Introduction into the game world

[fan]

Beginnings can be awkward or awesome.

We are usually dropped into a minutely developed world, and have no idea what's going on. How to avoid awkward questions?

 

The most beautiful beginnings I know have been from PST and FO3.

 

In PST the method is intricately thought-out amnesia that connects on many levels to the storyline.

In FO3 you are literally born into a quarantined mini-world, and later released into the larger environment.

 

Off the bat, I can think of two ways to make things interesting in Project Eternity.

• Gradual awakening to the world
  

You never saw the world as it truly was. Blurred and unintelligible, many things you saw stayed incomprehensible until a something cures you of...

- deaf- and blindness

- a curse

- ...

The interesting part would be the transition. First you are in a kind of special needs situation. Your surroundings don't make much sense, most of what you understand and can say is gibberish. Then your character awakens to the world around you, and together with the player takes it in for the first time.

• Traumatic separation of body and soul
  

The intro shows blurred recollections of the terrible act of someone ripping your body and soul apart (sufficiently blurry to make your original race a mystery). Your soul gets damaged, yadda, yadda, you get a new body, and the main storyline can include wanting to find out who and what you were before. It would be interesting if there were racial tensions in the game, and you can't be sure what you were before.

 

I've got my own little dream of the main character being able to exist as a disembodied soul. It can not only invade dead creatures and animate the bodies, but dominate living ones's as well. Most of the time it will reside in an avatar it constructed from different materials, one of them being the soul's "characteristic" look indistinguishable from one of the sentient races.

I tried to post a blueprint of this "transient" race on page 7 of the merged "races of the world" thread, but it got buried...

 

So, what's your take?

[Monte Carlo]

Seriously? Old-skool would involve some adventurers sitting in an inn. It would be that simple. They did it in Icewind Dale, no fuss, just a classic start to a game.

 

I'm a less-is-more kind of person when it comes to this, I like finding stuff out with fairly minimal info as to who my character is.

 

I also loved the IWD-style story board intros that were narrated. If they were to spend some money on VO, that would be where I'd spend it.