Lessons from... Technobabylon!
An adventure game of all things.
Let this thread's initial post serve also as a recommendation for you to play this game by Technocrat and Wadjet Eye Games. The latter is a pretty great small independent studio that makes adventure games. I had played Dave Gilbert's Blackwell games, a series of adventure games about a girl medium and her ghost companion working as a kind of paranormal detectives that help ghosts move on... in general they're not very difficult or obtuse games, they create an interesting lore so they never feel cheap, they build up on some very interesting game mechanics and despite the drop in general quality (mostly graphics) of the fourth instalment they get progressively better. The stories are sometimes hit and miss, Gilbert being better at smaller personal stories and some very well done intromissions of the real world (not gonna do spoilers) in the game than with some melodramatic attempts at the epic... still I consider myself a fan.
Gilbert's involvement in this game is more as a producer and distributor, also as a counselor, as this is a James Dearden game. Apart from Beneath a Steel Sky, which didn't actually have much in the way of cyberpunk... situations if it did have some of the setting, and the more current times setting of the Blackwell games (I haven't played Blade Runner and Snatcher is more of a visual novel/text adventure hybrid), I couldn't picture a cyberpunk point and click adventure that really would work.
This one works. It has little if any moon logic and the situations are very cyberpunk or, at least, very Philip K. Dick. You really get that Blade Runner/Minority Report feel from them with a lot of things that must have been inspired from playing cyberspace based PCs in Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. I won't spoil them, just play it.
So, what's there to be learned from Technobabylon:
- World building through in-game, cyberspace based, intertextuality: The game doesn't have an extensive glossary/encyclopaedia that a lot of RPGs have (ME, The Witcher... CP2077 is bound to have one and I have nothing against it and in fact they could do something very interesting with it) and a lot of its world building is scattered and muddied... but it relies on little things like a line of dialogue, the news on the net or... well, wait for a puzzle in which you have to figure out where someone is connected to the "Trance" from. Well, wait for everything happening around that puzzle. Cyberspace has to be international, a gate to the rest of the world that makes the world of the game feel bigger.
- Intergenerational conflict: While relying on a lot of tropes and cliches, it was well written and had some degree of originality. If you are kind of an expert, you can predict what is going to happen, but I don't think it will come off to anyone as cheap, because it does a good job telegraphing as much as it wants to and at the right moment and all that... very well crafted. CP2077 is going to be set in a world where barely anyone has lived before cybernetics or cyberspace or anything cyberpunk became widespread, but it would be nice if they took some cues as to how to use characters with different backgrounds, outlooks and expertise in different fields, helping us live the future shock.
- Puzzles that make you have to actively understand how this world works. Apart from the puzzles I mentioned, there are some recurring ones in Technobabylon that involve the programming of Androids. They are simple, but they're something else for how clever and funny they are.
Did you play Technobabylon? If yes, what did you think of it and are there any lessons you'd want CDPR to learn from it for CP2077? If no, does it sound like a game you'd want to play?
An adventure game of all things.
Let this thread's initial post serve also as a recommendation for you to play this game by Technocrat and Wadjet Eye Games. The latter is a pretty great small independent studio that makes adventure games. I had played Dave Gilbert's Blackwell games, a series of adventure games about a girl medium and her ghost companion working as a kind of paranormal detectives that help ghosts move on... in general they're not very difficult or obtuse games, they create an interesting lore so they never feel cheap, they build up on some very interesting game mechanics and despite the drop in general quality (mostly graphics) of the fourth instalment they get progressively better. The stories are sometimes hit and miss, Gilbert being better at smaller personal stories and some very well done intromissions of the real world (not gonna do spoilers) in the game than with some melodramatic attempts at the epic... still I consider myself a fan.
Gilbert's involvement in this game is more as a producer and distributor, also as a counselor, as this is a James Dearden game. Apart from Beneath a Steel Sky, which didn't actually have much in the way of cyberpunk... situations if it did have some of the setting, and the more current times setting of the Blackwell games (I haven't played Blade Runner and Snatcher is more of a visual novel/text adventure hybrid), I couldn't picture a cyberpunk point and click adventure that really would work.
This one works. It has little if any moon logic and the situations are very cyberpunk or, at least, very Philip K. Dick. You really get that Blade Runner/Minority Report feel from them with a lot of things that must have been inspired from playing cyberspace based PCs in Cyberpunk and Shadowrun. I won't spoil them, just play it.
So, what's there to be learned from Technobabylon:
- World building through in-game, cyberspace based, intertextuality: The game doesn't have an extensive glossary/encyclopaedia that a lot of RPGs have (ME, The Witcher... CP2077 is bound to have one and I have nothing against it and in fact they could do something very interesting with it) and a lot of its world building is scattered and muddied... but it relies on little things like a line of dialogue, the news on the net or... well, wait for a puzzle in which you have to figure out where someone is connected to the "Trance" from. Well, wait for everything happening around that puzzle. Cyberspace has to be international, a gate to the rest of the world that makes the world of the game feel bigger.
- Intergenerational conflict: While relying on a lot of tropes and cliches, it was well written and had some degree of originality. If you are kind of an expert, you can predict what is going to happen, but I don't think it will come off to anyone as cheap, because it does a good job telegraphing as much as it wants to and at the right moment and all that... very well crafted. CP2077 is going to be set in a world where barely anyone has lived before cybernetics or cyberspace or anything cyberpunk became widespread, but it would be nice if they took some cues as to how to use characters with different backgrounds, outlooks and expertise in different fields, helping us live the future shock.
- Puzzles that make you have to actively understand how this world works. Apart from the puzzles I mentioned, there are some recurring ones in Technobabylon that involve the programming of Androids. They are simple, but they're something else for how clever and funny they are.
Did you play Technobabylon? If yes, what did you think of it and are there any lessons you'd want CDPR to learn from it for CP2077? If no, does it sound like a game you'd want to play?