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New GMTK Episode - How the Nemesis System Creates Stories
🕑 Added 2021-01-28 16:22:16 +0000 UTCHello!
This is the first GMTK video of 2021 - a deep dive into the Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. It will be released to the masses in a couple hours.
I said in my 2020 wrap up that I wanted to work on some bigger projects in the new year, and that's exactly how I started. Playing the games, reading through all the published material, and working out the best way to describe all of this was a huge amount of work that essentially took all month.
It was a fun video to make, though! I've always been curious how the Nemesis System works and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on it now. And I learned a lot of interesting ideas and techniques that I think could be applicable to other types of systemic storytelling.
I hope you find it interesting and I'll see you soon! Patreon rewards for January will be available this weekend. Cheers for your support, as always!
Mark
Comments
Theis Egeberg
Great content. It lead me to actually read the patent for the nemesis system. It swerves between being specific to the point of revealing source code: "The game engine may cause less experienced captains to be much weaker than those who have experience in the faction, so these may be useful for easy domination or easy fodder for other captains to defeat and use to increase power." And so generic as to represent any game: "A video game apparatus, comprising means for controlling game events in a computer-implemented game, the game events involving an avatar that is operated in response to input from a player, and a first non-player character that is controlled in response to a first set of character parameters defined in a computer memory and in response to operation of the avatar;" A lot of articles has popped up hyping the point about the patent from your video in the last couple of hours. Good work, most of them cite you. However I'm not sure how much the nemesis system is actually patented outside a ghost-human vs. orcs-in-a-fort setting. It's worth finding out though.
Oskar van Velden
Wonderful episode, Mark! Very interesting. I played and finished Shadow of Mordor - never touched the second one. And now realise why - because of all the backlash and the feeling the game wasn't as good as the first one. I believe it's in my Playstation Plus Games - so will definitely check it out. And Alba is also very cute indeed - play it with my daughter (6).
