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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV Looks To Right The Wrongs Of Its Predecessor

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV Looks To Right The Wrongs Of Its Predecessor https://ift.tt/VFGJQnU Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV is arriving nearly a decade after the release of the third game in the real-time strategy series, and after spending some time with an extensive preview build that covered the opening missions of two its campaigns, I’m happy to report that it seems to be a return to form after the ill-received changes in Dawn of War III. The Dawn of War series has always reinvented itself with each entry. Dawn of War II eschewed the first game’s focus on amassing large armies in favor of micro-managing smaller groups, or sometimes individual units. It removed the original's base-building mechanics, and its maps were less of an open-ended sandbox, hewing closer to being an isometric action-RPG. While these changes didn’t sit well with some players of the original Dawn of War, others found the alterations to be bold, and the game was received positively , with man...
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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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