ELRICH -
I owe you an apology as well, for not responding sooner. I have to say I completely agree with your goals for your Beat the Boss entry. How did that work out? Let me also say that your comments on the importance of story have altered my plans for my next two or three columns. I want to start talking about more than just underlying theory and start getting into actual techniques for creating good stories. Anything you can share with us about your experiences with your Beat the Boss project would be much appreciated!

Oh, and Park — did you ever play the SP campaigns for Empires:Dawn of the Modern World?

Ingo always delivered a masterpiece. I demoed Ulio a long time ago. Then 1-2 years later, I re-installed AOK to play the full campaign. Only that campaign. You really felt for the guy’s misfortunes.

But RTS games are usually macro-level where you aren’t suppose to identify with any single unit, traditionally. I think a lot of FPS and RPG games from the very beginning have done an amazing job. Emotional appeal was never the focus of any RTS game except perhaps Warcraft 3.

Without a good story, good storytelling and interesting characters a game would be basically:
Unit A who has 120 hit points and does 12 damage hits unit B and after calculating 45% chance to hit rate, hits the opponent. The damage would be 9 points minus Unit B’s armor of 3 defense points so the resulting loss of hit points to unit B is 6.
Very exciting
Sounds more like a math word problem rather than a living, breathing story. At its core, every game has similar math for unit to unit battle, so what makes it touch your soul? Graphics help, but are not necessary. Haven’t we all read a book and FELT the characters as if they were real people even though we have never seen them? Why were the first-made Star Wars movies more loved and the newer prequel movies (I think most people’s opinion)? The newer ones of course had much better special effects (graphics), but it lacked great characters like Han Solo and a farm kid you got to see grow into a wise, but still mistake-making Jedi.

The Age of Mythology Heaven Scenario and Design forum is hosting a Beat the Boss contest where you create a scenario and have to make an interesting way to defeat a boss (a unique and unusually strong unit for those who dont know). I’m putting most of my focus into the story rather than the mechanics of the game. I am hoping that if I can touch the judges soul with my very real characters that they will have this ‘experiential moment’ which will set my entry apart from the typical hack and slash entry.

In the original Age of Empires, the typical mission briefing reads like this:

The elimination of the Izumo leader brought a temporary peace to that part of your border, but the Izumo are getting aggressive again. Izumo raiders from islands in the Inland Sea have attacked a number of your coastal villages. They have carried off important treasures from several shrines. You are ordered to attack the Izumo islands and recover the six treasures they have stolen.

For all of its ground-breaking advancement of the RTS genre, the original Age of Empires always struck me as a game that never fully exploited the story-telling potential of the medium. There’s a lot lacking in a mission briefing like this one. Why are the Izumo getting aggressive? The more real the writer makes their motives, the more compelled I will feel to counterattack because the more real their threat will seem to me. What are the treasures that were stolen? Why are they important to my people? And more significantly, are they important to me personally?

And who exactly am I playing? The Yamato, obviously, but who is my character, the man assigned to undertake this mission? The more real you make him, the more emotionally invested I become in the game.

Three modders really jumped on this and used a new approach to character creation in their custom AoE levels. I was one of them in my Persian Wars series, along with Chris Theriault and a mysterious modder named Imhotep who did some of the best AoE custom work we had ever seen, then disappeared one day after some melodrama on the site. Both of these guys did a lot of tremendous groundbreaking work here.

In fact, Chris, aka Eggman, created a wonderful scenario about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in which the character of Caesar figures prominently as a real protagonist. Well guess what? When the ES put out the Rise of Rome expansion pack, they had a four-scenario mini-campaign in which we follow one character, Julius Caesar, through key events in his life. When I was working for Stainless Steel Studios, we called this a “focused campaign” as opposed to an “epic campaign.” But it was a direct route from here to WarCraft 3!