Atomboy
Atom Team
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2016
- Messages
- 717
Believe it or not, we'll do everything to make this attempt at a Slavic Fallout the best there ever was. And seeing how one of you mentioned BORDERZONE of all the obscure things in existence, you of all people will KNOW whether we did our best or failed. Because you seem to know of all the previous tries made by us Eastern Europeans. Ever.
1. So this is the elephant in the room, the weight of the past fallout-clones that you might not be responsible for but will still be asked to answer. Game industry is a small world and nobody ever wants to say anything negative about anyone else, but fans want to know what it is you've learned from those past failures. What went wrong, in your view, and how will you avoid their mistakes?
2. Atom will inevitably be compared against the classics, and their successors Wasteland 2, Underrail etc. It's best to preempt that comparison now and state clearly how you are different. After all you are going for the same audience.
Honestly, we knew what we were getting ourselves into. But it felt right never the less. Sort of like baby turtles know to run for the sea. Can't say we're over-competent or even over-confident. But we see two major problems with other Slavouts: clunky, barely functioning, buggy engine, and overall half-bakedness story-wise (poor dialogues with no more than two choices most of the time seem like a particular trend nowadays). Our main programmer Dmitriy and the massive support Unity 3D's community can give us (if only we ask for it) are our solution for the first problem. The second problem is solved by me and our writers. I know how the English version looks nowadays (although I TRIED A LOT) but when we improve our translation, it's going to surpass most of our competition in the Fallout race. Quantitatively - for sure. And, hopefully, quality-wise as well. We have text for everything. Everyone has a unique dialogue, most conversations can go one of up to five ways depending on your skills, most quests have multiple solutions, and, at least in the Russian version we don't have this style of overall prose I like to call "B-Movie impersonation". Our prose does not try to look like Fallout's or Torment's. We have this highly stylized colloquial language partially based on Russian authors from the XX century we enjoy, partially inspired by art-brute. Text is the main thing, anyway. Good text. At least - the best we've got. Sure, text was important for many slavic Fallouts. But in ours, it's our everything. Role-playing in each dialogue, changing the world in every quest, getting unique stories depending on the skills and attributes you picked. Making every action matter, or at least become a rumor or a legend somewhere in the world. Little things. Stuff like that.
As for your second question, in this comparison we also like to imagine ourselves riding out on our concept and our role-playing / world changing opportunities. What I mean by saying "concept" is: What we're telling is not really the same story as in the titles you mentioned. Even if we disregard the setting itself (although it being the USSR instead of the West is also kind of original, right? Hope so!) our aim is not to show how "War Never Changes" or how people rebuild after a disaster, or how they cope in the depths of the planet they ruined. It's more along the lines of the question Torment asks. Something like "What does it take to destroy humanity?". The society in our game setting is much closer to medieval than in the titles you mentioned. And I don't mean savagery, crazy new forms of government and such. We're working to show how the psychology of the masses changes in the aftermath of everything getting blown to bits. While traveling our world, you will find that most people carry the medieval mythological thinking inside them: in our world legends, myths and gods are born. Bandits act like feudal lords, honest working people regress into peasantry, bureaucrats (not warlords) rule the biggest city on the map, stories of past tech birth mystical legends, former Communist Party Members and the KGB become boogeymen that are said to wait for lonely travelers near their hidden installations in the deep woods, magic and witchcraft are explanations many NPCs have for genetic mutations and even the war itself. Our world is as realistic as we can make it while still keeping it fun (no retro-futurism, no laser blasters, no smart robots, no AI's, no ghouls even, for now at least, even the mutants are mostly deformed animals). But it's also highly esoteric in a sense. Something along the lines of Sigil meets the NCR. Hopefully, it works out as a pro, not a con :D