Strategy Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 444

games about historical events tend to know a lot about the pertinent history,
and the more representational your game claims to be, the more closely they will
scrutinize it to see if it rings true. You can get away with a certain amount of sim-
plification (as Age of Empires did) provided that you are honest about it.
The danger here is dipping too often from the same well. So many games are set
during World War II that the market has become oversaturated. Customers don't
want to buy the same game again and again. However, there is always room for
original approaches so long as you can make them compelling. You should at least
think about moving into less common territory; consider the Korean War, the wars
of Shaka Zulu, the Warring States era in Chinese history, and so on. Humanity's
long and bloody history offers plenty to borrow from.
Modern Settings
Choosing a present-day military conflict risks generating controversy and negative
public opinion. Although this could gain your game some degree of notoriety,
unless the game itself is a superlative addition to the gaming world, the disadvan-
tages of such exposure greatly outweigh any advantages. In 2009, game publisher
Konami announced, then withdrew, a game called Six Days in Fallujah , based on
the 2004 battle in that Iraqi city. American and British war veterans, as well as
peace groups, objected strongly to the game despite the designer's plans to be both
accurate and respectful. ( Six Days in Fallujah was actually a third-person shooter,
not a strategy game, but it still illustrates the risk of making a game about a sensi-
tive subject.)
If you want to use modern settings and weaponry, you might find it less controver-
sial to make them fictitious. Both America's Army and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
use fictitious settings.
With a modern setting, you have to address the problem of battlefield scale. It takes
foot infantry days to walk across a region that a jet fighter can fly over in a few sec-
onds. You therefore have to choose which scale your game is really designed for
and perhaps exclude units that don't work well on that scale.
Future (Science Fiction) Settings
Science fiction (SF) settings remain popular and allow a lot of scope for invention,
but unless you have a compelling world to present, you run the risk that your fan-
tasy will not capture the public's imagination. It's easier to base them on a success-
ful license ( Star Wars , Star Trek , Alien , and so on) than to carve out a new universe
for yourself. StarCraft managed it, but not everybody is so fortunate.
From a design standpoint, the danger with science fiction games is that it is easy to
add fantastic components that magically solve problems—a consistent weakness of
the Star Trek stories, in which the chief engineer is always reversing the phase