Your Ideal Game

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downzorz
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Your Ideal Game

Post by downzorz »

Everybody has that idea for a video game in the back of their mind that doesn't exist, but if someone made it they would throw money at them. So what is yours?

I've got a couple

First: A stealth-based video game that focuses on blending in, not hiding behind stuff. I picture it in some dystopia where surveillance is prevalent enough to make sneaking around impractical, so stealth revolves around blending in a lot. You have to worry about things like maintaining cover ID's, dressing right, and avoiding suspicion. Kinda looks like Burn Notice in my mind.

Second: A game like Skyrim in style, but with a world-builder and online multiplayer. I like the idea of players setting up servers, Minecraft-style. Heavily moddable, because the community makes better mods than most companies.

Third: A revival in text-based gaming. The potential is pretty big here: MUDs can do things that graphical games can't, in large part because of the freedom of the concept.

Fourth: A D&D 3.5 video game that stays very true to the mechanics. Or an After Sundown video game. Or a GURPS video game. Anything based on an RPG that sticks to the mechanical complexity of TTRPG's but handles rolling behind the scenes to quicken combat, and has the capacity to be run by a DM- so world-building tools, NPC creation tools, and the like.

Last: A sequel to Robot Arena II.
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Post by Parthenon »

Phantom Crash Three. So you have a global fighting tournament of mechs with an existing schedule across multiple locations, and you are trying to win. You have the different manufacturers, invisibility and maps from the first two games, but you then add in cool stuff to make things actually worthwhile.

Like have quiet and busy times at each location, and have some actual minor effort in moving from place to place. So in a few days the place you are at will only have grade C and D matches, so you have to move to either London with several Grade B and C matches but with a manufacturer challenge, or Paris with lots of A and B matches. But you have to choose whether to go by train and miss the last days of the current location/the first days the the new one, or hiring trucks to take the mech which costs more, or flying it all but at an extravagant price.

And making it all televised, so that having crazy designs and stuff on your mech makes you a recognisable personality and more likely to get sponsorship from manufacturers.

Basically, it should be a light-hearted game which has over the top stylings. I don't know, you should be an ex-soldier after the war who has taken his old mech and is fighting to make enough money for his sister's operation. But meanwhile you get into a rivalry with someone from your old squad who can't forgive you accidentally shooting his nose off and always has ridiculous fake noses, with a matching one on his mech. And your regular truck driver is not so secretly a spy who wants you to save the world by doing missions in your mech against the most ridiculous midget who happens to be president of the middle of nowhere and regularly finds armies of shitty mechs. Something fun and ridiculous, with interesting strategic planning between matches.

.... reading this again, I wonder where the anime craziness came in.

I'd also like to see a 3rd person shooter on a medium scale. With moveable scenery so you can pick up a sturdy table and use it as a shield, or swing round a large dumpster as your extendible actions rather than a scripted sequence. And psychic powers so you can use them to help move scenery, jump huge distances to get better views and charge through walls.

No, wait, I want a Global Frequency (Warren Ellis) game. Where you have random happenings and dozens of agents around the area, and you have to use the closest ones who each have useful skills while tapping into the research/hacking skills of dozens more people online. And if it doesn't work you have to airstrike and carry on.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

What, besides the Pokemon MMO and Star Wars smuggler sim that are near-universal demands without supply for... reasons?

Years ago, I planned out a game that looked a lot like Gunpoint, in that it was a 2D city-based superhero game. Then there were a big pile of superheroes you could pick from, each of whom provided a different game experience. So, playing as the telekinetic means you pay a lot of attention to the scenery, the flyer has a unique relationship with terrain, the invisible dude transforms the stealth aspects, and so on. Fuck, in the age of DLC, you could probably drop new characters into that thing forever.
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Post by Surgo »

Morrowind, with modern graphics and a real combat system. Everything else about the game was perfect.
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Post by DSMatticus »

My ideal game is probably a weird mix of X-Com + M&B Warband + Dom3. You've got a tactical minigame where you're throwing around magic effects and stabbing people in the face (I referenced X-Com instead of, say, a tactical JRPG because the idea would be to emphasize and retain the tactical aspect and feeling), and then a strategic campaign a la Warband where there's a big ol' world out there and things are happening in it even if you don't do anything and there are lots of subsystems for you to interact with that world and change it yourself. Except I'd want it to be way more randomized and add a lot more depth to some of the systems. Give "I want to be a mercenary/merchant" more of an endgame. Probably add an army minigame to go with the tactical minigame for when you decide to conquer the world. Definitely flesh out NPC interaction and make it more interesting. Nibble lightly on Dom3's fluff and world-shaping magic.

You build a party of heroic badasses and do whatever you feel like in a dynamic and responsive fantasy world. I want it.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

The me-being-12, and open-feeling non-linear solution of Ultima V plus
The sprawling worlld, backstory details and ability to work for and against a variety of factions of Morrowind plus the ability to actually alter the game world of Minecraft
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Post by Korgan0 »

piss-drowner

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you don't know whose

all you know is that there's so much piss
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Post by Vebyast »

An asymmetric-multiplayer RTS-FPS hybrid. Some players are playing an RTS and have a whole economy and giant armies and terrain and order queues going on. Some players are playing an FPS, though; whenever someone in the RTS wants to build a hero-type unit, instead of getting just another unit but with levels, they get an FPS player. FPS players interpret orders from the RTS players as nav markers, target icons, and similar; RTS players can assign units to the FPS players so they don't have to worry about microing their entire militaries.

That would be an awesome game by itself, but it doesn't stop there. The first obvious step is to make the FPS Mechwarrior and to let FPS players design their own mechs; an RTS player no longer has to pay a flat fee for a player, but can instead see a selection of FPS players to hire and what mechs they'd be piloting. Playing the RTS and need to break open a turtle? Hire a lance of assault mechs. Playing the FPS and want to run around at top speed looking for things to shoot? Make a light mech and someone might hire you at the start of the game. On top of that, add an economy - FPS players have to finance their own mechs and assault drops, and RTS players aren't buying a unit so much as contracting an FPS player to fight on their side. And then you can put in auctions, so RTS players get in bidding wars against each other. And so on and so forth.
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Post by Kaelik »

You ever seem savage?
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Vebyast wrote:An asymmetric-multiplayer RTS-FPS hybrid.
It was almost a Genre, Battlezone 1 and 2 were utterly awesome for their era... then the Modern Warfare FPS Genre killed gaming for most of a decade...
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Post by nockermensch »

Right. I might as well tell you about my idea, since I never seem to actually start working on it.

Picture a procedural world generator, like the one Dwarf Fortress uses. It creates a fantasy world, starting with the landscape, then placing starting populations, then having these populations expand, go to war, create and lose artifacts and such.

With the world done, picture a "CREATE CAMPAIGN" button. This examines the world files, looks for some mess that could be solved through face-stabbing and then procedurally writes a plot, to be fought through N scenarios.

Each scenario is a top-down, tactical RPG battle, in the vein of Shinning Force or Fire Emblem.

Every game element is fully customizable via xml files describing the possible races, cultures, classes, special attacks, monsters, etc. Enemy IA is customizable via Lua scripting.

The game works the math for each scenario, allowing each one to be winnable, albeit with the degree of difficulty you selected on the settings.

The game uses seeds for its World Generator and Campaign Generator RNGs, and once generated, a campaign can be played how many times you want, or shared with your friends (maybe by packing all the generated files, or by giving them the seed you used).

After a campaign is finished, the game presents a "CREATE SEQUEL" button. It advances the world-building algorithm by N years, and generates another campaign with the requisite that at least X% of its plot has to do with the previous campaign.

This should be workable, because cynically speaking, CRPG plots follow templates. In the end, it's always a matter of Killing <BBG>, Collecting <Artifact> or whatever. Characters and even inter-character dynamics are also pretty much templated, thanks to tvtropes and to the Japanese fascination with well defined social relations.

So you create characters by giving them a random personality from a tvtropes list (weighted to the role they fill) and then assign relationships between then. This leads to dialog matrixes with hundreds of lines to fill, but which I'm sure that people on the Internet would gladly fill for free (judging the the mod scene eagerness).
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Post by Vebyast »

Kaelik wrote:You ever seem savage?
Huh, I had not. Thanks for the pointer. Looks like the RTS side is a bit weak - I was thinking that the game would have much more solid RTS mechanics in order to hold FPS players' responsibilities down to small-unit tactics and character builds - but it's definitely close to what I was thinking of.
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Post by Wiseman »

Well pokemon does have the awesome potential to be a great MMO. but...

Also, I second the D&D 3.5 engine. Full world building and a way to allow homebrew systems would be awesome.

I would also like a sort of pokemon beat-em-up game that still follows the basic form of a pokemon game, with gyms, levels, rivals, elite four and the evil team.
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Post by John Magnum »

Bulletstorm + Serious Sam
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Post by Bihlbo »

RRAAAAWWWRR!!

It's an immersive first-person dinosaur sim/MMO. One huge world, every player playing as a prehistoric (non-fantasy, non-myth) creature. There is no text box, no chat feature, and no language displayed on the screen of any kind. The controls for each type of dinosaur are intuitive enough that after messing around for a while you get the gyst of it, but you have a large amount of control over your dinosaur and it is unlikely you will have full control without experimenting.

Part of the difficulty of the game is in developing methods of communication, both between players and between other members of your species. Gestures and body language, scent (represented by some visual cues), and the roars and grunts your creature can express would be the primary methods of communication. As you learn how to communicate with the AI members of your species, an inter-species language gradually develops among players with a broader experience of playing the various species.

Part of the difficulty is in leading other members of your species. After your creature grows to maturity, gain control over your herd and guide their progress. Protect, feed, migrate, and breed. If you want future generations to have greener skin, make sure only the greenest of your tribe breeds the next generation. You can change the communication styles and instincts of your species by teaching things to the young, and these new understandings can be passed on to future generations. The genetic data for each creature is extensive, but players only get to see the most observable traits. Time passes far more quickly than in real life, so as to allow microevolutionary changes to occur without the game going on for years.

The world is dangerous. As a predator creature you must hunt and find prey for your pack or you will starve and die. Sometimes that prey will be controlled by a player, but you likely won't know if they are (unless you become good at recognizing cleverness as expressed through action). As an herbivore you will need to migrate to greener pastures, move with the seasons, and protect the herd from predators. The environment is dangerous as well, modeling a perhaps more treacherous version of what we thought dinosaurs could have experienced.

The world is also persistent. Nothing ever spawns and despawns from nothing to nothing. A birth must occur from parent creatures of like kind. A corpse stays as the bones are cleaned and covered with overgrowth. Every AI creature that exists is a potential player, and every player creature was once an AI creature. Because of this, extinction is fully possible.

When you log into the game you take control of a random just-born creature. As long as this creature survives and you do not attempt to change control, this creature remains reserved for your future use. While your creature is alive you may mark other creatures of your herd with a scent marker that designates them as your heir. If your current creature dies or gets too old for your liking you may switch to controlling an heir. If through using the limited communication options available to walnut-brained beasts you manage to make another creature not already in your herd comfortable in your presence, you may mark them as an heir as well (allowing you to switch to another species). Or, you may abandon your current creature to get another assigned at random.

The game has no tutorial, no quests, no menus, no creature statistics screen, no instructions... no words of any kind, save for the title, RRAAAAWWWRR!!. Everything players need to know comes through being taught by AI members of your species (such as how to motion toward food or warn of danger) and through experimentation. Certain things like marking another creature as an heir would always be the same.

Part of the draw of the game is the emergent storytelling this creates. Part of it is also in cross-cultural friendships that evolve between people involved in life-or-death struggles, who might never have another chance to meet or interact because of language or distance barriers. It challenges our concepts of identity, purpose, justice, family, and entitlement.

You can lead a herd of creatures to greatness, guiding their development to the point of nearly diverging the species, or you can jump from creature to creature, hunting wantonly as though it were an FPS, challenging your skills against the skills taught to the AI by other players. And you can lose everything you worked for in a tsunami if that just happens to occur.
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Post by Vebyast »

Bihlbo wrote:RRAAAAWWWRR!!
I like this idea. Kind of an MMO Black and White + Populous + Spore. The universally-iconic interface is a really nice touch. Combined with the subject matter, I could definitely see this being popular with kids. And we even have the technology for the interface now; previous attempts at gestural and whole-body control have failed because keyboard and mouse kind of suck, c.f. Surgeon Simulator 2013, but if you use the Leap Motion or similar you're set.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Surgo wrote:Morrowind, with modern graphics and a real combat system. Everything else about the game was perfect.
Dragon's Dogma is that missing part of Morrowind you're looking for (as in, has great combat and graphics). It's not a PC moddable game though.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Wed Jul 17, 2013 4:45 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Sigil »

OgreBattle wrote:
Surgo wrote:Morrowind, with modern graphics and a real combat system. Everything else about the game was perfect.
Dragon's Dogma is what you're looking for (as in, has great combat and graphics)
As much as I love Dragons Dogma, I wouldn't say it is similar to Morrowind. The overworld, such as it is, is actually relatively small. It takes place in a single kingdom, and while the distances between areas feels appropriate for gameplay it fails to really sell the illusion that it represents the whole thing, its more abstract than any of the 'scrolls games. For an example of what I mean by this, the in-game area of Skyrim is a map of only 13.9 square mile (much smaller than Skyrim in lore) but this abstraction goes largely unnoticed by being handled well. Dragons Dogma feels much more sparsely populated, there are only a few populated areas in the game, and though you are free to go most places from the start, the content is clearly gated. If you go to an endgame zone early, there will be nothing to do. If you return to an early game zone later, there will be very little new to do.

Additionally the story is strange and poorly delivered, to the point where it might as well have been non-existant for me. I often felt like I was in a single player MMO. I looked for the question marks above NPC heads, collected my quest, ran out to kill something, and hauled ass back.

But. BUT! The combat is very, very fun. This is where the game shines. There are several classes you can choose from, and freely swap into and out of in town, retaining some abilities between classes. Fighting hordes of man-sized enemies is satisfying and quick paced, but hunting down giant beasts is where the best parts of the game are. Large enemies take location specific damage, and you can scale them (actively, no QTE crap) to reach the place you want to stab the hell out of. If you want to fight wyrms, ogres, dragons, manticores, chimeras, griffins, beholders, and more all while feeling badass, this is a game for you. The endgame content for both the original and the expansion fortunately provides semi-endless dungeons to facilitate lots of giant monster killing.

This is a good game, and you should play it, but don't expect for it to play like Morrowind, or for that manner any western open world RPG. This game plays more like Monster Hunter or Demons Souls with meaningful RPG character advancement and leveling.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Oh, I meant the parts Morrowind is lacking, Dragon's Dogma has.

If it was as open as Morrowind, then you'd have something pretty close to perfect.
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Post by Kaelik »

My ideal game is a persistent zombie world. DayZ, but more so. You would have a much greater ability to modify the environment, by building barricades, and blowing things up.

And then, the final touch. When you log in for the first time, you start as some stupid useless default human with a very small number of points to spend. And then, you can, if you survive, learn more and more, but it is very slow. Alternatively, when you die as a human, you get effectively two different options: stop playing while your zombie clock runs for a couple hours, or play as a zombie. When you play as a zombie, you play as a Zombie for those two hours, and you only ever play as a (smarter) basic zombie. But basic zombies have a call other zombies function, so as long as you don't die, you can drag a small horde around with you.

When you next get to play as a human, your best zombie score gives you more points to spend on being human at creation. You can play zombie whenever you want, but mostly people will want to play humans I imagine.

Human points can be spent on skills like barricade construction, shooting, ect. Having items, like guns ect. Or a better starting location.

The main thing is just that a persistent modifiable world hasn't been done well to any extent yet, so modifying it for zombies can't occur until that baseline exists.
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Post by echoVanguard »

Kaelik wrote:persistent zombie world
Have you tried Urban Dead? I played it for a few months and had a wonderful time.

echo
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Post by Kaelik »

echoVanguard wrote:
Kaelik wrote:persistent zombie world
Have you tried Urban Dead? I played it for a few months and had a wonderful time.

echo
You completely fail to understand what would actually make the game fun. Because that is the perfect example of something so tremendously unfun for all the obvious reasons that I don't know why you would think that even comes close to meeting my requirements.

Hint: the fact that it is a zombie game is merely setting, it is the way the hypothetical gameplay would play out that makes it interesting.
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Post by Sigil »

OgreBattle wrote:Oh, I meant the parts Morrowind is lacking, Dragon's Dogma has.

If it was as open as Morrowind, then you'd have something pretty close to perfect.
I'd just like for any of the ES games to have good combat. Dragons Dogma type combat would be icing. It's just something Bethesda never has done very well.
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Post by Shrapnel »

Hmm... I never really thought about that before, but... you're right, Bethesda does always have terrible combats systems, although they do improve slightly with each game. (Although FO3 and NV, I thought, had fairly good combat systems.)

Morrowind's a great game, no question, but it's combat system is one of the worst one's I've ever seen, to say nothing of the shit-tastic magic system. Actually - now that I think about - from a purely mechanical viewpoint, Morrowind wasn't all that great.
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Post by Sigil »

I realized back in the day that Morrowind had terrible combat, but I could accept that since it was all really dice rolls, I was fooled into thinking Oblivion's combat was good because it was so much better by comparison. It wasn't until I was playing Skyrim that I suddenly relized "Wait a minute, the actual gameplay here is kind of crap." Fallout 3 & New Vegas definately have the best combat of the Bethesda games (yeah, I know NV is Obsidian). The reason I keep coming back to Elder Scrolls is for the world, they manage to pull of the atmosphere of those games so well.
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