this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
89 points (88.0% liked)
Games
16403 readers
1106 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Narrative Legos was a concept to solve that problem. A game like Civilization is built to be systemic, and people can play that base game and be satisfied, and then you've got an affordable avenue to add content into the middle of the game and sell people new features that add a lot of content without taking a lot of work, like story-driven DLC typically takes for a game like Mass Effect or BioShock. So, that is a means to reduce costs, long-term, if they nail it. A systemic, story-driven game is one that can afford to be shorter while still demanding $60-$70, since you're meant to replay it. Then again, it sounds like they steered that game into just being a roguelite eventually, so maybe not every part of the concept worked.
Honestly, if you don't care about all the nice graphics and music and such, Unciv -- a reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android -- does demonstrate that the game doesn't really need all those assets to be perfectly playable.
That being said, I do enjoy the music and the graphics (though the responsiveness of Unciv is nice).
I always read Narrative Legos as Levine's frustration with the limitations of storytelling in games like System Shock 2/Bioshock (his babies). It seemed like he wanted a way for stories to be able to grow naturally based on choices made (somewhat like BG3, but more organic in nature, happening without having to necessarily be coded as such). Although that's probably because I'm more interested in the writing games side than programming games side, so my thoughts went to what it meant for writing.
However, I can see what you mean about how that can also impact the cost of development because now you can add more narrative to the game without it having to be such a separate, stand-alone piece (like DLC and Expansion Packs of yesteryear). So, interesting perspective, thank you for sharing it.
He's called out Civilization and DLC specifically as the inspiration for this experiment, but perhaps I missed another article where it was also intended to solve some limitation. One thing I'm sure of though is that Levine's criticism of his own work always finds its way into the story of his next game, haha.