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Wadjet Eye Unavowed - Dave Gilbert's RPG-inspired urban fantasy game

Kem0sabe

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Just a cursory glance says that you have to be wrong. It is more plausible than other cRPGs almost right away because your character starts as someone who isn't important and stays unimportant for all of Act 1. There's some sense that is in an especially capable person, which he gradually utilizes to become one of the principal investors into an expedition to claim an ancient civilization's treasures as well as one of its leaders, but destiny is dealt with much more subtly here than it is in other Bioware games and more to the point almost all cRPGs. The primary sources of tension derive from the little microcosm the protagonist and his family and friends inhabit. The major "antagonists" (Orsino, Meredith, and the Arishok) get a whole lot of face time to explain their ideals and goals so the audience can understand the clashes and/or alliances between them and the protagonist at an ideological as well as a physical level.

Just a better written narrative at a fundamental level. I've read enough fantasy books to know.
You make it sound better than it actually is, like most Bioware games, the plots sound interesting on paper (if you did a blob of inquisition's plot it would sound like a good mix of political intrigue and racial tensions) but the execution is where Bioware fails miserably.
 

felipepepe

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The real question is: who's to blame for that?

I like DA2's premise. You have a grim story of a man struggling to survive & feed his family in a city built on the back of slaves, dominated by a mage-hating order and under threat of foreign invaders... all this taking over a decade to unroll and being told by an unreliable narrator.

Yet the game per se is a dumb, pandering power fantasy about fucking everything that moves, being loved by the world, effortless killing 50 guards in a fight, swimming in cash and summoning meteor swarms at Lv 2, right in the middle of the city square, no fucks given. Hard to create any tension this way.

IMHO, writers aren't really the ones to blame here... it must be an incredibly frustrating environment to work. Especially when characters can only behave in three ways: EDGY, JESUS or LULZ.
 
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Kem0sabe

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The real question is: who's to blame for that?

I like DA2's premise. You have a grim story of a man struggling to survive & feed his family in a city built on the back of slaves, dominated by a mage-hating order and under threat of foreign invaders... all this taking over a decade to unroll and being told by an unreliable narrator.

Yet the game per se is a dumb, pandering power fantasy about fucking everything that moves, being loved by the world, effortless killing 50 guards in a fight, swimming in cash and summoning meteor swarms at Lv 2, right in the middle of the city square, no fucks given. Hard to create any tension this way.

IMHO, writers aren't really the ones to blame here... it must be an incredibly frustrating environment to work. Especially when characters can only have three emotions - EDGY, JESUS or LULZ.
Play the game, read the dialogues... Tell me again how are the writers not to blame for that shit? I understand your point, but fuck the writing is bad in this game, fan fiction bad.
 
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You make it sound better than it actually is, like most Bioware games, the plots sound interesting on paper (if you did a blob of inquisition's plot it would sound like a good mix of political intrigue and racial tensions) but the execution is where Bioware fails miserably.

It isn't hard to figure out where Inquisition went wrong. You were fighting an "epic war" that at a gameplay level consisted of MMO busywork at a narrative level was directed against a generic antagonist that rarely showed up or did anything to make us care about beating him. Never killed anyone we cared about or did anything to raise the stakes above the level of a gentle drama. So you did a bunch of MMO busywork until the ending of a story that barely existed happened to you. DAII almost focused exclusively on the story. It was like a visual novel with the novel parts stretched out by walking. The "bad guys" actually showed up, did stuff, explained their ideas, etc. Heck, the end of Act II they even worked together to stop the Qunari, buttressing up the sense that at some level Kirkwall was a community even if it was a community divided.
 

DeepOcean

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It isn't hard to figure out where Inquisition went wrong. You were fighting an "epic war" that at a gameplay level consisted of MMO busywork at a narrative level was directed against a generic antagonist that rarely showed up or did anything to make us care about beating him. Never killed anyone we cared about or did anything to raise the stakes above the level of a gentle drama. So you did a bunch of MMO busywork until the ending of a story that barely existed happened to you. DAII almost focused exclusively on the story. It was like a visual novel with the novel parts stretched out by walking. The "bad guys" actually showed up, did stuff, explained their ideas, etc. Heck, the end of Act II they even worked together to stop the Qunari, buttressing up the sense that at some level Kirkwall was a community even if it was a community divided.

The concept was solid as you can see on this video, templars turning their back on you at the end, but Bioware can't resist their juvenile shit, they never did. It is this way since Baldur's Gate 1, the difference is that now the gameplay is complete MMO shit and there is no Wizard's of the Coast to impose some restraint on them and keep the worse fan fiction under control. Obviously, the bad girl couldn't be just some scheming bitch, she needed to be a scheming bitch, with a red lirium animu sword, capable of flying and summoning super cool statues and obviously that she must have a convenient crazyness fit and the templars, of course, side with you because you need a good ending with the entire city jerking you off.

If you read a dragon age plot synopsis as you describe, you would think it is great stuff and boy I couldn't stop laughing when I actually tried to play the game, for this very same reason I'm cautious with Siege of the Dragonspear thing Beam Dog is doing, interesting concepts that could end with animu lirium swords and flying villain. Bioware always got good concepts, the Mass Effect universe is quite interesting, for example, but I would shoot anyone in the head who said Mass Effect 3 has a good plot just to avoid said person breeding and spreading her genes.
 

Infinitron

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http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=53350

Wadjet Eye Games is extraordinarily proud to announce our next upcoming project: Unavowed!

Story
For six months, you were possessed by a demon. For six months, you unwillingly tore a trail of bloodshed through New York City. Now, finally, you are rescued by the Unavowed - an ancient society dedicated to stopping evil.

You are free, but your world is in tatters. You have no home, no friends, and you are wanted by the police. You can not return to your old life, but perhaps you can start a new one. Join the Unavowed, and learn to fight against the oncoming darkness.

Coming in 2017!

Written & Programmed by: Dave Gilbert (story co-designed with Jennifer Hepler)
Backgrounds and sprites: Ben Chandler
Music: Thomas Regin
Portraits (not pictured yet): Ivan Ulyanov

Features:
-Choose a male or female protagonist
-Choose one of three playable origin stories
-branching storyline
-A total of five companion characters to choose from. Each with their own talents and abilities.
-Double the resolution of a typical Wadjet Eye Game!
-All the usual guff - voice acting, commentary, original music, etc

This is the first original game I have written in two years, and my first ORIGINAL IP since Blackwell Legacy in 2006. It's super exciting to be working on this. More news as it comes.

Screenshots:

unavowed-alley.png

Hanging out with a jinn, a fire mage, and a dark creature from across the void.

unavowed-roof.png

Exorcisms are not for the weak.

unavowed-office.png

This guy is either conducting some horrible magic, or he's a video game developer.

unavowed-basement.png

Everything a modern day mage could want.

unavowed-shootcop.png

This probably isn't good.

unavowed-street.png

A city street at night.
 

Kem0sabe

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Great art, if a bit cliché in terms of story. This urban fantasy bad monster gone good thing, secret societies and all, has been done to death by every other writer.
 

Alex

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Great art, if a bit cliché in terms of story. This urban fantasy bad monster gone good thing, secret societies and all, has been done to death by every other writer.

Well, that was also the case with the medium investigator. Originality of premise seems like a really small factor in games.
 

Kem0sabe

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Well, that was also the case with the medium investigator. Originality of premise seems like a really small factor in games.
I can't fault their writing and characters so far, the track record has been almost perfect.

It's just that the bullet points from the story could be the back cover of a 100 different fantasy authors.

Would love to see more high concept stories in adventure gamss and rpgs, instead of constantly rehashing old tropes.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Party building! Choice and consequence! https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/29/blackwell-unavowed-interview/


Wadjet Eye Interview: Urban Fantasy Adventure Unavowed Returns To World Of Blackwell Series
Adam Smith on March 29th, 2016 at 3:00 pm.

unavowed.jpg


Part RPG, part adventure game, Unavowed is the next project from Wadjet Eye Games founder Dave Gilbert and even though it features entirely new characters, it takes place in the same world as the wonderful Blackwell series. I met with Gilbert at GDC and he explained the game’s origins and intricacies, as well as talking about his love of urban fantasy, and his development as a game designer and storyteller.


I was very sad when the Blackwell series ended and that was only partly due to story-related happenings. Most of the sadness related to saying goodbye to characters I enjoyed spending time with and might never see again.

Whether or not there will be cameos in Unavowed, I can’t say, but when I asked if there were any links between the two series, which both feature paranormal happenings on the streets of New York City, Gilbert did confirm that the game takes place in the same ‘universe’ that was host to the Blackwell games. He hadn’t wanted to close the door on that world, which had developed a fairly complex supernatural mythology all of its own, but had decided to move away from Blackwell.

“I don’t like the first Blackwell game at all now. I’m my own worst critic, I know, but I cringe when I think about some of the decisions I made there.”

He’s referring mainly to the flow of the storytelling, which utilises big textual infodumps to explain motivations and character backstories. There’s certainly an improvement from one game to the next, and that first game is undoubtedly the weakest of the five, but I think it works fine as an introduction. Gilbert disagrees: “Unavowed lets me revisit the world without that baggage. People don’t need to feel they have to take in the whole series, beginning with The Blackwell Legacy. Instead, they can start fresh with Unavowed, which sets up its own story with its own characters. And benefits from everything I’ve learned about game design over the last decade.”

unavowed3.jpg


The game is a full-on urban fantasy, inspired by the likes of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, of which Gilbert is a big fan. In the scenes I saw, there was demonic possession, magic and plenty of talk that was both arcane and esoteric. There was also combat. Sort of. There was a violent confrontation, at the very least.

“I was inspired by Jennifer Hepler’s suggestion that combat could be entirely removed from RPGs. If that were the case, why couldn’t an adventure game become more like an RPG by containing RPG-like choices and parties of NPCs?”

Unavowed is an adventure game, with all the pointing, clicking and puzzling you might expect, but it’s also an RPG without combat. Hepler is credited as story co-designer on the game and in one scene, the influence of her thoughts about RPGs without combat is clear.

unavowed2.jpg


A situation has developed, whereby two of the player character’s friends are being threatened by a creature that is blocking their path. Using the kind of logic that any adventure game fan will understand, the confrontation can be cut short if the player manages to manipulate the environment such that the creature ends up on the receiving end of a strong electric current.

Those two friends who accompany the player are chosen from a pool of five characters. And, yes, that means you’re building a party and each member has their own skills that can be used in various situations as well as unique dialogue. There’ll be a choice of playable characters as well, although that’ll be a case of picking male or female rather than selecting certain personality traits or skills. The player character will be the only unvoiced character in the game and that’s both an artistic choice and an end-result of pragmatic design. With two characters to choose from and a storyline that branches and provides multiple solutions to problems, there would need to be an enormous amount of audio for the player character alone.

Unavowed looks superb. Aesthetically, in that the art of long-time Wadjet Eye artist Ben Chandler is so well-suited to this noir-and-necromancy world and is seen at double the resolution of previous games, but also in terms of Gilbert’s decision to incorporate elements not normally associated with point and click adventures. That party system, for one, and branching choices with potentially dire consequences for another.

unavowed5.jpg


In speaking to Gilbert, I’m struck by how clearly he recognises the value of escapist fantasy in storytelling. While not noticeably a post-9/11 game in any political sense, the Blackwell games and The Shivah before them, seem like an effort to reframe the city and its potential to surprise in a way that is manageable and marvelous. Gilbert mentions the attack on the city as we’re talking, explaining that he had been unemployed at the time and had turned to Adventure Game Studio as a way to take his mind off what was happening. A pure form of escapism through creation that led to a career as both designer and producer of the finest adventure games since the days of Lucasarts.

His New York, as seen in the earlier games and again in Unavowed, is a world in which something weird and/or wonderful waits around every corner. It’s a city of possibilities and opportunities, some of which are thrilling and some of which are tragic. Although there are ghosts and demons, they’re stitched into familiar fabric in a way that makes them seem even more lurid and outrageous than they would in a dungeon or on a plain of volcanic ash. When I asked Gilbert about the presence of real-life New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s presence as a character at the heart of the Blackwell series, his answer suggested that Mitchell fulfilled many of those escapist functions in a very different way to Butcher, Whedon and other urban fantasy writers.

“Mitchell was an extraordinary storyteller. He could make wonderful stories out of everyday experiences. And he could talk to anyone, in a bar or on the street. That’s not something I can do.”

unavowed6.jpg


There’s a fascinating connection between Gilbert’s admiration of Mitchell’s ability to discover stories through conversations with strangers – a device unavailable to him due, perhaps, both to the way the city has changed since Mitchell’s time and Gilbert’s own social confidence – and his admiration of works like the Dresden Files that seem like almost pure invention. Yes, they’re set in an approximation of the real world, but where there might be a gap in our understanding or in the drama, it is plugged with various mythological and supernatural borrowings.

Where Mitchell extracted the extraordinary from what many might see as ordinary folk (one of Mitchell’s lessons, I think, is that there is no such thing as an ordinary person), urban fantasy risks obscuring the ordinary entirely. I trust Gilbert and his team to find the extraordinary in the familiar rather than eliminating the latter entirely in pursuit of dark magicks and otherworldly passages. Anyone who has more than a passing familiarity with Mitchell’s work would find it difficult to dispute that he was an urban fantasist of sorts himself, who used his intellect and inventive reading of character and place to add flavour to the stories he discovered. Everything is changed in the retelling, whether it’s the story of McSorley’s bar or one of many visions of faerie through the ages.

unavowed4.jpg


Every storyteller is an archaeologist, a reteller of tales, and Gilbert’s enthusiasm for his chosen genre is couched in respect for those who have gone before, whether their fantasies involved demons and djinns or derelicts and drunkards. Gabriel Knight explored history through the lens of lycanthropy and other aspects of the supernatural, and Gilbert has made a name for himself by reimagining New York’s peculiar mythology through its own urban legends.

The demonic possession and mages on the city streets of this new title might speak to a particular form of fantasy fiction, but Gilbert has a strong enough understanding of character and place to make Unavowed a distinct and empathetic contribution to that genre. And, hopefully, another unusual vision of the city itself.

Unavowed will be out sometime next year.
 

V_K

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I'm all for a combat-free RPG, but why did he have to keep the boring bits (dialog choices) and throw out the exciting ones (character building)? :negative:
Actually, I know why - because Hepler - it's just that rhethorical questions make for better expression of frustration.
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
i don't care about hepler (she's not leading, only co-designing, dave have the authority to cut shitty ideas she has, and keep the good ones), and every dave gilbert game is :d1p:



so excited!:love:
 

Kem0sabe

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Rpg without combat is not a rpg... Triggered intensely by this.

Also, I hope the game is not just a bunch of dresden inspired bits stitched together, and tries to go it's own way.

The art looks good at least.
 

bertram_tung

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Insert Title Here
Wadjet Eye Games is the closest thing we have to a Lucasarts/Sierra adventure game company these days. Sure, they don't have the same level of production or polish (for obvious reasons), but they are very deserving of extremely high praise for the quality and quantity of games they crank out on a consistent basis. I take great interest in every single one of their games at this point. The majority of them do not let me down.
 

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