Red thread

I don't know if that's an English phrase or something I've converted from another language but a red thread is a theme or a message or similar that follows through the whole story line. I think this is important, especially in an action mod where players can loose focus from the overall goal in all the action; it's useful to remind the player from time to time of the story line. In my mod I plan to have the player uncover a super weapon nearing the end, it uses electromagnetism to modify the trajectory of space junk orbiting earth in order to call down bombings of superheated metal from the sky. The player isn't meant to fully understand the dynamics of this weapon at first, however he does see some of it's effects. The weapon's strong electromagnetic force can disrupt an electric system easily, in aircrafts this means a crash. The player starts the game in a crashed advisor pod and 5 minutes later runs into a crashed gunship. In Minerva (I'm mentioning it a lot because it's my idea of the best mod out there) the player is constantly brought back to the story line by the messages from minerva and the facility itself; this is an interesting point actually. The player not only has to hear about the storyline but also take part in it. By this I mean that you can't let the player forget why he's fighting, interesting props and settings help this; in hl2 ep2 when the player fights the striders attacking the silo the player knows exactly what is going on and why he has to fight, in F.E.A.R though the player can easily forget the goal. Although the player is constantly given objectives and goes around uncovering mysteries it can often become "Oh god scary girl, shoot enemies, save hostages, so freaked out ruuuuun" instead of the player being motivated by the story line. This relates to self determination theory, this is relatedness in games. If the player is fighting for something specific and feels motivated to do so the game has relatedness.

(also trying some custom textures)







Not all players will get this though, it needs some sort of amplification to get the player's attention. I won't use npc dialouge because I think that that will be shoving it into the players face; I don't want to do that, the player has to notice it and realize that it's a trend.