I saw Hoppers.
Cute. Hilarious. I loved it.
But maybe I'm just getting old, but I agreed with the villains and saw no flaws with their plan.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
team attempt to smear and judge the Final Girl and her testimony. The social horror of being placed under a spotlight with your trauma for all to view and judge. Or as another team seeks to spin the evidence to exonerate a client, not matter how illogical or insane the spin is.
Movie pitch idea:
A horror movie crossed with a courtroom drama.
The Final Girl of a horror movie event re-experiences the trauma of the event during the eventual trial of the serial killer.
Juxtapose the horrific events against the ensuing courtroom battle where the killer and their defense-
what trying to write smut feels like:
I keep making the mistake of looking at the news and trying to be informed.
I’m angry. And scared. And hurting. I have so much rage building in my heart and it’s aching.
And it’s not one that exists if the player is rolling in money regardless of what they do, even if the story might say otherwise. If money is no object, it’s just whatever the player decides to do for their own moral compass.
That’s now a dynamic player relationship that we can exploit. One player might suck it up no matter what and complete every quest but feel really nasty after. Another might say “fuck this shit” and betray that vendor at the cost of access to those weapons and for cheaper.
I’m not saying make that vendor a serial puppy kicker or hat wearing villain. Or in offensively annoyed with. Make them characters.
But… what if the guy is incompetent? Never has the right intel. Or has bonus objectives that are difficult to pull off and you probably won’t check every box?
In a setting like Night City, how much are you willing to do to cozy up to a vendor for sweet guns and gear? Maybe they sell “Uniques” that players covet and want to collect. How much might you participate within corrupt cycles of abuse, oppression, and the like when it’s for your paycheck?
Now, let’s put some pressure back in. What are the limits to my desire to form a relationship with this vendor and *maybe* get a discount?
It’s easy to just go “Give quest. Do quest. Reward” A B C. And that’s not *bad*. It’s not *wrong*. But it’s not often interesting.
With a painful economy, maybe I now want to cozy up to opportunities for discounts- now I have a player engagement hook.
2077 could have done this with the guy who runs the gun store in your building. Or, arguably, they do do this with Viktor.
Ok, if there is a cycle of crime and always needing money and every item being enormously expensive-
Well, now I might narratively want to develop a relationship with vendors. A lot of games have quests with rewards of “Discount at store”, but I almost never think of them. Rolling in cash anyway.
However, I believe creating needs or pressures in gameplay can drive interesting mechanical choices.
To spin off this thought again,
I get where games get comfortable and don’t need to have complex economies. If you do them wrong, they can be tedious and boring or game breaking and frustrating at worst. And, in the age of the internet, folks will eventually make “guides” to negate it.
Wanting an RPG experience to put me into my character’s shoes.
I think games have a very intrinsic “empathy” quality we don’t capitalize on very well because it requires harder and more committed bold choices than AAA has the budget to risk these days.
You thought you would.
System wise? The game is completely balanced towards $8k you earned anyway. But you will feel so much different about that $8k if it was $128k before that.
That’s a very “smoke and mirrors” idea, but I think that demonstrates the kinda stuff I’m looking for in-
Like, ok, 2077 is about how V is just a merc making ends meet and paying bills. Is there some way we can incorporate that into our experience?
A pitch I’d have is quest rewards having huge payouts… which then deduct rent, bills, car maintenance, or gun care. And you’re left with SO MUCH less than-
Or I wish we could have made more interesting gameplay choices?
I’ve always kinda lamented that any game about the cycle of crime, poverty, and economics don’t do anything more interesting with how we engage with money and systems of commerce.
True, but there’s a degree to which I guess, and I say this not as criticism and out of love for 2077, I want some harder commitments to the experience.
Like, I get the realities of RPG branches, but I wish Corpo!V had a consistent flavor and undercurrent through out the game.
Assignment and comparing notes between them. I like games that experiment a bit.
So I’ve been told. I respect Disco Elysium and I’ve watched playthroughs of it, but I’m certain it’s a game I wouldn’t actually enjoy playing. And we’re not getting a sequel there.
I guess I’m looking for more expressions and executions of those kind of ideas. Seeing how everyone interprets the-
For example, I’d be curious about an RPG, but all of the skills and abilities are built around the power fantasy role of “Detective” instead of a more generic RPG breakdown.
You aren’t an RPG character shoehorned into a detective. Your RPG character is a detective, if that makes sense?
I empathize with the desire for Silent/blank slate protagonists for RPGs. It’s the cleanest answer to the problem.
I’m kinda more interested in, while not full characters like Lara Croft or James Sunderland, but characters that commit to a theme or bit.
They paired things back to more emotional foundations that kept it grounded and focused.
Also, this game didn’t need 3 1st person torture scenes…
If you’d ever like to talk about earlier iterations of the game, I’d be happy to discuss some of the variations.
I think one of the things that developmentally worked in their narrative favor is that earlier versions were much heavier on the drama, grit, and “edge”.
There are a lot of call backs and reprised lines in the script.
I really should go back to it and fall in love again. Or maybe just review all the data files I have and reveal some of the development secrets I and a group of others discovered years ago.
I genuinely do not know what they want us to think. What is the realistic intended audience reaction here?
Like… what is your actual intention in displaying this?
It doesn’t make you look cool. I’m not in awe of how you look when *you don’t look like that*. I’m not in awe of the work you didn’t put into the gym.
And I’m not celebrating the “out kinky queer life” you’re having to AI generate.
Look at the drawing of you as a Spartan with abs that you don’t have and you didn’t draw!
Look at all the glitchy ugly nonsense as floating arms, too many fingers, and garbage physics rendering!
Here’s a thing I don’t get about the endless deluge of AI slop pictures and videos-
Genuinely… what reaction do you want me to have here?
Look at all the leather folks that definitely did not have a dance party in the street!
