This week I created 5 different iterations of document describing Shelter setting and game start. Simplifying. Distilling the setting&start to fit into 7 sentences.
It is hard to comprehend the iron grip that the game mechanics hold on the setting itself, until you work on these at the lowest level.
For instance, in Fallout, one of the first goals was to make the Player discover Shady Sands, seemingly on their own. Discovering things on your own is a vital part of feeling like an adventurer. How can you accomplish that without explicitly revealing the town on the map, and pulling back the curtain in the process?
The solution was interesting: reveal a DIFFERENT place on Player's map, and put Shady Sands between start area and THAT place. Seems basic, but it was necessary, and, as it seems, irreplaceable.
Such problems and solutions defined the majority of Fallout. Another example: there's a main quest, with a suitably "epic" goal. But just how urgent should it be?
Let's imagine for a moment that the very game area is crumbling due to massive earthquakes, and your goal is to stabilize the planet's core by launching a Subatomic Stabilizer Device(tm) into it.
While the planet around you is falling apart, does it really make any sense to go around killing Radscorpions or rescuing someone's daughter from the local hostiles?
This is why Fallout's threat was more subtle. Not all mutants were hostile. Some you could talk to (even The Master himself). Their threat was a slower, creeping one, and it wasn't out of intentions that were 100% evil in nature. The threat loomed on the horizon, instead of trampling over the Player's sensibilities with an overblown urgency.
On the other hand... in earlier documents, Shelter's "threat" was a totalitarian regime. Now, that may work in a movie like Equilibrium, but in a game, that is just too passive. The regime is always there. People have lived with it before your do-gooder quest, and they can continue to do so. It can't expand anymore than it already has... unless you strap on some convoluted catalyst on top of it.
In the Player, fighting against a faceless regime is more likely to generate apathy rather than interest.
This is why, in current iteration of Shelter document, the game's main threat is a takeover by robots. They mean well, but they go about it entirely the wrong way.
Note: this is not final :|
