- Pronouns
- He/They
this was brought to my attention after a pair of tweets surfaced discussing the fact the game had a booth at PAX East last week.
while there’s been games that use basic concepts from the series, most notoriously a custom game mode for Disney Infinity. (for the record, the backlash for this was fairly overblown, as it was solely designed as a demonstration of that game’s “toy box” level creation tools and nothing more.)
this is quite possibly the most blatant take on bringing the main gameplay outside of the Nintendo Switch ecosystem. and in the form of a free to play game with microtransactions at that.
aside from the novelty of having multiple ports, the biggest addition for this is that there’s a built-in map editor for creating your own arenas.
the devs are also clear that they have one main goal for this game, using it to promote Ocean Conservation. while Splatoon might already have implications that it takes place on a post-apocalyptic earth ravaged by global warming. the marketing for TideTurn is insistent on their plans to use the title for charitable purposes, with the official site at one point containing an entire blog solely devoted to the subject.
As humans continue to dump waste and plastic into the ocean, allow Fukushima radiated waters to continue to spill for all these years into the ocean, speed up coral-damaging global warming, continue weapons testing and nuclear testing in our seas, and overfish certain species, the oceans are in constant turmoil. If Atlantians are below the waters watching the destruction of their world, it might be only a matter of time before our coastal cities are crumbled by Atlantian technology.
For our own sake, let’s hope we only have to fight Atlantians within TideTurn. We have a lot of work to do if we want to be visited by Atlantians in peace.
(The quote they’re referring to is from author Jane McGonigal and her book “Reality Is Broken: WHY GAMES MAKE US BETTER AND HOW THEY CAN CHANGE THE WORLD”)Stanion Studios agrees with McGonical that gamers are resourceful, strategic, attuned to problem solving, community conscious, and instantly motivated to help total strangers. These are the characteristics of heroes. By developing bonds, gamers already enact change in their communities quite effectively, and can also be significant voices for ocean restoration and conservation. And imagine doing so by playing a game that allows players to directly engage with urgent ocean issues, but from a fantastical landscape filled with water beings and advanced technology and characters to care about — just imagine the kind of change the gaming community could effect? Imagine if World of Warcraft had a call to action? Imagine if the games we played had a way for us to also engage with the real world and to make it better? Imagine if our games inspired us to be a better version of ourselves. That’s one way to turn the tides.
all of this suggests it could turn out to be a fairly decent game in the end, though there’s still some slight concern about this being the teams first game.
Stanion Studios was originally a multimedia production company that assisted on various Films and TV Series, including at least one short film that went around the festival circuit.
the titular Ian Stanion that founded the company does have some programming experience, but not for games specifically. with him previously developing applications for Google.
at the very least, they’re certainly self-aware about the “competition”
I also hope this game ends up finally killing all of the knee-jerk “clone” comparisons Foamstars has been getting since it’s reveal, despite the fact it only has surface level similarities at best.