Talk:Storyline
Guideline (discussion)
Thank you so much for the guideline and the overall restoring of peace and order. :) Now I will remove the unrelevant portions of my past ramblings. --Bandobras 18:27, 12 June 2006 (CEST)
UFOAI: Synopsis (altugi)
> We are in the year 2084.
Bandobras: Isn't that a bit too far ahead? Many of the weapons currently in game are contemporary and others can be explained as influence of the alien tech or wild prototypes. On the other hand 2084 may be hard to imagine and immerse onself in...
> Following a UN security report in 2027 titled "Terror from Outer Space"
--- That doesn't sound like a title your typical UN bureaucrat would come up with...
--- Yeah. We need a real bureaucrat to do this one right. Perhaps could begin with "Assessment of qualitative..." (sorry, no native speaker here:). Or we could search the real UN pages...
BloodMagus: Prehaps something more like 'Assessment of Protocols and Defences against a Hostile Extraterrestrial Force'
Bandobras: Nice. Probably much more readable than actuall UN titles are, but does not sound naive, either...
--- Since the chatter section was removed, I repeat the assertion that 2084 is waaaay too far ahead for verisimilitude. In general the idea of an worldwide-known organisation funded by the UN isn't very compelling, either - a secret consortium a la the original X-Com seems better. I'm afraid I must give this storyline a thumbs-down.
Bandobras: I'm glad you agree with me on the time setting. The deletion of our comments was a misunderstanding (on our part, mostly:). About thumbs: I would rather use them to write a better one, if I could. ;) I guess a non-secret organization could be nice, for a change, if done right. No more problems with lame explanations how burning down a city can be overlooked by the public opinion. On the other hand, some explanation has to be found for e.g. why the organization is relatively poor (at the beginning), why only few soldiers, no army cooperation, etc. I see some of this is already tackled in the story. OTOH, perhaps the gameplay will have for instance army cooperation (e.g., for hunting the last remaining alien on the battlefield --- a button "call the army" that concludes the battle automatically, with percent of additional civilian casualties and destroyed alien artifacts based on the number of remaining aliens).
Altugi: On thumbs down... The official version supports the "world-wide known org under the UN" idea. Personally I prefer to have secret orgs too, but I wanted to stick a bit to the official version while I wrote this. Also 2084 is the date in the official version. I would have preferred to keep it somewhere around 2040. For the UN report: I was looking for a title that tells in simple words what it is about, so that the player immediately gets it. You could have one sounding like a UN report title... but I'm not sure if that is really the better option. Personally I would definately stick to a X-Com Apocalypse setting and environment. But the engine doesn't support such an option. And as we have a Storyline/Final section, all this storyline talk here is just worthless musing anyway. It would help the project more if you discuss (not edit) the article at Storyline/Final.
So your thumbs are down? That's ok, my head is up :-))
Btw, when I made this entry first, I thought it's ok to write down our ideas. I didn't realize that this article was meant as a placeholder for the original idea. So I want to say to the admins: I wouldn't mind if you erase this entry. If it was meant as a place for the official storyline, then it should be so.
Bandobras: So we messed up. :) How funny. ;D I would not like all this wiped up, since there are interesting ideas in your story and, I think, relevant criticism on the talk page. I'm glad this is now sorted out with the Guidlines and I guess the discussion can now move to the forum. Thanks! --Bandobras 18:30, 12 June 2006 (CEST)
BTAxis: Some justification for the current storyline here. 2084 isn't THAT far into the future. It's only 80 years. Since WWII, weapons haven't really evolved that much, and I doubt firearms will change much in the next 100 years. I also doubt the political environment will change nearly as fast in 80 years as the storyline would suggest, so in that respect it's actually not set nearly far enough into the future. But this is fiction, and some liberties must be taken. As for a secret organization, I strongly oppose the ideas in that direction put forward so far, because it's simply not realistic, given the nature of the open warfare that lies at the basis of this game. It's good for Jagged Alliance, not X-COM.
Fair enough about 2084. If you say that things are similar to ours, let it be. About open warfare --- perhaps open, but not on a very large scale, or the missions will get unimportant too early (in the late game I agree to using "auto combat" for missions, but not earlier). --Bandobras 02:36, 14 July 2006 (CEST)
I added the suggestions about Africa and Russia to the /Final section. --BTAxis 13:26, 27 July 2006 (CEST)
--I like the idea of everyone being fired recently because it allows infinite twists about tracking down those who had left, or having them reappear in later levels (dead or alive, on either side)... i.e., good guys who would have come back but didn't know about the attack, bad guys who were abusing the system and waiting for retirement, bad guys who want the attack to succeed just to stick it to the man or because they believe its the only way the funding will really get solved, etc. I'm a school teacher, and there are plenty of teachers who want the schools to fail in the hopes they'll get more funding. And I LOVE the idea of the whole thing being a result of bureaucracy, because here in the US we catch a terrorist a week trying to blow up an orphanage, and 50% of congress (and 90% of the UN) still votes that the best way to handle it is moral equivalency and denial. --66.97.136.23 15:08, 29 August 2006 (CEST)
I'd like to suggested changes to the Intro..as seen on the article page. I think this gives a better overview of the Phalanx, it also infuses elements of the orginal sotry arch by altugi and the final story arch. It flows better overall, the abrupt transiotion from struggling world to alien attack is shocking transition and good intent, but gets somewhat akward later when Phalanx is mentioned (almost as a after thought) toward the end, and the reader is left wondering wait...what?
The edit introduces a couple of things I like. It ties to the world we know (project Blue Book and the dates of operation are accurate), gradually ties in our perception of aliens, and the world leaders have kept us in the dark. It also provides context and history to the team your playing, rather than a seeming afterthought. It introduces the “Calder Valley Incident” which you can explore later in the research tree, what exactly happened. This gives the people that ignore the intro a reason to go back and read it and provides a fun little tie in to the game moment for the players that pay attention. :)
I'd also like to know who I can talk to about contributing, and assessing where best my abilities could be used.
Back ground: Published writer (journalist and tech writer though... not so much creative)
Project manager (Global project lead for major hardware manuf.)
Beta Tester (Commandos, Myth)
Map design (ok this on is a stretch but I created some great maps for Jagged Alliance Series using their map editing tools, also a channel moderator for base building in City of Heroes).
I've been able to eek some great and original ideas out of those tools with pre made sets.
Also served in the Air Force so I generally know how to create authentic sounding documents, miltary installation maps, termonology, ect. -davidf
--ender101 18:25, 14 June 2007 (CEST)
Where search?
Hello, you have on your [b]search[/b]? A very uncomfortable all the time to search for information manually.
Constructive Critique?
If I can inject an "outsider's" view of things, I actually love your storyline but there are a few things I thought I'd bring up;
- 1 Why would the aliens tip thier hand and launch a full-scale invasion before they are truly ready to "win"? Thier goal is pretty obviously to infect humanity with the XVI virus/bug/thing so why the overt attack that only acted to spur us into action? It would've been far more likely that they'd capture a few hundred captives on a global scale over time so as not to arouse suspicion.
- 2 Is it necissary for PHALANX to have died off and then resurrected? More of a suggestion really, why not have PHALANX operating continually from 1955 until "present"? The game could start with PHALANX noticing increasingly suspicious UFO activity and begin it investigation from that point (discovering the danger of XVI-H along the way). It would be an interesting dichotomy between this Human utopian paradise and a shadowy war being fought against an unseen threat.