Slashdot Mirror
An FPS Minus the Shooting
phaedrus5001 writes "Ars has a story about a first person shooter under development that involves no shooting on the part of the player; at least, no shooting bullets. The game, Warco, has the player in the role of a war correspondent. The object is to immerse yourself in missions and firefights in order to document what happens. From the article: 'Players will experience the process of filming conflicts, going into dangerous situations armed with nothing but a camera. They will then edit the footage into a compelling news story.' While it's an interesting and different concept, it should be even more interesting to see if the developers can actually convince a publisher to release the project."
Do you get to use a Canon for this?
It's under development and they're hitting mainstream geek-press already (Ars, Slashdot). So a large part of their target market already knows about it.
Developing a game like this shouldn't give you too much hope to get rich. As TFA states they hope to make it "a commercial reality", not sure what they mean with it but it sounds like they hope to have it break even or make a little profit off of it. It's so out of the ordinary that to me it's hard to say what could happen to a project like it.
But to get back to the point: you don't need multi-million budgets for marketing. If you have an interesting product (and they do) then the press will happily write about it, like /. does now. No need to buy advertising on TV or whatever.
Very interesting, the underrated game Beyond Good And Evil involves creature photography as a fairly central gameplay element, and that bit is very good.
So it's like Pokémon Snap. Nothing innovative, move on.
Games generally need some kind of scoring mechanic to keep players playing. If this game moves ahead, then it would require a system that scores the report based on objective criteria - the only other option would be to have a gaming community score reports (but with a niche game, and a troll-ridden community, this seems unfeasible).
So what gets the most points? Shooting video of soldiers fighting hard for their country? Or getting insider shots of blatant war crimes? Perhaps civilians cowering in fear, or mass graves? The kind of shots that a true war correspondent would want are not the kind that are suited to a game.
A clever concept, but impossible to judge the success of the player to any meaningful degree. It's more likely to be a dialogue-driven story game, with bits of running around, making "moral" choices, and shooting video that's edited together for nothing more than the pleasure of the gamer. I applaud the originality, but I'm skeptical of its appeal.
Publishers really are not the problem. Publishers have more to fear handing money over for a knock off FPS than this. Your COD low budget rip off isn't going to make any money. What publishers do have to fear for is game play. If the game play is solid, they are going to have absolutely no problem gathering up the cash. In fact, if there is good game play here, I think publishers will be clawing their eyes out to get their hands on this. Everyone wants a Portal or Minecraft.
If this game doesn't get picked up, it is because it is not fun. You are free to wrap up a moral lesson on the value of journalism, war, or whatever, but if it is just a moral lesson wrapped with empty and dull game play, no one is going to play it.
You can color me mildly skeptical of this game. They have spent a lot of time talking about the neat gimmick that is the setting and the protagonist's job. Nearly everyone agrees that the setting sounds interesting and unique. What I have not heard them say much about is how they are going to make the game fun. Am I going to be an idiot with a health bar chasing the Call of Duty guys as they tear up the street and mow down civilians? Is this going to look more like an on open world FPS RPG than a shooter on rails? Am I going to be scoring points for getting action shots of civilians getting shot and terrorist getting blown away, or am I sleuthing around and talking to people trying to find a story?
Fun game play doesn't have to involve putting a bullet between someone's eyes, but I am pretty sure it has to involve more than chasing around the Call of Duty guys with a camera as they run through scripted battles. I'm not saying that this game isn't going to be fun, just that they have not shown what neat game play gimmick is going to go along with what everyone agrees is an interesting concept and setting.
The concept is rather unique though and I can't really tell whether or not it will work. It is a gamble.
Well, it's not that unique :) - seriously though:
Substitute Pokémon Island for a warzone and Pokémon poses for battlefield atrocities and you're there or thereabouts.
I'd rather take the battlefield atrocities, thanks.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
If they don't have an Easy Mode (embedded journalist mode) the games will be very quick; both sides will be shooting at you, and that makes writing very difficult.
Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made. - Otto von Bismarck
What about Portal? It didn't involve any bullet shooting and it was a FPS
If there's no shooting it's not a fucking FPS. By definition.
Why can't you just say it's a game you play in the first person. You could have a first person adventure/puzzle game, a first person Civ-style game, a first person sports game...
FPS = First Person SHOOTer
What did you do, exactly, with that Portal gun to make it work? Here's a hint, GP said " It didn't involve any bullet shooting and it was a FPS".
Even in this game, you have a camera. What do photographers call it when they take pictures or video?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
OB: http://xkcd.com/569/
What about Pokémon Snap? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokémon_Snap I can imagine the tag-line: "War crimes! Gotta catch 'em all!"
World Skin - a photo safari in the Land of War - an Interactive A/V Installation by renowned artist Maurice Benayoun won the golden Nica award at the Ars Electonica Festival in 1997! It was presented in a 3D-Cave on 6 Screens using OpenGL on SGI workstations. quite a feat for that time.
"World Skin" is a 3 person game. One driver, two photographers.
"Armed with a camera, visitors are placed in a sinister war zone that is visualized on a large projection screen in 3D animation and video. By operating photo cameras visitors may take pictures of the war scenes and experience how the camera becomes a 'weapon' that enables them to wipe out the projected images. Only the outline of the taken picture is left as a silhouette in the projection. Visitors can take a print of the photos they shot with them." http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16
Steam in particular, but other digital services as well (like Impulse and Direct2Drive) have become a way that many people get a good number of games. Well, they also promote games as well. Steam runs games on promo on their front page. The trend seems to be either games that are really big and popular, or games that are indy and somewhat obscure, but well done.
A recent example is Bastion. Made by a team of 7 friends it has won a rather large amount of acclaim. I'd never heard of it, until Steam had it featured. It interested me, and apparently a ton of other people. It has sold really well, been written about in the game press, and so on. No big studio, no big marketing budget, just a good game that got promoted by Steam.
Likewise you have other opportunities for promotion with these digital sellers in that they love doing deals. Impulse and Steam like to offer a sale every weekend, and one each day as well. So you agree to a temporary price reduction, and you get front page exposure, or even a special popup in the case of weekend deals. Plus people repost it on various sites.
If you have a high quality game, it really can rise up and do well with nothing behind it. Might not happen in one day, but it can happen.
Most of the people who complain that you "have to have a big studio to make it," just don't produce good games (or often produce any games at all, they just talk about doing it). Not any more. Digital downloads have become a great equalizer. No, you won't do Call of Duty's billion dollars of sales, but you may sell a couple hundred thousand copies, maybe even a couple million. You aren't likely to get rich, but you can make some money.
Big studios and big budgets are only needed for big games. If your project involves tons of high end art, voice acting, and so on then yes you might be talking a $50 million budget and you'll need financial backing to make that happen. However if you are less ambitious, there's plenty of market for cheaper indy titles.
There really wasn't much shooting in Mirror's Edge, either. In fact, you can complete the game without shooting a single bullet, and that doesn't even increase the difficulty all that much.
Just release it yourself, online!
And get it digitally signed by the console maker how? Nintendo doesn't want to deal with first-time developers, and Sony's web site for signing up as a developer has been broken for five months now.
Not always true. There were bots for Quake 3 that were absolutely spooky. they never got stuck and could make decisions to go a different route as well as adding some randomness to throw you off.
The reaper bot was good, but several guys made modifications that would fool people into thinking they were players. One of the bots would actually rocket jump successfully.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure it did - the turrets shoot plenty of bullets (and they shoot the whole bullet - that's 65% more bullet per bullet).
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Like the Elder Scroll games?