- Joined
- Feb 1, 2021
In general, TNOfication is already attested, and almost always attempted, in most mods. Even the brainstorming for contemporary mods builds on TNO designs. For the sake of this thread's sanity, here's some clarity on what is arguably TNOfication and what isn't:
TNOfication is:
TNOfication is:
- The tendency to create narrative events with vividly speaking, acting and often feeling characters. These usually supplant HOI4's traditional approach to storytelling –if any is to be observed– based on news reports. The move from a journalistic to a novella-like style is a mark of TNO influence. Event chains in TNO resemble novel fragments more than adventure-game phases, for instance.
- The presence of representations of culmination, and there are none more common than fucking superevents. Even Kaiserredux fell for this meme. Wherever you see a photo, music and a quote, that's a direct legacy of the mod that cursed a thousand pieces of historical media. Not all superevents are culminative, however. The Yasuda Crisis wasn't particularly so. But HOI4 mods have taken cues from the major ones, all of which were of that kind.
- The use of national foci as episodes. Originally, focus trees were meant to develop the potential abilities of a country, usually in political manoeuvring and the economy. They weren't particularly time-based, though some were obviously meant to be more than purely stackable: Germany progressively unlocks its historically-based opportunities to go to war and so on. However, TNOfied mods will turn focus trees into little steps the player takes towards advancing a storyline, usually through events, and the result is the transformation of the tree into a sort of checklist of chapters you are meant to go through. Very often you slog through them more than anything.
- The use of multiple non-native GUIs to bolster interactivity. Though this almost a non-TNO characteristic, the mod's influence has definitively pushed modders away from using traditional HOI4 means of representing or interacting with a country's affairs and have pursued, more and more, bloated designs that border on mini-games within a game. There had been extra GUIs before, some of them mini-gamey as well. There hadn't been so many until a certain popular mod based half its content on them. When the Barbarossa DLC released, people actually assumed Paradox had been influenced by TNO in implementing the Stalin mini-game. That's how much TNO influence buried previous iterations of its designs.
- The insistence in presenting ideological spectrum disputes and warlord balkanizations:
- Ideological spectrum disputes almost always pit conservatives against reformists, with some radicals lurking in the background. Certainly, there were cases of this before TNO (Kaiserreich and syndicalists, no less), but TNO's German Civil War and original Japan cemented the idea that countries should almost always find themselves between moderate and radical options. This almost automatically comes up in new mods: "the reformer", "the conservative", "the weird radical", "the military guy"...
- Balkanizations occur again and again, especially to decide a country's fate via "reunification". Bonus points if the reunification has a fucking superevent. This is all over the place in HOI4 mods and it has become the laziest way to put forth a great deal of options with some clear gameplay-based objective.
- Subideologies. TNO came up with this near-useless, complicating system and mods have given up on ignoring it. No debate.
- Extreme, often obscured, hidden, rare, marginal ideologies, especially if it's a single one. Building off the Burgundian System, HOI4 modders now turn to making a certain color on the ideology wheel particularly cursed to make paths interesting. Try and remember that one mod that suggested "ultratotalitarianism," Twilight of the Anthropocene's "Accelerationism" or that other one which also had some "System" ideology. Curiously, Red Flood isn't necessarily one, as their Accelerationism is sort of frequent, diverse and central to the mod.
- Excessive color coding to mark the good things, the bad things, and above all the bad things which are unpredictable...
- Failstates. Before TNO, modders would hardly ever force the collapse of the country you may have succeeded at playing. At most, there's the ambiguous, even admittedly skeptical or uncertain ending you find yourself in. More mods, however, seem to be considering having the player crash for their attempt at playing for too long.
- Time-sensitive storytelling. Mods before TNO weren't particularly defined by the years they had content for, much less by how long the player could take to go down successive national foci to advance a story. The gameplay flow was freer, more sandbox-like. TNOfication means turning HOI4 into a visual novel through the unpause button.
TNOfication is not:
- When a teaser has epithetic names for leaders ("the Caligula", "the Judas"...)
- When any mini-game is in the decisions tab
- When a country has a civil war, especially if it is multi-sided (this was actually a product of now forgotten Kaiserfication)
- When a single or a few events have a non-journalistic style to them
- When there's a reformist
- When there's a strange ideology that may or may not be exportable
- When there's a grimdark vibe
- When there's some economy besides civilian factories
- When there's a debate on realism (this is actually a fundamental theme in alt-history media, how some people think it's a result of TNOfication is beyond me)
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