You are a Soldier of one of the combatants of World War II. The year is 1940 and Hitler’s Third Reich is at the edge of conquering all of Europe. Are you a proud German Soldier serving the Fatherland? Perhaps you are a British Soldier fighting for King and Empire. Maybe you are a brave Soviet Soldier waiting for when war will come to the Motherland. Perhaps you are a brave member of the glorious Free French fighting for freedom and liberty in France, or a collaborator of Vichy?
Are you an Airman flying high in the sky? A Tank Driver rushing through the enemy? An Artillery Gunner bombarding your foes from afar? An Officer bravely leading his men into battle? A Spy behind enemy lines? Or one of the many millions of Infantry Soldiers fighting for their lives on the battlefield? It is your choice.
Will you allow History to go as written and the fate of World War II to remain the same that we all know? Or will you change the very course of history?
Alright so Choice of War: Paths of the Second World War is a game I am working to make, actually my first. Though it will be quite long considering that I will be making a German Storyline, a British one, Soviet one, French, and a normal history and alternate history for each. Basically you grasp the reigns of history and decide which way it goes.
Yes. Each character will have a chance to find their love during the war. Or if the character isn’t that kind of person, plenty of opportunities for some behibd the scenes action will arise.
At the risk of coming off as a bit off a dick, allow me to make a suggestion. It seems to
me that a big reason many WIP’s fail
Is because their authors attempt to make these massive and epic games when they have very little experience writing and/or coding. I would recommend you cut down to two or preferably one storyline and focus on that. This would allow you to add more detail into the story and reduce the risk of feeling overwhelmed and stop writing like so many other authors do. However this is obviously just my opinion and feel free to ignore it if that’s what you wish.
I was going to make much the same suggestion as @Verand, and I don’t want to seem like a dick, either.
I just finished a game about World War I, and in my game you can only be a British infantryman and you’re only at the Battle of the Somme, and the game is still huge. Even such a superficially narrow background leads to a host of storylines – you can acquire different specialties, be different personalities, do different things, suffer different wounds, etc.
Your idea of doing soldiers from different nations is excellent, but I’d think about limiting your game to maybe a single campaign. You could do North Africa 1942, for example, and weave in German, Italian, British/Commonwealth, American and French perspectives. Maybe also have a neutral or a spy or something. Or perhaps Leningrad (Russian, German, Italian/Axis), Normandy (the usual suspects), or Berlin 1945 (everyone converging at the same place).
Also, the title won’t be able to have “Choice of” at the start. That’s only for official CoG games, not hosted games.
Well I have to agree with the previous posts with how impressively massive this seems for a first time story. My suggestion is to instead of writing all of these stories that use one setting, break it up. Do say the German story now, finish that, and then if you still feel the urge, go on to the soviet or British story. If you don’t feel like continuing, or just need a break you could publish the finished story and perhaps make an entire series with each perspective being it’s own book. but the point is to be careful not to burn yourself out before anything gets finished.
Beyond that though this does seem like a very interesting idea indeed.
Perhaps I could separate the different storylines into different games. Germany, France, Russia, Great Britain, maybe throw Italy in there. I do intend to try and get the entire war in and will work diligently to do so.
Reason for no America is that American Troops didn’t see real action on the European Front until late 1942. If the idea is to change history I feel you need to face the entire brunt of the War.
Japanese Army please. Maybe you could substitute it in place of the French so the players can also cut down some enemies with a katana in close combat lol.
In all seriousness, I’d also recommend reducing the number of options. Otherwise you run the risk of it getting too long and you being burnt out as a result and abandoning the project. A Soviet, German, British and French is fine but maybe reduce the number of campaigns or something? Or if you want to write it to the end of the War, maybe just have the player choose from one Axis power and one Allied power?
Your choice in the end coz it’s your game obviously. Looks really interesting and looking forward to it.
A bit of a suggestion; you say in your intro you can choose from a number of countries and within each a number of roles; pilot, artillery gunner, tank driver, infantryman, officer, spy. That sounds amazing however a word of caution:
If you are going to have say 5 nations and within each lets say again 5 different roles, you could find yourself suddenly having 25 pretty distinct paths, almost games within their own right, after all the war for a pilot is very different to that of an infantryman, there wouldn’t be much crossover.
What I’m getting at is that I think it would just be too massive an undertaking. Perhaps you could do the German path say as an officer, the British as an infantryman, the Russian as tank driver etc etc. Not only would that make it more manageable, it would also be a lot less boring for author and player alike. After all, writing a whole path for a British infantryman and then a whole path as a German infantryman, they are going to end up pretty similar, similar sort of choices have to be made.
Perhaps once you’ve written one path for each you could think about making multiple careers available for each nation, but in terms of getting something done, I thinking narrowing the focus would be wise.
Sorry for writing so much, and its just a suggestion after all, do as you please, I’m just speaking from experience.
