Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has one of the most interesting world in stories inside and outside of gaming. I hope we will see many more stories set in that world.
The hook alone is great.
Spoiler for the prolog and trailers.Around the end of the 19th century the whole world broke apart and a part of Paris (called Lumiere in the game) was thrown into the sea. And this giant “Paintress” started painting the number 100 on an enormous monolith and each year she counts down. And everyone who is that old or older evaporates into ash and flower petals.
So the people started sending out expeditions to find out wtf is going on.
Spoiler for the rest of the game.The world is actually a magical painting the Paintress’ son made when he was a child. For him, his sister and their parents to play in. But when he was an adult their other sister was tricked by “the Writers” into setting a fire which killed him. In her grief the mother fled into the painting because it was the last bit she had of him. Fearing she would stay in there until she died of starvation the father went in as well to get her out. As she wouldn’t relent he started erasing the painting and she tried to prevent that. Every year painting the age of the people she wouldn’t be able to save from him onto the monolith. So we actually have this world of magical Painters and Writers who are at war with each other and it is hinted that there are Musicians as well. And who knows what other artists with magical powers exist in this world. I’m imagining Programmers joining the fray in the future. The possibilities both inside any art pieces and outside in the “real” world are endless.
Just remembered all the servers for Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy that were dedicated to polite dueling. You had a big etiquette to follow if you wanted to do lightsaber battles. If you attacked someone with their lightsaber off you got banned instantly. Those servers were mostly used for chatting.
I’m reminded of my daughter who used her Hulk puppet as a baby puppet. Kids will always find a way to play what they want.
She also didn’t care much for the story in Spider-Man or GTA but then again I think those games are designed with such players in mind.
Every time I think of some example I realise that it’s actually encouraged by the game. Like Creative Mode in Minecraft to just build stuff, playing Sim City without catastrophes, killing every NPC in an RPG.
My brother used to shoot me in the back in Doom co-op. But if PvP wasn’t intended it would be turned off.
I think the only game that really let you branch out with your choices was Detroit: Become Human. You could literally delete fully playable characters and their storylines from the game by the first choice you make with them.
It probably doesn’t work with interactable objects and other edge cases. And it for sure doesn’t work with trees because they highlighted in the Witcher 4 showcase how they created a version specifically for trees.
The thing that would speak against ARM are the recent sightings of new AMD based APUs from Valve on benchmark sites. Unless that is the next thing over and they are actually now ready with Deckard/Frame.