Design: Storyline

[BTAxis]

The thing with making the decisions is that you can't please everyone. By default. Even so, I'm hesitant to just write down something I like on the wiki, because that would be hypocritical, after all the arguing I did about keeping in mind what people would enjoy.

Your suggestion about making people give their opinion on the storyline variants makes sense, but the problem there is that there aren't really any concrete storyline variants to rate yet. Most of them are vague, and filled with "what if"s and "possibly"s. I'll try to flesh out the contingency thread a bit and make it a little more solid when I have some time. I suggest you do the same for the ones you posted.

Also, I'm not a leader, okay? I'm just some dude who involves himself with this part of the design. My word is not law.

[Bandobras]

No offence, dude.

With all respect for you as a leading non-leader, I would rather not flesh out a story (and not even the "reason for invasion" fragment) knowing that only one of the the several stories will be actually used. Both the individual preferences and your final decision will be obviously guesses, even if the stories are fleshed out, because one has to play the actual game to make a fully informed decision. And, after all, we can always batcktrack and this will still be cheaper than fleshing out all the variants.

For an informed guess I think it is enough to have a sketch of possible variant such as the one in
http://ufo.myexp.de/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=173
for the "artifact as the reason for invasion" family (though I should update it with some recent additions by other people). The "reason for invasion will remain a mystery" stance needs not further fleshing out. Your "contingency" as reason for invasion presentation is already overdone (unless you want to give some more variants, but with less detail). There are already some nice texts, but with not many variants, about the "alien hiding on Earth" reason.

I think it might be a good idea to link to those topics and perhaps shortly summarize 10 main categories of reasons for invasion for the people that do not have time to read through all the topics. It's all guesswork, anyway, but already people know they hate some variants, so let's start eliminating dead branches. When we have the reason for invasion, we will have much less alternatives to follow, we will focus more on next things, and still, when the next things are decided the "reason" things can be refined or even redecided.

P.S. There are also some more ideas, like warmongering, revenge for unintended harm done to them, revenge for killing their scouting missions, etc. Most of them are quite clear and nobody volunteered to study them, but surely they should be among those 10 categores.

[BloodMagus]

I believe the reason why certain plot ideas, i. e 'warmongering, revenge for unintended harm done to them, revenge for killing their scouting missions', have been overlooked is because most people see their use as futile.

Warmongering is at best cliche. Its not to say it couldn't be done as a reason for invasion, but it would need to be done very well. This invasion scenario has been over used in film, and the original Xcoms technically used it as well. The person who sucessfully works this into a plot will undoubtly be hit upon by some kind of epiphany beforehand. Attempts to develop this purely from scratch will prove impossible


'Revenge for Killing their Scouts' seems completely unrealistic to me. I would think as a player, this use of this in plot would be seen as a choice of convenience /laziness. A scout is a military unit, and is sent when a military response is expected.  The idea of getting upset because your miltary units got attacked is childish.

The idea is reused in 'Revenge for Unintended Harm'. Invasion is never about revenge. The resources and time can never be justified by retribution. Military revenge is generally carried out through the use of guerillas and insurgency. Alot more bang for your buck.


I will attempt to explain the rationale behind invasion, in terms of economics and strategy:

To commit to an invasion, the results of the invasion must offer more value then the projects time and resources to be used.

To commit to an invasion, it must be possible to continue the invasion as long as necessary, that is 5 to 10 times the expected time frame. That is you must have the resources and units to sustain the warfare.

The sucess of the invasion must seem tactically possible will the available units & resources plus the units and resources from future production and gathering, based on current intelligence.

A retreat option must be possible if there is a likely chance of failure.

The motivation for the invasion must be rational enough that all troops employed will agree or understand it.

And before anyone starts off on the tangent, you can't justify a war purely on revenge. There's got to be a solid return, like land, resources or status.
Its just stupid.



Lastly, the whole Mumbai scenario really needs to get thrown out. Its no way to start a game plot. You don't start a plot straight off with a climax, because the plot intensity will be going down hill from then onwards until its ready to start building up again.

[BTAxis]

Maybe that's true, but the fact is that you need to make it clear prior to the start of the game that the aliens are hostile, and that we intend to fight them. You can't really do that without some climactic event or chain of events. In fact, that's how many stories of this type start.

[Bandobras]

You may be right. The fact that nobody explored the other mentioned ideas may be not because of the lack of time, but because of our collective gut-feeling. Then, indeed, do not include them individually in the 10 top variants listing, but reserve for them

10. Other (cliche, unbelievable, too hard to implement without the "authors are lazy" feeling, other)

'Revenge for Killing their Scouts' seems completely unrealistic to me.

I agree. Civilized aliens would just come and resolve the misunderstanding or make us punish the wrongdoers (e.g. CIA ). And warmongering aliens do not need pretexts.

Invasion is never about revenge. The resources and time can never be justified by retribution.

I think you quietly assume Aliens live under democracy/oligarchy/etc. What if they live under single-person tyranny? Then there is a plenty of examples of wars fought merely for personal revenge (even if WWI was actually not). Of course if a mad tyrant rules aliens, again his particular reasons are not that important and their believability even less so, which makes it quite cheap.

I will attempt to explain the rationale behind invasion, in terms of economics and strategy:

Nice reading. I have a warm feeling our mainstream variants are in accordance with your analysis.

To commit to an invasion, it must be possible to continue the invasion as long as necessary, that is 5 to 10 times the expected time frame. That is you must have the resources and units to sustain the warfare.

Unless no resistance was expected and still the goal of the expedition is very important and urgent. (We do not want a total war so that our beloved squad combat actually has any importance.)

The motivation for the invasion must be rational enough that all troops employed will agree or understand it.

Again a lot of assumptions about alien psychology (I like that, I dislike the cheap explanations "do not try to understand; aliens are just very alien"). But then you exhibit some strange assumptions about the lack of propaganda, chauvinism, brain washing, wishful thinking, rationalizing in the face of brutality and trauma, etc. in the alien army. Is it so different from our armies?

Lastly, the whole Mumbai scenario really needs to get thrown out. Its no way to start a game plot. You don't start a plot straight off with a climax, because the plot intensity will be going down hill from then onwards until its ready to start building up again.

I'm with BTAxis here. Yes, starting with nobody certain about ufos, the need to convince UN, peacemongering, etc. makes for a very interesting plot, but not quite for this kind of game. I feel the openning scene where the aliens are shown as very powerful and very cruel is very good. Then you start the game, prepare your squad for the worst, sit on your hands for a day, for the second day, for the third day, a UFO appears, but nobody is able to chase it down, the fourth day, the fifth day...

Then the siren rings and you begin experiencing the Mumbai horror on your own skin, step by step, consious all the way that what you see is a fraction of the Mumbai forces and still you return to base with half you squad dead or wounded, or most civilians killed to the outrage of your sponsors. And the aliens start bring better weapons and soldier than the onces in Mumbai and their number increases.

[BloodMagus]

Look, I'm not disagreeing with you two outright.
I'm just saying that the Mumbai Incident is not the way to go about things.
I'm not trying to peddle my idea of a story, I'm just trying to ensure that certain mistakes aren't made. I feel that the currently plot resembles that of UFO Aftermath, of which I felt was poor executed. Good engine, good concepts, shit story.

There are ways to make the aliens appear hostile. But the complete destruction of a city  by ground incursion with no enemy casualities is not the way to go about it.

Can't remember who brought it up before, but there was mention about a suspension of belief etc. The game's plot needs to present a realistic scenario, and be a functional plot.

We want the players to believe that this could be real. We want them to believe that this could be happening in real life, starting tomorrow. Pull them into the story.

Didn't XCOM feel real to you?

Let me propose a more fitting alternative to the Mumbai Incident.
Ideally this would be a player mission (you personally experiecing the mumbai incident), but could always be presented as a back story.

----BEGINNING----
Aliens have been monitored entering known space. Phalanx Protocols followed with the organisation of a Extraterrestrial Combat Force (codename Phalanx) to defend against incursions.
Aliens land a ground force at 'Mumbai'. Phalanx Deployed. Civilians evacuate as a huge arse firefight occurs, aliens neutralised at the expense 90% of the phalanx team killed (alt: aliens self destruct their landing craft killing all surviving the phalanx or if the humans lose they deploy a tactical nuke to wipe out the aliens).
Phalanx forced to start reassembling their team (all the decent soldiers having been killed at mumbai), as the Aliens change their strategy (knowing the humans just kicked their arse) to hit and run attacks with small forces.
----END----
Normal play can continue from here.


Just don't make the plot mistakes they did in UFO Aftermath & Aftershock.

Bandobras:

I don't see an advanced alien race having radically different logic to ourselves. They might be biologically & Culturally different, but tactics and strategies are always going to be similar albeit superior. Simply because good tactics and strategies work, bad ones don't. Darwinism.

I don't see a mad tyrant amassing a large army and travelling across the galaxy. Just oozes B-Movie plot to me. The crazy Tyrants generally get taken out by an associate anyway.

I'll think you find that wars supposedly started for revenge, generally have other motives behind them, with someone ending up alot better off then they were before. I can't honestly think of any war solely fought for revenge.

[BTAxis]

----BEGINNING----
Aliens have been monitored entering known space. Phalanx Protocols followed with the organisation of a Extraterrestrial Combat Force (codename Phalanx) to defend against incursions.
Aliens land a ground force at 'Mumbai'. Phalanx Deployed. Civilians evacuate as a huge arse firefight occurs, aliens neutralised at the expense 90% of the phalanx team killed (alt: aliens self destruct their landing craft killing all surviving the phalanx or if the humans lose they deploy a tactical nuke to wipe out the aliens).
Phalanx forced to start reassembling their team (all the decent soldiers having been killed at mumbai), as the Aliens change their strategy (knowing the humans just kicked their arse) to hit and run attacks with small forces.
----END----

I actually think this sounds LESS believeable that the plot as it is now. The aliens killed all the decent soldiers in one attack, and THEN start attacking in smaller numbers? Come on. The aliens would realize in a matter of days that Phalanx has lost most of its fangs, and attack in force again.

Also, I would like to point out that in the current plot, Mumbai is not destroyed. There are just lots of civilian casualties, and no alien ones. The reason is not because the aliens are all-powerful, but because the police forces in the city are unable to deal with them, and the army is too slow to respond to urban attacks like that. I think you misunderstood that part. I think you have a point about the bit about there not being alien casualties, though. Suppose the army shows up (late), and then kills a number of aliens before they retreat. That would still fit into the current plot, and it wouldn't be a climactic event. It would just be a normal terror attac like you get them at the start of the game, except the army failed to react appropriately, hecte Phalanx taking over. That wouldn't create a discontinuity in the plot development, I feel.

[cycyc]

There is are lots of things said in this thread, and I somehow feel bad to contribute some more. 1) Maybe one should open a new thread "information given at the start", because here we come to the vital  part. XCOM 1 - THE game, one which could keep you playing for years, had actually very little information at the beginning.
Old-Intro: Alien [mutones] land in a city and start a massacre, x-com gets alarm. Men in [hard-armors] run with [plasma rifles] and after landing in a [avengerlike] plane defeat the aliens. All in very static, dark & mystical style with no comment. !! important !! this is not any explanation, its more of a preview what you can achive in the game, if you stick to it (all []-technologies are only achiveable after 2months game time).
With the mysterious music and the little you get to know about your troups it all had a feeling of playing an "X-Files" episode, where the Ufopedia was almost the only source of information. While the good music and graphics in the x-mas release remind me of that good old time, the messages "You let some of them get away, get after them" really bothered me.
2) And we need to check the intention of the aliens. In http://ufo.myexp.de/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1318#1318 I already mentioned the FAILURE screen in X-Com 1, which I got a couple of times when aliens invaded my first base. At the time I dont see any implemented.
I fully support the current backline and BTAxis view, that the backline is somehow more than the storyline, but at the two points I mentioned theres need for adjustment, because we need at the same time to leave enogh gaps to fill with imagination and supply enough information to make it somehow realistic.

[bartl]

As I have posted in another thread my idea for the sorry was:

An experiments of Teslar (or other scientst) in the begining of human industrialisation has a side effect not even noticed on our planet. This side effect wipe out the complete peaceful alien homeworld. The few that have survieved on the colonies have swear to eliminate this evil bastards (the humans). The preperations begin...

On the journey towards our world they have received our tv transmissions which have been full pictures of world war I, II and ... So for them the humans are bloodthirsty monsters they have to eliminate on their holly mission.

The mothership or main fleet is still on the way, but the aliens are outnumbered by the human civilisation. So they send some faster alien scout ships which are now reaching the earth and making experiments and research how they can effectively eliminate the humans.

As the world leaders (just noticed the scout ships, do not even have an idea about purpose and and and) do not want to provocate a panic the alien invasion is keept secret and the team and the player as team leader have a mission to stop ... the aliens

Ok, what do you think ??

Bartl

[cycyc]

Well I think this guy is called Tesla and studying physics I really dont like the "physical experiment has major unexpected consequence far away"-type scenario. Violates laws of conservation...
Though you didnt make any comment on my 2 points. I guess youre aiming at an "aliens wipe all of us out" ending. At the moment I'm working on 3 possible failures:
* wipe out
* part of empire
* "rational" explotation
I relly dont know which one to prefer yet.

[Terran_Era]

This is my first post here.

In Relation to the story. I don't think that the Aliens should be type casted as evil warmongering people who like to fight and so they come to kick as and chew bubble gum, and they are all out of gum ... which is why they are here.

That plot line has been done many times over.

I think that the alien race should be similar to the Roman Republic, ie the roman empire just before Julis Ceasar. The Aliens are a collection of different races bound together by a form of government.
    The reason the aliens are here: its a planet in the life zone. It has oxygen, water, plant life, and they wish too have it all to them selves. Much like any other empire in human history.

This would affect the way the game is played in that, a) They came to earth with a major army. Not one small mother ship or something insignificant. That would mean they came with an Armarda that was equiped to fight a war. PHALAX is not they army to battle the aliens. i mean really. 8 men against thousands just doesn't work. PHALAX should represent the commandos. The special ops of earth that get sent on the delicate missions. ie, destroy a specific building, capture a alien leader, etc. However all the time there is a full scale war going on. armies on the move( think what happened to europe in ww2 and that is what will happen to earth)

so you could have missions in where the PHALAX commandos support earth military.

the introduction to this would be: earth has started to colonize the moon and the aliens appear and destroy the colony. a couple thousand people die and earth realises that they are no longer alone. That gives the player an idea of the deadly nature of the aliens but it isn't a major event. in fact its more like a single shot.

by changing Phalax to the commandos and have a war i feel that gives a more plausible game setting.

best example i can think of would be ... phalax = rainbow six and earth military = the cops.

[Bandobras]

Nice ideas, but too much work: if there is a huge war, the conditions under which Phalanx operates are usually not dependent on the Phalanx. So some game-scripts would have to model the outcome of the various phases of the war and tell the player what to do. As opposed to the current model, where the aliens are not very much opposed or very much active, so what happens next is very much dependent of the mission results. So less scripts and bigger satisfaction for winning the missions, I think.

[dmaster]

Hi everyone. I'm new to the forum and a big and fervour fan of the x-com games. Here comes may help for this amazing project goes even further. I hope you like it and do coments about why you like it or not and how it could be bether.

Chapter 1: The Elerium Wars

•The Aliens discover the presence of Elerium at the Core of the Earth.
•They begin to do research at our planet to validate the extraction and discover that we have a huge amount of Elerium and at a significant easy extraction.
•The Elerium is a mineral that are “incrustrated” at others minerals, in really small amounts, so that’s why we never discovered them.
•After they know about it, they decide to take the planet.
•Then, they begin to study us, to understand us as a life form and social beings.
•At September, 2010, during studies of mineral samples, a Japanese researcher, Kenshiro Wanabe, discovers almost insignificant particles of an unknown mineral, incrustrated at the particles of the mineral he is studying.
•At the same time, the invasion begins. A huge Alien Ship lands at Mumbai city and there it creates his first operational base on Earth.
•All the inhabitants of the city and from cities near Mumbai are decimated. Almost 10 millions people died at the invasion. In History, this event is now know as “The Mumbai Incident” and marks the beginning of the invasion.
•All the most powerful nations at the world recognize the gravity of the event and send troops to the place, subordinated to the UN.
•The UN army attacks the Alien Mumbai base and even with grate loses; they manage to destroy the Aliens. But some of them flee to the space.
•The Worls midia divulges that the UN army was victorious and the Alien treat is for ever ended.
•The leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth reunite and agreed that the Alien treat is far from over and decide to create a secret organization to monitor and fights this treat.
•The PHALANX is then created with the support of all these nations.
•At the same day that PHALANX is created, a small news comes to the world midia. A Japanese researcher discovers an unknown mineral.
•The humans discover the presence of Elerium at their planet, but they don’t already know what it really is or what it do.
•The game begins at this point, and the player needs to discover the Elerium at Alien ships, and the link with the new discovered mineral of the news. After this the plot continues to be unveiled until the total understand of the Aliens reasons and the ways to fights them.

[Bandobras]

I may be mistaken, but I remember there was already a discussion about minerals as the Reason for Invation and people agreed other kinds of loot are more interesting. Have you found the discussion on the forum?

[dmaster]

No, i didn't, sorry  :oops:

But to defend my plot, i dont know if every one knows, but Elerium is the main energy source for the Aliens (at the original x-com series at last) and a very important matter for them...