One of the big advertisements of Humankind is the focus on telling a story about your people and their choices through time.

We already know that one of the methods will be events where you can chose an outcome that will affect your "cultural personality" as well as immediate physical rewards.

My question is, what other methods will there be to emphasize the story?

For example, Civ 6 added era scores and timelines to reward significant events, but this still not a significant part of the game experience.

Narrative could be added to diplomacy so that if an AI is trading for a food item, the dialog will mention how your people are great cooks. Or when you encounter a civilization with lots of horse resources, you are told they are great riders.

Once archeology is invented, the relics you discover should be based on past achievements. Or when your people decide to make a time capsule, you are shown what they decided to give to the future.

In ES2 big battles will leave a mark on the system in which they took place. I could see something similar in Humankind; significant battles could be chronicled in your civilization's history, or artifacts can be uncovered from archaeological digs at the site of battles from previous generations.

Civ also had the artifact/shipwreck system, but the problem with this approach is that it is very limited.

There will be two general types of players of HK; one who want to play for the 4X game aspects, and those who want to play to create the story. I know this because that's how I play. Pick the type of victory I want to win, min-max my city/civ/culture for that victory, and ignore the rest.

If a player just wants to play the game, there should be an option to do that, but for players who want to experience the story, what are the "break" points to make them stop and think?

Consider this:

If, as a player, I have to research an isolated technology, then build a unit, guide that unit to a dig site, wait for the dig to finish, then have a random artifact appear, that's not much of a draw towards a culture's story.

Archeology could be an entire subject of its own, but also consider how Civ handled the "Great Works" feature. Great People are assigned, pretty much at random, and so what your civ produces could ultimately have no connection to how you're actually playing the game. You could be playing with a nomadic civ like the Huns, but get a great person who produces paintings...something for which the Huns were never known.

I'm looking for those break points where its convenient for the player to stop and imagine what kind of civ they have, their fiction, their food, their music and buildings. Some of it can be an actual in-game location to explore, but if its not done right it will just be ignored.

I think the way they present what the player has accomplished will be important as well.  Most of the 4X games I've played end with a victory/game-over screen and some charts.  If they could somehow present what you've done with a little slide show or something, that would really cool.  The Fame mechanic will probably make it easy to pick out the highlights as I imagine you can go by what has generated the player the most Fame over time.  This quote from a PC Gamer article makes it seem like they may present something similar to this during era shifts:

“We’ll give you markers along the road,” says de Waubert de Genlis. “So you understand that yes, you’ve lost territory. Yes, you’ve lost colonies. But you’re strong, and you’re entering the sixth age as the most interesting country, with an amazing story. What you want to do is make sure you survive the last age and make sure we’re still talking about you at the end.”  

Or maybe I'm reading it wrong.

Bet it'd be as easy as reading Fame-over-time (Easy example, leading in Science Generation) of stuff that generates Fame in a DPS-like way, reading bursts of sudden heavy increase of Fame (easy example, winning a glorious victory in a City Siege vs a much stronger foe), tallying it up, compare & contrast with other Players, math it up to a score, biggest Score = 'most memorable people'.

TyraxLightning wrote:

Bet it'd be as easy as reading Fame-over-time (Easy example, leading in Science Generation) of stuff that generates Fame in a DPS-like way, reading bursts of sudden heavy increase of Fame (easy example, winning a glorious victory in a City Siege vs a much stronger foe), tallying it up, compare & contrast with other Players, math it up to a score, biggest Score = 'most memorable people'.

Well, yeah, that's how you win, but that doesn't do much for creating a timeline for the big events in your history. I like the slideshow idea, you could have 3 big things (a war, you being one of the best researchers, settling a new continent) each era that moved your people up or down in fame and thus get a story of what your people were like.

I wonder if the Slideshow will be capable of displaying major Mega Derp moments in a Player's play & potentially instilling TF2-like Humor...?

Huge moments of Blunder can be as memorable as Epic Win moments...

TyraxLightning wrote:

I wonder if the Slideshow will be capable of displaying major Mega Derp moments in a Player's play & potentially instilling TF2-like Humor...?

Huge moments of Blunder can be as memorable as Epic Win moments...

I agree, perhaps we could have a "story file" like civ 6 which allows us to see every major event throughout the game. it could cetainly help storytelling.

Aye_Avast wrote:

Civ also had the artifact/shipwreck system, but the problem with this approach is that it is very limited.

There will be two general types of players of HK; one who want to play for the 4X game aspects, and those who want to play to create the story. I know this because that's how I play. Pick the type of victory I want to win, min-max my city/civ/culture for that victory, and ignore the rest.

If a player just wants to play the game, there should be an option to do that, but for players who want to experience the story, what are the "break" points to make them stop and think?

Consider this:

If, as a player, I have to research an isolated technology, then build a unit, guide that unit to a dig site, wait for the dig to finish, then have a random artifact appear, that's not much of a draw towards a culture's story.

Archeology could be an entire subject of its own, but also consider how Civ handled the "Great Works" feature. Great People are assigned, pretty much at random, and so what your civ produces could ultimately have no connection to how you're actually playing the game. You could be playing with a nomadic civ like the Huns, but get a great person who produces paintings...something for which the Huns were never known.

I'm looking for those break points where its convenient for the player to stop and imagine what kind of civ they have, their fiction, their food, their music and buildings. Some of it can be an actual in-game location to explore, but if its not done right it will just be ignored.

I am also interested in this. And I don`t think it should be defined only by big moments, although I welcome them, but storytelling and playing a role in that story needs to be constructed as we advance through the game. A timeline would help review the story, and it is great if Humankind has it, but the decisions you make as you go along in the mechanics the game will have need to help us mold the story and not just go through the mechanics to win. Maybe something that shows you how you are morphing into your own story, that can show you what you have given up and what you can accomplish or become.