Really want story mode.
AceAl
Member
So I'm loving the improved art and sound assets we got for TW4. As we've remarked in discord already, the units with real models look great and the announcer sounds amazing. Whoever she is. There's a bit too much reverb, but I'm sure there's a thematic reason for it. As well as a thematic reason that seedbots are fighting grumpy slugs alongside their plated warrior crustacean friends.
I don't expect to see it any time soon, but by the final release I would really like to see a story included to try and hook these elements together conceptually. Preferably a single-player campaign, so that the player can feel a part of the story, but a spin-off TV series would work too I guess.
The gameplay balance can be still focused on MP PvP, which is why I wouldn't expect a story released at this stage of development. The campaign can be a light-hearted frolic in OP land like SC2, that's fine for me too. I'm just tired of online games like Overwatch that barely pay lip service to a coherent world. Seriously; there's no story explaining what's happening in-game, they just threw a few scraps into a blog post. It really sucks to be struck by ennui in the middle of an exciting death-brawl, but it's happening to me more and more with these modern games. I fear it may happen with Atlas too, in time.
As a final reason (perhaps even a threat) to provide a story mode, you should know that if you don't explain these things then the fans will take it into their own hands. Here's my attempt at writing an origin story for our favorite green squads:
Comments
Rocky Beginnings
A Green Origin Story
Chapter I - The Goddess of Strength
Gorok was the goddess of strength. Those with sinews hewn from marble, those who tossed around granite boulders like frisbees, and those for whom "pumping iron" means more than just a cute little ditty about trains; they all loved and worshipped Gorok for her strength. She was a shining yellow beacon in their lives and prayers.
She loved the strong right back. Particularly in one man, she could not help but love the strength she saw everywhere: his bulging muscles, his rock-hard abs, and his majestic handlebar moustache. It didn't need the wax to stand erect, it was a mountain unto his upper lip. And she wanted it - the muscles, the abs, the upper lip (and the lower lip, preferably at same time). Who dares resist the affections of a goddess? But his heart was like ice, and his cool cyan skin never blushed. She couldn't get any excitement out of him when they were together.
"Ryme, sweetie, shall we watch this movie tonight?"
"Not a bad choice."
"Ryme, darling, want to meet me for dinner tonight?"
"On my way."
"Ryme, my love, want to make wild passionate love tonight?"
"Ready for action."
"Ryme, I want your babies."
"Heh, chill out dear. I'm not sure we're ready for this."
"Not ready? I'm immortal and unaging, but one day your hair is going to turn white, then you'll die of old age. What are you waiting for?"
"Sorry dear. I meant you're not ready for this."
"WHAT!", shrieked Gorok, as she crushed her copper mug in her fist.
"Come over here, let me explain." Ryme gestured her over to the window. They were at her country villa, and the window oversaw a massive garden she had made with her own hands. "Before we think about bringing new life into this world", said Ryme in his even tone, "I need to know you can show a nurturing compassion as well as strength. You have a garden the size of a city block, and even weeds don't grow in it."
"It's a zen garden. Those rocks were placed with an eye for transcendental beauty!"
"And it is beautiful, just like you. But it is no place for new life."
"I'll show you! When next you visit, that garden will be teeming with life! Trees! Spiders! I might even import a Giraffe!"
Ryme kept a straight face while Gorok screamed. "If you could just keep a houseplant alive for a week, I'll believe you can do it.", he said without a hint of sarcasm. Then he hugged her, and in the face of his calm reasonable demeanour, she was unable to punch him in the face like she originally wanted.
Chapter II - To Plant a Garden
Ryme's gauntlet proved to be more trouble for Gorok than she thought. One week later she was too embarrassed to speak to him, for her simple plan of removing some rocks so that weeds could grow themselves had failed. Her backup plan of buying a houseplant (a beautiful Mammillaria with prominent areoles) and watering it every hour had also failed, although the drain in her living room finally proved useful.
Trying desperately to avoid Ryme, Gorok went to a coffee shop in another city for the day. "I just need some exotic coffee to put things in perspective", she thought. But this coffee shop wasn't used to her tastes.
"Quadruple Shot of espresso, extra strong please", ordered Gorok.
"L-Lady, you're asking for a lethal dose", stammered the perplexed barista.
"I can take it. No coffee is stronger than Gorok."
The guy behind her spoke up, "I'm impressed. I'm totally wired from just one shot of the espresso here."
"Then you are weak", said Gorok dismissively. "But perhaps you can be of use to me, I'm looking for a green thumb."
She turned around, to see that the man was young and of short stature - with green pigmented skin.
"Is that some kind of joke?", he asked pointedly.
"No, I meant it metaphorically. Although at this point, I'll take what I can get. You see, I have a garden that I need to blossom into verdant greenery A-SAP."
"And you're still picking out seeds, need some advice on varieties suitable for the climate?"
"Is seed a type of plant? I'm really just struggling on the basics still."
"Yes, you are. My name is Alder, I think I can help. I don't really have any gardening experience but my houseplants have been flourishing for weeks."
"You're hired! Here's my address, we start tomorrow at eight."
"Eight in the morning, or eight in the evening?"
"First one, then the other! There's a lot of gardening to do."
Alder showed up on the dot, happy to have his first real job in months. He had a degree in mathematics, which proves that he's a super cool dude, but unfortunately there were no cool dude positions available.
He saw Gorok standing against a door in a long wall. "Hail Gorok", he said as he approached.
"Ho Alder." came her response. "Do you like my zen garden?" And with this, she opened the double doors set into the wall revealing a massive expanse of manicured monoliths.
"Wow. That's really impressive", said Alder. He really was impressed, and started to feel confused. "Why not just keep it like this?"
"I have my reasons. Let's turn this zen garden into an ULTRA garden."
"Okay… do you know what you wanted to plant?"
"I want to plant plants. I'm not picky about the details."
"Okay… do you have any seeds yet?"
"Are seeds a type of plant? If so, probably not."
"Okay… let's go get some seeds. I know a place."
They went into a darkened part of the city, where Alder knocked on the door of a non-descript tenement. "Nobody's home", shouted a voice from the other side of the door.
"It's me, Alder. Open up."
The door creaked open an inch and someone peered through the crack. "But it's her," he whispered, "the plant murderer."
Alder turned to Gorok.
"My previous attempts had been less than successful", she shrugged, "There were no survivors."
Alder turned back to the crack in the door, "I'm going to help her this time. I'll make sure that no more plants die by her hand."
The face in the shadows shook from side to side, and the door closed.
"I'll pay double!" shouted Gorok.
The door opened. "Okay Alder, I'll put my faith in you. If there's a seed you need, from rapeseed to fireweed, our creed is to cede that seed (for suitable monetary compensation)!"
The seed vendor dealt with, Gorok hefted a huge bag of seeds, twice her size, and headed back to the garden. Alder began to explain the plan while they walked.
"Okay, these seeds are enough to blanket the garden in a tropical paradise of vegetation. I checked out the soil, and it's pretty good with a lot of untapped nitrates. But we're severely lacking water, and tropical plants need a lot of water. I have some plans for a sprinkler system that can distribute it, but you'll need to find a way to route an additional 20kL a day through your plumbing system."
"Hah, my plumbing is weak! I have a better idea. Would you say this river is about 20kL a day?"
"Uh, the one we're walking past? It's more like 20kL a minute."
"Perfect! It will serve us."
"What, you got a terraforming array somewhere?"
"These are my terraforming array", bragged Gorok, as she made a pose with her biceps.
Alder just kept walking. When they got back to the villa, he suggested one more detail. "Why don't you go do that thing with the river, and I'll start on the seeds over here. Got any tools I can borrow?"
"Sure, use whatever you need. But I'll be taking this", Gorok grabbed a shovel the size of a Rhino out of the toolshed and started walking back towards the river.
Chapter III - A Matter of Time
Alder was glad to get rid of her, because there was still one thing he didn't have a solution for. Time. He had estimated earlier that to fill that area with plants would require approximately 1.3 million seeds, but he hadn't yet put it together with the fact that he could plant approximately 4.5 seeds a minute (calculation of time required for manual planting is left as an exercise for the reader). He wracked his brains and the toolshed for a solution, thankful that Gorok wasn't there to see him panic.
Half an hour in, he still had nothing. And while it would normally take a hundred men several months to divert a river of that size, he wasn't going to bet against the goddess of strength doing it in under an hour. Desperate, he decided "use whatever you need" applied to the whole villa and he started to explore beyond the toolshed.
First, he needed a drink and so explored the kitchen. Gorok had an amazing selection of divinely strong coffees, but Alder wisely decided not to risk his life on those. The fridge held plenty of nectar and ambrosia, so he started on that. Already he was feeling a little better and less panicked.
As he continued to explore, worry set in again. Each of the rooms was amazing and inspirational, but nothing would help with planting seeds. A bubble bath with bubbles the size of lesser bathtubs didn't have the requisite 1.3 million bubbles, and the conveyor belt on the dining table just didn't move fast enough to significantly speed up the process.
Eventually though, he found the room that held the answer. The AI Core. He just asked it for a solution, and it told him how to build autonomous AI ‘seedbots' that would do the planting. "Thanks AI Core!" shouted Alder, and he went back to the toolshed to start assembling.
In the afternoon, Gorok came back. Covered in dirt and mud, she slammed the shovel into the ground to the hilt. "It is done", she proclaimed, "the river will run through the garden now. Set up your sprinkler systems."
Alder looked at the zen garden, which had not changed a speck, and then looked back at Gorok.
"Wait for a moment. Patience is also strength." And with that cryptic fragment, she just stared at the dry garden.
Alder looked over there too, and began to hear a rumbling noise. Suddenly a river crashed right through the east wall, scattering blocks of stone across the garden. The river ran down the garden path to the door on the west wall, smashing it to timber fragments, and then continued on out of sight. When the dust settled, stones and debris were scattered throughout the garden - which now had a (dirty brown) river running through it.
"Ah, the mighty river", sighed Gorok. "We were going to redo that garden anyways, right?"
"Uh, yeah." muttered Alder. "I solved the seed problem while you were gone, everything is on track."
"What seed problem?"
"Did it ever occur to you that 1.3 millions seeds would take a while to plant?"
"Diverting a river normally takes a while too. I assumed you had some kind of strength that could deal with the seeds."
"What? Oh, yeah! I have strength of mind! See, these little machines have a temporal acclimatizer unit assembled from spare…"
"Hold it a moment. I'm going to go clean up, you can come into the villa and explain the technobabble in a few minutes."
"Uh, okay. I'll just get back to work then."
So Gorok went into the villa, and Alder kept assembling seedbots. A few seedbots later, he went into the villa to see Gorok reclining on a couch.
He excitedly began to explain his master-stroke: "Okay, here's my solution. It would normally take a lot of time to plant all these seeds, but your AI core helped me parallelize it. Each of these seedbots contains both an ordinary garden trowel and a temporal acclimatizer unit assembled from spare parts of your refrigerator (you won't need to chill your produce now anyways, it's growing fresh outside). The temporal acclimatizer allows it to speed up the growth factor of nascent plants, letting flowers bud in seconds and fully grown trees in a matter of hours! Since you had extra of these springy thingies, it can even launch the trowel up to twenty meters and plant whole rows at a time! Not that we'll plant in rows of course, it doesn't give the requisite natural look, so I added a stochastic variance hinge to the springy thingies and it should look like a natural outgrowth of the existing foliage. Well, it would in places that had existing foliage. What do you think? Gorok?"
Gorok had remained impassive the entire time. Alder tapped her gently on the shoulder to make sure she was awake, and her arm fell off. Revealing a dress stuffed with straw and propped up with twigs, the parts that still held together were remarkable lifelike.
At this point the real Gorok came down the stairs, having taken a bath and changed to remove every last speck of dirt from her earlier stint at manual labor. Alder turned to her and began to babble. "Ah, there you are! Let me tell you about these seed bots…"
Gorok put up her hand to silence him. "Please, my decoy has suffered enough. Just tell me, is the garden ready yet?"
"It'll be done tonight", said Alder proudly, "just come out here and have a look."
Chapter IV - The Big Payoff
They moved to the window, and saw the beginnings of Eden. While the trees were still less than a meter tall, and the edges of the garden were still full of seedbots planting the rest of the seeds, the river was a blue squiggle in a spreading valley of green. Shrubs and vines lined the banks, flowers budded in the shade of saplings, and grass and moss clung to every surface of rock or dirt.
"Look, we have some blueberries already!" said Alder as he pointed to a nearby bush. It indeed had a couple of blueberries hanging off it, tantalizingly heavy despite their small size.
"Eh, I'll pass. I've got a lot of Ambroisa in the fridge still."
"About that…"
"I know", said Gorok with a devious glint in her eye. "Naughty Alder. But I think we can make that one of our little secrets. You know what else will be our little secret?"
Alder was feeling panic again. "Um.. no?"
"You are. Turns out that I needed this garden to prove a point about my gardening skills, not my delegation skills."
"You have gardening skills?"
"No, and that's our third secret for the day. Here's your pay, thank you very much, and don't tell anyone about what you did here today."
"Okay", sighed Alder. "Can I at least keep the seedbots?"
"Sure, if by 'keep' you mean 'remove all the evidence once they've completed their task and my garden is gorgeous'."
"Yeah, I guess that's exactly what I mean."
"Great. Thank you very much for your help Alder. I mean, strange green man I've never seen before. I need to start practicing that line, you understand."
"Yeah, I understand."
"Cheer up. Here, I got you this as a bonus for your hard work." Gorok handed him a mug which read ‘WORLD'S BEST PLANT-DAD'. "I really do appreciate it, and I'll never forget your help. Even if I never admit to it either."
So Alder took his seedbots away that night, and Gorok had at last completed Ryme's challenge.
Gorok invited Ryme over the very next day. "Ryme, my pet, come over to the window for a moment."
"On the move."
"Isn't it lovely? So verdant, so green. It's my garden, and it's full of life."
"They don't stand a chance."
"WHAT!", raged Gorok, "I have the veritable Garden of Eden right in my backyard! You can't deny this accomplishment, and you can't deny that I have succeeded in your challenge!"
"Heh heh, cool off love. I was only joking."
"Well it wasn't funny."
"You're right", said Ryme softly. "I never should have doubted you in the first place." Ryme embraced Gorok, and eventually that night things led to the bedroom.
Ryme: "I put on my robe and wizard hat."
Gorok: "I take off your robe and wizard hat."
Ryme: "You have summoned a titan."
Gorok: "I'm going to backdoor."
Ryme: "And off we go!"
Gorok: "Go top, go top!"
Ryme: "Coming top, hang on!"
And so forth. Nine months later, Grath was born. The End.
Epilogue
A few weeks later, Alder happened upon that neighbourhood again. He stood upon a nearby mountain and looked down upon Gorok's garden. Or what was left of it. He cried, and cried as he ran down the mountain and climbed the vines into the garden. She must have diverted more rivers, for on the inside of the wall there was watery muck up to Alder's waist. The flowers, the bushes, even the moss had been swept up in the deluge. All but the taller trees were dead, submerged above their leaves, and rotting bits of dead plant broke off to collect in the stagnant muck.
As he weeped, Alder took out his "WORLD'S BEST PLANT-DAD" mug. He had failed his children, and he smashed the mug against a tree. It scraped off some of the bark, and Alder realized his new purpose in life. Fashioning a mask from tree bark, he would no longer be a failed Plant-Dad. He would become Plant-Man, and fight for the lives of plants everywhere using plant-tactics and his army of seedbots. He vowed to go abroad, and train against the foes of flora, until one day he would be strong enough to return and challenge Gorok. Hopefully, she wouldn't try to raise a garden again in the meantime.
This was actually really inspiring for me to pick up Alder again and earn that mug.