Plan for Edward Gardner
by Edward Gardner · 03/17/2005 (7:03 am) · 7 comments
What DOES make Lore unique?
At it's heart, it's a shooter. We have some cool mechanics, cool weapons, and some fun variations on traditional shooter gameplay, but at the end of the day, in the actual game, it's got a Tribes meets Mechwarrior vibe. Someone once said that if you have to use other games names to describe your game, you haven't innovated, just copied. That may be true, but in this case, there's more to Lore than just a copy.
We've made an accessible robot shooter. We have throttles, torso twists, aspect seeking weapons, countermeasures, speed/armor tradeoffs, energy management, weapons selection and mutliple classes of MAV's to drive. It's ALOT faster than say, Mechwarrior, the MAV's are nimble, not QUITE human, but nimble and they get places quick. I'd even say it's a bit faster than Mechassault. These are not 40-60 foot tall, 100 ton war machines, and I think we deliver on the scale we intend, 15 foot tall, acrobatic remotely piloted mechanized vehicles. I think, and this seems to bear out, that anyone can pick up Lore and play it and be successful. Your FPS nuts will be right at home with WASD and the mouse, and your sim nuts will find that the control scheme CAN be tweaked with a fair amount of depth.
I think that's one unique point. It sits in the middle of two, sometimes drastically different, genres and manages to be playable and FUN.
Oh yeah, it's fun. I have played alot of shooters. Alot. Lore puts you right into the action, the controls feel right and tight (to me), the physics is there, the machines have mass and stuff starts HAPPENING. Some of this is it's accessibility, see above, but those little game play tweaks, the rate of fire, the pure VOLUME of things happening make it a frantic furball as soon as you spawn. People like fighting. Lore gives you lots of fighting. The levels, again in my opinion, are well designed, you always know where the action is, the levels funnel you along roads with enough visual clues to give you the indication, without putting up a big sign that says "go this way!" That takes some energy to do that right.
I'd say we made a solid class based shooter with fast, fun, accessible gameplay and control options to appeal to both FPS and sim fans. That would be my one sentence statement. I REALLY like playing my own game.
But is that unique? Sometimes even I forget there is more to Lore than blowing stuff up.
Max Gaming started out life doing web and MUD stuff. Alot of imagination driven stuff. When we got into online ladders and leagues, we found that the in game mechanics of the games we liked to play lacked a certain strategic depth. There were GREAT stories to be told, stories of heros, villains and conquests. There was a whole strategic layer to the universe that a simple FP Shooter or FP Simulator just didn't deliver by themselves. So we created maps, resource systems, rules for engagement, planetary conquest, basically a whole real time strategy component that existed outside the "blow things up" part of the game. When we built Lore, we built ComCent.
We have a story we're telling. We're releasing a paper based RPG, and have plans for additional games in the Universe.
ComCent is our way of letting the players help write that story. Tracking the results of the war online and in game, tightly coupled with the gameplay, I think is one of our really unique points. We're telling an original story (that's another) and the outcome is influenced by the players (that's a third). There's a war going on. An invasion. Our players get to influence the outcome of these events. Our fictional timeline has a big blank spot in it around 2160, the setting for Lore. Even we don't know what will happen. Other games with mechanics similar to this don't have the story component. You can't really influence the future history of other games like this, the story is already written, no matter how hard you fight, you can't change the outcome. In Lore, the players are helping write what fanboys call the "canon."
And that's just cool.
So, to recap:
- Fast paced, class-based, accessible, customizeable gameplay for deep tactical play.
- In- and out-of-game tracking of the original game story as it develops, totally influenced and directed by the players themselves, providing a much needed strategic element.
I haven't run this by the marketing guys, but that's my gut reaction. That's what makes it fun for me.
Join the Invasion. Help us tell the story. See you in the Lore Lobby on Friday.
At it's heart, it's a shooter. We have some cool mechanics, cool weapons, and some fun variations on traditional shooter gameplay, but at the end of the day, in the actual game, it's got a Tribes meets Mechwarrior vibe. Someone once said that if you have to use other games names to describe your game, you haven't innovated, just copied. That may be true, but in this case, there's more to Lore than just a copy.
We've made an accessible robot shooter. We have throttles, torso twists, aspect seeking weapons, countermeasures, speed/armor tradeoffs, energy management, weapons selection and mutliple classes of MAV's to drive. It's ALOT faster than say, Mechwarrior, the MAV's are nimble, not QUITE human, but nimble and they get places quick. I'd even say it's a bit faster than Mechassault. These are not 40-60 foot tall, 100 ton war machines, and I think we deliver on the scale we intend, 15 foot tall, acrobatic remotely piloted mechanized vehicles. I think, and this seems to bear out, that anyone can pick up Lore and play it and be successful. Your FPS nuts will be right at home with WASD and the mouse, and your sim nuts will find that the control scheme CAN be tweaked with a fair amount of depth.
I think that's one unique point. It sits in the middle of two, sometimes drastically different, genres and manages to be playable and FUN.
Oh yeah, it's fun. I have played alot of shooters. Alot. Lore puts you right into the action, the controls feel right and tight (to me), the physics is there, the machines have mass and stuff starts HAPPENING. Some of this is it's accessibility, see above, but those little game play tweaks, the rate of fire, the pure VOLUME of things happening make it a frantic furball as soon as you spawn. People like fighting. Lore gives you lots of fighting. The levels, again in my opinion, are well designed, you always know where the action is, the levels funnel you along roads with enough visual clues to give you the indication, without putting up a big sign that says "go this way!" That takes some energy to do that right.
I'd say we made a solid class based shooter with fast, fun, accessible gameplay and control options to appeal to both FPS and sim fans. That would be my one sentence statement. I REALLY like playing my own game.
But is that unique? Sometimes even I forget there is more to Lore than blowing stuff up.
Max Gaming started out life doing web and MUD stuff. Alot of imagination driven stuff. When we got into online ladders and leagues, we found that the in game mechanics of the games we liked to play lacked a certain strategic depth. There were GREAT stories to be told, stories of heros, villains and conquests. There was a whole strategic layer to the universe that a simple FP Shooter or FP Simulator just didn't deliver by themselves. So we created maps, resource systems, rules for engagement, planetary conquest, basically a whole real time strategy component that existed outside the "blow things up" part of the game. When we built Lore, we built ComCent.
We have a story we're telling. We're releasing a paper based RPG, and have plans for additional games in the Universe.
ComCent is our way of letting the players help write that story. Tracking the results of the war online and in game, tightly coupled with the gameplay, I think is one of our really unique points. We're telling an original story (that's another) and the outcome is influenced by the players (that's a third). There's a war going on. An invasion. Our players get to influence the outcome of these events. Our fictional timeline has a big blank spot in it around 2160, the setting for Lore. Even we don't know what will happen. Other games with mechanics similar to this don't have the story component. You can't really influence the future history of other games like this, the story is already written, no matter how hard you fight, you can't change the outcome. In Lore, the players are helping write what fanboys call the "canon."
And that's just cool.
So, to recap:
- Fast paced, class-based, accessible, customizeable gameplay for deep tactical play.
- In- and out-of-game tracking of the original game story as it develops, totally influenced and directed by the players themselves, providing a much needed strategic element.
I haven't run this by the marketing guys, but that's my gut reaction. That's what makes it fun for me.
Join the Invasion. Help us tell the story. See you in the Lore Lobby on Friday.
About the author
#2
Lore is a great game that allows anyone to pick it up with relative ease and without needing to remember a billion control keys, but also allows you to elaborate more on those controls as your comfort level grows and you want to do more. Max Gaming strove to make a great game that at its heart revolved around fast paced action and ease of use and I think we successfully hit the nail on the head here with it in Lore Invasion.
So if you are reading this, be ready to play Lore Invasion on March 18th and get into the action. Support your community, support your peers and get into a great game that you will enjoy. Its a game that will grow on you more and more as time goes on, so get into it today and enjoy a great product!
03/17/2005 (9:42 am)
Well said Ed. Lore is a great game that allows anyone to pick it up with relative ease and without needing to remember a billion control keys, but also allows you to elaborate more on those controls as your comfort level grows and you want to do more. Max Gaming strove to make a great game that at its heart revolved around fast paced action and ease of use and I think we successfully hit the nail on the head here with it in Lore Invasion.
So if you are reading this, be ready to play Lore Invasion on March 18th and get into the action. Support your community, support your peers and get into a great game that you will enjoy. Its a game that will grow on you more and more as time goes on, so get into it today and enjoy a great product!
#3
The action is hot and people find thier game (the best with a squad based campaign approach I think) and others with just leveraging the MAV their in to its best tacticsl use. Now the challenge is to let the world of players both of shooters and mechs know about Lore.
03/17/2005 (4:02 pm)
Ed - This is really it. We ask what different and where is the unique appeal for Lore and while that may mean innovative it really means why will I want to play. I've watched people play almost as much as I've played Lore. And that ability for either a seasoned counter-strike player or an old Mech player to sit down and find the action and enjoy it has really come together. The action is hot and people find thier game (the best with a squad based campaign approach I think) and others with just leveraging the MAV their in to its best tacticsl use. Now the challenge is to let the world of players both of shooters and mechs know about Lore.
#5
03/17/2005 (6:20 pm)
One of the coolest things that happend at GDC was that the producer of Mechwarrior 2 stopped and sat down with the game for a good 5 or 10 minutes, of course we didn't find out that he was the producer of Mech2 until after we had given him a brief walkthrough of the game and he was tearing about. It was so very cool to have this guy come by and play Lore and enjoy it considering we had used his game as part of what inspired us to make Lore in the first place. 
#6
You guys have every reason to be proud. Great work.
03/17/2005 (11:08 pm)
Don't worry about the originality thing, originality is neat, but the primary goal of games is fun. And anyway, originality comes more from the way that you mix the "ingrediants", than from what ingrediants you use. The difference between a master chef and a poor chef (like myself) is how they put everything together. Heck, Shakespeare wrote about love and betrayal and human emotion, things that had been written about plenty before he came along, yet his way of telling those tales made him one of histories greatest storytellers.You guys have every reason to be proud. Great work.
#7
We wanted to make a giant robot game, we were inspired by some pretty great games, but what we made was definitely our own.
Today is the day ;)
03/18/2005 (5:38 am)
I think the key difference between simply copying, and what we have done, is summed up in "inspiration."We wanted to make a giant robot game, we were inspired by some pretty great games, but what we made was definitely our own.
Today is the day ;)
Torque Owner Jeremy Alessi
On the innovation front ... every idea is the combination of two or more pre-existing ideas. That's just the way things are and I personally think it's a good idea to link together other gameplay concepts to make new ones. It's the natural evolution of everything in this universe. The older generation of designers drew on movies, books, and everyday life to come up with their game ideas. The newer generation which grew up playing video games will naturally use those games for reference as well as all the above. Tribes meets Mechwarrior is a cool combo and it's yours, great job!