Paradox Pulls The Plug
Six Truths About Video Game Stories - The Bottom Feeder
Just more strategy and management games it seems.Paradox Interactive cancel several projects amid managerial shakeup, the returning CEO Fredrik Wester outlines their refocused ambitions.
Six Truths About Video Game Stories - The Bottom Feeder
Xenonauts 2 - September UpdateWe write super-retro, super-low-budget games that don't look great. Never have. Never will. So how do we succeed?
The answer is: Writing. Our game design is quite solid, but the stories we tell is what keeps us in business. Our games are highly interactive novels with settings, characters, and stories that get people to actually give us real money.
Now let's be clear. I'm not a great fantasy writer. If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore. Still, as a writer I'm simply competent. Which, by video games standards, makes me awesome. Overall, I'm good enough that people give me money, and that is sufficient.
I really care about video game storytelling. More than I should. Because video game storytelling is usually pretty lousy. I cherish the games that do it well, sigh at the games that don't, and quietly pull my hair out when a game with really shaky writing gets hailed as high art.
So, although nobody asked, I would like to make six observations about video game writing. These are all things I've said in the past, but I'm collecting them in one place. Then you can bask in my wisdom, yell at me, or both.
Welcome to this month's update! A few things have been a tad slow over the past few weeks owing to various team holidays and illness, but we're getting back on track now and ready to share some more progress with you.
As well as doing a number of bugfixes on V21 of the Closed Beta after its release, we have mostly been working on the strategy balancing / air combat and some of the new art assets for the tactical combat.