EWR/TEW: Discussão Geral

#4: Switching Player Order

In previous games you've always had to play in turn order but that's now been thrown out the window. During AM mode, there's now a Switch Player button on the left hand menu. You can switch back and forth to your heart's content, even multiple times per turn. So, player A can do his thing, player B can then come in and do some stuff, player A can come back and do things, etc, etc. The turn only ends when all the players have set themselves as being done. Obviously this has no impact if you only play single player games, but I think this is a real bonus if you're doing a multi player game or like to control multiple companies at once.

(This next bit is super minor, but I'm going to throw it in as it's so closely related to the above.)

In PM mode, in the past it was always split so that all the players ran their shows, then the AI. There's nothing particularly bad about this method, but it did mean there was one annoying niggle in that the AI would have to "guess" who would have been used on the big AI-controlled shows and this was not always 100% accurate - it meant that occasionally smaller companies did not have access to talent that technically they should have.

What happens in the new game is that the shows happen in size order, regardless of whether the company is controlled by a human or the AI. This means that the guesswork is removed, so if a bigger company does not utilise one of their roster then that worker is potentially available to work for a smaller company that night. As I said above, this is a really minor change and, honestly, I doubt if most people would have even noticed, but it does get rid of a small irritation and I wanted to flag it up so that people didn't mistakenly think that they could switch player order in PM mode too.

#5: Event Intent

Each event in TEW2020 can be given an intent; this tells the game how it is being promoted to the fans and what its aim is. The four levels are Normal, Lesser, Tour, and Throwaway.

Normal is the default and is what you're used to from previous games.

Lesser shows get a slightly reduced attendance level and are less powerful with regards to altering the company's popularity - a show needs to be much better or worse to trigger gains or losses. This type of show is for events that have a relatively weak line-up or aren't being treated overly seriously.

Tour shows are specifically meant to be part of Japanese-style tours (more on them in a later entry) and are not designed for use outside of a company that is running that sort of schedule. These shows are automatically not broadcast (but can be taped for highlights) and the attendance levels are much lower than normal. The fans are more lenient however, so a show has to be particularly awful to lose popularity. It's very hard to gain popularity from these type of shows due to their nature.

Throwaway shows are specifically designed to be used for charity shows, one-off tributes, etc, where there is no pretense that the card is going to be a serious spectacle (or even fit continuity). Attendances will be very low and a show would have to be absolutely amazing or dire to have any affect on popularity.

These intent levels therefore give the user a little more creative leeway and allow for some real life situations to be covered.

#6: TEW2020 save game to database converter

I think this is one of the more requested features over the years, so I'm glad to finally be able to include this one.

TEW2020 contains a new feature which turns a save game directly into a new database. It's located in the Options menu (right above the existing button to make an MDB file). The resulting database then works like any other mod - you can edit it via the main editor, use it to launch new games, etc.

(I know some people only skim read these posts, so I'm just going to highlight that this is converting a TEW2020 save game into a database. It does not mean you can continue TEW2016 saves in the new game.)

This could potentially be useful in a number of ways. If you're playing and end up with a particularly interesting game world, this would be a great way to turn it into a mod and share it with people. I'd imagine it's going to be incredibly useful for those of you who like playing organic mods. It's also has a lot of potential for ageing scenarios - for example, you might take the default data, run ten years, and then use this to create a "CornellVerse 2030" mod. It's also going to be good for creating "what if?" scenarios.

As the resulting database is made directly from the save game there shouldn't ever be any need to do any subsequent work to make the mod playable, although as I'm guessing most people strip out the unused avatars at the start of each game you might want to do a quick import to add some back in.

The one thorny issue that this does bring up (at least on these boards, this wouldn't be a problem elsewhere) is the ownership of the database you create if you are playing a game based on someone else's mod. For example, if you play 10 years into the future and use this feature, the resulting database is going to have literally tens of thousands of changes to it. Could you then be considered the co-creator? If the game world is utterly unrecognisable is it realistically a new piece of work? Would you need the original maker's permission to distribute it? I'm really not sure what the best way to handle this will be. What I suspect we'll do is just play it by ear post-release and see what the general feeling is.

#7: Venues and locations

This is more of a structural / conceptual change rather than a playable feature, but I think it will have a very positive impact overall.

The Locations that you're familiar with from previous games are now categorised into two groups, Locations and Venues. (They're still within the same file within the editor, so there's no extra clicking involved.)

Venues are specific buildings (like "Madison Square Garden"). These have all the detail you're used to, like a capacity and open and closing dates. They also have a new field, "Limited to one company per night", which you can use if you don't like seeing multiple companies occupying the same place at the same time.

Locations on the other hand are geographical (as in "Brooklyn" or "Melbourne"). These have less detail, being limited to a maximum capacity (to stop situations where you might have 100,000 people turning up to some small rural town) and an importance rating.

The big advantage to this is that a singe Location can give a region all the destinations it needs to serve any number of companies of different sizes, so database makers are potentially saved a ton of work.

For example, if you take the Southern England region, in previous games you'd need to realistically provide at least eight different places to work - one to hold a few hundred people, one to hold a thousand or so, one to hold several thousand, and so on. Under the new system, you could make a single Location, "London", with a high maximum capacity and that provides for everyone. Whether a company is drawing 30 or 30,000 fans, they're covered. Or you could make "East London", "West London", etc, if you want to just give a little more variation. So database makers who are happy with that level of detail (or just want to have placeholders for a short time) can fill their game world extremely quickly and when you're reading the results you're going to see "Promotion drew 150 people to London", "Promotion drew 20,000 people to London", and it'll all make sense and look correct.

Of course, the database makers who want to go super detailed and have nothing but real venues can also do it their way, they just use multiple Venues rather than Locations. Or you can mix and match, so you might have nothing but real life Venues filling somewhere like Tri State but give Hawaii just a single Location.

I hope that's all clear, I appreciate that this might be one of the features that's a little tricky to appreciate without seeing it in action. If you have any questions, ask them in the usual thread.

Just a reminder that tomorrow is the end of this run of having a journal entry every day, and as I'm away for Christmas there probably won't be another entry after that for a while.

#8: Areas and regions

I've been asked to provide a breakdown of the areas and regions of the game world, so that will be today's entry.

USA: Great Lakes, Mid Atlantic, Mid South, Mid West, New England, North West, South East, South West, Tri State, Puerto Rico, Hawaii

Canada: The Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, British Columbia

Mexico: Occidente, Centro, Sur, Sureste, Noroccidente, Noreste

British Isles: Wales, Ireland, Southern England, Scotland, Northern England, Midlands

Japan: Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, Chugoku, Kansai, Chubu, Kanto, Tohoku

Europe: Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Central Europe, Southern Europe, Southern Mediterranean, Iberia, Northern Europe, Russia

Oceania: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand

India: North India, Central India, South India

So, you have an expanded Mexico, Wales coming in, Europe getting reorganised, and India debuting.

The game world screen has also been totally redesigned so that's it's a single screen, no pop ups, and each area and region has a proper bio and stats screen giving you text descriptions of exactly what each region covers (i.e. what states are in each US region, what countries are in each Euro region, etc), the spillover, etc, so that should be much more intuitive and user friendly.

I'll finish by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas. As I said elsewhere, I don't know whether I'll get a chance to post next week, so you'll either be getting the next entry late next week or in the first few days of 2019. Have a happy and safe holiday everyone.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas.

I need to make a quick correction to the last journal entry: I gave "Northern Europe" as one of the regions, that should have read "Western Europe".

#9: Attributes

Coming into the game from the WMMA series, Attributes will be making their debut in 2020.

Attributes are essentially tags that can be assigned to workers to give them specific quirks or abilities. These range from personality changers (like "Party Animal" and "Troublemaker") to lifestyle effects (like "Former Hard Drug User" or "Straight Edge") to ones that change what a worker is willing to do (like "Daredevil" which means they are always willing to do crazy and stunt bumps). A worker with no attributes simply uses the default behaviour.

As you can guess from the above examples, this replaces the old personality system and the old lifestyle system. It also incorporates what used to be represented by the acting / musician / etc tick boxes.

Attributes can be assigned via the editor and will also be gained, lost, and developed over the course of gameplay.

Each attribute can also be set as Permanent (meaning that it can never be lost, obviously) and Hidden (meaning that it will be invisible during gameplay; otherwise it will be freely seen when viewing a worker). Hidden attributes lose that designation if they become known (such as if a worker fails a drugs test).

There are several advantages to this system. From a player's perspective, it's now far more intuitive; rather than having to try and figure out what a worker's personality settings might mean, you can see immediately whether they are going to be someone who'll be up for taking crazy bumps, etc. Their personality and outside interests are also going to be clear in one look rather than having to search through sub-menus. You're also getting more unique workers who can have all sorts of different quirks to make them feel more alive.

For people writing or editing databases, this marks a significant cut in workload when creating workers. It also removes a lot of guesswork when it comes to behaviour as you don't need to try and fiddle with the various personality settings to try and create specific effects - you just pick the effect you want from the Attribute list and apply it. This also opens up options that weren't previously available; for example, if you really want a wrestler who is quite conservative in terms of personality but will happily engage in hardcore matches you can do this very easily.

Another advantage of this system is that it's very easy to add in new attributes when and if they're needed, so if there are any real life (or fantasy) situations where a specific quirk is needed to model a specific person, it's very easy to patch in the necessary Attribute.

I won't be giving a list of the Attributes at this point simply because we're nowhere near finished with them - at the moment only the basics and a few specific quirks have been added - and I expect there to be at least a hundred or so more added by the time we get to the testing phase.

As a side note, the TEW2016->TEW2020 converter automatically fills in Attributes for you, so that will also remove a lot of work for database makers.

As this is the last entry of 2018, everyone here at GDS would like to wish you a happy new year. See you in 2019!

Happy new year everybody.

#10: Company sizes

The way that company sizes work has been totally redone for TEW2020.

First of all, the names of the seven categories have changed. They are now Insignificant, Tiny, Small, Medium, Big, Large, and Titanic. This is primarily a cosmetic change as I didn't like Cult (as it has some pejorative associations and also has a different meaning in regards to products) and the old National and International names don't necessarily fit anymore.

The criteria for each level has been totally redone, with two particularly important changes.

The first change is that there's no longer both Importance and Popularity - now you just have the latter. This makes the system easier to understand as there's only one set of values and absolutely no maths involved, and it means you can't drop in size "out of the blue" because a region's importance level changed. Regions can still be more or less important though, as we'll cover in a moment.

The second change is that the criteria for each size is unique to your company's home base. That means that playing a company in the Tri State region will involve different challenges and strategies than playing in the North West, which will be different to Puerto Rico, which will be different to Scotland, etc, etc.

We'll now look at this in more detail.

Taking a Puerto Rican company for example, the criteria are as follows:

Tiny: "Laying The Foundation" - Achieve 17 popularity in your home region.
Small: "Building a Fanbase" - Achieve 35 popularity in your home region.
Medium: "Establishing A Stronghold" - Achieve 65 popularity in your home region.
Big: "Seat Of Power" - Achieve 89 popularity in your home region, plus 77 in Mid Atlantic, Mid South, and South East regions.
Large: "International Expansion" - Achieve Big size and also 71 throughout the regions of either Canada or Mexico.
Titanic: "American Domination": Achieve Large size and also 77 in every region of the game world.

The "Laying The Foundation" and "Building A Fanbase" are the same for every company in the game world, for reference, as they simulate building your company up.

By contrast, a Great Lakes based company would have:

Medium: "Expanding East" - Achieve 59 popularity in your home region, plus 35 in either Mid Atlantic or Tri State.
Big: "Taking The East" - Achieve 77 popularity across eastern America (Great Lakes, Mid Atlantic, New England, South East, Tri State).
Large: "International Expansion" - Achieve Big size and also 71 throughout the regions of either Canada or Mexico.
Titanic: "American Domination": Achieve Large size and also 77 in every region of the game world.

As you can see, with a Puerto Rican company you're going to be concentrating hard on your home base and will be very insular until eventually making a move into mainland America only when you're already firmly established, whereas the Great Lakes company is going to be spreading outward pretty quickly. The same thing applies throughout the world, so a Scottish promotion is going to want to be looking to Ireland and the north of England before eventually spreading down towards London, whereas Mexican companies are always going to be drawn towards Mexico City. The expansions are always logically based on geography, but you'll still have a lot of freedom as to where you want to go: for example, if you start with a company slap bang in the middle of America you're going to be able to have a lot of freedom over which direction you want to expand toward.

The criteria are shown on the Size screen in-game so that you'll always know what is expected of you to go up (or down) in size. They take exactly the same form as I've written them out above, where you have a "title" and then an exact description of what popularity you need in which regions.

The nice thing about this system is that key markets become strategically very important, more so even than in TEW2016. For example, if you're playing as a Mexican company then you know that to be a player on the national stage you're going to have to go into Mexico City at some point because that's the most important place in the country - without making a splash there, you're not going to be able to rise to the bigger sizes. However, everyone else knows that too: whether the other companies are AI or human controlled, they're also going to be eyeing up Mexico City. So, as a consequence, regional battles are going to naturally flare up and become very important. This makes the game world feel more alive, more competitive, and will make you feel more apart of it rather than operating in isolation, as well as making real life key markets feel much more important than they ever have before.

The criteria are designed to be pretty similar in terms of difficulty, so there won't be huge advantages or disadvantages just by virtue of where you are based (other than the natural pros - obviously if you're in Tri State you've got access to a lot more people than a company in Hawaii). For American companies in particular, it's a little easier to get to the bigger sizes than in previous games. As you can see from the Great Lakes example, getting to Big (what used to be "National") doesn't require you to take the whole country, just to be a powerhouse on one coast. This allows situations like WCW in real life, where a company can be a player on a national scale but have the majority of their popularity be in only one half of the States.

Overall, these changes not only make it more intuitive for the player, but it also allows the AI to be smarter about being able to build their companies up over time too so the game should be more competitive from that standpoint. It also makes writing databases slightly easier as you no longer have to play around with regional importance to get the sizes right.