I am issuing an open challenge to the Rimworld developers.

[Knight9910]

We've all heard the extremely ballsy claim that Rimworld makes: this IS NOT a game! It is a story generator!

Of course, my question is: if this is a story generator... ...where's all the stories?

I mean, they even compare themselves to Star Wars in the game, saying "there's a reason Luke Skywalker didn't quit and reload when his aunt and uncle died." Okay, yeah, but ya know, Luke's aunt and uncle getting slaughtered was the inciting incident to kick off an epic adventure spanning the galaxy and culminating in slaying an all-powerful dark lord and overthrowing an empire. In Rimworld when your relatives die, you get a mood debuff. That's it. There's no adventure to go on. There's no enemy to fight. There's no story.

The problem here is that every event is entirely self-contained and unrelated to anything and everything else. Royalty did add more of a quest system, but they're still entirely self-contained, and the choice to side with or rebel against the Empire ultimately means nothing.

I want to see an ACTUAL story system. When I get invaded by raiders, I don't want to just kill some of them and run the rest off and then we're done... I want to go on an adventure. I want to hunt them down, raid THEIR camp. And no, I know technically I can go attack their camps, but that doesn't mean anything. I want it to mean something. I want you to procedurally generate an entire story for me. I want you to generate my enemy. I want you to generate a boss fight that will be unlike any other boss fight out there. I want to make sure that they'll never hurt anyone again, and at last, my beloved Muffie the muffalo can rest in peace! But will the procedurally generated revenge heal the procedurally generated holes in my heart? Only time and RNG will tell!

And yes, this would be very hard to do... but hey, you guys are the ones who said you were different. You're not a game! You're not like everyone else! You're different! You're better! You're creating stories on par with Star Wars! Well, now's your chance to prove it.

Now, obviously, the developers have no need to do this. Nothing is going to happen if they don't. This isn't for me. This isn't for justice. This is for you. I want to challenge you to rise above what you are now and prove that this isn't just an excuse to not balance your gameplay. I want you to actually put your money where your mouth is, and show that Rimworld isn't just talking a bunch of big talk about being different. Rise up to greatness and show that you really can do something that no one has ever done before.

[Locklave]

It's ego stroking. The game is about creating and managing a colony on a dangerous Rimworld where crazy stuff happens and events play out. Something I think Ty forgot somewhere along the line. I don't think random events causing everyone to breakdown makes it a story generator.

Pawns don't become mentally tougher, they don't become jaded or desensitized. They never grow up and act like people that understand their life is in danger. The Pawns don't grow as people, which would be required to be a proper story. In fact their expectations get higher as time passes making them more emotionally fragile.

It's a drama simulator not a story generator. If they insist on not accepting it's clearly a colony sim with some pawn drama tacked on to an events system.

[SeminarCaviar]

This is a great challenge. I wonder what would happen if this is going to happen.

[Alenerel]

Well, it depends... For a lot of people these events are enough to make stories. Just look the post about the user that wanted to give his guinea pig a good respectable death. Some people just go to the combat log tab and see "oh, he missed the eye for almost nothing, thats so exciting" while I dont ever check that tab.

I dont know how you can make a procedural generated story... Altho linking the self containing quests doesnt sound like too difficult. In the end, it would be just the same again, just small blocks forming a larger block and it would look repeating again.

[RawCode]

There's no adventure to go on. There's no enemy to fight. There's no story.

You want everything to have some quest attached?

this is not "adventure" this is "another settlement needs our help i marked location on the map" and this gets boring really really fast, especially if you decided to play war crime simulator and renamed your "doctor" to "kidneygrab".

[GoblinCookie]

Yes it's very much a game, the idea of a 'story generator' is just using flowery language.  Even a game of chess can 'tell a story' quite fine.  Every game tells a story.

[Alenerel]

Im just gonna leave this here for op...
https://youtu.be/VdqhHKjepiE?t=324

[RicRider]

I think a lot of players get hung up on that description 'story generator' because they cannot fathom why they would want to generate stories.

What you want to do I think is use your imagination to fill in the gaps. So your procedural generation is going to throw a bunch of nonsense at you like llama people riding mechanoid insects with rocket launchers attacking a mechanoid cluster while a meteorite storm lands on your outhouses and while this is hilarious if you have too many crazy scenarios in a row like that it gets old quick.

I guess if you don't know why you could possibly need a story generator then think of what stories are intended for. It's not like you have to tell anyone these stories and be a real life Stephen King but when you're playing a game of RimWorld it's like the game is trying to tell you a story.

My suggestion is to stop micromanaging things and just play random games where you try and survive with what you have. If you actually want to write stories then you should take some of those colonies you played and use the screenshots and saves to create the seed of a good short story that could be RimWorld fanfic.

I think that's the kind of thing the developers were hoping for. If you played online games in the late '90s you might know there was a big underground scene for doing art and stories. I think RimWorld is a retro look back at that time that only some Indie games even try to achieve these days like Terraria for example.