Huh new subgenre? I always considered it already part of the well-established genre of narrative driven walking simulators.

Firewatch was such an awesome game, bit short though.

I love games like this. I replay Firewatch probably once a year. Walking simulator is such a dismissive genre name, but these games tend to be short and emotionally rich. What Remains of Edith Finch is one of my other favorites.

I wish there were 1000 more to play. Yes, I enjoy sinking hundreds of hours into Satisfactory or Dark Souls, but sometimes I want to feel things and that is what these games deliver.

I enjoyed the game quite a bit. It told a weird story that i enjoyed, in a small game world that i enjoyed being in. It could have been better in many ways, but id go so far as to say i loved it. As a game to just chill and play, without needing to be on your guard all the time, it was relaxing and entertaining. It was like reading a good book, you wanted to see what happened next.

Im not sure that id want for this style of gaming to be the next big thing, but I would have liked to have seen that style built on. Its a shame Campo Santo disappeared into Valve... I had hoped that Valley of the Gods would still see the light of day, but he says thats unlikely. Its a shame that Valve devours great game makers, then they never make games.

I really liked the first 80% of Firewatch. The last 20% though... I guess I didn't hate it, but I also really didn't like the switch in tone. Without giving spoilers, the ending left me feeling kind of disappointed with how normal it was. I remember finishing the game and immediately going to look if there was an alternative ending, because certainly the game wouldn't just end like... That.

Like, imagine working on a big murder mystery where a man was found dead inside a locked room with no windows. You gather tons of clues, interview countless people searching for a motive, spend a lot of time putting together all the pieces and... It turns out he simply tripped and hit his head.

Like, there's still a mystery. There's still a good story. It's not even a really bad ending, it's just not nearly as exciting as where you thought it would lead.

I got to admit - I only played Firewatch briefly (~20 minutes). I just remember walking around and replying to a lady on the radio before stepping away and never jumping back in.

It seems I missed what the reactive storytelling was supposed to be about.

I think they had something great there, I very much enjoyed playing it but the ending was so awful that every time I see a game that looks similar, I do not engage with it.

Valve bought Campo Santo and Valley of the Gods got put on Valve Time.

They don’t make games like this because the people got put into other projects.

The Long Dark is finishing up their episodic content with Blackfrost on the Horizon. Article seems to be missing research

It was just a regular walking sim. Didn't really do a lot that other walking sims didn't.

If your game doesn't feature shooting, platforming or sportsball, then you're already off the mainstream slop, and you're going to have to accept that you're going to make less money by targeting niche audiences.

FWIW, I liked it. But I can see why a lot of people wouldn't be interested. You're dealing with a world where people's "game collections" are just 6 yearly iterations of CoD and FIFA.

Odd, Firewatch was entirely forgettable for me — I don't think I agree that it should have sparked a subgenre.

Should it be influential? Yes, I think the only thing they did a very good job with was the dialogue. Am I surprised there aren't 'Firewatch-likes'? No.

I loved that game so much

Hey devs. Make games like this and I'll pay full price for all of them.

Firewatch has certain choose your own adventure style "What is thy name, adventurer?" questions that it will refer back to later but it doesn't effect the actual game that much. You get slightly different dialog lines from Horny Boss Chick On The Radio. What did it do that Roger Wilco couldn't?

I couldn't finish it.

This is certainly on me, but I just couldn't handle the story. Without too many spoilers, the game's story includes a tragic death, and when I played the game I was actively dealing with a recent death in the family and when I got to that part of the story... I just couldn't go any further.

And while this is a special case, it's also typical for how I play games, I play to escape the emotional social dilemmas of my life. Give me a strategy game, a puzzle game, a factory game. Give me some abstract puzzle to solve, a system to optimize, an army to outmaneuver; the last thing I want is a deep story with complex characters. Emotions just add weight to the experience, and my whole objective is to try to shrug off some of that weight for a while.

What does "reactive storytelling" mean? I didn't play Firewatch.

Too bad it did not blow up, people like slop throughout the ages anyway.

Playing my 2nd playthrough of the Witcher 3. First playthrough was in 2016. Forgot alot of details about it, but this game... It feels like playing it for the first time again. Sure I know some contracts and monsters before finding them, but they've not stopped updating this game since 2016

My first version I played was v1.3

It's now v4.0+

That's insane! And the game is so full of incredible world building and dialogue and action it's just incredible. They added FSR support for those that care. Updated graphics, fixed many bugs and packed even more content into it

How dit CDPR make this. They do show that a game can stay good for a long time, even arguably past it's expiration date. Not saying it's expired it's just 10yrs old...

That said, fire watch was beautiful but it really had a linear kind of feel to it. It was almost scary at moments. Very peaceful at others. But it was more of a demo of what a great story game could be than an actual game. There was absolutely no incentive to replay it after one playthrough. Not even after many years. I still don't think I'll ever touch it again. It had no gripping ending or mystery except for not meeting the lady in the other tower.

If they would've made a game like this but with that Reddit creepypasta story of a park ranger that found stairs in the woods that teleported people... That would be interesting.

I know the term walking simulator is used as a bit of a pejorative but firewatch and was very interesting experience. But it was just a walking simulator and there is a limit to how much you can do with that.

If you have a compelling story you want to tell there are better mediums than video games through which to tell that story unless you have some kind of unique thing you want to do that makes interactive media more appropriate.

I can't imagine for the sake of example that Game Of Thrones would have had anywhere near the cultural impact it did if it had been released as a video game.

"fighting the medium" is an excellent phrase! Never played Firewatch, though I have made some stumbling attempts at creative writing, and it's made me realize that certain things are very difficult to convey organically in words. How do you get across to a first time reader that an alien isn't actually shrugging or winking or pointing with an index finger, but expressing the same thing through non human body language? And then how do you do it over and over and over again, because when posting stories to a forum you have to assume this is everyone's first time reading.

In a visual medium like a webcomic, it's super simple to convey it through a combo of dialogue and visuals. Even the nature of the story itself has to fit the medium. With a comic, people expect short self-contained scenes or character interactions that may or may not connect to form a story arc. This is what I like to write about, little snippets that serve to build the world, just a few lines of dialogue or a paragraph describing a scene, but that's not what people expect from prose. They want meatier stuff.

Makes me wonder what would be impossible to express altogether in one medium vs another.

Firewatch was okay. I waited for it to get good, and it just didn't.