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Arawn82
Member Posts: 8
Check it out, Spread it through all Socail media you can... lets get this ball rolling...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwTwHDzFdws
Lets try to get it.
-Agent Arawn82
Comments
Fubar over on TSW's forums. [Also in the German forums: Fubar]
Always considered myself pretty intelligent but this whole concept , enjoyment factor, and entertainment value really has me scratching my head.
I just do not get it.
I can almost picture a group of geeks dressed in their star trek uniforms tweeting each other on their starfleet communicator cell phones about how vulcan this makes them all.
I have been playing another game like this, in a sense, called "Ingress". It is like a live action game where you use the real world in conjunction with the game world. It is a neat concept and I spend many hours playing Ingress I will most def be checking this out as TBW takes it to another level.
Your assumptions are quite off, to be honest. While I, of course, cannot comment on your subjective opinion on what is fun, I can try and explain to you what makes it fun for me.
Let me start by saying that, if you have very little interest in adventure/puzzle solving games in general, or simply do not get any satisfaction from solving puzzles, then it may be limited what fun you can get out of this game. Let me immediately follow that, by saying that there are other options then purely puzzle-solving, such as the Soldier/Sniper classes, who have a high "Tactical Skill" and high "Companion App", respectively. This translates to them getting more missions of that type - Tactical Skill being reflex- and accuracy-based challenges, and Companion App requiring physical real-world interaction.
Now, for the part that makes this enjoyable for me:
There is nothing quite like the feeling of finally solving a puzzle, that the entire community has been struggling with for hours, if not days or even weeks. Because of the way the community interacts, you very much feel you've been part of the solution, even if you didn't find it personally; every avenue you explored and attempts you made, were information that helped drive the community forward, and ultimately in the right direction.
Which is another big part of the game; the community. Because every player is in the same boat, the community very much tends to be quite awesome in and of itself, even moreso if you attempt to compare it to other game genres. You're welcomed and appreciated regardless of your ability to solve puzzles, your experience with ARGs, or any other arbritary circumstance that you share with everyone else just by participating in the game. The only way you'll possibly get treated badly, is if you're acting badly to begin with - and even then, it's more likely that people will ignore you, and focus on the puzzle.
A third reason has been HE's awesome capacity for involving their players in the game; special mentions during missions, active roles, acknowledgements. You aren't simply a part of the game purely because you play it, you are actively integrated into it by HE. In other words; the job of immersing yourself in the world is not just something that you yourself will be doing, it's something both the developers, and the community, do a great deal of work to make sure you feel like part of it all - beginning to see why it's called an "Augmented Reality Game"?
Finally, if you're worried the game has no "action-elements", don't be.
I've personally never had more adrenaline coursing through my veins, than I've had in one of HE's previoues Event-ARGs - not since playing Tribes 2 competitively, at least. As for "PvP" content, we know that a few players are likely to become "traitors" sometime in the 2nd generation - each generation lasting 3 months - and so it's likely you'll at some point find yourself matching wits with another player, more than you will be from just trying to find the solution first - which I'm rather sure is something we all try to do instinctively first, and then co-operate second.
If you're unfamiliar with ARGs, I encourage you to try 3 things to try and get a taste of what it's like:
- First, try the pre-beta ARG, and try to avoid walkthroughs as much as possible, see if you can get a glimpse of how it feels to get closer and closer to a solution. Of course, if you get frustrated, you can always use the walkthrough to skip ahead, but it does remove greatly from the experience.
- Second, join the IRC, see how you feel about the folks in there. While we're not many in there at the moment, I'll guarantee you'll feel welcome.
- Third, try Ingress, it'll give you a very basic idea of what the Companion App entails - but do keep in mind that the "Companion App" is only 1 out of 6 skills you'll be challenged in when playing the game.
On a final note, as I started out with saying, your assumption of us being a bunch of trekkies standing about role-playing and what-not is, sorry to say, quite far off. While there's nothing wrong with neither role-playing nor being infatuated with a concept, you will find that it's quite hard to feel alienated from the community. It's not just University students or proverbial hermits; it's people with families, with "ordinary" jobs, in high-school, people who are usually into FPS games, MMORPGs, and so on and so forth.
While people do entertain roleplaying, others simply play as themselves, which is both encouraged and completely viable - the game is, after all, about augmenting reality, and what better way to do that, than to bring yourself - your true self - into the game.
Either way, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by merely looking at it and deciding whether the game is fun or not. Yes, it might be new and unfamiliar, and quite different from other game genres you've tried, but that is - as with any change - a far cry from it being worse than what you know - merely different.
I can understand your concerns. So...my earliest ARG experience:
July 2001. The game was called Majestic. The tagline: It plays you.
Majestic was a bit like an early version of exactly what HE is trying to do here in that it was meant to be a persistant ARG. Only thing is for various reasons (not the least of which was a little event that happened just 2 months later and changed the way we viewed government conspiracy) Majestic was taken down after just several months. Anyway, I was never out in the field in Majestic. I did all my game play from my computer. In this game we'd get phone calls, faxes, emails, and have IM chats with NPC's. All of these things were meant to enhance our immersion into the game world they created.
As an example of a couple of things that I felt they did really well. I received a "threat" call one time. The call came to my landline while I was at work and so when I called to check my voicemail from my desk one of my co-workers actually believed it was a real threat. I have to admit, even though I knew it was fake, it was a little scary (and totally cool). Another time I recieved a fax proving to me that "they" knew who I was. All the information on the fax was info I provided when I signed up, all but one element: my blood type. I have to admit, they got me with that one. How in the hell could they know that? Well they couldn't. It was randomly generated and in my case it just happened to be correct. That one had my heart pounding until I checked the forums and found out the truth of it.
One of the last things they did that really got me was having to hack into a satelite to obtain lattitude and longitude of the location where our kidnapped "hero" was being held. Turned out to be my hometown. At first I thought it was like the blood type thing. However it turned out that my home city just happened to be the one they picked and this was the same for all players. Another player who lived nearby went to the location and took pictures of the area. Once people found out that I also lived near there I was getting all sorts of requests for information and was even asked to surveil the area. It was all pretty cool.
So that was Majestic and that was a long time ago now, but the basic premise is still the same. You're still going to be working alone and with others, field work is optional as well as your level of immersion. However, you will be solving "game related" puzzles using mostly real world clues, tools, and skills.