Nuclear Dawn: A Half-Life 2 Modification

Nuclear Dawn is one of those post-apocolyptic first-person shooter games that may come across as generic at first. With a very similar mod called Dystopia already being played by a ton of HL2 mod enthusiasts, it doesn’t seem like Nuclear Dawn has much more to offer. The actual success of this mod is unknown, but during its development, it would be faulty to say that it hasn’t built a substantial number of followers.

One of the things I love about the games I play is the story. In single-player games, the story and characters are everything. If the story isn’t good, nobody will play it. So what do you do if you are developing a game that has no single-player element? Well, unless the game has a huge budget like EA’s Battlefield series, the answer is difficult to come up with. For third party developers, designing a good modification or stand alone game can be difficult if it meant for online play only. The beauty of these types of games however, lies in the community.

Gamers love to write fan fiction. I can’t tell you how many fan fictions of Final Fantasy VII I read after playing the game. There is just something about reading stories that take you on different paths. Some stories may alter what happened in the game, others may continue them. Hell, they may even precede the game’s story and give you some background. It is a lot like that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where hundreds of Enterprises from alternate dimensions end up in the same plane of reality. All the people are slightly different; one ship in particular is badly damaged from an attack by the Borg and explodes. Seeing variations in stories help make things fresh and interesting.

The developers at Nuclear Dawn held a writing contest a while back. To make a long story short, I submitted a story that didn’t end up in the finals. However, the ones that did were excellently written. The developers of Nuclear Dawn haven’t exactly given the gamers a story. Instead, it is more of a timeline of events starting from present day and going far into the future. They have supplied a detailed chain of events on a global scale, allowing the players almost infinite possibilities. There is no main character, no main villian; the writer has the ability to create almost anything he or she wants. That makes for good storytelling.

My story is called The Loren Singularity.

The finalists were:

The Rip

The Eagle

Bring Em’ Back Alive

These three are definitely some of the best written fan fictions I have ever read. There will come a day when video-game literature will be an optional class at universities. Oh, and I think I just discovered my next column topic.