Singe player story idea.

[TWB*JimMiller]

Hello everyone, let me just say this idea is probably horrible, but I just cannot help but post it. I have an idea for the single player storyline for the game that I wanted to share. The main concept is to build attachment to the guys in your squad as well as to give an immersive in-depth background about what they are experiencing. First, you start out as a rookie and have to play a few missions to earn a command, each of these missions would begin as if the player is writing a letter to a loved one, this is where TWI could go into building character depth, then let the player experience it. After you earn your command, you then have to choose the members who are going to be in your squad. For each member you choose, you need to play a series of missions as that person that leads them up to the time that they might be chosen for your squad. Again with every mission in that specific person, it starts as a letter home and helps to define that specific character.

I think what this would do would be to build attachment to not only your character, but the characters of your squad. It will also give you a deep insight into these people outside of just telling a story. Once your squad is built, you play a series of missions together. At the end of it all you would essentially be standing, with the members of your squad that survived, as heroes of Stalingrad. If everything works out, the player will feel an emotional bond with the person he is playing as, as well as his squad members. Also it would help the player to not only get a good understand of the hope, fear, and other raw emotions that went on, but to then create the same feelings from the experience of the games combat.

Anyways, thats the idea.

TWB*JimMiller

 

[Capt.Cool]

really like this idea.

Does not really need to pick your comrades yourself, it would be enough if you see the names of your squadmembers, and that they have differennt, rememberable faces. That was one thing I liked in MOH (2nd or 3rd?), you had really "character faces" that stick in mind. The problem was it didnt really matter if these guys died or not. The game did not reward if you tried to keep this guys alive.


That should be better protraited in the game: be rewarded if you keep your buddys alive.
If they stay alive longer in the game, they should develope better skills (shooting, demolition, closecombat, ect.)
So the squad that you finish the game with are really the HEROS of STALINGRAD.

And if some of your buddies dies you should feel bad, cause teammember "Hans" or "Vassily" was already a very good marksman, and the new teammember that comes at his replacement is green and a very unexperienced shooter.
And you will think "oh boy, I really miss Hans! Why didnt I cover his back? His replacement is a joke!"

what do ya think of this idea?

 

[Bashenka]

WTH? Anatoli's my new sniper???!!! WHAAAAAT???!!! Where'd Vassily go?!
HE'S DEAD!!!???? OMG NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Now we'll never get to Berlin! *cries*

I can just imagine all the good fun that would bring .
I like the idea of character development, generally in all forms. Though personally I'm not expecting more than the multiplayer maps strewn together with perhaps some cool intro/closing cutscenes, I would not mind being pleasantly surprised and see a more fleshed out singleplayer.

 

[Zetsumei]

the best way to get a user to care about a squadmember dying is loosing someone that gained skills and has been with you for a while.

So definitely if the other characters can gain skills by surviving and get new attributes. And if they die you get a rooky that cant hit ****. People will start to care about losing someone. If at the begin of a mission are able to basically select the outfits arrange the skills and select weaponry etc for your squad. Then you'll hate it more when they die.

At least that was the case for me in hogs of war (a bit like a worms game with pigs), and you could select a squad at the beginning and update basically individual squad guys. So he could go from lvl1 sniper to level 4 sniper etc. And pretty much when later one of the regular pigs died i seriously started all over again because I didn't want him to die.

I don't know how possible it is to let you play every new squad member up to the point where you get added to the squad, and I don't know what kind of intermission cutscenes etc there will be and what the ability of twi is with that. Personally what I hope to see regarding cut scenes is like someone is reading a diary he just found of a soldier, and after reading a passage you fade into the actual battle. And with that preferably the diary of real soldiers . Or video footage if rights can be obtained from interviews about the battle.

Or say A grandpa sitting somewhere thinking about the war while he's with his family or whatever.

----------------------

 

[Bobdog]

I'm wondering how long you'd be able to keep a squad together, since in Ostfront the life expectancy of any one soldier is only ~ 45 seconds.

 

[<animal>INSTINCT]

I'm wondering how long you'd be able to keep a squad together, since in Ostfront the life expectancy of any one soldier is only ~ 45 seconds.

my thoughts exactly, but then again, we don't really know what the single player mode is going to be like. If the gameplay is similar to the multiplayer, then yeah, it won't do much good to have squadmates that level up in skill, since no one makes it through a game without dying at least a couple times

 

[Capt.Cool]

I'm wondering how long you'd be able to keep a squad together,
since in Ostfront the life expectancy of any one soldier is only ~ 45 seconds.

We are talking about singleplayer.

Life expectancy of a soldier in SP campain should depend of the difficulty level (easy/medium/hard/stalingrad).

And of course its impossible to bring ALL your squadmates through the SP campain, but thats the idea behind it:
some will die, and you will feel sad about the loss.

 

[Bobdog]

Still it wouldn't really be RO if you and your squadmates could absorb 5 or 10 rifle rounds before dropping.

 

[shadowwill]

(easy/medium/hard/stalingrad).

Awesome.

 

[TWB*JimMiller]

I was thinking that if they died, you would have a cutscene where you write the family of the deceased or something along those lines. Whatever to put you in the shoes of the soldiers and make you understand what they had to go though.

 

[Bashenka]

Originally posted by JimMiller
I was thinking that if they died, you would have a cutscene where you write the family of the deceased or something along those lines. Whatever to put you in the shoes of the soldiers and make you understand what they had to go though.

The joke's on you! Tripwire's making literacy a hero-unlock.

 

[Zetsumei]

I was thinking that if they died, you would have a cutscene where you write the family of the deceased or something along those lines. Whatever to put you in the shoes of the soldiers and make you understand what they had to go though.

Any forced story especially when semi interactive, only ends up feeling cheesy. Unless you have a really good writer. I think that going with objectivity and telling facts can have a bigger influence on players.

 

[Dwin]

Well assuming the single player campaign is realistic, it is perfectly reasonable for someone (player or NPC) to survive the entire campaign without dying once. Veterans of the real war did it!

 

[<animal>INSTINCT]

Well assuming the single player campaign is realistic, it is perfectly reasonable for someone (player or NPC) to survive the entire campaign without dying once. Veterans of the real war did it!

Veterans of the real war might also have gone through the whole war without actually killing a single person, and to me that doesn't sound very fun for a game

 

[Nimsky]

I think the whole "soldier writing in his diary or writing a letter to home" thing is incredibly clich

 

[Dwin]

Indeed. Leave the drama to Call of Duty. Let TWI do something different and interesting.

 

[Nezzer]

No, don't leave the drama to Call of Duty. A good single player needs drama like soldiers crying, shellshocked, losing their limbs and stuff, otherwise it's just another shooter like COD or MoH, with a bit of realism of course. Apart from the MP, I'd really like to see skill based suppression system and bolting/reloading.

Time and experience harden the soldier, or they completely destroy their minds, but anyway it should be realistic if in the first missions when we're just a rookie, we took a bit longer to reload, bolt, and recover from suppression.

In these first missions, something I'd also like to see is something like a "madness point"(in which our character would start to scream or cry putting his arms over his head) that we would reach if being suppressed for a long time or seeing a lot of your comrades dying

I like war-drama, that's why my favourite WWII single player FPS is Brothers in Arms series xD

 

[Zetsumei]

Drama is good if its good. But drama can really easily feel unnatural or cheesy. And games pulling of good drama is absolutely rare. For me documentaries about horrific happenings touch me more than movies about the same acts.

What I would like to see, is a clear reference to reality. Not drama about something that happened in game, but telling what drama occurred in real life. And that is obtained easier with making a clear distinction of what happens in game and what happened in real-life.

Discovery channel, History channel national geographic are popular channels, and even often don't display really accurate information. With research twi probably knows a lot about the battles from stalingrad, and basically telling the real stories in a compelling way is a lot heavier than most forms of information.

 

[Dwin]

No, don't leave the drama to Call of Duty. A good single player needs drama like soldiers crying, shellshocked, losing their limbs and stuff, otherwise it's just another shooter like COD or MoH, with a bit of realism of course. Apart from the MP, I'd really like to see skill based suppression system and bolting/reloading.

Time and experience harden the soldier, or they completely destroy their minds, but anyway it should be realistic if in the first missions when we're just a rookie, we took a bit longer to reload, bolt, and recover from suppression.

In these first missions, something I'd also like to see is something like a "madness point"(in which our character would start to scream or cry putting his arms over his head) that we would reach if being suppressed for a long time or seeing a lot of your comrades dying

I like war-drama, that's why my favourite WWII single player FPS is Brothers in Arms series xD

Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms's drama is forced. They want you to feel a certain way, and they will manipulate what happens in the game in order to do so and the audience eats it up. This might be okay for games intended for the masses, but I'd like to think that HoS will cater more to an audience than doesn't need to be spoonfed WW2 cliches.

 

[<animal>INSTINCT]

Thats true, spoonfeeding emotions to a player is a gaming cliche. While for some games it is appropriate, like the BiA series, it doesn't seem like the sort of thing RO should harp on

While every game needs some sort of drama for a single player campaign, it doesn't necessarily have to come from deliberately manipulating the players emotions with cinematics. I think it's better if the action itself evokes the drama the player is witnessing. Seeing a bunch of your guys getting torn-up by MG fire and blown to bits by mortars in the blink of an eye can be just as dramatic as a cutscene or scripted events, but this is just an opinion of mine and it really comes down to the individual players as to what makes their thoughts and emotions stir