Hades: Narrative as Reward
I don’t usually care for rogue-likes, myself. If I wanted to feel like I’m just failing over and over again, I’d focus on my real life. That said, Hades provides a fantastic twist on the concept: it rewards failure. Specifically, you need to fail to uncover the story of the game.
Tabletop RPG resolutions
One of my side-projects that I sadly get to spend less time on than I’d like, is a tabletop RPG system. It was originally intended for a dark urban fantasy setting (and another side-project that hasn’t seen any love for quite a while), but has grown past that. Anyway, I can get back to the worldbuilding elements and how it ties into mechanics another time because right now, I’m trying to decide on tone and the core resolution mechanic.
Are tutorials story?
Yes. There, done. What, I should expand on that? Ok — will do!
In some games, the tutorial is explicitly part of the story. Portal is really just a cycle of tutorial of a new mechanic, use the mechanic, and finally integrate it with previously learned mechanics.The Witcher 3 has its tutorial as a training montage for the main character, making it diegetic learning. The most common solution has the story starting but with little training messages that interrupt the player each time there’s something new, but even then there are story reasons for why the character is supposed to do those things. But then there are the games that are complex but can’t follow a plot.
League of both Having and Eating the Cake
In my last post, I talked about how there are many different versions of the fantasy genre. One potential result of that is that we have to exclude some interpretations if we want others. There are many examples of media that tries to combine fantasy subgenres and fails, but I want to talk about one that I think is excellent!
Is genre just a fantasy?
Ok, so I’m being slightly fastidious with the title as the genre I’ve been contemplating is indeed Fantasy. About a year and a half ago I had a discussion that took me off guard as the ones I talked to claimed that fantasy isn’t medieval.
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey — Historical accuracy
First post here and I have to start somewhere, so why not with a narrative analysis of one of the games I’m currently playing. For those who who have been living under a rock: the Assassin’s Creed series is tells the story of shadowy organisations who have influenced humanity through the ages. There is a “present” time where characters have the ability to access the lives of their ancestors and the majority of the games are set in the past. Each game focuses on one ancestor and thus one time period. In the case of Odyssey, this means rither Kassandra or Alexos during the Greek punic wars.