I'll try fail to keep this one relatively short and sweet, in contrast to a lot of my posts. 
The world of Deadhaus Sonata is envisioned to be persistent and growing/evolving, and there's already an interest on both dev and player (speaking for myself at the very least) sides to allow clans/guilds to be formed by the players. I'd like to beseech/ensure that, as a community-driven story and world, there's enough of a spotlight on that aspect of it for the clans/guilds/covens or whatever to be heavily included as well.
Speaking from past experience as a (now retired) veteran member of the Remnants of the Void clan (if you're unfamiliar, they're historically and consistently the 1st place winning clan for any/all clan events) from Warframe (among others), clan-based communities have their own culture and gravity to them that can keep breathing life into the experience of a game for players long after burn out would normally occur as a solo player--and I stipulate that I enjoy both solo and group game play, though in all honesty the greatest enjoyment comes when I play games with my IRL friends, I'd say that playing as part of a clan community has been my second preferred experience for game play approaches. We all know that a game has to be very compelling in some ways to be thoroughly enjoyable for the duration of a solo experience.
Back to the clan-based game play approach, however: the best times we had in RV in Warframe were when the devs put in persistent or recurring gameplay events that rewarded both solo and clan-based efforts. This included things like the original Dark Sectors nodes of the star map, the Raids, and the various large scale Events with leader boards. Warframe still has a pretty cool clan base of operations system (the Dojos), where you can customize, decorate, and build out the dojo itself, and do weapon, warframe (characters you play as), and combat ship (called railjacks) research and development. They initially teased adding the kingpin system (now known as the Kuva Liches and Sisters of Parvos) as a huge clan-focused system where there would be goals that the clans would work on as a whole to accomplish and progress through stages, but in the end the entire thing was stripped down and overly simplified as a solo only experience with no clan focus inclusion to it at all. Over time, all of these clan focuses except the Dojos were removed from Warframe (directly counter to DigitalExtremes' "Make clans great again" campaign ), and a lot of clans experienced extreme drops in membership and/or were abandoned completely as a result. RV and its sister clan PV (Phantoms of the Void) are still hanging around because of exemplary clan leadership, where they regularly host their own custom clan events in Warframe with various rewards and try to include as much clan participation as possible (including rewarding people who come up with clan events and/or host them). They, as always, are the exception however, and a lot of the clans activity and their memberships are stagnant or dwindling.
So how might we (and by we I mean both Apocalypse Studios and the community as a whole) avoid something like that coming to pass in Deadhaus Sonata? I think a good place to start would be at the start, which is to say to design the very game with fun, persistent, and evolving clan gameplay in mind from the get-go! The world of Deadhaus Sonata needs to be able to evolve along with these active communities, perhaps to the depth of the world of Malorum reacting to clan event outcomes--NPCs commenting on the top clans in an event, recognizing players who are in those clans and reacting to them in unique ways based on that, things like that would be pretty cool, I think. You could also throw in the usual exclusive/unique clan event rewards. DE and Warframe actually had an interesting clan reward from some events where certain clans that achieved a high enough spot in the leaderboards would have access to special weapon blueprints and be able to resell them to other players (RV gave these blueprints away for free, always), and in later iterations of these events DE made it to where personal copies of those blueprint rewards were also able to be acquired by solo players if they performed extremely well in these events (so they wouldn't have to bother with trading with the high ranking clans I guess), but initially it was a top clan only thing, which was kind of cool.
I guess to cut to the chase--the biggest/most obvious way to have the clan experience feel rewarding is to have rewards in the design, and having unique rewards is even more enticing. This could be access to exclusive weaponry, armor, abilities, housing, decorations, titles, missions, stories, lore elements and so on; there is, however, always an element of risk of building up disappointment/disillusionment from locking anything behind a certain kind of gameplay that not everyone would want to get into. So, as with most things, a balance is required there in what a clan player could access vs what an independent player could. I expect that there will, no matter what, be an approach of fairness to just about everything in Deadhaus Sonata, so that anything with a significant gameplay impact (anything that would grant notable changes in stats or abilities) would likely be accessible in some manner to a non-clan player just as it would a clan member, whether this would be a similar weapon but without a unique clan skin, or a similar skill but without a unique clan flair/effect, or just first dibs on something that will then later be accessible to everyone else, or whatever the case is.
Now as for the evolving narrative of the world itself, I'm not exactly sure how this will be able to be "balanced" between the impact of the individual player against the coordinated efforts of entire clans...could just be as simple as what I said earlier, where the world will react in certain ways to the accomplishments of certain clans, but it will always react the same general way in the story line to the individual player.
Possible Example:
After an event where Demons breach into Malorum and Deadhaus has to fight them back-
NPC: "You not only survived it, but you were also pivotal in ending the demon invasion, well done."
NPC if you were in the top placing clan: "Ah, you're a member of [Clan name]. You all nearly wiped out the demons on your own, as I hear it. It will be a VERY long time before they're able to mount another invasion on that scale, thanks to you lot."
It could be more involved than that, depending on how deep Apocalypse Studios cares to get into it. Down to differing commentary based not only on how your clan placed in an event, overall, but your own performance within the clan as well. "Your clan beat back the most demons, and YOU were the tip of the spear! Those demons will shudder at your name for untold millenia, I bet."
I suppose it could be simplified to three R's:
Clan gameplay has to have
- Rewards (in general, but the more unique/exclusive they can be, the better)
- Recognition (of the coordinated efforts and experience of the players in clans)
- Revision (evolving clan game play, addition of new things, improvement of existing things)
I'd like to ask everyone else now, in your history/experience in gaming as part of a clan/guild, what are some notable examples in your memory of games that did an amazing job with clan gameplay, versus what games handled them poorly? My example above from Warframe is both--started out amazing, then went more and more poorly over time. I'd like to collect some more ideas here for how to make the clan experience in Deadhaus Sonata a very very memorable one, but leaning heavily into the positive category!
The world of Deadhaus Sonata is envisioned to be persistent and growing/evolving, and there's already an interest on both dev and player (speaking for myself at the very least) sides to allow clans/guilds to be formed by the players. I'd like to beseech/ensure that, as a community-driven story and world, there's enough of a spotlight on that aspect of it for the clans/guilds/covens or whatever to be heavily included as well.
Speaking from past experience as a (now retired) veteran member of the Remnants of the Void clan (if you're unfamiliar, they're historically and consistently the 1st place winning clan for any/all clan events) from Warframe (among others), clan-based communities have their own culture and gravity to them that can keep breathing life into the experience of a game for players long after burn out would normally occur as a solo player--and I stipulate that I enjoy both solo and group game play, though in all honesty the greatest enjoyment comes when I play games with my IRL friends, I'd say that playing as part of a clan community has been my second preferred experience for game play approaches. We all know that a game has to be very compelling in some ways to be thoroughly enjoyable for the duration of a solo experience.
Back to the clan-based game play approach, however: the best times we had in RV in Warframe were when the devs put in persistent or recurring gameplay events that rewarded both solo and clan-based efforts. This included things like the original Dark Sectors nodes of the star map, the Raids, and the various large scale Events with leader boards. Warframe still has a pretty cool clan base of operations system (the Dojos), where you can customize, decorate, and build out the dojo itself, and do weapon, warframe (characters you play as), and combat ship (called railjacks) research and development. They initially teased adding the kingpin system (now known as the Kuva Liches and Sisters of Parvos) as a huge clan-focused system where there would be goals that the clans would work on as a whole to accomplish and progress through stages, but in the end the entire thing was stripped down and overly simplified as a solo only experience with no clan focus inclusion to it at all. Over time, all of these clan focuses except the Dojos were removed from Warframe (directly counter to DigitalExtremes' "Make clans great again" campaign
), and a lot of clans experienced extreme drops in membership and/or were abandoned completely as a result. RV and its sister clan PV (Phantoms of the Void) are still hanging around because of exemplary clan leadership, where they regularly host their own custom clan events in Warframe with various rewards and try to include as much clan participation as possible (including rewarding people who come up with clan events and/or host them). They, as always, are the exception however, and a lot of the clans activity and their memberships are stagnant or dwindling.So how might we (and by we I mean both Apocalypse Studios and the community as a whole) avoid something like that coming to pass in Deadhaus Sonata? I think a good place to start would be at the start, which is to say to design the very game with fun, persistent, and evolving clan gameplay in mind from the get-go! The world of Deadhaus Sonata needs to be able to evolve along with these active communities, perhaps to the depth of the world of Malorum reacting to clan event outcomes--NPCs commenting on the top clans in an event, recognizing players who are in those clans and reacting to them in unique ways based on that, things like that would be pretty cool, I think. You could also throw in the usual exclusive/unique clan event rewards. DE and Warframe actually had an interesting clan reward from some events where certain clans that achieved a high enough spot in the leaderboards would have access to special weapon blueprints and be able to resell them to other players (RV gave these blueprints away for free, always
), and in later iterations of these events DE made it to where personal copies of those blueprint rewards were also able to be acquired by solo players if they performed extremely well in these events (so they wouldn't have to bother with trading with the high ranking clans I guess), but initially it was a top clan only thing, which was kind of cool.I guess to cut to the chase--the biggest/most obvious way to have the clan experience feel rewarding is to have rewards in the design, and having unique rewards is even more enticing. This could be access to exclusive weaponry, armor, abilities, housing, decorations, titles, missions, stories, lore elements and so on; there is, however, always an element of risk of building up disappointment/disillusionment from locking anything behind a certain kind of gameplay that not everyone would want to get into. So, as with most things, a balance is required there in what a clan player could access vs what an independent player could. I expect that there will, no matter what, be an approach of fairness to just about everything in Deadhaus Sonata, so that anything with a significant gameplay impact (anything that would grant notable changes in stats or abilities) would likely be accessible in some manner to a non-clan player just as it would a clan member, whether this would be a similar weapon but without a unique clan skin, or a similar skill but without a unique clan flair/effect, or just first dibs on something that will then later be accessible to everyone else, or whatever the case is.
Now as for the evolving narrative of the world itself, I'm not exactly sure how this will be able to be "balanced" between the impact of the individual player against the coordinated efforts of entire clans...could just be as simple as what I said earlier, where the world will react in certain ways to the accomplishments of certain clans, but it will always react the same general way in the story line to the individual player.
Possible Example:
After an event where Demons breach into Malorum and Deadhaus has to fight them back-
NPC: "You not only survived it, but you were also pivotal in ending the demon invasion, well done."
NPC if you were in the top placing clan: "Ah, you're a member of [Clan name]. You all nearly wiped out the demons on your own, as I hear it. It will be a VERY long time before they're able to mount another invasion on that scale, thanks to you lot."
It could be more involved than that, depending on how deep Apocalypse Studios cares to get into it. Down to differing commentary based not only on how your clan placed in an event, overall, but your own performance within the clan as well. "Your clan beat back the most demons, and YOU were the tip of the spear! Those demons will shudder at your name for untold millenia, I bet."
I suppose it could be simplified to three R's:
Clan gameplay has to have
- Rewards (in general, but the more unique/exclusive they can be, the better)
- Recognition (of the coordinated efforts and experience of the players in clans)
- Revision (evolving clan game play, addition of new things, improvement of existing things)
I'd like to ask everyone else now, in your history/experience in gaming as part of a clan/guild, what are some notable examples in your memory of games that did an amazing job with clan gameplay, versus what games handled them poorly? My example above from Warframe is both--started out amazing, then went more and more poorly over time. I'd like to collect some more ideas here for how to make the clan experience in Deadhaus Sonata a very very memorable one, but leaning heavily into the positive category!
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