Why Wildermyth's Best Story Wasn't Written By Anyone
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- Опубліковано 10 лип 2021
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Videogames are a storytelling medium, everyone knows that - but unlike their contemporaries, they allow us to write our own stories too - by interacting with the systems and mechanics of games, we can tell gripping stories of survival against the odds, create epic rivalries between us and NPCs, and epic quests starring heroes of our own creation.
So... how can games do this?
Well, one of the best ways is through a particular game design ethos called permanence - where games remember your actions and allow you to build on them, not just over the course of a single level, but an entire playthrough - and there's no better example of it than a little game called Wildermyth. As a result, the Architect has spent the last few weeks making friends with orcs, delving into old addictions and apologizing to dragons for that big misunderstanding, all in an effort to understand how games can create stories not by writing them - but by giving us space to write them ourselves...
You Saw:
Wildermyth - 2021
Shadow of War - 2017
Spelunky 2 - 2020
DOOM Eternal - 2020
Prodeus - Early Access
Super Mario 3d World - 2013
Super Mario Galaxy - 2007
Humankind - Early Access
Slipways - 2021
Dark Souls 2 - 2014
Resident Evil 2 Remake - 2019
Pokemon Fire Red - 2004
Pokemon Sword - 2019
Sid Meir's Civilization 6 - 2016
Sid Meir's Civilization - 1991
Donkey Kong - 1981
Dragon's lair - 1983
Galaxians - 1979
paperboy - 1984
Defender - 1981
Metal Slug 3 - 2000
Gauntlet - 1985
Hades - 2020
Dark Souls - 2012
The Matrix - 2000
Tales of Maj'Eyal - 2012
Skul the hero slayer - 2021
FTL - 2012
Dicey Dungeons - 2019
Nowhere Prophet - 2019
The Long Dark - 2014
Hunt: Showdown - 2018
XCOM: UFO Defence - 1994
XCOM 2 - 2016
Star Renegades - 2020
Assasins' Creed Odyssey - 2018
Shadow of Mordor - 2014
The Fermi Paradox - Early Access
Death Stranding - 2019
No Man's Sky - 2016
Among Us - 2018
Fallout New Vegas - 2010
It Takes Two - 2021 - Ігри
Maybe the real wild myth was that independent critical content could survive without your generous support - you're totally not paying for chocolate ice cream I'm currently eating: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD KILL ME, TWITTER DOT COM? WELL YOU DIDN'T AND NOW I'M HERE TO GET ME REVENGE!!!: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
Good job being first.
Your concept of permanence is definitely a theme present in Legacy board games.
Ah, social platforms. The enemy of the very society they enable.
VERY SMOOTH MR MILLARD, VERYYYY SMOOTH.
Just a question: does Chao pays extra to be mentioned last or y'all UA-camrs do it just because it's funny?
Many thanks for the patreon dudes and dudettes who consistently appear in most of the good UA-cam channels out there, y'all help make our lives better
When my brother was playing Enter the Gungeon, he had gotten the "Shifty Pig" item for the first time (it spawns a pig that follows you around). It had been useless the entire run. When fighting the Dragun he died and he leaned back and sighed in disappointment. For those who don't know when you die the game will line up crosshairs, shoot you, and game over. Just as the game was lining up its crosshairs it took the shot and the Pig jumped in the way sacrificing itself. My brother got a second chance and he won beating the game for the first time. In the process he unlocked the "Hero Pig" item.
i love everyones experience with that item being so similar, its such a fun thing, gungeon has so many amazing fun little moments like that that are just so amazing to experience for the first time
Whoa, is that a reference to the seven deadly sins anime where hawk the pig jumped in front of demon hendrikson’s attack and saved meliodas and elizabeth
@@o.d.d.792 Holy shit it might be, that's cool! I've never seen a 7DS reference.
@@o.d.d.792 I hightly doubt it.
Pretty sure it is just a typical "companion sacrifice his life for you" thing and that companion just happen to be a pig.
@@o.d.d.792 it can only be seen as a reference if that pig in dungeon came out after seven deadly sins. Otherwise you could claim the inverse. But even then, this isn't a unique thing to happen in stories or games. Coincidences happen.
I REMEMBER GETTING THIS SCAR, LEMME SHOW YOU HOW IT FELT!
shit not this guy again
"Wait a minute,.. WHO ARRRRR YOU?"- Blond kid!
It's all fun and games until your Shadow of Mordor nemesis shows up at your house
@@ArchitectofGames how many times have beat you this guy
@@benedictprove3937 uguk blood-hunter? Nooooo
This is exactly where Skyrim lost me. Nothing ever felt like it had a lasting impact on the world or its people. I appreciate that you have put it into words so eloquently.
The experience that really killed it for me was defeating Alduin, sprinting back to Whiterun expecting some big welcome, only to get the 'Did someone steal your sweetroll?" line immediately from the first guard I saw
Even more disappointing when they could have fixed it with some basic use of the stats the game already tracks - even just removing some voice lines for NPCs when your fame or their knowledge is outside certain ranges would improve it immensely.
Or at least stop some random townsperson immediately recognising every obscure artefact you’re carrying.
"Hey, you there. Go fetch my house keys from the bottom of a well. ...Cool, that's really helpful. Want to be Lord of Doom Keep? Go on, take the keys, I don't need all this stress in my life." - "Uh, so what can I do with Doom Keep?" - "Not a lot, to be honest. It's mostly just scenery. Looks good on a resumé though!"
This is where player choice starts to conflict with the game's narrative. Skyrim is designed to make sure the player can see the most content possible regardless of their decisions, but this has the effect of making the decisions themselves feel meaningless.
Well, that and the game-play in general, which is not very good.
Surprised you didn't mention darkwood; that game has almost every action, even some that players automatically assume don't matter have effects later in the game.
Darkwood is great, it'll get a mention one of these days!
Another good one is Massive Chalice. That one is also a tactics game that has a similar system of being played out over hundreds of years and generations of heroes
I've been DM-ing the one campaign of D&D (among others) for around 11 years now and I love to use notes taken from 5+ years ago to base quests around, one of my players realised the connection on one occasion and was utterly gob smacked that some tiny decision he made IRL 5+ years ago came back and sparked a huge quest line.
The moment he put it all together and just sat there with realisation that everything his character does can and will have implications was just *chef kiss* what I live for as a DM.
Permanency, or as I like to call it, not-static-stupid-shit.
now thats how you DM, you dont just have a world to use a campign no you have a world for MANY campaigns.
@@lechking941 Exactly! And I ended up splitting up our party into two groups because we could never coordinate 6 schedules, so I decided to run them separately, but only by a matter of a few in game days and usually fairly close by spatially too, so I can have one party affect the other and visa versa, without needing a live interaction between players whose schedules have already shown not to mesh well.
Most of them had a PC in both parties in the end as it just gave everyone double the chances to be around for the next session.
And then they all had kids, and it was the last I saw of them, more or less. :/
@@therealdoomsage oof life can be evil to the DM, but i hope you can get another one of thoes worlds going and this time maybe a full party how ever players it is
@@lechking941 I've been slowly turning it into an indy title ;)
Thanks for the kind words, btw, I very much appreciate it!
@@therealdoomsage nice well than best of luck.
Rimworld does a great job with emergent storytelling, too. Never thought one bean looking human looking at another dead bean could seem so sad until I played it.
That is what I was thinking too.
This concept of Permanence is what made Dwarf Fortress into my favorite videogame ever. Sometimes playing it feels less like playing a game and more like the game and you are collaboratively writing the lore of a world together.
One of my favorite things to do is starting a game in adventurer mode and then seeking out and exploring my abandoned fortresses from fortress mode. The feeling of seeing my old fortress that got destroyed by a necromancer's army recontextualized as a zombie-infected ruin, my old dwarves now turned into undead enemies and the defenses I laid out recontextualized as deadly traps I have to overcome to get to the treasures inside is like nothing I've ever experienced in any other game.
There are 4 types of gamers
1-noobs
2-actually good
3-souls gamers
4- people who understand dwarf fortress
"Permadeath isn't fun. Permanent choices are." Thank you, thank you, thank you, for pointing this out. I've been really frustrated with the forced ironman mode in games that have come out over the last few years that I otherwise would enjoy, and metaprogression has become a synonym for grind/padding as of late as well.
Indeed! This is why whenever I'm discussing what the core of the 'roguelike' experience is for me, I use the term 'decision permanence'. While this is virtually always implemented in the form of permadeath, the fact your decisions have weight and meaning is the actual important part.
Yeah, it's kinda why I nearly never restarted in Banner Saga (just twice, and one was at the end of Book 1), but restart every time in Fire Emblem.
In FE, it's just a sign I did bad (or the game did me bad, which is worse)
i dunno man maybe the ironman mode games just aren't for you. I personally really like permadeath and i would always choose to play it. it's kind of like re-watching an anime/tv series or re-reading a book. You pick up on smaller details and do better each and every time and I really enjoy that feeling in a game.
@@eureka5701 I do like some ironman games though. Let me give an example of what I mean by an unnecessary ironman mode. There's a game I played a while back with forced ironman that doesn't make sense. When a character in the party dies, the only thing lost is the player's time. The game imposes effectively zero permanent consequence in game when a character dies. All but two characters are infinitely replaceable for free. It just costs me time as the player to level up a replacement so that I can then use them to keep progressing the game. It saved me time as a player to bypass the ironman mode by creating copies of my save game files and simply overwriting the files with an old save. Effectively, I used an out of game solution to remove the in game ironman mode, and I did it because it was faster and less hassle than leveling up a replacement character in game. In short, the game's forced ironman mode only caused increased grind. That's it. It was padding. The only in game impact of ncluding a traditional save and load system within the game would have been to reduce grind. That's the kind ironman I dislike because it disrespects my time while adding nothing to the experience.
@@CowCommando "All but two characters are infinitely replaceable for free. "
Let me guess, Darkest dungeon?
I kinda have to disagree with this one, permadeath is part of the experience, DD is a really unfair random game where things might spiral out of control quickly as you have to jugle with parties member who become more and more lunatic (or gifted if you're lucky ), because it's supposed to portray a cruel world where thing are just not kind for a bunch of nameless adventurer who don't know they'll like ran to their demise instead of being the choosen heroes of whatever prophecy.
If you had a fixed party that could be whiped out, that mean restarting would be just a frustration fiesta as how the game is balanced.
If there was no permadeath, party member death would mean nothing and there would have almost no tension, you just know you had to retreat and try once more head first.
It's true tho than character death should be little more impactfull, but again the fact adventurers don't leave a mark in the world in their death is consistent with the world setting they are nobodies and they will dies as nobodies.
16:42
"N"
Mhm
"i"
Oh are you just naming it nidoran?
"g"
NO
Not British
Oh my god, I got really worried, too.
I thought it was about to be a certified gamer moment...
haha ikr
I was legit worried lol
There's one downside to permanence that wasn't mentioned here and that few games successfully avoid: snowballing. If a permanent effect of you losing a battle is to get a disability, then the next battle becomes even harder and you can easily get stuck in a downwards spiral. Or the opposite if every victory makes you stronger. This can be super frustrating and highly encourages the bane of storytelling - reloading.
This is the major flaw in XCOM, if you lose a couple of high level characters in one mission, you might as well restart the whole campaign as the greenhorns you replace them with simply won't be good enough to win the next battle. Frankly, every 4X game has this problem. Depending on how well you played the early game, the end game is either impossibly difficult or trivially easy. I guess adaptive difficulty could solve this problem, but I've never seen it done well in grand strategy.
The solution I think is to change the nature of the game then. If you get stuck in a downward spiral, offer more powerful immediate options that have serious consequences down the line. You're down on your luck and need to make a pact with a demon to save someone, only to end up killing countless people for it in return. You make more and more enemies doing less and less ethical things as darker routes become necessary.
Desperation opens as many doors as it closes and makes the story more interesting.
Playing well in the early game is like ensuring an easier end game with a strong foundation. Playing poorly in the early game makes dangerous options more necessary later on. If it's handled right you could become even more powerful going the dark path than the light one.
@@tranquilclaws8470 That's a good solution - if balanced well. The problem is that if there is no meaningful penalty to doing badly in the early game (or even a hidden bonus via the 'dark path'), then there are no stakes at all. On the other hand, if the penalties are too strong, then the player has no real choice than to restart. Making it risky (ie, chance base) really just delays the player finding out if the penalty was huge, small, or actually a bonus. Not to mention all the other problems of having luck based events in strategy games.
Maybe there's a good middle-ground somewhere, but it's on a thin knife edge. Considering the different skill levels and experience of players, I haven't played any strategy game that has found it.
With 4x, one problem is bad AI. If I go on a rampage with a giant army, the AI never puts up much of a fight, it doesn't build a huge army, go on the offensive, use chokepoints, etc. Sometimes it sends units on suicide missions for no reason.
@@QuantumHistorian My suggestion mainly works for storytelling games that have a permanent world existing beyond a single match. These types of games have much more room for this system because the penalty for winning or losing has less importance than the state of the world after the war ends. If you unleash a zombie plague in the enemy continent, that whole place will be infested with zombies even after the war has ended. Better yet, the zombies are evolving enough to swim across the channel to get you now. The next civilization to rise up now has to deal with constant zombie attacks.
You could create a whole D&D world out of the desperate actions of two warring factions in ancient history.
@@tranquilclaws8470 Yes, this would work well. But then the permeance is purely narrative or aesthetic, and not fundamentally strategic. Nothing wrong with that, but it's different. Still, it means that if the player wants the "good" ending without zombies surviving the end of the war, they are strongly encouraged to reload bad starts.
"Nidoran's nickname?"
"Nig... el..."
That was a close one
I recommend you take a look at so-called "Legacy" board games. They show how you can achieve that feeling of permanence even in a board game. I myself only played one of them so far, but I've seen others rave on about the exhilirating feeling of making permanent changes to your game components, by putting on stickers, writing on the board, ripping up cards...and even in the one legacy game campaign I played, I could feel how the nature of the game, the permanence of it, influenced my decisions. I did things that weren't that smart in the moment, but would potentially benefit me in later rounds.
Is this really a good thing in a board game though? In video games you always have a reset button and you can start a new save, but cards you destroyed in these board games you'll need to replace by buying a whole new set. Its always struck me as consumerism. I dont need to rip up a card, i can just remove it from play...
Best example of this is Oath by Leder games- it changes over each play through, without destroying things: players who win start the next game as the chancellor, and the map & deck are changed depending on the state of the world
@@GrangerBabeGaming The main question is how realistic is it that you'll ever want to play the same Legacy game from the start again, knowing all of the choices ahead of time and all of the consequences? You''ll have spent countless sessions and countless hours on the same game by the time you're done.
A more realistic question is: Will you even finish a Legacy game?
A better consumerist argument would be in what you do after your done with a game (or done playing it). Reselling or gifting a legacy game can be tricky - some have unofficial ways to reset the game, but most decrease the quality and marketability quite a bit.
@@GrangerBabeGaming I mean, first of all, nobody's forcing you to make permanent changes. You can, theoretically, always just put cards in a special bag instead of ripping them up, make copies of your character cards so you don't have to write on the originals, or use erasable pens, etc. Secondly, every Legacy game I know comes with variant that can be played repeatedly once the campaign is over, so it's not like it's a one and done thing once you're finished with the Legacy aspect.
The funny thing is this: The _only_ people I've ever seen be critical of Legacy games are people who haven't played them, while _everyone_ I've ever seen talk about Legacy games they actually played had primarily good things to say about them.
Or in the TTRPG space: Mörk Borg tells you (perhaps tongue in cheek) to burn the book when the game's built-in countdown to the apocalypse brings about the end of the world.
So glad you made this video. I fell in love with this games story building instantly the other day!
Banger video, a lot of interesting points about storytelling and the way we weave our own narratives in games that I’ve never been able to pull together you helped me gather so many thoughts with this and thank you so much for the shout out!
Surprised you went through this whole topic without touching on Dwarf Fortress, the king of this type of story telling.
Probably because it sucks to get in to.
@@Kalicer I'm hoping that the upcoming Steam release of Dwarf Fortress will fix this.
Damn, you just sold me this game, it looked like just another turn based tactical rpg, seems like a great game with such system in place.
I love that Wildermyth and RimWorld are both amazing storytelling mediums, yet the gameplay is completely different
I remember a little detail in heat signature, where if you choose to retire your characther, you can leave ona of your items to be found later somewhere on the enemy ship. Or if you get captured, there is a chance that the rescue mission will pop up, allowing you to play as that character once again
Heat Signature does this really well but is very overlooked as a game. You can pick a player character and they each have a backstory that also determines what their overall goal is. You get lots of "second chances" but eventually they do die forever - and if they don't, then when you achieve their overall goal (e.g. to kill a person for revenge, make an amount of money to get their family out of poverty, get a rare weapon), they go into retirement. But all the stations that character liberated stay liberated for your next character, so through all these characters' individual and separate stories, you create a story of wresting control of the galaxy away from evil megacorporations. The fact that characters will come to a natural end, whether you win or lose, takes a lot of stress out of long-format permadeath (i.e. where a single run spans multiple play sessions).
5:12 that's heck if an item to carry, serves both as weapon and communication device
of*
Ah, and now for some delightfully brilliant content about a game I haven't stopped playing for a week.
:D
Why did you think this video took so long?! I was too busy playing Wildermyth
Heck ya! Someone talking about my new favorite game! Amazing.
I'm so glad so many people have already heard of it!
@@ArchitectofGames can you talk about below zero 😁it’s amazing!
I think permanence is part of what makes the Total War games fun. Your armies in the battles aren't just spawned units that will disappear at the end, the damage they take will stick with them once you go back to the strategic layer. And if you have more enemy armies bearing down on you, keeping units healthy can be vitally important, to the point that retreating them or the whole army might be the best decision. It's something I really liked about Star Wars: Empire at War too.
I never knew this about death stranding, that sounds really interesting and fun.
Same! I wonder if this is what they meant by ‘strand-type game.’
I feel like you'd like analysing a game called Stoneshard. To describe it simply, its a roguelike where everything, including the player, has a complex set of statistics that dictate their survival. Not just simple locational health, where if a part of your body is injured, you wont be able to use it to its full extent, but even things like locational statuses, such as bleeding from your left arm. There is also hunger, sobriety and sanity, which means every action and situation has consequences, even on your ability to control your character's own actions.
Also, I forgot to mention, even common enemies can be lethal if you don't take the right precautions. That human over there that's threatening to attack you? Yeah, they're just as strong as you are.
You've managed to take a game that I knew next to nothing about and explain it and its mechanics in such an intriguing way that I'm now dying to give it a shot. Your insight is incredible, and the way you relate mechanics across a broad spectrum of works in an uplifting and brilliant way continues to make me fall in love with gaming all over again. Cheers my guy
I want to mention in relation to permanence the Mystery Dungeon series, especially the first two Pokémon iterations. It runs a lot like a roguelite through each individual dungeon, but the overall story actually improves via the permanence. The unpredictability/randomness of the dungeons provides excellent emerging storytelling that connects you with the main characters.
Anyone else been watching to the end of every video for so long that you instantly know when a top teir patron disappeared? Where did Alex Deloch go??
So is this in a way the story version of procedural generations? Like instead of having a whole premade story, it emerges from the interactions of smaller narrative mechanics
Yeah, I guess
Sounds about right
Yes and no. There are five campaigns and two completely procedural campaigns, one 3 chapter and one 5 chapter mode. The 5 campaigns feel like very good DND campaigns and surprised me in how good they were. They do use procedural generation in the campaigns to flesh out characters with various origins, encounters, and events. I have a few characters with prosthetics after close scrapes that stay between games. I have marks on them (that give stat bonuses) from them participating in cult initiation rituals to see if they could get information on the enemy. I did the first campaign and brought in one of the characters into the second, and he had the spear that was something of a mcguffin in the first. It's very, very good. It feels as good as Shadow of War's nemesis system. Can't praise it enough.
There are 6 campaings with an actual main story with events set in stone, but everything else, relationships between characters, side stories, etc. Are procedurally generated for unique experiences and its awesome.
3:40 "Arcade games are the Dark Souls of video games."
Wait, isn't Dark Souls the Dark Souls of video games?
nonono, Dark Souls is the Dark Souls of Dark Souls.
dont get it twisted.
Ghosts and Goblins is the Dark Souls of arcade games.
Nah, Dark Souls is waaaaay easier than any perma-death game.
This was SO interesting!!!!!!!! I've GOT to play Wildermyth.
Interesting video . I really like how you explored how we create our own stories and how this game takes full advantage of it
17:11 Or it’s a Telltale game which your choices only lead up to a few dialog changes and you got close to none permanence
Or Golden Sun Dark Dawn that just made this into an art form. 4 choices based on emotions, none of them ever matters! It's honestly wonderful
I feel that a Talltale game is one best played once and only once. It’s just better that way in my opinion.
@@collincampbell7508 It can be if Telltale didn't constantly scream 'YOUR CHOICE MATTERS' 'SOMEONE WILL REMEMBER THIS' when you are playing the game. Detroit is a perfect example of what Telltale can achieve if they didn't waste all their money on big titles instead of making actual games.
*Telltale will remember this comment*
@@jinkeloid Detroit ended up being a better Telltale game than an actual Telltale game.
That's crazy.
yes, bring wildermyth to the mind of the people.
dude thanks a ton for this video, just the idea of an amazing story got me to pick up wildermyth and I am so glad I did
That took a long time to bring it home to Wildermyth.
This video was so good, I watched it again for a second time since it popped up in my home feed again.
"HOW MANY TIMES WILL WE HAVE TO TEACH YOU, THIS LESSON OLD MAN!!!?"
Insightful and explained well. Fantastic essay!
Love this game. So glad you decided to dive into the brilliant innovations that make it tick.
Great video as always 👍
i was just thinking of this game. great timing. great game. great video.
Your content is always great and I appreciate it very much. Just wanted to let you know.
Just letting you know you encouraged me to buy what has now become one of my favorite games from 2021, so thanks Adam !
This game looks great! I picked it up yesterday because of your video. Thanks for the great content!
You are a classy human being. This was a delight to listen to.
probably my favorite video so far! this is exactly what I think a lot of games are missing. I would like the gangs around the world in multifaction games for example
You might like Mount and Blade II Bannerlord
You just got a new subscriber. This was great
I recently finished all the roads in my Death Stranding game and yeah.
It's an amazing feeling that keeps being amazing every time I use the road - or I get the notification someone else did. Blessed.
I think you should check Dwarf Fortress. In the game you randomly generate a world to manage a stronghold or go into a rogue like adventure. It's a little difficult and confusing at first, at least for me.
But the fun is more in the stories it make. Each character of that world have is pesonality randomly generated and this can lead to moments like the ones talked in the video.
There is "another game mode " called legends. It's purely to see the history of the world, the people and artefacts.
Great video, I feel like this is the main concept dwarf fortress runs on.
After having watched this video, I bought Wildermyth, and have spent most of my free time playing it. Such a great game. Thank you for alerting me to it.
thank you for the shout out for heavyeyed, i have a new sub now =]
I just got into this game! It's so so so good. Truly a hidden gem, I hope it blows up after this video.
You should try the Homeworld series. It has a linear story but one of its core mechanics is the "permanent fleet".
Its a space based RTS where all the units, resources and technologies are carried over from one level to the next. You can also capture enemy ships, some of whitch are exclusive to specific missions. Some entries (Deserts of Kharak and Cataclysm) also have a unit experience mechanic and a upgrade system for the mothership (the main ship that acts as the "base") that gradually transforms it from a vulnerable production vessel to a warship far more powerful than any other "normal" unit.
This is why rivals that change based off player choices make a game that much more memorable.
Although even a reoccurring foe can make a story more memorable on its own.
Okay okay, I *really* need to check this game out. Never heard of it before but those mechanics sound amazing
Great video, and thanks for turning me into Wildermyth!
Great commentary? Awesome, love to hear it.
Funny jokes throughout it? Even better.
Seeing Wildermyth, Tales Of Maj'Eyal, and Hunt: Showdown mentioned in the same video? Priceless.
Games with emergent story telling like this can be great fun. For anyone interested in seeing more of it I recommend watching Kruggsmash's Dwarf Frotress videos which are basically someone actively adding a narrative to the emergent gameplay they experience.
I've never heard of this game, but... now I HAVE TO check it out. Love this kind of stuff.
Good video as always my dude
Excellent essay! Is the term “permanence” as you use it here something that you came up with, or did you borrow it from another essay / literature? Just wanna know when I’m referencing it, as I’m definitely sharing this with my team :)
Good video. I'd like to add one thing. The developers have made the tools available to create your own campaigns which you can then share on the steam workshop.
Thanks for the vid
Real rollercoaster there while you were naming that Nidoran.
16:45 *holds breath*
1 second later: oh ok
I honestly find that i do not like perma death. I tend to play endless games so it really just feels crushing when i die.
Just got this game so excited to play it
So glad to see Tales of Maj'eyal in one of these. I feel it is really underappreciated as a game that is very much in the classic roguelike style, but with more modern UI and design choices.
Hey, just thought I’d come back here and thank you for introducing me to wildermyth lol. It’s a lot of fun, and overall just a game that doesn’t see nearly enough love. So thanks
I appreciate the research that went into this video as well as your love of roguelikes and knowledge of their history but it seems like you almost forgot to talk about the subject of the video itself, namely Wildermyth, but tbh you've convinced me to buy it in the 5 minutes you actually talked about it near the end.
*chuckles in 10.000 years homebrew D&D campaign world*
Wanna know a popular FPS that had decent permanence? Call of duty black ops 2 single player. There are some parts where you CAN fail and the story goes on. It would even trigger an extra mission in the case you failed to make up for it. That in turn had an effect on the ending.
Wait, this was actually a thing? I remember the interview with the developer where he talked about it.
Then I played it and was disappointed, so I googled, and google said it wasn't a thing, and I got sad.
@@mawillix2018 So spoilers...
If don't manage to rescue someone critical to getting a good ending in the main mission, you get a second chance in another side mission.
My favorite opponents to go up against are the Cyborg Morthraki!
I really like facing off against them, because they give off vibes of ancient beings of myth rising again from their ruins to retake their place on this Earth.
I would love to hear what everyone's favorite baddies are for their campaigns.
Looks pretty good. Gonna put it on the wishlist. I enjoyed playing Battle Brothers recently because of the same reasons!
You've 100% convinced me to give this one a shot
Another video that references Death Stranding, another whole bit of mechanics I'd never even known was in the game, even having played the thing meticulously for tens of hours. Hope that game gets talked about for years to come still.
Thank You Adam
When you were naming that Pokemon "Nigel" I was sweating
Excellent points! I would like to amend - not argue, as such, merely state an exception - that among the more ephemeral-style shooters, System Shock and its first sequel both felt like they had a fair bit of permanence, to me. Granted, there were some enemy respawns to keep things interesting, but the scavenging of key or merely needed items and materials always felt more impactful than in later, similar games, to me. You'd obtain some important code or unique component on one floor, head back to another floor, get a security captain's key card and a fancy new gun - all that sort of thing. Or you'd get a telekinesis power that you could then use to obtain more upgrade modules from otherwise impossible-to-reach places, giving you more potential to grow in whatever ways you saw fit. Good memories. Shame the series has been progressively dumbed down into a mostly banal shooter by the time of Bioshock Infinite.
Adam finally referencing Pokémon!! I never thought I'd see this day.
Hey, this video wasn't lame at all! Bonus points for amazing visual gags, by the way.
It's nice to see Wildermyth get some love. It's such a good game.
I'm really shocked you didn't mention Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress here, where the story and permanence is about a settlement and the interactions therein. Dwarf Fortress has even been termed by its own dev as a "story generator", and is so focused on this aspect that "Losing is fun" is part of the ethos of the community - It's possible to build and maintain an invincible fort, even a little easy, but the real fun happens when sieges go wrong, when dwarfs go mad, and when you fight unspeakable Forgotten Beasts.
Good video, though!
Have you considered making a video on QTEs, what makes an effective one and the different ways they've been utilised?
05:12 "Conditions" was pretty funny :)
"Arcade games were the Dark Souls of video games" is a cursed statement, but also true
Amazing video! Could you do one based on Escape from Tarkov? When you talked about Hunt Showdown you reminded me of Tarkov, that game has almost the same but instead of losing your character, it's losing your loot and quests, tied to amazing risk v/s reward feelings, with lots of decisions into it, and related to progression (permanence) for your character, throwing emerging gameplay (other players ambushing you for example) into the pool at the same time
Celestial-crow-frog? isn't that a homestuck?
Honestly a great video, and something which, even when done only decently right, can really make a game. Right now I'm thinking of Rule the Waves 2, one of my current games, which I think does it pretty well, kind of in a similar vein to new X-Com. You get to custom-design all of your ships ingame, and it takes actual time and resources to construct them, which makes losing them more painful. But over their service lives, as they get upgraded but also fall behind technologically, they can kind of start to feel like characters, with battles fought and enemies sunk, and who knows if their fate will be a sudden sinking, something more gradual, scrapping as they get obsolete, or if they make it to the end of the game. Although there's no inherent story-telling mechanics in the game and the graphics look straight out of MS Excel and MS Paint, it's one of those games which is excellent at crafting stories in the players head, a bit like Rimworld (another great one I'm sure people are already bringing up in the comments section).
I remember one playthrough I did as China, where I built a large armored cruiser, completed in 1910, with a hexagonal layout of double 10" turrets. This ship, Nan Chen, served throughout the entirety of the rest of the campaign, scoring victories against enemies in the first decade after her completion and still proving a worthwhile combat asset after a few decades in service. Despite more modern ships, she kind of became a mascot of my fleet, an old girl soldiering on which I'd hope would get more chances to shine while ships from after her time met their ends after shorter careers. At the very end of this campaign (the game ends in 1955, although if I'm in a war at that time I play past 1955 until it ends, at which point I end the game. It has an option to continue until 1970), I got into a war against Britain, France, and the Soviet Union with Japan as my ally. Basically, a hopeless war. As my unrest ticked up to dangerous levels, where my government collapsing from rebellion was inevitable, my fleet got into one last battle in November of 1957. Nan Chen, now upgraded but still sporting her 12 10" guns, but now with a SAM launcher fitted, was a part of this battle. The initial battle went favorably, but as my fleet retreated after daybreak they came under air attack from aircraft from Russian carriers and British airbases. Nan Chen started taking air-dropped torpedo hits, and attempted to limp home under protection of the fleet. The third torpedo hit did her in, and she sank. It was enough to give me a defeat, and with this battle, my government collapsed, and the war ended with severe reparations. I like to think the spirit of the Qing Chinese people lived with this ship, and died with her.
Yeah, this game has certainly given me stories like this. More examples are the Canadian battleship Nova Scotia sinking in protection of her namesake territory, trying to stop an American invasion of said lands, whilst an American battlecruiser, Constellation, which had previously in the battle detonated a Canadian battleship and a Canadian aircraft carrier, sank broadside-on to her at a close distance, after Nova Scotia had landed a last-ditch torpedo into the crippled Constellation's hull. This game honestly has a weird sense of unintentional poetry sometimes.
But yeah, I just like how this game does it. The one you're mentioning in this video seems to do it better. Also, this gives me a good explanation as to why I didn't like Bomber Crew's sense of permanence, since on release it had permanence in terms of death of characters and loss of upgrades (whilst keeping mission progress), but the path to progress through the game had individual hand-crafted missions which you had to play over and over again to get back up to where you were previously, making the permanence mechanics lead to boring gameplay. They later made the permanence only affect player death but not really affect upgrades/skills too heavily, which honestly just cheapened the whole mechanic. I really don't think either worked just because of how the missions themselves worked. Sorry, needed a small rant there.
this looks amazing
This is a really interesting topic and you might be interested in the board game Oath. It does something like this as a board game.
This videos reminded me of how games feel when they actually feel special. Just briefly.
I had a game idea like this on where you create a bloodline as the world evolves.
I am saving ALL THESE videos incase I need them for video game design later in life.
Nice yogscast reference ;)
Request: can you add a little tag in the corner during gameplay shots to identify the game? I have no idea what game is the one with the man with a gun and the two kids.
3:40
This had me rolling! XD