TheTaskAtHand

Delta Story!

I want to take the opportunity of this first email to summarize our meeting.

We talked about the role and character of ExOps , and who the Heroes will be, and can be. We agreed that we do not want a singular, Max Payne-type character, although we don’t really know anything else about our Heroes, or ExOps .

We achieved one important thing; we identified a lack in the Mercenaries property, and discovered some ignorance. We identified the things we don’t know, that we need to know.

We don’t know what the thing in Mercenaries is; that’s like Blackhawk Down in FSW. We know what the gameplay is; but we need something stylistically evocative that communicates to the players what kind of experience they’re in for besides just gameplay elements.

We also don’t know what the Core Statement of Mercenaries is. “GTA in a Warzone” is very “high concept,” but it doesn’t serve as a guide to character, art, story, or music. You could certainly pitch “GTA in a Warzone” to a movie producer and get your project greenlighted, but it wouldn’t tell the writers and artists what to do. We’ll know when we have the Mercenaries Core Statement when we can look at a character or plot or piece of music and say “that doesn’t fit our game.”

These two things are related, maybe they’re the same thing said two different ways. Actually, as I write this, I think they are the same thing. I was saying that FSW’s Core Statement is “Squad-based tactical gameplay.” But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe it’s “Blackhawk down from a Squad-based tactical gameplay POV.” Personally, my experience is that this is a bad Core Statement since it’s long and unwieldy and contains too many elements any one of which the average consumer might not be familiar with, but some brands are stronger than others, and this is why.

We know the Genre (action-movie) and we are homing in on the Tone (somewhere between Tom Clancy and Vin Deisel-XXX). I still want clarity on the characterization. If you tell me “Action movie genre, Tom Clancy/XXX tone,” I still don’t know enough about the property. That covers way too much ground and could include very contradictory things. If you tell me “A gritty version of the A-Team,” then I get it. “Gritty” tells me the tone, and “A-Team” tells me genre and characterization.

Agreeing that we needed something tangible to react to before we could proceed, Rob volunteered to draw up some characters for us to talk about. Rob’s going to do some research, some writing, he and I will confer in the hopes that we can present a united front to the collective, and then we’ll meet again to talk about the characters and what we like about them and what they tell us about the Property. We may realize what we want based on what these character have, or what they lack. Who knows?! It’s a mystery!

This summary can serve as a springboard for further debate and discussion; and that discussion can inform Rob’s work, but it should not prevent Rob from working on the new Mercenaries heroes. I don’t want the discussion to become the job.

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As an addendum; let me give an example of what I mean by a good “Core Statement.” The company that published Dungeons & Dragons identified their core statement as “Medieval Fantasy.” This is a good Core Statement because it informs everything that comes afterward, and it uses two terms everyone’s familiar with, even when they mean different things by it. Any artist or writer or musician and everyone in the audience knows what “fits” this IP, and have a pretty good idea of what stories can be told from those two words.

Good Core Statements can be identified, as in the D&D example, or they can be invented. We may be forced to invent a brand identity for Mercenaries if what we currently have is, as it seems at first blush, not enough.