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This New Roguelike Wants To Make Its Difficulty More Welcoming

This New Roguelike Wants To Make Its Difficulty More Welcoming https://ift.tt/4IGbQgh Murals might look like a stylish take on the Hades roguelike formula at first glance, but Disney Illusion Island developer Dlala Studios isn't aiming to copy Supermassive's homework. Instead, the studio is looking to put its own spin on the genre , as it fuses dark fairy tales and hews closer to the action-first approach of modern-day Doom and Diablo. One other big difference in Murals is that it'll offer a customizable approach to difficulty, as Dlala Studios says it wants to prioritize player fun over punishing runs--unless you're into that kind of thing. "There are difficulty selectors, and you can kind of tweak some of the individual settings," Dlala CEO, Aj Grand-Scrutton, said to GameSpot. "We've kind of got some of the high-level ones you'd imagine: enemy damage, enemy health. We've also got stuff that affects the player's health. Something t...

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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