Been playing Conquest Earth and have thought about how a cool-ish idea for a game has been ruined by allowing too much to be known early on. Basically, the Galielio (sp?) space probe sent to Jupiter has been seen as an act of war by aliens there and they come to Earth to wipe us out and convert our atmosphere to Sulphur Dioxide in order to colonise it. Now, this is all spelt out in big letters on the back of the CD case before you even enter the game, so there are no surprises. Imagine if it was like this, theres a raging civil war on earth (yeah I know, real original ) and subtley, strange things begin to happen, like entire regiments dissapearing and electronics being hacked into. Now each side blames the other until slowly (ever so slowly) they realise there are aliens studying and preparing to attack Earth. Then you go into the background of why they might be attacking Earth. Better? What does everyone think? Has anyone seen any other games where the effort to get the story out of the way quickly has killed the story line?

I''ve seen here and in conversations with writer friends, where they are thinking "I''ll do something cool, and then it will be all a dream! that will suprise the player/reader"
I know everyone is just trying to find that LittleExtraSomething, but the player/reader shouldn''t feel cheated by the sudden reversal.

Deus Ex could have accomplished something like heavy_bolter suggested if instead of suddenly deserting over to enemy at about the 1/4 mark of the game, everything was normal. Good wholesome UNATCO. Then the player and the other agents start hearing odd things from the man-on-the-street about some of the missions that YOU were not involved in. Instead of fighting UNATCO, it would be more of a Fighting Corruption from the Inside. Instead of just deserting, you have to fight betrayal within the ranks, learn who to trust, work out the depth of the conspircy, not by going to far points of the globe, but by working with the different agents and managers around you.

well, as far as examples where games focus too much on technology and too little on storyline are the doom and quake games. For that matter, almost everything from id software is VERY thin on story, but they sell like crazy despite that. Oh, there''s random demons wandering around a world ripped off from the Alien movies... dum de dum.. well, guess I should go through hell to kill them all. Gimme a break, that''s just pathetic. These days people will toss out a genuinely good game just because the graphics aren''t above and beyond anything already out there. Personally, I''d rather have a good, involved game that looked like it was made 3 years ago than some of these all flash and no substance peices of crap that make it so well in the industry for reasons unknown. The days of the Lucas Arts adventure games are gone. Everything has to be 3D and realistic or else it won''t even sell. It makes me sick that greatly written games are ignored just because they don''t look that interesting. Never judge a game by its graphics engine. I''ve wasted more money on cool looking games that I absolutely hate now than I can ever remember. I know this is a little off topic to the origional post, but it still kinda fits with the overall theme of the followups.