How to post DQ2 story material without spoiling everything?

#1

Hey folks!

Now that we’ve sorted out some internal contractor pipeline stuff and gotten everything churning away we’ve started building up a nice backlog of story and art material that could easily turn into a series of blog posts. The thing is, we develop stuff internally in a spoiler-iffic “God’s eye view” kinda way, and so I’m reluctant to just dump things out as-is in case some of our early fans want to follow development but leave a lot of the surprise for the actual release.

But I owe it to you all to give juicy updates at a more regular pace.

Do any of you have any suggestions for how you’d like us to present this stuff without spoiling everything?

Random ideas to get the ball rolling:

  • Spoil Act 1 all you want in extreme detail, show nothing further on?
  • Reveal all the characters, but don’t tell us the story?
  • Show characters in silhouette and be vague
  • Other better ideas?
#2

Describe to me the world as the main characters know it, the ones you start with. Preferably from their perspective, so if anything is a lie or deception, the player will still be surprised.

What is their town like? What do they know of the world? What have their major experiences been while working in service of their city? What do they think about the other cultures within the world, even if it isn’t true or simply propaganda they’ve been told? What is their day to day life like?

If I know as much as the characters do when I first dive into the game, that’s fine. If Act 1 has any surprising twists or turns, I’d rather be left in the dark about them - like I was with whether or not Bakal was truly a friend or enemy, or the reveal of Zelemir.

If a character joining meant to be a surprise, just shroud them in a vague silhouette if you want to talk about them.

This is just me, though. Others might want to know more. :stuck_out_tongue:

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#3

I sorta like the idea of how old SNES/Genesis-era JRPG instruction booklets (remember those, kids?) did it: introduce all the main characters and give them a full bio, and any spoiler-y characters (main villains, heel-face turn late game party additions) would be given a black silhouette and a more limited, intentionally vague bio: “This mysterious figure seems to be behind it all… but who is this sinister person and why do they command such power?”

A similar thing can be done with the story: give us a few more of those diary-style journals from the main characters that set the stage and maybe talk about how they feel about other party members and goings-on in the world that are relevant to them: this can hint at plot points without giving them away entirely.

Anyway, that’s the sort of thing I’d like to see, personally. I’m sure it’s not what everyone would want but you wanted us to throw our hats into the ring, so there ya go. :wink:

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#4

This is great. Just everybody give me their exact personal opinion so I have some kind of sample of what the opinionated folks in the audience think.

#5

I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule about this kind of thing, and personal preference comes into play. So what I’d recommend is to categorize parts of your game:

  • Things that should be a complete surprise
  • Things that only observant fans will realize before playing the game
  • Things that you are fine with players knowing, and might actually attract them to the game

One example is from the movie How To Train Your Dragon 2. In the previews leading up to the movie’s release, I was surprised to discover that Hiccup finds his mother, and what’s more, that they boldly revealed it in the trailer. However, it worked for that movie because they held back on other, possibly larger plot spoilers. Instead of being a plot twist that they kept secret, they were bold about it and used it to draw you into the film instead.

In answer to your direct questions, I don’t want to know all of Act 1, and I don’t want to know all of the characters. However, there may be portions of Act 3 that you could freely reveal and would benefit your game in the end.

#6

I agree with Screenhog, but that unfortunately only has that kind of success in that kind of stuff (movies/sequels), and DQ2 isn’t a direct sequel to the first game (or is it? hmm). Just spoil the start of the story (doesn’t have to be the whole of the first arc). Let’s pretend this is DQ1 we’re talking about:

“[Azra], an inhabitant of [can’t remember this city’s name], is dumped in [city]'s dead body dump, in order to avoid getting the rest of the inhabitants infected by the deadly plague going on. However, she survives and finds other people in the same state as her. But things don’t go as well as she would think.” What will happen next? You don’t know… There’s also this rather vague explanation of the backstory (which is more explored in the actual game).

#7

I agree with screenhog’s three points of stuff that should be kept in mind while revealing things. Personally, I like teaser trailers or images, maybe even comics, that help give us an insight into the setting and allow us to make up our own headcanons about what the world might be like, until the actual game is made available. For example, Persona 5 recently released a new trailer, which showed us that the MC for that game wasn’t as innocent as he seemed to be in the first teaser trailer shown awhile ago.
Of course, I don’t expect you guys to go through with an animated trailer to get people invested in your games. However, you guys could do a comic (I imagine that might be a little more within budget), or add more journal entries to “Captain Javir’s Guide to Survivorness-itivity”.
I can’t find where you posted more information about the actual humans involved [either it was on here or it’s somewhere on the dfq2 website], but posting more about them helped me get a sense of them, their personality, what their world is like. I could almost imagine the siblings’ cookie(?) incident, and I’d love to see that in-game (or for someone to draw that once the game’s out).
Maybe showing any sort of symbolic thing or an image of something that happens around the start of the crew’s “greater” journal [ie an image of Group going down into a dark cavern, and just beyond their sight they’ll discover Important Life Changer that sets them off on the story’s quest], though I guess that’d not do too much for others…
Or you could just show progress on the art, if there’s any new images that you can reveal that aren’t up on the dq2 website.


TL;DR: personally, I will be happy with anything thrown out, so long as it’s not ‘here’s a sample of the battle’, because I’m more invested in the story of a game than the mechanics of battle. [unless it’s an action game, then I’ll want to see what actual battle footage will look like]. Also, we won’t know that something’s a spoiler until after we start playing the game, or unless Word of God says it is. But I definitely wouldn’t be happy with all of chapter 1 revealed. : ( I’m not really a fan of repetition or replaying things until i’ve forgotten it, so having to see chapter one again once playing will make me wish I could just skip to chapter two.

Okay that wasn’t a very good tl;dr. I’ve spent days trying to let this question roll around in my head in the hopes that I’d come up with something good. ;>>

#8

My preference is ye ol’ character snapshots and possibly some general location snapshots.

The character snapshots are usually designed to set a character up before they get swept up in the events of a story. In that case, it’s more prologue than spoiler, usually. In the case of pasts that need to be kept secret, there’s kind of a fine line. Usually, people just go ‘mysterious past!’ or lay it all out and it kinda spoils the effect when you’re watching that character for it going in. I think I’d prefer just a snippet in time in those cases, or a short term sort of goal or situation that the character is in just prior to the events of the story.

Cleverness’ intro was quite good as far as I’m concerned.

Then location snapshots serve to set up your world as a sort of inhabitant common knowledge info dump. The problem is these are usually presented as info dumps and can get tedious to read through pretty quick. One of the best and hardest methods of doing these is to write them as a very short vignette with a lot of focus on the location and setting the story is placed in. And the best version of that involves a lot of artwork of these locations so the author can spare the words from their narrative.