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Preview Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory Gameplay Footage and Preview at IGN

Infinitron

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Tags: Black Shamrock; Cyanide Studio; Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory

IGN have gotten their hands on ten minutes of Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory gameplay footage. In this typical troubleshooting scenario, the player character and his team are tasked with investigating the whereabouts of a maintenance team who have gone missing in the sector's lower levels, with the side objective of retrieving a cowardly floor scrubbing robot. Once there, the scrubot is easily located but the team is nowhere to seen, replaced with an army of hostile security bots who have been reprogrammed to think they're characters from a fantasy RPG. The game plays a bit like a real-time version of Shadowrun Returns, with a large emphasis on cover. Unfortunately the person playing skips through all the dialogue, so it comes across as more hack n' slash than it should. Thankfully IGN have also written a preview which provides some necessary context. Here's the gameplay footage and an excerpt:



You take on the role of a Troubleshooter: someone whose job is to deal with any problems in Alpha Complex that may require a more personal touch than Friend Computers many drones and servo-arms are able to provide. In our demo, this meant investigating why one of the maintenance bots in a sub-basement level was behaving oddly.

It turned out that a group of Traitors - the designation given to anyone in the Alpha Complex facility that does not follow the rules or remain Happy™ - had sealed off a few rooms in the sub-basement to use as their personal LARP-ing grounds (they'd even reprogrammed security bots to shout "Lightning Bolt!" as they fire their lasers), and it was up to us and our three crew members to clear them out.

Combat in Paranoia is real-time, but you can pause the action whenever you like for as long as you want to give your squad of four commands, sending them to cover, attacking specific enemies or making use of their unique specializations. For example, while your Cleanliness Officer might be able to use disinfecting chemical to deal acid damage, or your Happiness Officer (basically the logical and horrifying extrapolation of Big Pharma and Social Media) could buff your team with psychotropic drugs.

What's interesting is that rather than failing and restarting a mission upon death with a different skill loadout, HiM features a unique take on permadeath. Friend Computer understands that accidents happen, and as such has issued Troubleshooters with a bank of clones that are activated upon a unit's accidental termination (or an intentional one, depending on your actions). What's interesting is that each time you activate a clone, you're able to re-spec your skills and attribute points, effectively creating a new character every time you die. Friend Computer only provides six clones that can be re-spec'd, though, so you'll have to choose wisely if you don't want to get stuck with a skill set you don't want. I'm told, however, that there may be a certain geneticist somewhere in Alpha Complex that could help with that - if you've got funds and are willing to risk the demerits...

Of course, it wouldn't be called "Paranoia" without good reason. While your team members may be under your control during combat and missions, they are very much not your team members. Even though your jobs will take you into areas where Friend Computer's scanners don't work, that doesn't mean your team members won't inform Friend Computer of any misdeeds you commit while on a mission. For example, when we found ourselves at a locked door, our tech expert suggested that I hack a nearby vending machine to gain access to the local network and unlock the door. It was a good idea, so I did - and the little weasel ratted me out as soon as we got back upstairs, which caused my Treason Level (a percent rating system that every citizen has indicating how concerned Friend Computer is with their Happiness™) to increase and change my citizen rating from Questionable to Suspicious.

We didn't see much of Alpha Complex beyond the couple of floors we visited, but the little bit of the world it showed us did a great job playing with this notion of omnipotence and mistrust, and how you have to deal with it. Wherever your character goes, security cameras track your every move - even the Friend Computer icon at the top of the screen (it lets you know when you're in view of its cameras) follows the motion of your mouse cursor with eerie, silent malice.

Though I only experienced a small portion Paranoia's world, I was immediately hooked by its witty take on the "robots gone awry" genre, and can't wait to see how my exploits play out depending on my choices. Will I splinter off from the other citizens to join a secret society and overthrow FC? Or will I remain a steadfast and Happy™ agent of Friend Computer's ruthlessly intelligent design? Happiness may be mandatory, but participation is entirely voluntary - and I'll gladly be throwing on my read overalls later this year.

The game definitely has potential and the writing seems fun. For it to be a truly good game though, we'll have to see some more variety. Hopefully the developers are up to the task.
 

hexer

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I never played Paranoia PnP but the setting sounds fun, like a parody of 1984.
Will keep an eye on it
 

undecaf

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While your team members may be under your control during combat and missions, they are very much not your team members. Even though your jobs will take you into areas where Friend Computer's scanners don't work, that doesn't mean your team members won't inform Friend Computer of any misdeeds you commit while on a mission.

It'd be neat if there was a mechanic where those "team mates" would themselves sometimes do stuff you'd be obligated to inform to the Friend Computer. Maybe your responsibility would be to get rid of an exceptionally good team member, or risk getting into trouble yourself by neglecting his actions. And shit like that.
 

Saduj

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I mean, it was funny when Tony Soprano said he worked in waste management, as in "wasting people"

Actually, on the show, he owned a waste management business and got his W-2 from it every year so he could report income. Not sure if this is still the case, but the garbage hauling business in NY/NJ used to be almost completely controlled by the mafia. They split up territory so that they could control pricing. It wasn’t even a secret. Well before the show came out people would joke about it. My uncles old neighbor was a mob guy who owned such a business. Although he would refer to it as “carting” in order to avoid the stigma.
 

Saduj

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Just rewatched the scene and it's when the therapist asks Tony what he does: it shows multiple shots of Tony killing people and then he says "Waste management"

I don’t remember the scene but yeah that’s a play on words then. The other thing also used to be true but I think the mega corps took over that racket.
 

Spectacle

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Nice to see that they are trying to bring the level of intra-party conflict expected in PnP Paranoia to the CRPG!
 

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It looks pretty neat. Maybe it will not set the world on fire, but definitely has potential to be an enjoyable game, even if mechanically simple (just like Shadowrun games). Paranoia's setting is a strong point, but in the end quality of writing will be the maker or breaker. Dialogues in the demo suffer from overabundance of (pop-) culture references, hopefully that is just for this specific quest, not the dominating trend throughout the game.
 

luj1

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Looks indistinguishable from most isometric stuff / nuXCOMs, etc. And no Ken Rolston on board....
 

luj1

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That's very debatable because he's been that way for a LONG time, yet NPCs lied to you in Morrowind and even Amalur...
 

Roguey

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That's very debatable because he's been that way for a LONG time, yet NPCs lied to you in Morrowind and even Amalur...
He was the executive design director on Reckoning, whatever that is. Ian Frazier was the lead designer.

The citation is that infamous interview that was about Morrowind, before Oblivion's release, the one that enraged Kirkbride https://en.uesp.net/wiki/General:Douglas_Goodall_Interview

Also, Ken Rolston and I have very different writing styles. I tend to make plots based on characters instead of starting with a plot outline. I like to make a few interesting characters, put them together, and see where it leads. Everything in Morrowind was designed top-down, and I had a hard time adjusting to that. There were only a few quests where I could give the characters some character.

Ken and I also disagreed on "relativism" and "betrayal," among other things. I appreciate disinformation, but I believe it works best when you know what the truth is. I like to write a true account and then conceal it among carefully designed false accounts. Ken wrote a dozen different accounts, apparently without any personal preference to which, if any, was accurate, and ignored the contradictions. I wanted to have NPCs betray the player in a few quests, but Ken had a "no-betrayal" rule (and some other rules, like "only one coincidence allowed"), which didn't make sense to me. I can't say that I'm right and he's wrong. In fact, I often felt that he was talking past me or over my head. I understood all of his words, but they didn't combine into sentences that made sense to me.

Sinder Velvin: Can you remember any other rules that Ken Rolston had?

Douglas Goodall: There were quite a few of them, but since I didn't understand most of them, this is something you ought to ask Ken if you get the chance. The only ones I'm sure I understood were "no betrayal" and "everything must be a metaphor/everything must be based on something."

"No betrayal" meant that key NPCs couldn't turn on the player, lie to the player if they were honest in the past, nor could an NPC steal an item from the player, etc. This is good as a general rule, but it's the kind of rule that begs for exceptions.

"Everything must be a metaphor" is how the quirky Cyrodiil of Daggerfall and the alien Cyrodiil of the Pocket Guide became the Roman Empire, how the Bretons got French names, etc. I felt Tamriel had been moving away from generic fantasy and medieval history with every game until Morrowind. I wanted this trend to continue and resented having to squeeze a Hermaeus Mora-shaped Vvardenfell into a Roman Province-shaped space. I think Ken uses historical examples to make the world more believable. If you just make stuff up, there's a good chance you'll make something wrong and break suspension of disbelief. That's true, but I'd argue that if you use an inappropriate or easily recognized metaphor, you have the same risk. Besides, making stuff up is more fun for both the creators and consumers. Did I mention I enjoy arguing?

I don't want to sound too hard on Ken. In many cases where we disagreed, I think he made a good choice. It wouldn't have been my first choice, but that doesn't mean the Elder Scrolls isn't in good hands. Note that I didn't expect Morrowind to be nearly as popular as it was, at least not among "classic" Elder Scrolls fans, which basically proves me wrong.
 

luj1

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I know where the citation is from and it's literally stacked to the brim with a Mt Everest of salt coming from Douglas Goodall's butthurt arse.

You are right though, he'd only get in the way (and by that I mean not be able to save this from becoming an utterly forgettable title and waste of an IP).
 

luj1

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Probably not but for different reasons... "happiness is mandatory" is a trope from the tabletop, you peasant...
 

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