How YOU Wrote Rimworld's Best Story
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
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Rimworld's best story didn't exist until you played the game - in fact, if you hadn't picked it up, generated a few colonists and spent a few hours trying to stop them getting eaten by megaspiders, it wouldn't have had a story at all! Somehow, without you even thinking about it, you stepped into the role of Rimworld's storyteller and a narrative that was entirely unique formed around you... how?
After spending a few hours stranded on an alien planet fighting off a spaceborn pathogen, The Architect has gotten a few ideas. More and more, games are eschewing the traditional relationship between author and audience, allowing the players themselves to tell their own stories their own way, but how can games be designed to facilitate this unique kind of fun, and how much freedom should us players have in creating our own emergent narratives?
You Saw:
Rimworld - 2013
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023
Shadows of Doubt - Early Access
Metal Gear Solid 5 - 2015
Crusader Kings 3 - 2020
Lethal Company - 2023
Shadow of War - 2017
Grand Theft Auto 5 - 2013
Far Cry 5 - 2018
The Sims 4 - 2014
Starfield - 2023
Baldur's Gate 3 - 2023
Deep Rock Galactic - 2020
Xcom 2 - 2016
Stellaris - 2016
Death Stranding - 2019
Teardown - 2022
Far Cry 6 - 2021
Far Cry 4 - 2014
Far Cry 3 - 2012
Hunt: Showdown - 2018
Pokemon Fire Red - 2004
Darkest Dungeon - 2016
Darkest Dungeon 2 - 2023
Hitman 3 - 2021
Noita - 2019
Civilization 6 - 2016
Left 4 Dead 2 - 2010
Back 4 Blood - 2021
Darktide - 2021
Dishonored 2 - 2016
Disco Elysium - 2019
Wildermyth - 2021
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 2011
Fallout 3 - 2008
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - 2006
Slay the Princess - 2023
Tales from the Borderlands - 2014
Suzerain - 2020
Mass Effect Legendary Edition - 2021
80 Days - 2014
Tiny Tina's Wonderland - 2022
Dread Delusion - 2024
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Could you please tell me which is the video from AI and Games where he use AI Dungeon? The footage you used at 20:25
Rimworld standard scenario doesn't give you a mostly useless pet. It gives you a random domesticated animal as a pet.
The difference is: this could be a husky that is basically a dedicated hauler/brawler, or a cow to convert grass to food, or it could be a cat to be a cat.
"The video depicts an artwork of a hooded man explaining why this creation is enjoyable. The video is contrasted with a small green semicircle in its foreground. 37 judges are watching in anger with bowls on their heads on a cliff in the background."
Quality: Legendary.
It menaces with spikes.
I don't save scum in Rimworld- I express directorial intent.
I love this.
I use the resources of the game against it
@@Bears-Are_Swell weird
@@Bears-Are_Swell As you can see the characteristics directly of each individual and not a physical appearance generalization, I'd say you are into eugenics and not racism... Have you watched Gattaca? It's a sci-fi drama based on eugenics vs nature, it makes the point of artificial vs natural selection.
@@Bears-Are_Swell I just know the definition of racism and eugenics... Also I study history enough to stay aware of all left wing political parties wanting to become 1940's Germany.
The most fun I remember having on Stellaris was the time I blew up my own empire's homeworld during the midgame, gambling against the odds that my scientists could contain an eldritch phenomena for study instead of disposing of it like any sensible person would've done.
It was a VERY densely packed planet, so upon exploding (imploding?) it took a quarter of my empire's population and economy with it overnight, the resulting economic crash taking decades to resolve from while leaving me badly underprepared to ward off opportunistic invading xenos.
My takeaway from that was that emergent stories are often more fun with major setbacks to make them more unique, rather than 'optimal play'.
No lessons were learned about making dumb choices in the name of overly ambitious mad-science-wizardly.
10/10 would risk killing tens of billions again.
Absolutely agree. It is often much more fun to play on "ironman" or with permadeath on, as actions have consequences, and those consequences are fun to resolve
"Vampires became worshiped, boosting overall happiness" is my favourite sentence ever said
this is why gaming is the pinnacle of all media. it either tells a story interactively by your input, or lets you write your own story by your actions
Agreed, a lot of stories shine thanks to allowing its players to interact with it
I love games but Pinnacle?? you've clearly never read diary of a Wimpy kid
@chesterr551 Greg literally gets hooked on a Facebook game, now _thats_ some Anti Gaming Propaganda lol
I think trying to say x is the pinnacle of all media is a rather useless endeavor, since every piece of media has it's own ups and downs, and tools to express the same message(for example, an habid reader can make set pieces better than any game or movie, but writters don't have as much control over a scene like a movie director where the viewer will see what the director wants).
I've seen Civvie accidentally stumble into a few emergent narrative moments on his channel. Specifically, he accidentally glitched a Mother Spider into null_space during a run of Blood, and unleashed a horde of friendly killer hellhounds onto the town of Paradise during a campaign of Postal 2.
One of the beauties of Rimworld being a story generator is that the developer console can just be turned on with a single click. I've never thought about it until I was coaching a new player, and they said they didn't think story-wise a certain positive event made sense at one moment, or they didn't want to deal with a disease outbreak because it was distracting them from a more interesting event line, or they decided it had been too long since a negative event and triggered one, that I realized Tynan probably knew this and gave us the tools to cheat and change the story if we came up with a more enjoyable story than what Randy rolled for us. This is probably also related to their full embrace of mods.
As someone once joked its the difference between a bomb hidden under a table going off and a random clown appearing and stabbing the characters.
One builds tension so that even watching the events you see how everything is falling together for better and for worse.
The other is just random nonsense that makes no sense at the moment and makes no sense afterwards.
Better to feel the impact and adjust the story to make sense... Rather than have some random thing that makes no sense happen.
Also loved some of the test ideas people had with mods like the Fallout Idea where you get a full bunker akin to fallout... But only a single person.
Where the beginning is all about ensuring that one person survives and how you try and build up from that.
It's also really handy for dealing with bugs and mod conflicts. If an item doesn't work, just delete it and spawn it again, no sweat.
One of my strongest memories of rimworld started sort of similar to Jerbear's. The colony took in a guy and the only thing he was good at was art. He had some permanent wounds which made most all his stats pretty terrible and he was so ugly, no one liked him. Eventually though, he had made friends with the colonist and had made a surplus of artworks. To help the colony, he set out with a load of art to sell to a nearby ally. However, on the trip, he experienced terrible luck. We zoom in as a pack of ravenous chickens start chasing him. As he ran from them, he was struck by lightning and downed. Shortly after, the chickens finished him off. The colony that originally shunned him, mourned his loss. Certainly not the story I'd picture when starting the game but it is one that has stuck with me for years
What a guy 😮
the colony mourned his loss bc there was no one that could sell art anymore
Now thats some bad luck he had
I think Shadows of Doubt’s current biggest problem is the lack of motive behind killings. On the tutorial case, I was fixated on one of the victim’s coworkers who had emails on their computer from someone begging for money, the victim had a life insurance policy recently taken out on them
Neurons fire, I investigate this woman thoroughly, onto to later learn the emails were generic spam you will find basically anywhere and there is actually no motive behind killings.
It may have been updated since then, but I haven’t played
Yes it is really dumb there are only serial killers. And there are only like 5 types as well, all of which you solve in the exact same way different time... They made such amazing systems for a procedurally generated sandbox investigation game, but when it came to actually using all those systems they completely botched it. I really hope they completely overhaul how the murder cases work
@@redblue5140 I enjoyed my time with the game, I just stopped after learning how shallow it currently is, but I look forward to later updates
@@steamtasticvagabond474 Yeah it's an amazing game the first few hours when you think it's a lot deeper than it really is. It's the first game to give me a sense of wonder in a long time. I am pessimistic about updates fixing it though. They are already planning to leave early access which to me suggests they've lost passion and want to get to their next project
One of the funniest ongoing stories in my very first rimworld run were the interactions with my two cooks, Cheeseman and Botates (yes those were their names lol). They were both VERY good at their jobs, but they absolutely HATED each other and constantly got into social fights. I can only imagine the experience for the other colonists just coming into the kitchen for lunch to find the cooks in a fistfight again.
18:45 the Rimworld soundtrack is super underrated
Every song is a banger it's crazy!
I forget how good because I turned off the music after hour 100
@@BlueBeetle1939 honestly, throwing on some good music mods helps alot, so your both listening to new stuff and some old stuff.
Sorry you've been dealing with Covid! I hope you're on the mend, though.
And thank you so much for those kind words at the end. I'm glad you dig what I do!
*bumps up Rimworld on my list a few spaces*
We all stan Otter and Adam
I remember one colony that had to flee from bugs. They ended up in the middle of no where and started to rebuild. They got a notice of two factions fighting nearby; so why not go over there and hang out? We lost a bunch of stuff, could pick over the battlefield to get some supplies.
We did that but we also found Regina; a half dead woman from one of the factions, bleeding out. She had good stats bar missing a leg but I noticed most of her friends died during the battle save for one. But that last person wasn't a friend; it was the leader of her faction and she had a -100 relation to her. So we picked her up, healed her got her recruited pretty fast and soon started going off on a revenge quest to let Regina put a bullet in the faction leader's head.
Rimworld is one of the few games I watch being played on youtube where I don't mind watching failure, because it's a story first and foremost (and the youtubers I watch very much know this, and lean into it)
I like watching Vtubers play the game for this reason. It's always a failure, but they are entertainers who know how to make failure fun.
A Rimworld video essay without mentioning Dwarf Fortress? Impossible!
Boatmurdered erasure😥
Dwarf Fortress had a chance to be something, and the Dev decided that fixing the UI was not important enough to make the game popular. So now we have Rimworld instead.
@@Krell356wouldn’t the steam version count as fixing the UI?
@@Krell356 The ui and visuals weren't their priority, neither was the game's popularity. They just wanted to make a super in depth world generator and fortress simulator for people to play and they succeeded. Simply due to the style and complexity of the game it would never be as popular as more watered down versions.
Dwarf Fortress is something. It’s a major inspiration for w bunch of games, including Minecraft of all things!
Another game to consider, which is essentially the granddad of games like Rimworld: Dwarf Fortress. Especially after Dwarf Fortress' Adventure Mode is finished and rereleased. If you want a game that has an emergent story, play while keeping track of your initial dwarves. Check in on them on occasion. You'll see that while *you* are directing the story of the fortress itself, there are as many stories going on underneath your nose as there are dwarves in your fortress *and* the stories of all the nations in the overworld. Bonus points if your fortress becomes the Mountainhome.
Right? Its so goddam advanced, I cant believe its made by just two dudes😭 (And seeing how badly LLC. Firms have failed to innovate in the past 10 years it actually makes a lot of sense again...)
@@SimuLord They're called colony sims; also, your first sentence weirdly implies Dwarf Fortress isn't still actively influential.
@@SimuLord "Stardew-like" how dare you desecrate Harvest Moon like that
Didn't Tynan specifically say he was inspired by Dwarf Fortress stories like Boatmurdered to create a game focused on dynamically creating those experiences?
@@0freeicecream956 Exactly that. He basically simplified DF down to what was necessary to tell the story, not to simulate the world. That explains most of the differences and similarities. And probably took inspiration from Firefly or something for the space western vibe.
You not stripping jerbear for his coat before executing him caused me physical pain
the man already lost everything, at least let him die with some dignity
my stories are min-maxed, too.
@@smoothkid765 not even a min max thing why would you ever leave a prisoner with armor and a weapon that's just asking for a revolt
I thought of all the storage and hydroponics space that was wasted, since you can easily compress it more...
This actually reminded me of Fire Emblem a bit.
I've been looking into the "Permadeath vs no Permadeath" argument lately, especially in regards to Resetting, either using in-game mechanics, or just save-scumming.
A lot of people think that using reset methods completely negate Permadeath and that the Reset mechanics should be removed in favor of a Classic vs Casual game mode at the start. They often argue that Permadeath is what made Fire Emblem so amazing by having Emergent storytelling. Forcing you to play through a character's death, seeing who gets stronger and who gets benched, etc.
The problem is that, while that's all true, Fire Emblem is also a Strategy / Tactics game AND an RPG with Levels and Stats, so players often play it as a Tactical RPG and less of an Emergent Storytelling Strategy game like XCOM. It certainly doesn't help that Fire Emblem games aren't really designed with Emergent Storytelling other than Permadeath. There's no good catch up mechanic to offset any negative outcomes and the story isn't really designed to be reset in case of a screw up. There's also little variation in the actual story depending on your actions. It's completely relegated to gameplay.
Emergent storytelling requires supporting Players FAILING for it to actually work and Fire Emblem doesn't really support failure.
yeh i was shocked at how little the death of a character mattered in the story/to any of the characters even to mention them in passing.
Here's my story so far. Sorry if it's a bit of a ramble I gotta eat soon.
Three colonists crash land onto a planet.
-Aly, the 26 biologically-year-old but 2000+ chronologically-year-old cave dweller. She's an undergrounder who being social and going outside but has a passion for art.
-Beniko Mullen. A woman who used to be a royal princess. By far the best talker.
-Trigger. Aly's son and Mullen's ex-husband. Former soldier and policeman.
-A golden retriever who gets eaten by a cougar early on lol
So they crash land with their trusty dog and get to building. Life is confusing and hard at first (with the odd bit of cannibalism here and there), but soon they start to get the hang of things. But the first major turning point happens when Mullen recruit her first raider, Pigeon.
Life continues on and the camp slowly improves. Life's looking good. So good that Trigger tries to rekindle his lost spark with his ex-wife, Mullen. Mullen rebuffs him, which saddens Trigger at first. And although Pigeon never made a move on Mullen, they start sharing deep conversations more and more often. A lot more often than Mullen ever shared with Pigeon. Trigger doesn't hate Pigeon for it, but it starts to look like Trigger will never rekindle the spark that once held their flame together.
However, he doesn't give up. Maybe... just maybe they can do things right the second time. He continues trying to woo her, continues getting rejected, rinse and repeat. It seems like a hopeless, futile pursuit. But then, Trigger says a joke and wouldn't you know it, Mullen falls back in love with him. They build a double bed, and they spend the night together. All seems well and looking up.
However, the next morning another person raids the camp. A large bear-sized dude, but he is BOOKING IT. He's sprinting through the woods like a wolf chasing its prey. But the colonists got guns, so it shouldn't be a problem right?
Trigger comes out first, aims his rifle at the raider. BAM!! Misses. Aims again. BAM! Misses. By then the raider is beating the ever living fuck out of Trigger. And by the time Mullen, Aly, and Pigeon come out to rescue him it's already too late... the raider kidnaps Trigger and disappears off the map.
-
Now that's where I'm at. A couple other things happened like a pet rhino domesticating itself as well as other people joining, but this is the main story in my playthrough. I have no idea if Trigger is alive or not or if we'll ever get a chance to get him back. Ever since then Mullen has had a few minor mental breakdowns (and is constantly on the verge on another one), yet she's the de facto leader who has to run the colony.
If we ever get a chance to rescue Trigger, I'm sending everything I got. I'm willing to blow dozens of hours of progress just to have the chance to see Mullen and Trigger reunite. Better love story than Twilight.
Yeah rant over
Jesus thats so sad i hope you find him
While I absolutely love Rimworld, I never could get into it as a story generator; I just don't have the memory to actually remember what my pawns lived through.
What is the point of the pawns of the god that guides them does not remember their names or their stories?
@@prateeksharmakharel7678 I like to build things; I like to watch numbers get better
There are a lot of numbers to get bigger
I'm intending to soon play a game of Rimworld where every time they go to sleep I open a word document and write as if it's a Diary of one of the characters. When that character dies I'll just switch to another and explain why
There's a mod to let you do this ingame, literally called "Diary", a spiritual successor to the old "Rimstory" mod.
Some of my best memories come from my 'chronicled' games, where instead of just looking at what events the game threw at me as something that happened, I went to copious efforts to improv connections between them. Like when we got fibrous mechanites not that long after I installed an archotech leg that I stole onto one of my colonists, I wrote that it was essentially an infection of sorts due to improper handling of the incomprehensible equipment during surgery.
Or when we had a prison camp rescue but the pawn within not only wasn't who was advertised on the quest (bug?) and had some nasty traits and wasn't the person we thought they were, and there was another downed refugee nearby who we went to rescue; after the camp prisoner hurled abuse at them and reading their ideo I inferred that they were a racist shitbag who should have stayed in that prison, whose rescue was not worth the sacrifices it costed, and so instead of banishing them I had one of my hotheaded colonists with a really nasty past of her own get drafted and wrote it as her just pulling out her gun and fucking shooting them before the colony leader's sister took the bastard out back and caved their head in with an axe.
I don't think I've intentionally killed one of my own pawns with another like that since, it was something I only did because I was constantly actively keeping the identities of my colonists in mind instead of letting the game become gamey. Strongly recommend.
One thing you got to be careful about when it comes to emergent gameplay is make sure that the player isn’t encouraged to do the same thing repeatedly. This is why I think Ubisoft games aren’t a good example despite their systems. In far cry the optimal strategy is sneaking in bushes and throwing rocks, while in Assassins creed you can often just charge into enemies because of the piss easy combat (ironically) this is why the Monolith Middle Earth games nemesis system is so good for reasons outside of characterization, because it circumvents this issue on at least some level due to orcs being immune to some things and returning orcs learning from your previous fight and making it so you can’t do that strategy again. I’ve noticed some people (particularly in the steam community forums on certain games like Rimworld) get mad at these events being called stories for some reason. I’m not saying that they can’t have their opinion, but I find it funny that they got mad about the “story generator” term and don’t see how the events that naturally occur count as a story on some level.
Because story says nothing. Everything is a story generator. Story comes after play. Some things are better stories than others and event based games with high player agency produce so many events in such a chaotic way that interesting things automatically happen because if you press random long enough 12345 will eventually come around. But in theory you can have a new story even in linear games, which is why the videos with "I let my non-gamer girlfriend play darksouls" are liked, because the non-gamers interact differently enough with the games, making the experience and therefore story more different than most gamers.
While linear games are usually not really worth telling in the community because everyone has experienced the same thing and knows what happens. There people ask "what was your favorite part of the story" rather than "what story happened to you"
Does that make sense?
Lmao, I’m pretty sure it’s the devs use that term.
There is, if you let it, some room in Skyrim for such stories. Though mostly for your mortal followers and if you live in a homestead, family. Some of my best adventures, have come from traveling long time with a follower I had slowly equipped with great gear, without any exploitation of the game and dramatically losing them. Like when I had once retired Eric the Slayer to Stewart over my homestead and he died defending my family from a dragon, while I was fighting my way through bandits, that happened to be raiding.
10:22 HEY I SAW THAT KID DIE ON THE FADE OUT YOU CANT FOOL ME
I feel like the secret sauce is making the world a character in its own right. Part of what makes Rimworld so compelling is its Firefly-inspired setting where humans simply never solved the FTL problem, so colonized planets can't communicate with or control each other. It makes it feel like it's impossible for you to ever see the big picture or become an invincible "chosen one" because the universe is just too big, there's always something bigger out there that could kick your little sand castle.
My favorite Rimworld story was from my recent Anomaly run. I tried to establish my base first and eventually took in a child who was being chased by pirates. My colony had a couple, and the mother was sterile, and the child became friends with the couple so they were almost like an adoptive family. Then the child had to watch as her adoptive mother and father got devoured by monsters, and witness the colony's descent into void worship due to the leader's breaking sanity thanks to those deaths. It was a tragedy that ended with everyone dead because I had the VE Mechanoids mod and I never cleared any mechanoid fleets, so they spawned a big unstopable army and steamrolled me
Good vid. I love how memorable rimworld playthroughs are, the half an hour me and my friend spent making a custom religion was well worth it as I think they would have got bored playing without that storytelling.
One of the best youtubers that truly explore the concept of emergent narratives and their interactions is Pete Complete. His RimWorld series are full nuanced characters that grow in truly unexpected directions just by how Pete "directs" the events.
I enjoy replaying games, so aftera while all the saves kind of merge together in my head. Not so Rimworld! Every time I go back to look at previous saves, it's that recognition of "oh yeah, this colony! I remember this colony!" I love how memorable every single individual colony is.
I'll give you a 4th situation on the pets you describe at the end. My cat Nika had a great life roaming around the land, till one day a fox got to her. Missing leg, tail and eye, I managed to save her(and taught myself area seclusion at the same time). She was slowly recovering while I sent out a caravan, leaving my maintenance guy behind(as he is a convert child and won't fight). Well, HardHat got assaulted by a mad squirrel. Alone, at home, refusing to fight, bleeding out, I see the message "Nika is no longer incapable of walking"
Hardhat ran as fast as he could to her, and Nika valiantly fought off the squirrel, saving the day. She gets only the best foods now, she helps train my huskies
I waa really excited to see you mention Wildermyth, I love that game! Dwarf Fortress would be another obvious suggestion
I don't know if anyone has ever told you this but you have a really smart sounding voice :)
It's very soothing
Something I really like is Rimworld determines the nature of the attack on your bases value in a few metrics, then does a weighted random roll.
This also creates a curve of attack frequency just by existing, at the start of the gameyou have little of value and haven't annoyed anyone or horded specific resources so raids are more likely to be skipped.
By the end of the game you have a high value base, multiple enemies, and a cache of things raiders might want; so the raids happen at maximum frequency with more raiders when they do happen.
It's such a great system for balancing the difficulty while also making the raids feel organic and the result of your actions with randomness thrown in(so it's not always the same outcome).
Hmmmm... Wait until your builder gets too good, makes one too many masterwork chairs and tables, and suddenly, the colony looks mighty raidable.
This type of emergent narrative is why I’m addicted to football manager
Rimworld is a tutorial for dwarf fortress. Change my mind
Love the film otter shoutout. I’ve really been enjoying his videos. Your channel and his have been my fav lately! Cheers!
Glad to hear it!
3:16 "Zero rimming at all. Blatant false advertising" Well... If you know, there *is* a mod for that.
The Patreon "Aaah!" gets me in the funny bone every time.
Great job on this one! inspired me to play more of all the games you listed and realise why i enjoy them so much more then many other games.
The best stories are the ones you make on your own, or with friends.
one time I had a colonist who was a rich explorer setting out to make his own off world trading company. he took in a mother and her children who helped the facility grow. eventually though the colony got a message from someone saying that if he killed the entire family the colony would receive necessary components in building our food storage so we could survive winter. So he had to take the family out to the woods and with the pulse rifle that brought him all he had he buried that family in the woods. afterwards he fell into a deep depression and wouldn't leave his bedroom for days at a time.
10/10 game
The Royalty DLC has some great design elements as well: noble pawns require lavish bedrooms, clothing, and thronerooms and mostly refuse to do any work.
This is bad because the strength of the raids which hit your colonies is dependent on how mcuh wealth you amass, so every once of luxury you have inevitably comes back to bite you and you have to do lots of quests to butter up the empire into letting you have access to the spice melange -- but the payoff is that your colony now has a wizard queen who can summon orbital bombardments and space marines.
Another quirk is that pawns with the ascetic trait ignore most of the downsides to the pawn in question when it comes to work and apperal, so it maybe optimal to make the colonist the least interested in finery your resident noble.
My best personal experience of emergent storytelling is oblivion, I had failed to pickpocket a secluded guard in one of the cities. I resisted arrest and was promptly attacked, but was then saved by three more guards who killed the one who tried to arrest me.
This is why i love kenshi
I was also surprised that wasn't talked about. Then again, looking at how his city ended up in flames, he might not be ready for that story yet.
I, to this day, hold my Kenshi character bugman Zhaksy (Kazakh for "good") as somewhat of a role model. This goofy bug swordsman - drug mule with a stolen katana is the pinnacle of resilience and perseverance. He escaped slavery twice with only 2 limbs left, facetanked an orbital lazer and 5 billion hungry bandits, crossed the Great Desert on foot multiple times just to sell some hash and in the end built himself a gang of misfits
I live to be like Zhaksy
God, I'll never forget my first Rimworld colony. I'll never forget when I lost my first colonist to a wild lynx, or when his sister Grumps had a baby that no-one in the colony could care for. Grumps and the other colonist (an assassin named Rynyk) were both incapable of caring... but the last minute they managed to tame a wild man named Dodd who could take care of the baby. And then Rynyk and Dodd got married, lost their first child to a giant murderbug and their second got kidnapped by Yttakin.... and Grumps got clubbed to death by neanderthals so Rynyk and Dodd raised her child as their own...
I was so incredibly invested in that colony, and particularly the story about Rynyk. I think I spent over 200 hours before I managed to build a ship for every colonist (well over 20 at the time). I couldn't decide if I wanted Rynyk to go with the rest of the colonists - but in the end I decided that her story on Rimworld was done and she left with the rest. I'll never forget her or her struggles.
Jare Bear' ~ A cute nick name for someone named Jeremiah
This is a really good take on emergent stories, you need just enough details to be interesting, and then you throw it to the player
you know it's a cardinal sin to talk about rimworld (or any other colony sim) without mentioning dwarf fortess, right? you're going in the book of grudges my friend. may the beards of our ancestors have mercy for your poor, poor soul. but they will not. for they are just. like the anvil of the khul-taran.
Damn it! HOW COULD YOU WIN THE MOST PETTIEST AWARD?! IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MINE! MINE!
@@infiniteraide1642 no worries, next time we can win together, brother!
Absolutely top-tier script, as always! Awesome video!
I'd feel you'd like Rule the Waves series games. I mean, your "characters" are ships you design, but, as a naval history nerd, it's really the only other game I've played to give me the same emergent storytelling feeling of Rimworld. Maybe early ARK:SE is up there too, for private server multiplayer clan drama.
In xcom 2 I had two guys they didn’t have any compatibility at all, and I had them in their to try to connect to the other two teammates, I activated a cell with my last troop and one of the guys gets shot and downed in the first turn, bleeding out. So I call an early evac and get one guy to save the other. After the mission the two people with the lowest compatibility become buddies. And when one of them died the other wiped a cell out by himself. Good times good times
I had a colonist who was insane at art. She would crank out sculptures all the time but she only made one masterpiece. To commemorate it I put it up in the rec room. She died in a raid the next day.
The interest moment for me, is that the story could start even before crash-landing.
Right now, in some mountains is beginning to grow a young settlement. I jokingly named only man that get to the pods after my GM: “Miyuki “John DnD” Miyamura”(my GM using this name as pseudonym)
When he rushed to the pods, he had a choice to take with him 2 complete strangers and a mechanical cow, or his daughter, and he chose two complete strangers, and now, he must struggle and reform religion they choose to adapt to new hostile environment
thank you for putting all the game sin the desc
Fs in the chat for my boy Jerberg; But this is why I love age of Wonders to an extent, getting to create an Empire before I start playing, thinking of how their history developed and then using that to frame my game play.
It also massively sucks that WarnerBros copyrighted the "Nemsis" system for Middle-Earth: Shadows of war, such a unique cool system that probably won't ever see the light of day again.
There are ways to do something similar to the Nemesis system without breaking copyright, but it's still a system that requires a lot of resources to work well.
You might like trying Northrend Bound, its a custom map from Warcraft 3 with it's own emergent storytelling
Rimworld is the only game in you can sit on your enemies skin while eating their flesh and later researching new way to commit war crimes
The canon we most enjoy is headcanon
17:00 SLAY THE PRINCESS MENTIONEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD LETS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I know games like RimWorld do this very intentionally, but i also love the narratives that accidentally spring up in games like Rust, Rust movies documenting the ups and downs, rivalries and friendships of a server wipe is some of my favourite content on TH-cam.
Been playing non stop rimworld for a few weeks. Best story so far, I started as a group of tribals in a frozen doom world. I used the xenotype editor to make them cold tolerant, under the pretense that they are native to this ice world and thus would have adapted already. I also used the xenotype editor to create a snow ogre class. That are basically melee focused raid bosses with huge bodys cold immunity +20 melee, and are super hyper tanky. and can eat raw meat with no downsides. the catch is that these creatures can not pass on their genes move super slowly, must eat 7 times as much as a normal character. have no social skill.. are not smart and can not research anything, have awful gunplay, can not drive(i use a vechicle mod) or do art. are hyper agressive, and use a custom raider ideology i added.
Back to the story: The tribe rolls up on a cave out in the middle of an ice sheet. and makes their home there. after battling starvation for weeks. They strike an old vault while cave digging, This vault contained 10 cryosleep cascats that opened. Resulting in a huge battle. where the tribe leader was kidnaped, and the entire tribe was wiped out. I kept playing though.
As my next wanders. I created 3 snow ogres. Under the pretense that they where just passing by hunting what little wildlife there was. They ignored all the loot and took the corpses for food. I then abandon the colony and settled a few miles away. The snow ogres eventually destroyed themselves becouse of hyper aggression.
But then a man in black appeared. And in his social stat it stated the entirety of my first tribe was his actual family. So I came up with the idea that offscreen, he was out hunting and scouting, came back to see his entire tribe gone, with only the body's of the cryosleep people left. and bloody Ogre footprints leading to the west. and so he hunted the ogres. Tracking them here over many days...only the ogres where all dead. Except for one who was bleeding out. and so he took care of them hoping to extract info. Finding out that the ogeres had nothing to do with his tribes defeat he teamed up with the final survivor, to track down the only remaining member of his clan, his wife. along the way he tamed a white fox. and thats where we are now.
I'm judging you for that hothouse build with 4 sun lamps
I find this very interesting :)
In TTRPG space we have a great many "Modern" designs that focus on emergent narratives supported by highly procedural mechanics since the early 2000s : old examples are The Pool, The Shadow of Yesterday and Trollbabe, while more recent examples can be Apocalypse World and its many descendants (from Monsterhearts to Fantasy World, to Brindelwood Bay, and so many more). And of course all the GM-Less games.
It's a pity that, mostly because of how the market / product category works, all the mainstream publishers prefer to focus on "Trad" designs (like D&D, Cyberpunk, Cthulhu, Vampire, etc) which rely on a GM to do a ton of preparation, with all the pros and cons that that entails (especially the endless stream of supplemental content they allow for... which is much less appealing in emergent storytelling, when the best "content" is the one emerging procedurally at the table).
I absolutely agree that playing games is a lot more fun if you roleplay. Anyone can make the most advantageous decisions for an optimal playthrough, especially if you don't restrict yourself from looking things up. But roleplaying gives you a more unique experience that's tailored for your character. Including games like the Bethesda Fallout games. And previous Fallouts. And most other roleplaying games.
One place where Rimworld succeeds and Baldur's Gate 3 fails is the way the former is built for dealing with problems in an interesting way, while the latter is built for solving problems in interesting ways. It doesn't sound like there's much of a difference, but dealing with a problem doesn't necessarily mean you solve it. Success or failure, Rimworld goes on like it always does, and you'll get a story out of it regardless, but BG3 often just cuts out when you fail to accomplish something, making you miss out on things. That encourages to save scumming, since the story to be told if you fail is much shorter than if you succeed. If anything, Rimworld, much like Dorf Fortress, is more fun if you lose on occasion. BG3 can be fun even if you lose, but it'll almost always be less fun compared to succeeding. So in that sense, Rimworld is actually closer to a real DnD experience than BG3.
And for me the game where I cared the most about randomly generated pawns is (modded) battle brothers, even without much story or non combat interaction and a lot of pure optimization.
Ah yes, I too remember the last time I thought having a base made out of wood was a good idea.
Yeah.
Here is the best rimworld story.
It all started with 3 crewmates crashlanding their escape pods from their space ships.
We built a shack, started a farm, got our basic stuff undercontrol.
Then, one colonist got food poisoning and passed out, a mad raccoon attacked at the same time a colonist dug too deep and too greedily into the mountains and spawned a giant spider and its swarms attacked the miner.
My third one happened to be near the edge of the map, the moment a mad raccoon spawned in, bit critically my third little guy.
Killed the raccoon, but my dude died of bloodloss on his way to bed.
My last, puking from food poisoning was stuck in bed, while constantly passing out, until the bugs arrived in our homes, killed the house cat then took a bite off my already dying little guy.
What a story
Slash those immortal Nemesis uruks in half. Uhgar the Cursed who "lived for a thousand years and died a thousand deaths"? More like two-piece uruk sashimi lol. Nan iChîr Gelair Mordor!
I think Fire Emblem is also a good example of the games writing their own stories, with elements like randomized stats growths and perma death for all characters except the main character and some of the newer games giving more freedom for creating character builds and their romantic/platonic relationships
Not really. That game still has a story. You still have to do that story. It might be different from who play the important parts, but it is still a scripted story.
Oh hey, Adam Millard is talking about -2D Dwarf Fortress- Rimworld, this should be interesting.
In all seriousness, I do agree with you that story generators like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld are a very interesting kind of game. One of the reasons we like D&D so much.
Art lies in the eyes of the beholder. Always has been.
If you look at A Link to the Past, since your character never talks you can decide a main aspect of the story. Does your uncles' death shake you to the core and you struggle to keep going, ready to break down at any moment? Or are you a smug young sword master who found and excuse to kill people? Do you save the princess to save the land or because you are a peasant looking for a way up?
me crying over my modlist as tending stopped working abruptly, right after the manhunter scps got spawned in on my starving colomy(forgot about winter): ah yes, story.
in all seriousness, love this game :) so many fun mods
That is a story isn't it?
I once had a colony that lived in a jungle. They had been hit by the plague and some manhunting animals. 70% of the colony was sick, 90% of the fighters were wounded or sick. Then another raid showed up. The colony panicked. Wounded and sick soldiers grabbed their poorly maintained rifle they looted from an enemy a few weeks ago and were ready to give their life to protect the colony.
Scouts reported that the raid was a dangerous one. They had seen grenade launchers among all of the raiders. It was clear the battle was going to be explosive.
However. When the soldiers came into contact with the raiders. It turned out the raiders were not exactly smart. The grande launchers were actually 100% smoke launchers, and not a single raider had anything to actually hurt the soldiers with.
The battle started and the smoke was everywhere. Since the colony soldiers had nothing to fear unless they went in close, they just had to hold out until they scored enough hits through the smoke to drive the raiders away. After the battle the tending of the sick and wounded was able to continue.
I don't think the answer could be a whole video unless it's way more interesting than I realized, but something I've been wondering lately about games is it is that in games where enemies sometimes have grab attacks, the hitboxes for those always feel uniquely unfair.
The fact you called the Sims "the original emergint narrative game" without seemingly even knowing that Dwarf Fortress exists made me overreact so trucking hard. To be entirely honist you are probably right, knowing that the first version of Dwarf Fortress was released in 2006 and the Sims was released in 2000, but a video on both RimWorld and emergent narratives that dosen't even mention Dwarf fortress feels like an internet crime.
PS: the steam page for Dwarf Fortress is deceptive. it was only avalible via the Bay 12 Games website for about 16 years before it got polished up for steam, and it looked like incoprehensible ASCII sclop.
Rimworld's mods add to the story tellings. There are so many mods and you can pick and choose what type you want. Do you want a medieval only story? Mods can do it.
Speedy recovery friend!
You're wrong about SHadows of Doubt. If you play long enough and/or play on a smaller map. The cases start to intertwine with each other. Look at Insym's recent series, where an entire floor of a certain apartmen building were like a murder cult or something, and 2 killings in the same apartment created a search for a ghost killer.
Neither of those scenarios would have happened in a more traditional detective game.
Classic. That's such a Static thing to do.
I wrote an 8000 word script about procedural and emergent narrative design Monday citing XCOM and Rimworld and then deleted to focus on specific issues related to my game and I'm so glad I did since this one is 20x what my script was.
There are so many titles I want to add to your list of examples for different reasons, but the most important would probably be Piranha Bytes RPG's for their basic reactivity. All the way back in the original Gothic, it were the simple things - like the NPC's getting worried when you'd enter their house or draw a weapon in the middle of the street - that made all the difference in the immersiveness department. For a more modern example, RDR2 seems to be following a similar philosophy. Yet sadly, the fact that so many AAA RPG's still ignore those basics (even while obviously having the resources to implement the systems if they wanted to) kind of hints that it might be more of a conscious decision to dumb things down and cater to people who don't care about deeper immersion and storytelling
What are you going to do if Chao ever stops being your patron?
Still love the story of the one guy in Stellaris who turned a ton of people into burger meat and then traded the food to their original empire.
Stellaris can be so HILARIOUSLY cruel when you read between the lines.
I just want to shoutout Space Station 13 for a second. It has a ton of the systems you mentioned that do encourage emergent storytelling, but also the fact that it's a multiplayer RPG gives a lot of those disparate elements something to unify them.
I have noticed that this is also stuff that occurs in Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina. This despite the fact that they are fairly linear in terms of story. A lot of that seems to be because of the nuggets the player can create.
Ah, Emergent Storytelling, the pinnacle of Analog and Digital Gaming.
Minecraft John's story starts with him taking his dad, Wayne Drake's place as C.C.P.S gatekeeper because his dad impregnated three women and failed to pay child support he was exiled from the facility. There he met his best friend and average 4chan user, Terraria Frank. However, when security in the underground facility became automated, he and Terraria Frank decided to become scouts instead of gatekeepers, going on wacky adventures for the C.C.P.S
I made all of this because one of my dwellers in fallout shelter made way more children than I needed and I exiled him out of frustration.
Emergent Narratives really are the bread and butter of streamers and let's play TH-camrs. Sure, you can play a game with a story built in, but it's always going to be about the story of how you interact with it.
I would love to hear your thoughts on Rust through the lens of emergent storytelling. There's an entire sect of youtube based on the stories that emerge from this game - and the safety of your base provides this same respite that allows for variance in the excitement of the game.
Theres disco Elysium...a game that makes you decide who you are....as you play as a detective who drunk so much untill he forgot everything. Lost his memory.
Damn, now I wanna play Rimworld again. It's been a long time
5 minutes in and all i can think of is the masterpiece that is Kenshi that I love for its emergent storytelling!
god damn i love Rimworld so much. So excited to watch this vid
Adam, I am astounded you didn't make some kind of reference to the Galactic War in Helldivers 1 and 2.
It's emergent storytelling, but across 100,000 players. The community literally just chose saving 4 thousand children over unlocking a stratagem. If that's not emergent storytelling, I don't know what is.
The decisive factor, I think, that makes _Rimworld_ work is that it thrives off of the very thing that holds most games back: jank.
Nobody really relies on random systems to generate a story because they (correctly) assume in advance that a carefully constructed narrative cannot be randomly generated by a computor. Tremendous effort has been expended producing AI that can iron all the randomness and jank out to make a story that resembles something thought out. But it is precisly because stories are built using harmonious and proven heuristics that they're uninteresting. Every ounce of precious unpredictability which would even necessitate the reader's imagination has been rigorously boiled off in a bid to immitate award-winning novels.
Rimworld, a game not even half a gigabyte in size with all DLC expansions installed, instead takes the jankiness of sheer random selection and completely leans into it. If a colonist has an absurd and mismatched backstory and skillset -- without even really contemplating it, your mind has already tried to put together how such an implausible biography coud have resulted. (It's even possible to get child colonists who are chronologically hundreds of years old. It isn't even that uncommon.)
The garbled descriptions of a given colonist's art projects are as strangly provocative as they are humorus when they describe their fellow colonists howling at an exploding gun turret as a flight of boomaloupes whinney them to sleep and a yorkshire terrier glares at them from behind a Christmas tree with a constipated expression in the neo-classical style.
Even if you go in with a definte plan, all kinds of unpredictable things will force you to reconsider. The experience isn't just a blank canvas for the player to ship how they wish, completely swept away on the caprices of chance, or rigorously dictated by optimization but rather all three are able to have a crucial role that plays off of the other two: What's best for the colony maynot match up with your personal criteria and you never know what hand the game will deal you.
A suboptimal colony that has a distinct ethos and aspiration behind it may not be optimal or even face extinction. Or perhaps the implausible society which places the wellfare of pandabears above those of it's citizens somehow manages to survie under your guidance inspite of the odds -- both outcomes are fascinating.
Ludeon Studios looked at the ambiguity of randomized systems in games and had the insight to view them as a feature rather than a limitation.
Even enhanced graphics may be a step backwards in the medium of games for this reason by subtly reducing the player to a spectator: A _suggestive_ visual environment is already more interactive than a highly resolved and clearly deliniated one.
If you enjoy these types of games I recommend Dwarf Fortress. So many hours creating the story of an entire world.
RimWorld is my favorite game because of this stuff. It's almost alone in this genre of personal story generator. The only thing that comes close for me is Kenshi, but while I love Kenshi, it's not exactly the same as the characters have no "personalities." So outside of combat and faction affiliations, Kenshi characters all act the same way more or less. And Dwarf Fortress is more about the whole fortress rather than individuals.
That's kind of why Dwarf Fortress, while a game that I have enjoyed for 50 hours, still isn't my favorite because just like you said, dwarves are far more disposable. This is helped by how fast dwavres learn things faster rather than a bit slower, in addition to how many of them come into the fortress. I prefer Rimworld because it takes the approach of "less is more" with its colonists.
@@infiniteraide1642 Yeah same. I have hundreds of hours in Dwarf Fortress myself. Used to play it even before the graphical update on Steam, and it's fun but it's really about the whole fortress. A dwarf could die randomly and you wouldn't notice until their ghost shows up.
RimWorld makes a big deal even of the death of a pet.
I think your end point about AI generation really hits the nail on the head
Yeah, we could technically have limitless dialogue and endless content, but without any sort of cohesion or direction, none of it is really going to matter.
It's basically the whole "massive world that's as deep as a puddle vs small world that's as deep as an ocean" concept but applied to NPC's and conversations instead of world size
Fucking Nemesis. Every time when I hear about it, I remember that Warner Bros. stole that from gamedesign possibilities forever.
Ahhhh RW, a modern day classic, I still remember when I modded in stand-ins of all my high school friends and the storyline in game predicted who would cheat on who, who would die first and why we were never going to lasts as a friend group (specially afther mechs attacked)
It comes down to three main things:
-- Rules (The "game essence" part where you're given consisteny meachnaics and rewarded for understaning and taking advantage of them.)
-- Unpredictability (The chaotic part where lots of different systems inter-relate, leading to random outcomes within the framework of the above rules.)
-- Expressivity (Providing _intrinsic_ engagement in addition to the extrinsic rewards of mastering the mechanics.)
Rimworld Ideology is explicitly this. Yes, some ideologion memes are more powerful than others, but the main attraction is coming up with all kinds of strange dogmas and precepts that your colonists will fanatically adhere too, causing them to suffer mental breakdowns if the cows you literally made sacred get slaughtered for any reason.
It's telling that the most powerful meme in the game, inhumanization, explicitly makes your colonists no longer human because they become possessed by a machine god the instant they suffer a mental break.
I.E, the intrinsic stakes are just as high as the extrinsic stakes: you made the ultimate colony of transhuman demigods with the power to dominate the terrors of the void themselves . . . but at what cost?
This is me with any sandbox game, i love ss13 gor this exact reason