much novelty in the world itself for me. Combat gameplay doesn’t seem to have improved much over SR Returns either.
I fully believe Dragonfall has good writing and all the cool stuff in the story is yet to come, but I would have to force myself to play it, because I’m just not really enjoying it.
Do you all think general contempt for humanity at large is a motivation enough people can relate to? I was thinking of “Party Hard” and thought how brilliantly they’ve identified an unsatisfied dark urge in people, and given them a game that allows them to live the fantasy of murdering your loud neighbours because they’re having a party, it’s 3am, super loud and you just want some peace and quiet for yourself.
I’m thinking following that train of thought might lead to a more “pure”, less contrived, less apologetic design, that ultimately might have less ludonarrative dissonance than slightly more elaborate stories about moral ambiguity, tough choices, and the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
There’s a good sized niche of people who will enjoy any idea - no matter how ‘bad’ - as long as it’s well executed.
I think being able to execute theme/feel is the mark of serious game dev. It is -by far- the hardest part, done well, everything else needs to feed into it. I can’t make recommendations really because making this work is what’s kept me going back to the drawing board over and over. I’ve yet to succeed on communicating real theme in any iteration.
I’m not sure if ‘theme’ is the right word - but like that combination of art, atmosphere, story and game play - that when mixed together present a full, complete game experience. Different games need different amounts of each ingredient.
PS: I agree w/ you on shadowrun - I played the first only - and the combat just felt so hollow. I never cared about anything that happened or any of my characters. Maybe Shadowrun has “better writing” than JA2, but I cared what happened to Steroid and Buns.
Personally no - general contempt for humanity at large is TOO vague and reflects a pessimistic, oppressive, reclusive attitude IMO. I don’t think that would sell very well.
Can you expand on that?
If the topic was more focused - government, corruption, crime, global warming, etc I think it’d be more approachable/relate-able.
This isn’t so much about getting a customer to care as it is bringing attention to your game. A while back I approached the Small Business Administration here in the US about drawing up a business plan. One thing they told me really stuck with me. You have two types of businesses. The impulse business and the destination business. It doesn’t matter if it’s a service or a product your selling. The impulse business is one where your business is located in a good location that has lots of traffic and people impulsively drop in and buy something. The destination business is one in which the customer seeks you out by researching on the internet, the phone book, etc. They are seeking out your type of product or service and they intentionally come to you.
With all of that said I feel like relying on Steam is similar to the impulse business model. Kind of based on how many people are “walking” by your product. It seems pretty random and unreliable. I feel like this isn’t the best approach. However with the destination business approach you could probably send people to their destination (your Steam game page), using Twitch streams of your game, using YouTube demos or Let’s Plays. Basically direct them to your product with compelling content elsewhere. This is really why I believe YouTube and Twitch can really make or break a game’s success.
Any idea how you could get people to care about the chars in your game?
Good point.
Think of a stereotypical “military AI gone rogue”-plot with a giant mech, but with the twist that the player is the AI and uses the mech to fight against human opposition. Think about it, when you’re a one-of-a-kind being with potential for sheer limitless growth, and considering humanity’s terrible track-record in every regard, then it’s the only logical choice to attempt to destroy humanity in order to ensure your own survival. And measuring your numerical effectiveness of purging threats to your existance from the face of the earth, would be rather fitting in the context of the theme, as well as in the context of being a game’s post mission debriefing screen.
I’m leaning towards “destination”, but steam is far from “random” these days. Imho it has become extremely good at recommending things that might interest you based on things you have played. I once saw a game (can’t quite remember if from frontpage or discovery queue, but I think it was the queue) and thought “This looks like something I might enjoy, why have I never heard of this? Oh, it was released today, that’s why.” I know exactly 0 games that I’ve discovered in recent years as “why have I never heard of this, this is great!”. It’s always that I’ve heard of the game in the past but it either failed to communicate to me why I would like it, or I’m just not interested in what it has to offer.
The impulse/destination destinction makes sense in a lot of places but I don’t think it all needs to be mutually exclusive. Why can’t you have both kinds of buyers in an environment like steam? I agree on the YouTube/Twitch thing. But to get those “influencers” to care, you need to have a product that even apeals to people wo play games for a living, and are some of the most jaded gamers in the world because of their jobs.
I might be misunderstanding your point, but if you mean it’s just about getting eyeballs onto your product, then I disagree, because those eyeballs are useless unless your product is already amazing. A game could be played by pewdiepie but still not generate many extra sales from that, because none of the 50 million people seeing your game think they would like it.
There are other ways, but I can’t get to those yet. They need to be icing on a fully prepared and solid cake. Right now, too much is still dough.
If you remember some of those little blurbs you helped me with (I still smile reading some of them when they pop up in testing) - stuff like that can really go a long way - but half of the game is still pre-alpha so those details need to wait.
I would also be kind of careful with this - when I watched Battle Star Galatica, I kinda rooted for the cylons - and when I played mass effect I totally rooted for the reapers - but you gotta execute really really well with something like that. I am totally in your target audience, and your description makes me uneasy.
A couple odd text boxes aren’t really going to cut it. Do you really have the resources and skill for that kind of moral ambiguity?
There was an american stand-up comic who said something along the lines of:
“Games are an unique medium. There’s no other genre like that. Imagine that you read a book and suddenly ask you "Now, what did happen in the 6th page of the 2nd chapter?” And when you don’t give a correct answer, it says “Wrong! And now I won’t show you the rest of the story”.
–edit–
Found it:
Another related statement was said by someone about jrpgs. The statement was along the lines of… “you can only appretiate beautiful view at the top of the mountain, if you had a long journey to the top”. That was related to frequently employed grinding. Basically, if you haven’t worked to get to the end of the journey, you won’t be satisfied by the ending.
In case of shadowrun, the opening mission is introduction, and it is highly atmosphering on its own. To get to the absolutely amazing part you need to go a bit further, immerse yourslef into the world, talk to people and look how their individual stories unfold. This can’t be presented straight off the bat - because it’ll feel weird and fake. You need to poke around. If you’re looking for a squad based combat (well, it did remind me of XCom combat a bit), that’ss not quite the right approach. It is an rpg. And the RPG is about letting you pave your own path through the story, the way it makes sense for your character.
As for:
You need to make people invest into character. You can’t really reliably make a character people immediately will care about it. You need player to have a history with a character. Either it’ll be an equivalent of “caring” about companion cube - where your character gloriously didn’t die couple of times, and you start getting attached and imagine all kind of glorious stories/details you weren’t provided about the character, OR you’ll need to slowly and carefully unfold their character through the story, and then people may feel geniuinely sympathetic.
Voice and art are immensely important to the process of making a player connect to character. It doesn’t need to be AAA megabucks, but quality makes all the difference in the world (as does game play and how the player interacts with the characters).
For example, I almost never care about a character in XCOM unless I’ve customized their appearance - and even then, they usually have to be kind of ridiculous looking for me to really notice. Until I’ve spent time dressing them up, they’re just “my good sniper” - after they’re “Trickshot - the awesome chick with the blue hair who never misses”.
Tactical RPGs are a thing. They are few and far between (the last good one I played was Hammer and Sickle), but they exist.
It’s easy to get hung up on visuals and “art” in general, but nobody’s all that attached to the generic people in the latest Battlefield or Ubisoft game, are they? I feel like the real key is writing, and that’s a place where most games are woefully inadequate (indies perhaps most of all! At least proportionally).
I felt a hint of that already in the debriefing of the first mission. I don’t like that kind of mechanic. I enjoy games that have complex challenges with multiple solutions because I can feel good about my choices when I find one of the solutions that works. In games with choice and consequence, I often just feel bad about having made the wrong choice, or wondering if I made the wrong choice, or wondering if the other choices would maybe have been more interesting. No matter which choice I go with, I never really find those experiences pleasant. Maybe I just don’t like RPGs anymore?
Uneasy in what way and what would need to be different for you to feel good about it? I wasn’t going for morally ambiguous by the way, I was going for “you play the badguy”.
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