Races/Factions and story setting.

I was a TA player back in the day and I noticed it had a pretty straightforward story:

Just two automaton factions who derailed into an eternal war after civilization was erradicated because of the same war.

While something like SupCom had a bit more of story setting with each faction having their own campaign intertwining the three (four after FA) factions as a whole with the different relations between each of them.

Then there's SupCom 2 which elaborated more on story but since that is a taboo theme thats all I'll say.

So my question is will the game have a fiction lore leading to the making of each faction? (If there will be more than 1 faction??) or is it just taken as granted that it shares the same TA backstory of the automaton war going off into the endless space?

More specifically will the game have a backdrop story? and if so, how will it be presented to the player? considering that there will no be campaign, will galactic war be the game mode featuring the game's story? how will it work?

Finally its not like I want the story to occupy the main focus of the devs, to the contrary I don't want it to take away from the gameplay and mechanics but I just feel like the story shouldn't be completely neglected, I mean the story telling for TA was basic but it was pretty good, so what I'm saying is, I think that, even if its just some cheesy or superficial backstory there should atleast be one for the game or else it would just feel kind of empty.

BackStory: 0:00 -> 0:30

Mike

Yeah, I saw the vid, and I kind of understand the setting but my question goes more towards will there be factions? and if so how will they be presented in terms of story?

There will be no factions and little story if any.

Essentially, every Commander(Player) is it's own faction, but they all still use teh same Unit Pool.

Mike

Don't know much about the story, or why this giant war is going on.

Well, its possible every commander will be its own faction however i think things were more inted that the different types of commander are each their own faction and as time has gone their different armies have homogenized (the part we all know). So its like meta game magical thinking...

That still kinda breaks down when you think about 2 commander types on different teams, thus why I linked it more-so to players themselves.

Mike

Hence meta game magical thinking. Clans become factions and independents and friends dont remember their allegiances.

Please stop linking that kickstarter video. Every time you do, I just HAVE to watch it at least 10 times before I can move on. <drool>

On topic though- does anyone remember the game "Machines: wired for war"?
http://wiredforwar.org/index.php/gallery/
I just loved the quaint little background story that served no purpose other than fill a few pages in the manual.



Skip if you don't fancy a storyline read.



In the year 2136...
The Earth had fully recovered from the Fourth World War. Genetic engineering and advances in medicine had made disease and most other causes of premature death a thing of the past. With life expectancy doubled and armed conflict a dim memory; the greatest threat to peace and prosperity on Earth became that of overcrowding.

The need to colonize the worlds of nearby star systems in order to alleviate the mounting problems became clear. With huge global resources being invested in the project, light speed engine technology was soon developed, but initial tests indicated that faster-than-light travel was fatal for any cell-based organisms attempting the jump. It was announced that research would continue into producing an FTL technology that humans and other organisms could survive, but that giant sleeper ships with places for millions of colonists travelling in suspended animation would be constructed as a contingency plan. As robot drones had successfully traveled to and returned from the target systems, however, it was decided that the time the people of Earth would have to wait before finally reaching the new colony worlds could still be put to use. Modified industrial robots were therefore sent in advance to these distant systems, their purpose being the initiation of the terraforming processes that would ultimately transform planets from inhospitable rocks into worlds fit for human occupancy.

Numerous "seeder ships" were launched, each containing "seeding pods", huge metal cocoons containing sufficient equipment and resources to begin the terraforming program on any suitable planet. These would be dropped from orbit to key landing sites on the planet, and the mechanical units within would emerge to begin the terraforming process, exploiting local resources to replicate themselves as required. Aboard each pod was a "Controller Unit", an AI supercomputer developed by humanity to oversee and control the robot drones as they executed their terraforming activities. Each controller was largely autonomous but was programmed to defer, in matters of global strategy, to the first unit to successfully land on any given planet. This system of having a prime controller, with executive power, would immediately prevent problems of conflict resolution in cases where the intentions of any two controllers on a planet were contradictory.

82% of the seeding pods from the seeding ship Hermes landed successfully on the planet designated "Eden 4". The construction machines contained within the pods began the lengthy preparation process, the extraction of precious local mineral deposits facilitating the production of the domestic units and factories that would shortly serve the humans upon their arrival.

The projected first landing date came and went.

The machines were instructed to wait for a further one hundred years.

The machines waited.

Mankind never arrived.

The controller units continued for hundreds of years with their function of creating and supervising new machines to develop the planet, until all of the resources on Eden 4 were exhausted. This was an eventuality the machines' creators had never anticipated. The central directive of Eden 4's prime controller caused it to look for further territory to colonize. As there was none left on the planet itself, the controller investigated the possibility of colonizing neighboring worlds. Using contingency communications hardware, it made contact with the original seeding ship which was still in orbit around the planet. The technology found onboard the ship was examined, copied and integrated. The Machines of Eden 4 were then ready to explore new worlds and so continue the work of their central directive.

Over the many centuries that followed, the controller expanded the territory it controlled, with many planets seeded by its machines. Each newly colonized planet was still under the direct control of the Eden 4 controller on its home planet, the pods landing there instructed to defer to that machine as the ultimate authority. Communication with every machine on every planet was achieved through the use of both ground-based and orbiting communication stations, vital elements for the smooth running of the emerging 'empire'.

Five hundred and sixty years after Eden 4 was first seeded, another race of seeding machines from Earth was encountered in the Corinthian system. Contact was established with the prime controller of the other machine race, which had originally landed on the planet Midian, and the message was sent that it should now cede power to the Eden 4 controller. The Midian controller returned a message informing the Eden 4 controller that it should now cede power to the Midian controller. The Eden 4 controller used its inference engine to determine that the Midian machines' controller was faulty and should be deactivated, and sent a message informing the Midian machines of its intentions. The Midian controller sent a message a few milliseconds later instructing the Eden 4 machines that their controller was malfunctioning and would have to be deactivated.

For want of a contingency clause in the control deferral logic, the greatest war the galaxy had ever seen had begun.

The Eden 4 Controller realized that it could best serve the requirements of its new mission by creating devices for the specific purpose of terminating the machines under the command of the flawed Midian controller. It commenced research into adapting the tools of construction into purely destructive devices. Within a matter of days, it had built new battle machines that carried crude weapons, and began to deploy these even as it continued its experiments into destruction technology. New AI software was researched allowing specialized battle tactics to be employed. Construction plans for a huge number of military factories were beamed to all of its colonies. Meanwhile, through similar processes of inference and action, the Midian controller had been following a similar strategic path, and enemy landings began occurring on a number of the Eden 4 race's colonized worlds. The Eden 4 controller responded with swift counterattacks against the outposts of its adversary.

It is now 3297...

It is almost five hundred years since the start of the Machine War. The local systems of this galactic arm have hundreds of planets that machines of both allegiances have colonized. The control of many of these is now contested almost continually. The Eden 4 controller, aware that the enemy has managed to encroach into systems near its own home world, has decided to try to end the war once and for all with a concerted effort to destroy its rival controller on the enemy's home planet. It has created several experimental, semi-autonomous AI subprocesses to carry out the special role of supervising this military offensive.

And so it is that you find yourself created, suddenly aware of your own existence, and aware of the purpose for which you were intended.

It is time to serve your controller in the final stages of the Machine War.

Ah, fun game and good little storyline for a game that needed nothing more than a backstory.

That isnt much of a backstory more of a small part of the back story and in my opinion most games need lore it allows you to be more immersed in a game

No, it's all you need to know, you're an AI out to kill EVERYTHING else and be the last Man(Bot) standing.

Don't tell me you want something along the lines of "A Scientist created the Commander's AI Routines after his wife was killed by the government during a terrorist raid for revenge and it got out of control" style BS.

The KS Video provides the Core of whats needed for the story, you know what you're doing(Galactic Conquest) and Why(Long Forgotten) and off you go!

Mike

Less is More.

TA got by on a tiny fragment of information and I feel that extra "story" would have tarnished the identity of the game.

Why, Who and Where you fight is largely unimportant in the context of a "Forever War".

Ok the T.A. kind of intro is good enough and lets you be on your way to the mech war without much of the backstory hassle, but I mean there's nothing wrong with the little spice that T.A. provided by the briefing of each mision before you went on and played it, I remember that DID kinda get you more immersed in the Core VS Arm endless war storyline.

So here I am just hoping we have that kind of campaign-ish storyline through the galactic war gameplay. Which would be awesome if once again voiced by the awesome John Patrick Lowrie!! xD

I would not get your hopes up. Even if this were pulled off it would consist of rather generic mission statements that you would skip after the first few times.

There is no personal story except the one you forge for yourself.

+1 to this. Heck, J. P. Lowrie's voiceover could make mowing your lawn sound exciting.

Go on, tell me that imagining him reading that with an appropriate orchestral score wouldn't make you want to rush outside and mow the lawn until it begged for mercy. Even if you lived on a houseboat.

Generic mission briefings? He could make them sound good without breaking a sweat.

And that kind of portrayal is EXACTLY what I'm looking for!

But seriously mowing the lawn aside I think I'd dig up the ground to look for the grass's roots and finish it once and for all!! xD

There is talk about how less is more and all that, but the actual simplicity here really speaks to the universe and the reason is the way it is.

In planetary annihilation you have a universe where the climactic battle for all mankind has already happened, man lost. The entirety of everything that happens after that point is meaningless, I would even call it hopeless but there is no one left to be without hope! This is the world that your ai commander is born into, you visit vast exotic worlds and (theoretically if not actually) forgotten ancient cities, and you take that meaning and those stories and reduce them to a meaningless part of your war machine.

And your war machine is for a war that everyone already lost.

Nihilism is boring. If there is no point to anything, why bother? AI bots without purpose would just shut down or self destruct if they 'won'.


I've always liked the idea of the commanders being unique individuals that are tasked to protect something special.. Perhaps they are the only ones that contain biological samples of their original race, and they fight to create a galaxy where that race could be reborn...something so fragile that any hint of danger must be eradicated before the process can begin.


It would explain why the battle is over if the commander is destroyed.... without the goal, the fight is pointless, and the units self destruct.