So if it's paid for your in trouble, and if it's not your in trouble? Even if it's a parody?
Seconded on the "actual dev team" front.
Yup! Doomed if I do, doomed if I don't. And it would be extremely hard to justify this as a parody and also make it a full-featured game. As has been said before, parodies tend to be short-form and highlighting particularly amusing points, not a like-for-like remake with word changes and silly images.
So, question for you all, what would the appetite be like for a more generalised, non-40K game but with most or all of the features that Chapter Master was intending to have? Would it lose its charm by not being FOR THE EMPRAH or is it more the retro management gameplay you were all looking for? (I would expect if the latter there are other games out there, but maybe there aren't and this is an untapped niche, I honestly don't know.)
For me the lore just informs so much of gameplay. What you fight. Geneseed. Training Regimes. Chapter Structure and Positions. The various factions. How travel works. A large portion of the events and quests. Pretty much all gear. Loyalty vs. going traitor.
If you could manage to do all that in a generic way that isn't, ya know, soullessly generic and/or seeming like a parody, I'd at least try it and give feedback. But FOR TEH EMPRAH is a large part of what motivates me about 40k.
Put it this way: I see it like a writer. I hate it when I get the sense that something exists to fill a need rather than because it started from an interesting idea. (i.e. "Hrm I need some sort of Chaos faction the player can fight or defect to....I guess I'll make "The Alliance of Darkness" who is made up of the former generals and councillors of the "Golden Empire" who made a bid to take over the Golden Empire and failed and are now space outcasts who use evil science to get revenge on their former masters." Or "hrm I need something that represents Gene Seed....I'll make the "Soldier X Implant" which is a limited technological resource all fighters are implanted with and is so valuable they try to recover it from the dead." That stuff kinda sticks in my craw because I dislike story or theme ideas that blatantly come from the need to fulfill tropes (in this case, expectations set by CM) rather than because it's an inspired idea. Like, every game or story or w/e needs a bad guy, we accept that. But the more specific your imperative is (ie. "bad guys who used to be part of the good guys" or "bad guys who used to be good guys who are now corrupted by evil") It starts getting more transparent which came first, the idea of the imperative.
You could also, I dunno, refactor the concept as well. Instead of a commanding a chapter, you're working with Kill Squads in some futuristic, pan-galatic military organization. There's two risks in my mind going the generic route: 1) the scope of the original CM might make a non-specific world setting for it hard to enjoy. 40k Fan-atics enjoyed CM for its sometimes excruciatingly faithful lore-based mechanics. 1000 marines to a T, all with names and what not. To be honest it was a little tedious and clunky to begin with but my love of the lore is what made me work through it. Can a game about generic fighters without a solid lore grounding make up the difference?
And for two, sometimes games made as clones but with all the references still scrubbed out can still run the risk of litigation. In this case GWS wouldn't have a leg to stand on or a real reason to do it. (They're not the original developer of the game so they're not in a position to complain about stealing its code. And for it to really be worth their time to challenge it as infringing on the 40k IP in a meaningful way, it'd have to be a real commercial success.) Still, something to think about.
My hope is that you'd start working on making a non-40k, Chapter Master mechanics-faithful game and over the course of development create your own legitimate, interesting IP that's informed by but not slaved to 40k. That'd I'd play and judge it on its own merits. But for the record, 40k is the only real sci-fi I get inspired by. I tend to glaze over most space RTSs and sims and such because the whole 'former Earth forces striking out into the galaxy looking for a new homeworld' thing has been done a bit to death. Part Battlestar Galactica and part Macross, I've never genuinely fallen in love with any other game that's tried it. (Having not played stuff like Homeworld and the giants of the genre, maybe that's not to be unexpected.)
Author
Topic: Chapter Master - In the name of the Emperor! (Read 798561 times)