|
Reviews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d02lhvvVSy8    Firewatch is a first person exploration adventure game where you play as a man named Henry, who is a fire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness a little while after the Yellowstone fires of 1988.  Your only contact with the outside world is via your handheld radio, through which you talk to your supervisor, Delilah. Your first day on the job, something mysterious draws you out of your lookout, and from that point on you begin exploring the wilderness.  The game has a focus on narrative, dialog choice, natural conversations, exploration, and probably fire?  It's out for Windows, OSX, Linux, and PlayStation 4.   Firewatch was made by Campo Santo, a new video game company formed by the two lead writers of The Walking Dead (Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin), a lead designer of Mark of the Ninja (Nels Anderson), the guy who does all those sweet movie posters (Olly Moss), and other people. Check out the development blog for more information about the company and the game, or read the first Campo Santo Quarterly Review, compiled by the Campo Santo Ombudsman, to get a feel for the company.  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXWlgP5hZzc   
TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Feb 9, 2016 |
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 17:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 05:07 |
|
|
Very cautiously optimistic about this since seeing it on this year's E3. I love the art direction they went with this, and the lady-on-the-radio thing seems cool too.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 17:53
|
|
|
do any of these guys do a podcast??
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:00
|
|
|
kevin mung posted:do any of these guys do a podcast??
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:03
|
|
|
I am glad this game finally has a release date, but gosh it's still a long way off.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:15
|
|
|
I actually really hope this game is good, and I think the set-up sounds like an actually substantial "walking simulator". I don't know what exactly the gameplay will consist of, but having orienteering and the danger of wildfire and other things gives me hope there will be more to this game's gameplay than "walk around an environment while somebody talks in your ear for two hours".
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:16
|
|
|
kevin mung posted:do any of these guys do a podcast?? yeah at least two of them
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:16
|
|
|
One of the companies involved in this game makes my FTP client.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:25
|
|
|
what iiiissss firewatch?
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:32
|
|
|
The trailers for this game are absolutely sublime. Perfect blend of telling you what you need to know to be interested while not telling you enough to ruin it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:32
|
|
|
kevin mung posted:do any of these guys do a podcast?? I'm not entirely sure if this is a joke or not, since a TON of us are on podcasts. Sean Vanaman and Chris Remo and I all work on Firewatch and also host Idle Thumbs, a weekly video game discussion podcast. Nels Anderson, another member of the Firewatch team, hosts Terminal7, a podcast about the card game Netrunner. Olly Moss has also guested on a number of podcasts. BottledBodhisvata posted:I actually really hope this game is good, and I think the set-up sounds like an actually substantial "walking simulator". I don't know what exactly the gameplay will consist of, but having orienteering and the danger of wildfire and other things gives me hope there will be more to this game's gameplay than "walk around an environment while somebody talks in your ear for two hours". It's got a lot in common with adventure games (lots of looking at, poking at, and talking about stuff, with very fine grained dialogue trees that remember your choices as you play, and your uncovering of the story and participation in the story is the central driving element in the game), but it's also set in a contiguous interconnected outdoor world, which you slowly unlock and more efficiently re-traverse as you gain new knowledge and abilities (eg: climbing rope lets you clip into old anchor/carabiner hookups around the world to get down previous inaccessible cliffs to new large areas of the map). A thing that I hope sets Firewatch apart from other similar "explore a space" games is that you are a participant in events that are happening inside the timeline of the game -- it's a mystery story that involves and hinges on you being there when you are -- and is not entirely focused on picking through the ashes of "what happened in this place long ago." A "first-person modern adventure game in a contiguous outdoor space" is very accurate, so don't expect a Miasmata or Metroid or something, but do expect a game that asks more of you than pushing through its contents in a line. The Devil Tesla posted:One of the companies involved in this game makes my FTP client. That is Panic. They are amazing! In addition to making great FTP clients and web development IDEs, they partnered with Keita Takahashi to make the official Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy tshirts that were for sale for most of the 2000s. Also, their first ever intern in the early '00s was a very young Derek Yu, who went on to make Spelunky as well as other things. Their founders are also responsible for the god send "Shut Up" browser plugin that blocks comment sections, as well as the Nokia NGage "Sidetalkin" gallery website if you remember that thing. Those guys are weird shadow puppetmasters of a bunch of great things. At one point they released a podcast player app called "Pantscast" that looked like a regular podcast player, but would look for silence between sentences and seamlessly splice in fart sound effects. It came pre-subscribed to NPRs Fresh Air. They also do crazy side projects like designing the trade show booths for Walt Disney Imagineering and posters for Disney theme parks. Strange, good people. ja2ke fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:34
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:That is Panic. They are amazing! In addition to making great FTP clients and web development IDEs, they partnered with Keita Takahashi to make the official Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy tshirts that were for sale for most of the 2000s. Also, their first ever intern in the early '00s was a very young Derek Yu, who went on to make Spelunky as well as other things. Those guys have their own weird shadow universe of gaming cred. They also do crazy side projects like designing the trade show booths for Walt Disney Imagineering and posters for Disney theme parks. Strange, good people. Apple wanted to buy their music player app to turn into iTunes but they were like "nah".
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:40
|
|
|
They made a usenet client and didn't stop selling it until a year ago. It is impossible for Panic to exist, basically.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:42
|
|
|
The Devil Tesla posted:Apple wanted to buy their music player app to turn into iTunes but they were like "nah". Yeah Steve Jobs flew them out to try and hire them to become the iTunes team, but they decided they were happier being independent and making weird stuff. So Apple bought the team that made the other (shittier) popular Mac MP3 player instead, and that became the iTunes we know and love today. The Devil Tesla posted:They made a usenet client and didn't stop selling it until a year ago. It is impossible for Panic to exist, basically. At one point they made Atari 2600 boxes for all of their software and the one they did for their Usenet file downloading client was... honest. (it's the box in the lower right of that blog post. note kleenex box by monitor) Weird that this has briefly become a Panic thread! ja2ke fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:44
|
|
|
So how do the dialog trees and systems interactivity/responsiveness differ from Telltale's recent games, which are rather fun single-branch (with flair) visual novels with lovely QTEs? Game looks neat. If it's $20 or $30 and reviews are okay I may pick it up at full price to support the devs. Drifter fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Oct 12, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 18:51
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:It's got a lot in common with adventure games (lots of looking at, poking at, and talking about stuff, with very fine grained dialogue trees that remember your choices as you play, and your uncovering of the story and participation in the story is the central driving element in the game), but it's also set in a contiguous interconnected outdoor world, which you slowly unlock and more efficiently re-traverse as you gain new knowledge and abilities (eg: climbing rope lets you clip into old anchor/carabiner hookups around the world to get down previous inaccessible cliffs to new large areas of the map). A thing that I hope sets Firewatch apart from other similar "explore a space" games is that you are a participant in events that are happening inside the timeline of the game -- it's a mystery story that involves and hinges on you being there when you are -- and is not entirely focused on picking through the ashes of "what happened in this place long ago." A "first-person modern adventure game in a contiguous outdoor space" is very accurate, so don't expect a Miasmata or Metroid or something, but do expect a game that asks more of you than pushing through its contents in a line. jake , will the game feature procedurally generated content for example if you walk into a grove the bears could be blue instead of brown also will there be guns in the game?
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:03
|
|
|
Drifter posted:So how do the dialog trees and systems interactivity/responsiveness differ from Telltale's recent games? On the surface, dialogue interactions in Firewatch will probably feel pretty similar to Telltale and other modern timer-based conversations. There are a few differences, though. The most obvious one comes from the fact that Firewatch is primarily a back and forth between two people -- that alone let us really drill down on the things you can talk about, and the variances that can happen within a single conversation. The game's script is very focused on Henry and Delilah and the way their relationship can build as the story unfolds. There are multiple telltale-episode-scripts worth of dialogue dedicated to just those conversations and all their various forms. Under the hood, Firewatch also does not use explicit pre-written dialog trees - we opted to use a tag-driven dynamic dialogue system like the one Valve uses. You can watch a fascinating GDC talk about their in here, but in short, every line of dialogue in Firewatch is self contained, and uses a simple but smart tag-based system to find the optimal line to play next. So instead of writing five conversation branches where Henry asks Delilah "How are you doing?" and she has five unique followups, Henry asking "How are you doing?" can trigger an event called "DelilahReplyToHowAreYouDoing" which can then find the most appropriate reply in the script, based on which facts are currently true or false in the game's variable set. It has allowed us to write a lot more variation and responsiveness to player action into the script at a very fine grained level. Firewatch isn't using "procedural dialogue" or anything like that -- every line is still scripted to appear in a specific place in the story depending on a person's playthrough -- but we can author branching down to the level of a single line mid-conversation, and it's very fast and cheap for us to do that, so it happens a lot. Also conversations are regularly interruptable. Your primary tool in the game is the walkie talkie, used to report or discuss the things you find in the world, so if you find something more interesting than the current conversation, you can (and should) start talking about it instead, and you won't have to wait for the current dialogue tree to finish. Anything you already discussed in the previous conversation is remembered by the game so you don't "lose" the contents of a conversation by interrupting it. In practice it tends to mean that when you're in a really dense environment full of interesting things to talk about, it feels like Henry and Delilah bounce around between subjects at a high clip as their familiarity with the space improves, while when you're out in the deep wilderness, the conversation threads tend to run longer and deeper because there's time and space to talk. But the pace of conversation is generally up to you. Our goal is that Firewatch's conversations play out naturally as a flowing and growing relationship over the course of the game, and don't feel like a string of mini-cutscenes or mini-audiologs. Hopefully it works out! Ahundredbux posted:jake , will the game feature procedurally generated content for example if you walk into a grove the bears could be blue instead of brown also will there be guns in the game? There's no proceduraly-generated content. It's a handmade world. The time of day system is all operating in realtime, but is driven by the story (if you stand still for hours it won't become night time, but as you progress through the story, the world does change around you in realtime). You can also pick up and throw things around to make big gross piles of garbage (or keep them in your tower) like you can in Gone Home and other physics-aware exploration games. I honestly can't remember if there are guns in the game. There's definitely a radio, a flashlight, and a compass.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:09
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:On the surface, dialogue interactions in Firewatch will probably feel pretty similar to Telltale and other modern timer-based conversations. There are a few differences, though. The most obvious one comes from the fact that Firewatch is primarily a back and forth between two people -- that alone let us really drill down on the things you can talk about, and the variances that can happen within a single conversation. The game's script is very focused on Henry and Delilah and the way their relationship can build as the story unfolds. There are multiple telltale-episode-scripts worth of dialogue dedicated to just those conversations and all their various forms. Holy poo poo, I loved that GDC talk back in the day. I think it's still saved to my hard drive somewhere. I haven't read your blogs or anything, but I'd love a little gamasutra-esque series of articles going more into depth surrounding the development and planning of that system you guys use. That sounds fascinating, and I'm sure it's changed since Valve's 2012 implementation.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:20
|
|
|
I've been looking forward to this since I first heard about it on Idle Thumbs (joint favorite podcast along with 3MA by the way, y'all are cool & good) so it's great to see a release date. Definitely going to pick it up unless the reviews are terrible, which I'd say would be tremendously surprising.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:25
|
|
|
Drifter posted:Holy poo poo, I loved that GDC talk back in the day. I think it's still saved to my hard drive somewhere. Yeah we had to bend it to do the things we wanted for Firewatch but as a philosophy it is very freeing! After thinking about game conversations as explicit trees and branches for a decade at Telltale (and as an adventure game mega fan before that), it was like fog lifting. The game still uses a very familiar call and response structure like most adventure games, and some conversations still have to be heard out in full (or nearly full) for the story to not break, but in my opinion the feeling of continuous light conversational patter throughout the game ends up coming across as really refreshing and interesting. It's been fun to make, at least!
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:31
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:There's no proceduraly-generated content. It's a handmade world. The time of day system is all operating in realtime, but is driven by the story (if you stand still for hours it won't become night time, but as you progress through the story, the world does change around you in realtime). You can also pick up and throw things around to make big gross piles of garbage (or keep them in your tower) like you can in Gone Home and other physics-aware exploration games. I honestly can't remember if there are guns in the game. There's definitely a radio, a flashlight, and a compass. sounds like how I played morrowind, sold
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 19:32
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:I'm not entirely sure if this is a joke or not, since a TON of us are on podcasts. Sean Vanaman and Chris Remo and I all work on Firewatch and also host Idle Thumbs, a weekly video game discussion podcast. Nels Anderson, another member of the Firewatch team, hosts Terminal7, a podcast about the card game Netrunner. Olly Moss has also guested on a number of podcasts. Yeah sorry, I was going to make a minimum effort follow up joke about how oops sorry, I was thinking about the giant bomb guys. Instead you responded to my post, so I guess ill just say like: cool guys, frosty podcast, ice cold game. its the only game ever my girlfriend has repeatedly asked about when we can play it, but no pressure or anything.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 23:06
|
|
|
This game is going to be fantastic. I want it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 23:26
|
|
|
Firewatch these nuts.
|
|
#
?
Oct 12, 2015 23:28
|
|
|
Pewdiepie posted:Firewatch these nuts.
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2015 12:03
|
|
|
ja2ke posted:There's no proceduraly-generated content. It's a handmade world. The time of day system is all operating in realtime, but is driven by the story (if you stand still for hours it won't become night time, but as you progress through the story, the world does change around you in realtime). You can also pick up and throw things around to make big gross piles of garbage (or keep them in your tower) like you can in Gone Home and other physics-aware exploration games. I honestly can't remember if there are guns in the game. There's definitely a radio, a flashlight, and a compass. Will the bears comment on the piles of garbage, and maybe compose procedural poems about them?
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2015 13:37
|
|
|
I'm really looking forward to this game but please make the next thnread in february so I don't have to get worked up in vain
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2015 14:19
|
|
|
I like fire. Is this game for me? Okay, okay. I had already made up my mind ages ago, because the art is real pretty. Pretty art means pretty fire. Attack on Princess fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Oct 15, 2015 |
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2015 14:35
|
|
|
Well well, look what seems to have quietly slipped onto steam and gotten a release date: http://store.steampowered.com/app/383870/ February 9th, just a couple weeks away. I'll say for sure, they don't seem to be overhyping this game in any way. I'm super looking forward to it though!
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 03:03
|
|
|
Every time I see something about this game I think it looks great, then I promptly forget about it again. That's a blessing, because now it has a release date and it isn't too far away. I'm really looking forward to this.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 03:08
|
|
|
Steam Description posted:You are a man named "Henry" who has retreated from his messy life to work as afire lookout in the Wyoming wilderness I didn't know the game was about denying the realities of half A presses, but I am more eager than ever now that I can learn about parallel universes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 04:55
|
|
|
Already have been interested in this but had no clue that the lead designer of Mark of the Ninja was helping make this game. My confidence in buying this day 1 shot through the roof because that game was near flawless, one of my favorite games ever.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 05:04
|
|
|
Wow - as an avid lover of the wyoming wilderness, cool art styles, and good game narratives, this is so extremely my poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 17:34
|
|
|
Can you talk at all about your research process for this game? I've driven three days to wyoming the last four summers so I'm not kidding when I say it's one of my loves in this world. Did you get to spend much time out there taking notes on the environment? Is this game going to be set in yellowstone proper or somewhere else (bighorn mountains, or the tetons perhaps)? are you going for an accurate depiction or an impressionistic one (obviously accurate is relative considering the art style)? is the terrain itself at all based on a real area (I see lots of spruce and birch and not much lodgepole, so I am guessing you took a few liberties at least)? what about animals, they are such a big part of the region - are we going to see any bison, elk, bears, etc? did you visit the active firewatch station in yellowstone? did you see my buds the fattest ground squirrels on the planet? lots of burning questions.
The Walrus fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Jan 27, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 27, 2016 18:50
|
|
|
The Walrus posted:Can you talk at all about your research process for this game? I've driven three days to wyoming the last four summers so I'm not kidding when I say it's one of my loves in this world. Did you get to spend much time out there taking notes on the environment? Is this game going to be set in yellowstone proper or somewhere else (bighorn mountains, or the tetons perhaps)? are you going for an accurate depiction or an impressionistic one (obviously accurate is relative considering the art style)? is the terrain itself at all based on a real area (I see lots of spruce and birch and not much lodgepole, so I am guessing you took a few liberties at least)? what about animals, they are such a big part of the region - are we going to see any bison, elk, bears, etc? did you visit the active firewatch station in yellowstone? did you see my buds the fattest ground squirrels on the planet? lots of burning questions. The game's set in Shoshone National Forest / the Thorofare, but the world map was made up for Firewatch to fit the needs of the game's story, aesthetic, and mechanics. That said, here are some answers to your questions... While we never made it out to Wyoming as a group, two of Firewatch's team grew up there: Sean Vanaman, the writer of the game and a designer on it grew up in Cody, and Nels Anderson, who is another designer and gameplay programmer on the game grew up in Jackson. During production Sean went back to visit his family a few times and while he was there he snapped a ton of reference photos. Nels wrote a bit about Wyoming for the unintiated in the dev blog. While we didn't go to Wyoming, we did take a trip to Yosemite since it was driveable from San Francisco, so that our team, especially Olly Moss who is from England, could all get a sense of what the American wilderness was like at all! We visited a lookout tower there and went on day hikes for two days early in production, and it was great. I wish we could have taken everyone to Wyoming and I know Yosemite's not the same, but it was not really feasible for us to take the whole team that far for research. Between two of our team growing up there and Yosemite + other camping trips we covered our bases pretty well for a small game team though, I think. Firewatch aims to capture the feeling of National Park / National Forest posters, and evoke the feelings you get from looking at those and wanting to walk inside them, as much as it aims to feel like a real place, so there is a lot of stylizing and exaggeration going on. I don't think the team visited any of the actual lookout towers in Yellowstone but the very very earliest inspiration from the game came from Sean remembering back to seeing fire lookout towers when hiking/hunting with his dad in Wyoming as a kid. We also visited a ton of other lookout towers over production. We made sure to use native plants and rock types, and tons of reference. There are lodgepole pines! They are really hard to make look good in a video game btw because they're spindly annoying things! It's why most games don't have them... but we do I promise! Here are some of our trees, as they looked in 2014. There have been some shader and texture improvements since then, and some more species added but that's an old, early look at some of them for you! There is some wildlife but I don't want to talk about it too much because its more fun to find.  If you roll back through the dev blog there are a lot of posts about building the world of the game, including a lot of the reference we pulled and how we put it all together. Our more recent posts are more about marketing and events we've been doing closer to launch, but if you roll back through the pages there is some pretty cool stuff written up by the team. ja2ke fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Jan 28, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 00:53
|
|
|
that's super awesome in all respects. can't wait to buy your game.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 16:14
|
|
|
im going to buy and enjoy this game
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 16:27
|
|
|
I am also going to buy and enjoy this game.
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 17:19
|
|
|
I want to buy your game now but you guys won't let me.
Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jan 28, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 17:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 05:07 |
|
|
Accordion Man posted:I want to buy your game now but you guys won't let me. It's here so soon. We're also putting a bunch of stuff up about the launch on the 2nd. (Tuesday!)
|
|
#
?
Jan 28, 2016 19:41
|
|