WIP Games

My brother and I originally conceptualized Potentium as something rather similar to Tiberium (alien substance, spread, arrived on meteor), but with different effects.  However, the idea evolved rapidly away until it was something else entirely.  Under my storyline, for instance, Potentium is simply a mineral, newly introduced to the planet, with a certain magical property which can be taken advantage of.  How Potentium “works”, per se, will be revealed throughout the game.

After coming up with the characters and the concepts, we took the series in different directions.  While my concept is more SRPGish, begins on an Earth-like world, and involves time travel and other related matters, his takes place on Earth and is more suited for a novel, an RTS, or an FPS (something I’d like to help him develop if I were ever to become skilled at programming). 

Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking my approach to Shadow of Potentium.  As it’s set up right now, 3 of the characters get pulled into another world, something that seems like a lame cliche to me, considering that they don’t return to their homeworld until before the end of the game.  I think I’ll work on changing that a little; it also gives me an excuse to get rid of the utterly random island-hopping chapters I planned in Kevin’s story. 

I was keeping track of the official Command & Conquer 3 forums and the GameFAQs forums, and what I’ve found there is quite intriguing.  I’ve been playing C&C games since the original, and it seems that there’s quite a stir over the fact that EA is producing the game.  I’ve had my share of experience with EA products (rather mediocre), but it seemed that everything they didn’t like about the game, they went on an EA-bashing spree.  I’ve had a similar experience with the Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series — every few books, the author switches, and some of those authors are lackluster — but I didn’t write hate mail to the authors because of how different it was from the last two books. 

While the amount of game-crashing glitches is unacceptable, it seems to me that it’s been blown way out of proportion due to the bias many have against EA.  I’m surprised to see how absolutely infuriated some people have been.  Times like this make me glad that I decided to be creative and start planning my own games rather than taking only the stories the pros dish out. 

Another thing I’ve noticed is that many people wanted C&C 3 to be Tiberian Sun 2.0 and “bring back” a lot of elements from C&C: TS.  That’s fine and all, but it sounded like they wanted an exact replica of TS, from the (cool) tiberian life forms down to the (dreaded) pavement and tunneling tech.  Problem is, if they brought back all the TS stuff, they’d have to build on it, and somehow I don’t think a slog through hostile neutrals and impassable terrain was what the developers intended.

But what does that all have to do with the Potentium series?  Nothing, actually (regarding Canon and complaining fans, that is).  However, I suspect that my brother and I were originally inspired by the C&C series when it came to Potentium.