Are complicated plots involving time travel and secret lore a good idea?

[gagew]

Basically I have a series of about 6 games planned out and they involve a stupid amount of travel between timelines, dimensions and divisions (there are 26 timelines in a dimension, 26 dimensions in a division, there are 26 divisions)
All the extradimensional travel already makes the plot hard to comprehend. Plus there is a lot of secret lore and history to the games as well. Is this a good idea or should I save this plot for something else, and make a game that's more suited to an audience who isn't an avid viewer of "Game Theory".

 

[Essy]

My opinion on this is it depends on how cohesively you can tie things together. When it comes to time travel plots there is a lot less room for retcons as they run the risk of breaking story immersion(unless the retcon itself is a piece of the story, such as if there were another time traveler.) Likewise you need to make sure that you have a clearly defined cause and effect for changes that may occur over iterations(at least for major events.)

Be prepared to rewrite your whole story a lot if you're going with the 'little by little' approach.

My immediate concern is scale.

26^3 = 17576 different instances even ignoring time travel. I'd say that you probably shouldn't use them all. Stick to just a few per game and maybe attribute a reason as to why those few are special. You can always make nods to the others without actually going there.

Also don't worry too much about your intended audience unless this is a major commercial product with a lot of money behind it. Even then Game Theory has 9.5 million subscribers, that's not a small amount of potentially interested players.

 

[Sinnistar]

Well, if it's any help, Tales of the Lumminai is my game set in two parallel worlds that also has time travel of sorts by using Rifts as the gateway. I also plan for several games in the series to build a pretty complex history/lore about the Lumminai and the characters involved. TOTL has been doing quite well on Steam and has a solid player base who really liked the idea. Luminia and the Last Magician is the second part to that, which is following a character who went through the Rift and not only wound up on a different world, but also is about 900 years into the future. Because of this fact, Lumi from TOTL and Luminia end up bumping into each other after passing through the Rift, which is a sort of paradox since they're the same lol. It becomes confusing and chaotic, but the plot for it is solid. I've spent about 4 years developing the backstory for the universe surrounding my Lumminai creations, which resulted in a pretty good interwoven storyline full of side stories and alternate/parallel histories.

In my opinion, if it is done well and thought out properly, it is a great idea to follow. In the sense of your idea having 26 timelines/dimensions/divisions with various interations, I would definitely suggest breaking those into like 4-5 per game since that's an absurd amount of data to try shoving into one game and if there's a bug somewhere....oh boy, needle in a very large haystack lol. But yeah, if you have the whole idea well thought out and are confident you can create the concept without having to change much if anything at all, then I'd say go for it!

 

[Akra Olna]

That depends if you're smart enough to pull it off and make it not look like a cheesed version of Zelda.

Personally i don't dabble in multiverse theory so everything that can happen does happen and anything that has happened has happened. Time travel is all accounted for in advance. At least in Origin's alpha timeline.

One of my affluent games; Menagerie. Had a large focus on this sort of accounted for time-travel. it got several different praises for it's storytelling and time-travel ingenuity.

 

[Lung Spiders]

I'd personally be into something like that, but not if the gameplay is repetitive and grindy, which is hard to do with an RPG maker I think. if you can keep it fresh for six whole games then by all means, get on it.