For me, these sort of games revolve around two important themes which represent the "character" of the game and the experience: 1) the in-game characters and 2) the civilization or settlement. This thread will be addressing the characters found in these games with a suggestion to improve upon games of the past. One reason that everyone loves games like Dwarf Fortress is because of the narrative. The stories that crop up from our citizens experiences and personalities enhance the gameplay more then an 3D graphics or amazing sound design ever could; I suspect it also can save developers a lot of money. Games like Age of Empires 3, while very pretty, lack any attachment to your people or towns, and grow old after a while. An Age of Empires game almost always plays the same and hardly generates an interesting story (even with it's campaigns). Taking a dynamic narrative stance is the right way to go. Recently an article was posted about storytelling in games, it was an excellent read and gives me high hopes for Clockwork Empires. The game appears to have variety that is sorely lacking in modern gaming, depth, and, again, narrative.The relationship between Sgt. Egress and Penny, the leadership of Bollox, and the different stories behind the other characters really makes the game seem immersive and very interesting. This will be even greatly enhanced if the developers do indeed add personal goals and agendas for these characters relating to outside their physical and immediate (survival) needs. The one request I'd like to add on to all of this, seeing as the game is still early in development, is to allow the players help craft and create these stories as we see fit. For example, Dwarf Fortress pretty much gives the player their starting characters and we can only assign labors and skills to them, why not allow the players to craft and create those characters from the ground up? Personality, appearance, goals, skills, why not let players choose everything? No doubt this can be due to balance. Players could take advantage of this to make a team of super-soldiers who are also super-scientists or could perhaps have a team of slack jawed idiots who don't bother to wake up in the morning to get to work. I have one comment and one suggestion in response. So what if players want freedom and will undoubtedly abuse it, let them! Withhold achievements if you have to, dismiss them from leaderboards, but at least allow players to have that freedom to cheat, abuse, or misuse their freedom. My suggestion is to, at the very least, make it an option that can be enabled, disabled, or somehow activated. Console commands, cheat codes, or a difficulty option allow us some option to control who we get and who they are. Players can create expeditions of their best friends and create wonderful AAR stories about their wacky hijinks, players could create their own personal kingdoms and empires with the utmost control, or they can create great challenges to overcome. I'm hoping that Bollox Cogsbronze is a character that someone created to represent that particular player or story. The bureaucrat or overseer or leader of the group should be a character we control or have some degree of influence over. That is, unless you want to "play as" one of the other characters (Naturalist, Sergeant, Clerk, etc). I'd love to see a James009 character leading my initial expeditions and, perhaps, to see him develop over time (persistent character?). Furthermore, can characters be carried over between expeditions, perhaps I train/recruit/hire a very competent mechanic/engineer and want him to go with me on the next expedition? This would indeed be very cool and enhance the long term game, but I'd suggest letting us have multiple characters here (not stuck to one style or character). Regardless, the game should do well so long as characters are meaningful and interesting. I have no doubt that if the game is anything like that last blog read it will be a clear contender to Dwarf Fortress, Civilization, and Age of Empires. Best of luck and remember us players!
