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Mina The Hollower Traps You In The Bayou (To Teach You That You Can Get Out)

Mina The Hollower Traps You In The Bayou (To Teach You That You Can Get Out) https://ift.tt/ReSImk2 Mina the Hollower is very visually similar to classic Game Boy and Game Boy Color Zelda games like Link's Awakening and the Oracle duology. But mechanically it's significantly different, and Yacht Club discovered the distinction ran the risk of confusing players when it started putting the game in front of playtesters. As a result, it had to find clever ways to send a signal to players about this game's different expectations. In an interview with GameSpot, Yacht Club's David D'Angelo said that players often expected Zelda-like progression, including specialized equipment to solve puzzles. That isn't really how Mina works, however--the world is wide open, and you can go (mostly) anywhere you want right from the start. "The biggest thing we were worried about is that in a lot of ways it's not like a Zelda game in that you're not getting the H...
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How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later

How Borderlands Ensures Character-Driven Storytelling Remains A Focus 14 Years Later https://ift.tt/GvgXNM4

The Borderlands franchise holds a peculiar place within the history of the gaming industry, kickstarting a genre that has gone on to become a different kind of beast. After all, though the concept of combining both RPG and first-person shooter mechanics was first seen in 2007's Hellgate: London, the loot-shooter genre owes its popularity to 2009's Borderlands. And yet, today, many of the most popular loot-shooters are also live-service games (like Destiny 2 and Warframe). Borderlands is not, having never adopted that format. It instead has multiple sequels--some of which diverge from the original game and don't feature any looting or shooting.

Like these other live-service game franchises, however, character-driven storytelling has been one of the main unifying pillars of Borderlands, which has been supported by a writer's room. "Gearbox is casually unique in the sense that we maintain a writer's room," Gearbox Entertainment associate director of narrative properties April Johnson told me. "So we don't just plunk you to work on a project and say, 'Okay, enjoy the two of you doing this--we have multiple things that we are working on, so we won't Voltron up as a full unit until later.'"

Having a constant writer's room is a strategy you usually see in story-driven live-service games where maintaining a narrative vision over multiple years--over a decade in the case of some games like Destiny--is important. It's not often seen in AAA franchises that feature several sequels and recruit a new set of writers from project to project. Gearbox Entertainment is not wholly unique in this strategy within the gaming industry, but it is a rare exception and the team points to this as one of the reasons for how the studio has managed to curate a specific narrative voice across all its projects.

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