Hi guys,
my question is more a “probe” than a poll…
i am at the point at wich i have to choose a basic gameplay feature.
the game occurs in a very futuristic context kind of post post post apo
it’s an adventure/quest FPS or TPS with some coop/strategy (light).
i planned to make the player start weak, unarmed, unskilled and vulnerable, prefering a dodge/diplomatic/observation strategy to a brutal confrontation to avoid the player “burn em all” and kill the interest of the game.
although i may like this design, some may prefer a different gameplay…
what do you think ? (given you like to play that kind of games ofc)
@TonyLi , not to describe everything, but…
movies as references…could be…
“islant of doctor moreau”, “avatar”, “elysium”, “after earth” (altough it’s a plain failure)
for tv shows take a bit of “LOST” and a bit of “Under the dome”
recent games references could be “evolve” and “zero dawn” with a bit of “crysis 3”.
for books, take a bit of “the foundation”, a small book that is very important to me called “NIOURK” and a french comic called “Aquablue”.
add some “future animals” docs on youtube
and you get a glimpse.
for the story, it has been written in 2001 and Evolved…
so, the game will have both “mad-max” game style and “the long dark” style, depending on the phase of the game and the way you delt with environment.
Well that doesn’t narrow it down much. You listed everything from armed-to-the-teeth futuristic hunters to frail crash victims wandering around cluelessly. Maybe a little scope creep got in there?
What you want to make the player feel (i.e., the essential experience)? There’s a huge difference in feeling between the movies Alien and Aliens. I really enjoyed both. But if they were combined into one movie it would lose the essence that makes each movie unique.
got the point, so, to say more…
the player kinda “pops” into an unknown environment, that has nothing in common with what he used to know…
he will progress through it knowing nothing but discovering… meeting predators, preys, animals, maybe humans, half humans, weird creatures etc… linking with possible friendly or not people etc
it looks very free at first glimpse but there is a goal for him, the way he will discover what’s going on there dépends on his choices and acomplishments… but local missions will be designed to achieve the quest
it will not be a “5 minutes of intense gaming” each time, will be room for plenty of exploration. enemies or predators will be more obstacles than goals.
does it help ?
my interest in that poll is mainly to have opinions about how survival gamers prefer to play.
Got it. My point was that I have several different preferences, but I wouldn’t want to mix them in the same game. Today I’m in more of a Conan the Barbarian mood, so that’s how I voted.
Maybe I am off the mark on what you are after. It seems the best route in a super general sense is the easy break in and ramped difficulty so that the player must know the game at “end game” to really accomplish anything, but in the beginning it is pretty easy so new people can pick it up.
It also depends on the type of game too. There are some pretty successful games right now that remind me of the old quarter munchers from the late 70s.
on the opposite that is what i really want, why couldn’t they be mixed ? not talking about game “genres” but “game phases”.
and the way i wrote the story, you have to go brutal at some point…when needed only, not full-time-Conan
and well, you can play conan if you want, but you will have more enemies and you will be stalked instead of having potential allies, got it? but each way can be fun tough…
@jgnmoose i guess you are right for a classical full-forward FPS, in my case, the player will begin, ofc on a safe zone, but soon will be facing nasty things, that will make him want o avoid them… i’ts all about climax, i want him to fear what he’s going to encounter, to be cautious, not a basic brainless-bull…
but when the player will have linked with people, when being attacked or treated by another Superior force, the brutal force and combat will happen.
I know you’re just polling for preferences; I hope you don’t mind the discussion. You’re right; game phases could work – and in fact you could argue that they’re absolutely necessary to progress the narrative. But I’ll argue that it’s hard to go back to a previous phase. In the Conan the Barbarian movie (which is scoped closer to a game than the span of his entire life in the short stories), Conan goes from slave to gladiator to mercenary to hero. It would have been anticlimactic to fall back to being a slave. Or, in survival fiction terms, take 28 Days Later. The theme, as in all zombie movies, is that humans end up being more dangerous than zombies. And the protagonist has to become even more dangerous than the villainous humans to defeat them. At that point, it would be anticlimactic to go back to worrying about zombies as the main threat. You could introduce bigger, tougher zombies, but I don’t think that would be enough because the crucial shift has happened in the player’s head, not in the game world.
you re right on the difficulty rising, but difficulty doesn’t always mean a bigger vilain, cause you will have a BFG to get it. !
it can be a more strategy, it can be keeping allies together, maybe lead them, it can be give’em enough weapons for a combat coming soon . but finally you are right , BIG STUFF will come then, but i don’t want the player to know it will come, surprises and tilting situations is , to me, want can bring a constant interest in a game… coz you already know you will win, that’s a fact, the funny thing is NOT TO know how or when.
thanks for the interesting exchange tough
and @TonyLi i saw the Tools you have developped and …wow, i wouldn’t have found better for what i want to do…
cheers
