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Concepts That Should Be Games?
Now that we've seen what's in the pipe for the immediate future IGN is running an article hoping for the games of the future, and talking about novels, tv shows, and other properties that they'd like to see be made into games. From the article: "...while we at IGN are all for original, non-franchise titles--reference Katamari, Psychonauts, God of War, Spore--a lot of us have places in our hearts for certain TV shows, films, and books that made us all fuzzy with joy." What would you like to see be made into a game? Microsoft, if you are listening, I have two words for you: Shadowrun MMOG.
Shadowrun for Sega Genesis > Shadowrun for SNES
I had a concept for a game , it was kind of like a massive RPG . ,And you could eventualy buy your own world and start to produce things managed in a sim city kind of way where you build it up and can have custom garages for your space ships and a trophy hall . . ...
in the spirit of elite , but with planet sections (which would work kind of like morrowind , daggerfal etc) you could buy new ships and fly them around wing commander style and fly to difrent worlds and get jobs
In the game would be a games console for which you could buy mini games to play on it in your house/home planet/fortress ship or whatever . a kind of freeform RPG with space battles , world building and Galactic domination
It would have to be on a scale unseen since the days of elite
You could get loads of difrent jobs etc well thats just me it may be a little tricky
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I've always wanted to see a massively multiplayer online War Game, where players of different ranks would fight each other, ranks would be determined by skill and luck.
A person who is a grunt on the ground plays in a very FPS type of play, the squad commander would be in charge of them, and it would play much more like Full Spectrum Warrior. Above that is the battlefield commander, who would control the squads via an interface similar to that of Total Annihilation. Above him is the admin appointed players who choose where to fight and to allocate resources in which battle. No autonomous power plants on the battle field, only supply lines to main generators.
Admins could reward sides who fund R&D with goodies to help them.
I've always wanted to play an RTS where all the grunts on the ground were live players.
Two Roommates and a Boyfriend, updates Monday, Wednesday, and Friday
It would probably translate into a game better than the movie (although I liked the movie, too).
Set it during the Shadow War/Severed Dreams era. Quarter of a million NPCs and players, all alone in the night.
But this has to be done right. Model the ENTIRE freaking station. Servers should transparently link up with each other so all players share the same 'world.'
Train to be a Ranger, or become a Shadow agent. Smuggle Dust to far off colonies. Explore hyperspace wih no chance of ever making it back to
safety. Trade alien goods Down Below. Fight off the breaching pods of EA (Earth Alliance, NOT Electronic Arts) as a gropo or take part in suicidal Starfury runs against Vorlon planet killers. The possibilities are endless.
I would love to see this come true...
The Kenshin cartoon series features a Japanese Battousai who has decided to live in peace and be a protector of the weak. Very humourous at times and lots of moves to incorporate in a game.
Help Pinky and The Brain as they try to take over the world.
I want to drive one of those funky vehicles!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I always thought that The Ring would make an interesting survival-horror--adventure game.
Just as everyone's a critic, everyone thinks that they have the ultimate game idea.
The problem is that every single person who plays videogames - from those that work in the industry to those who occasionally fire up a console - ALL have a couple of ideas for a game. Heck, working in a development team we often come up with several concepts a week just talking amongst ourselves.
The problem is not the ideas - it's the implementation. The basic idea takes 1% of the effort, 1% of the time. Building the damn thing is what takes effort. 18+ months of VERY hard work toiling on a project. By the time you have a couple of designers, a content team, engineering staff, a producer and a publisher - that's when things start to diverge from the original idea. It's very difficult to preserve the original purity of your concept because in the end you have to create a game that (1) has to be fun, (2) can be marketed, and (3) that people will buy. It doesn't matter if *you* think it's a cool idea, if it won't sell enough to recoup your investment - in which case, good luck feeding yourself.
Independent games are great when they can get made and can tackle some of these areas that mainstream games can't approach. But it's the "getting made" part that's hard.
I've always thought that the battles (both real and "play") in Ender's Game would lend themselves brilliantly to computer games - if you could work out a sufficiently immersive UI...
I read in the Time issue that featured the Xbox360 on the cover that the Xbox team was gearing up to produce experimental games that would have appeal beyond the current market of shooters and sports games, especially since they want to bring in the female buyers. Well, when Sierra still produced adventures, they brought in women players en masse, at least according to Sierra's then manager, Ken Williams. Why not bring them back? I'm sure if done right, they'd be a big success. Microsoft owns the rights to Tex Murphy, so that might be a start. :)
In the meantime, Chinese and Indian kids are kicking your asses daily. So you sue them too. But at least no one tells you that dinosaurs are more than 6000 years old, and you can pray in school.
I'd like to see some quality MMO and single-player RPG's come out for some popular Fantasy series/titles. A new Wheel of Time or Malazan Book of the Fallen MMO or RPG would be awesome. As for original ideas, I'm still waiting for a MMORTS. Rome: Total War Online, anyone?
-Woad
Knightlore - the classic isometric platformer is crying out for a voxel remake, the faux-3-d screens being rendered in 3-voxel space for more satisfying hidden-object-hunting, puzzle-troubling and pixel/voxel perfect jumps
Manic Miner - the 2-d platformer classic cries out for online multiplay in a rotatable voxel space consisting of stacked bitplanes, stacked bitplanes for each of the 20 screens, now you have to avoid collision with other miner willies and navigate up and down the stack because each key is non-locally connected to others, miner willy now starts randomly on the map btw
Cholo - in desperate need for a postmodern update, an in-game perpetual reimagination featuring higher and higher resolutions, wireframes to flat polygons to texture-mapped ones, the sprite anatagonists making their own similar evolution
atic atac - in desperate need for a visual reimagination, those faux-vector backdrops converted into gravitar-esque real ones, in game sprites and objects now converted to mario64-esque primary color ones, but still trapped on the x-y plane(!!)
End Transmission
Big-O's giant robot battles had a sense of weight and realism to them. Imagine an on-screen Roger Smith pulling back that lever, and watching that giant pneumatic hammer arm rearing back....
The incongruous giant robot sections of the N64 Goemon games are the closest thing to the idea that's in my own personal gaming experience: a robot's cockpit view of the action, laggy, weighty controls, and a wide variety of attacks for different situations. I really think it'd work absurdly well, though I'd imagine that the chances of a Big-O licensed game are next to none by now.
And this is harcking back some, maybe someone can remember. There is a C64 magazine called Zzap 64 and in the back they would have a comic strip, and in one of these they described the God Game.
A real God Game, one where there's a nice inhabitted world, and you have godly powers to summon whatever you please to aid, or (more likely) hinder the people of the world.
Thats what I want
I want to perform evil "acts-of-god" dropping large rocks on groups of people etc.
Even controlling religion, bringing back sacrifical ceremonies.
That would be fun.
CJC (I'd get out more but I'm worried about the falling rocks)
Really, were have gone all that multidisciplinar games that there were in the beginning, games that were at the same time an RPG, a graphic adventure, an strategy game and some action/arcade, like Dune, Sword of the samurai or Defender of the crown?
I know every part of those games wasn't top of the art even in their times nor very complex (like the knights tournaments in DotC or the duels in Sword of the samurai), but they added a great immersive component to the game and some needed variation. What I would really like to see, was a turn based strategy game that allowed you to resolve the battles in RTS (something like the Total war series) but also with the ability to set individual epic missions which could be resolved like FPS, for instance.
Imagine for a moment that the missions in SW Rebellion could be resolved playing a Jedi Knight level, and the galactic battles piloting a fighter like in X-Wing or Tie Fighter.
Everyone knows that movie and TV licences almost invariably suck. Hard. Stick to (pretending) to make original games, please.
When they manage to get the plot wrong on the very first work they cover (Ender's Game was NOT about shipping children off long-distances in the hopes that they wouldn't have died of old age by the time they got there!) you can't have much interest in the rest of the article.
Well, that article ignored the fact that Fahrenheit 451 has already been made into a game. But what can you expect from the snes kiddies at IGN...
Anyway, I'd like to see games made out of stories that don't exactly sound like gaming material. The classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber would make a unique game. With a plot primarily revolving around relationships between characters and the obligations that customs force upon them, gameplay would have to be very different from the standard action game (though it is amusing to try to imagine the story used in a 3d platformer). The most obvious gameplay choice is to use the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style of selecting choices from a menu at the bottom of the screen, but that type of gameplay is almost universally derided as boring. Just look at the reviews of Sprung to see how much people hate that style of game. A better way would be to give the player some general goals and (through an internal monologue of the character he's controlling) some hints on how to achieve them. Then, using some sort of relationship indicator that graphically represents how an npc views the pc and also shows the npc's personality traits (which are gradually filled in as the player converses with the npc) so as to give the player a way of learning how to influence the npc, the player could choose conversation options and have this indicator change as the npc's opinion of him changes. There would also be a relationship chart that is filled in (again) as the player converses, which tracks the relations of npcs to each other - which can change based upon what the player does or tells them.
Another idea of mine is a game based upon the Phantom of the Opera, which seems to have been adapted into just about every entertainment medium except for videogames (yes, there was even a pinball table). Like the movie of last year, I'd base it more upon the stage musical than the original book, though a game would work well for fleshing out elements of the Phantom's past that were revealed in the book but not in the musical. Anyway, I'd include several genres - (sword)fighting, platforming, rhythm (an obvious for a game based upon a musical), abstract puzzle-solving, and traditional puzzle-solving adventuring. I'd set it up so that losing is impossible. Instead of having to reload if a swordfight is lost, the game would shift to a non-action sequence. In other words, puzzle-solving is all that would be REQUIRED to finish the game, but I'd have alternate endings and more plot details if the action sequences are successfully completed. That way anyone would be able to finish the game, and they'd be motivated to replay it to try completing sequences that were failed. One major key aspect, though, would be to keep the failure invisible and keep the player unaware that he's slowly ending up with sequences that are impossible to fail. Then, only after the end credits and whatnot, would the status report be shown on how many sequences were successfully completed.
Actually, Dreamfall sounds awfully similar to this idea. I wonder if Funcom has developed mind-reading devices. Just like the ones Sega used to learn about cel-shading from me in 1996 (and honestly, I did sketch out ideas about flatshaded polygons with black borders selectively applied to certain edges.)
*builds an aluminum foil hat*
I'm looking for a single player, simultaneous multiple entity game. The entities must have distinct roles as individuals and be able to perform specific team actions, whilst the player maintains individual control. I'm not talking about mouse control, where agents follow predefined behaviours, I want controller control, where if I drop concentration for a fraction of a second I loose control. Think monkeyball with 2+ balls, or a topdown/side scroller, isometric rpg
I've been playing games for over 20 years. I'm good, and the current set of games just don't stretch my abilities. At the moment all I seem to be doing, is:
I can't be the only one looking a for a challenge. I'll admit the market must be smaller, but it doesn't have to be an eye candy fest, just fun and difficult.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I would like to see a MMORPG based on FOX's popular science fiction franchise. I don't care about Predator (Aliens vs. Predators). I know FOX had a game like this before MMORPG was known.
I would like to see something like World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Galaxies, etc. with various missions (quests) in various places. There would be different classes as well like Natural Selections including commanders, ships (medic, weapons, etc.).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I have two words for you: Shadowrun MMOG
;)
That's five words!
One good turn - gets all the covers.
If you have a decent idea for a game, patent it! After all, that's what patents are all about. Be greedy and selfish, if it's really a good idea maybe the game studios will licence it.
MMORPG, with perma-death and insanity effects... set in the early 20th century and two main worlds (the normal one and the dreaming).
For example, when describing "Enders Game" he writes that: The gist of Ender's Game is that Earth is in danger of annihilation by an insectoid race. The twist is that the battle is taking place a long, long way from home, requiring Earth to train children to save the human race so that they won't die of old age by the time they reach the battlefield.
That is, infact, as they say "not even wrong". Ok, so it's correct that earth is in war with some aliens, but that's about it.
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But when Ender ends up commanding the flotilla in the final battle against the aliens (while himself beliving, or atleast being made to believe it is merely yet-another exersize) he is not old at all.
I don't remember if the book says exactly how old he is, but he gets put into military training from age ~7 and spends some time in two different (in-space) academies before this happens. I'd say he's probably a teenager or so.
If a 7 year old can command the battle at say 15, they could just aswell have started with a 20 year old and let him command at 28. Why this ain't done, but instead children are used isn't really explained in depth.
Wow, we're all impressed by your big words. Monkeyball with two balls would just be more of the same. You'd just have to do it twice as fast.
A shadowrun MMORPG would be so sweet. Shadowrun had some of the best concepts around, and was probably my favorite PNP game. I loved that you had the cyber stuff, implants, vampires, orcs, and vehicles decked out with missile launchers.
Another one I daydream about is a Transformers MMORPG. That one is a little trickier though. Since there is a predefined set of characters, I am not sure if you can really do it well. I am not sure it would be as fun to just be a random robot. I would want the chance to be one of the actual old-school Transformers. I probably wouldn't even care which one, except that it wouldn't really be that exciting to be Soundwave. He's awesome, but turning into a cassette player isn't exactly fantastic.
/. ++
I would like to see a game about good versus evil fighting with light swords in a galaxy far far away. And maybe they could make a series of movies about it (I'm pretty sure this hasn't been done yet, at least I haven't seen any mention of anything like this ever on Slashdot). And, if its really good they could merchandise all the items and submit the profits to the open source community. --- Seriously though, I don't think just a new idea is needed but a change from the same old concept of taking the same engine and just generating different graphics. Fundamentally a new successful game is one in which breaks out of the current genre and does something new and different. It's not the idea for the story but how it is implemented.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Will Wright's PEE
i think they're on to something
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
How about just a nice continuation of Total Annihilation? I just want a wargame that plays slowly and tends to last for hours, instead of the current crop of *Craft games and their knockoffs where I just end up fighting off the latest rush tactic from Korea in games that rarely last more than thirty minutes.
And before anyone points it out, I do realize that there's an Open-Source remake in the works, but I'm looking for a big studio production.
I thoroughly enjoyed Shadowrun as a RPG, and I'd like to see that turned into a MMOG. But at this point I'd take any edgy futuristic game (Cyberpunk, Warhammer 40k, even Twilight 2k). I haven't been too impressed with the sci-fi games that have been coming out. I have some hope for Auto Assault, but if that falls through a good Car Wars game is in order.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
It's hinted at and stated openly several times throughout the book. If you enjoyed it at all you might do well to re-read it because you managed to gloss over one of the central themes of the book.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
Online multiplayer (not massively) mystery/adventure game. Basically I'd like to see something like Gabriel Knight 3 put online with cooperative mystery solving as the main purpose of the game.
Each server would be a single detailed town or city in which the mysteries take place. Server population is kept low to encourage tight communities and the ability for everyone to have a role in solving the plot. Every couple of months the game designers come up with a new mystery plot to solve. They scatter clues around the town, give certain bits of information to certain PCs and then let them go wild trying to search for clues and combine information to solve the mystery. To make things interesting you make other PCs people who are trying to cover up and protect the mystery. So they're out looking for clues in order to steal them or killing off other players who have information on the plot.
It would take some brainstorming to figure out how to work all this as far as game rules go, but if it could be pulled off I think it would be one of the most interesting games out there.
I think he wanted something like the Japanese horror movie "The RIng" (aka Ringu), or its (IMO lame) American (or is it Canadian?) remake.
I don't need a signature.
Most /. users would say something a little different to Microsoft: "**** ***!" (I switched to Linux/Mac).
I don't need a signature.
As much as I loved God of War (it is a truly great game), it's not very original. It followed in very much the same path as Devil May Cry, Onimusha, and Prince of Persia in front of it. Now, granted, it's better than all of those, but the base concepts and visual style are basically the same.
Oddly enough, Katamari Damacy was a truly original game, but I *didn't* enjoy it for some reason.
-- Jinsaku
So, between an augmented Street Samurai and an initiate Mage, who would win the fight?
Seriously, as much as I love Shadowrun, its idea, atmosphere, etc... it features serious balancing issues. As the rules stand, a single mage could take out a whole corpo squadron with a twitch of the finger. On an MMORPG, this would kill it. It would need to be tweaked to an extent far beyond what any game company would be ready to invest in.
Otherwise, the rules would have to be changed deeply enough to lose a large part of what makes Shadowrun, well, Shadowrun.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Then you should be playing Savage, which has precisely this set-up. Windows & Linux versions.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Now that was a great game... I never did complete it, but I loved the exploration aspect. The first link on the Google search you posted includes a link to this site, where it looks like there's a homebrew remake underway. I hope they manage to complete it, although the page doesn't seem to have been updated since last year...
I particularly liked the ability to download and copy programs from robot to robot, solving puzzles with combinations of a utility provided by a specific program with the abilities of the type of robot carrying it. Nice mechanism - cool stuff.
Dark Tower Series by Stephen King
Otherland Series by Tad Williams
The Computer is your friend!
Of course, you'd go through clones a bit too quickly...
Would still be fun -- backstabbing, confusion, lies, deceipt, mutants -- everything one could ask for!
Fantastic idea, but what about a game explicitely based in Iain M. banks' Culture universe? (Aside from Halo, which unofficially "borrowed" quite heavily from it). The Culture novels sketch out an immensely complex and textured universe with wonderful characters, story-lines and set-pieces. They'd lend themselves to almost any game, but something cinematic, involving and immersive like a good FPS (less Doom, more Halo/Half Life 2/Deus Ex) would show it off to best effect.
I'd want something comparatively similar to Halo - at least some missions on an Orbital (just for the awe-inspiring location), but you could also have plenty on planets, GSVs or even AirSpheres (how cool would that be? And technically *easy* since it's almsot entirely enpty air).
Antoher cool thing would be streaming level geometry, so you can have effectively unbounded levels.
One thing I remember reading about Halo when it was first mooted was the idea that there wouldn't be "levels" as such - instead the engine would stream landscape off the hard disk, bump-mapping and abstracting it to reduce level of detail (and so processor time) as it got further away (like GTA3, with a further-away horizon, or Black & White's "whole island zooms in to worm in apple" engine).
You could (I believe) relatively easily generate such a system using algorithmic modeling (like Spore) for terrain, with geometry and bitmapped textures only explicitely specified for set-piece areas and buildings dotted around the map. The feeling of freedom would immerse you more in the game than any number of in-engine cutscenes, even if you spent 90+% of your time moving between planned-out set-piece locations.
You could break the monotony by requiring the player to change location at points in the game (eg, to other Orbitals/planets/etc), but once on one you could travel anywhere within it without waiting for loading screens or encountering impassable barriers (except on the outer edges of Orbitals/Plates, obviously).
Of course, an bump-mapping engine that good would also allow you to fly diametrically across Orbitals, or land on planets from orbit, so it should then be relatively trivial to even allow for flight-based missions (using true physics, please - none of this "spaceships handle like atmospheric planes" crap).
Imagine foot-based missions on an Orbital, which end with you getting into a shuttle, flying up to an orbiting GSV and flying/dogfighting (a la Consider Phlebas) within its interior structure, all without stopping to load...
(Ok, GSVs would probably also have to have their geometry explicitely (rather than algorithmically) defined, but with the huge memory capacities of today's desktop PCs, I still can't see any show-stopping problems as long as the "transit from orbital-to-GSV" time was long enough to stream the GSV into memory first. Hell, spice it up with a dogfight or two on the way, and the user won't even notice the time).
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
It mentions 1984 possibly as an RPG, which would be interesting. But I think I'd rather have Sims: 1984. Atlhough, it'd be just a wee bit darker and bleaker than the other Sims titles, so maybe the branding wouldn't work so well. But a sims-type game set in Orwell's 1984.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Oh, let's see off the top of my head... Everything on GameCube? Every review talks about how perfect Zelda: Breaking Wind of the Maker is, or how terrific the Mario: Moonshine was, but basically the core videogame audience goes out and buys Grand Theft Auto, Gran Turismo, Halo, SOCOM, etc. PS2 is marketed to adults, and that's what most gamers are now. And that's okay, not everyone wants a 3d Candyland to run around in.
;)
Other examples? Monkey Island, Dirt Track Racing, Klonoa, Hunting games, even Final Fantasy X-2 and NASCAR 2005. I don't want to play a game like X-2 if it looks gay. On the other hand, try to market NASCAR or hunting games to non-fans. They're challenging, fun and different. But you can't get the guy with the Acura in his driveway to even consider them.
Non-virtual example? Soccer in the United States is a marketing problem, not a "fun" problem.
Imagine this: Blizzard finally releases Starcraft 2. But let's say they use the same 75mb executable and 5 year old technology. It has new alien races, all new tech trees, etc, perfectly balanced. Tons of fun. But you know what? It has a marketing problem. It wouldn't really sell. It's a marketing problem because you can't just say 'fun' on every game box- anyone can do that. You've got to have '3d interactive graphics, surround sound, smarter SCVs, adjustable AI', etc., etc. And you've got to give your core fan base new stuff- or they won't 'evangelize' for you.
But if they call it 'Retro Starcraft', then it sells. That's marketing.
Doctor Who would make the ultimate MMORPG since the back story would essentially allow you to go anywhere and do anything. You could fight in the Roman Colisseum one day, then travel to the far future and intervene in the Dalek Civil War the next.
The new series has established the Time Lords are no more, but perhaps the time travelling American will end up having a sufficiently compelling backstory that players could fill in, as Time Agents or rogues.
One word and 4 letters?
I've always thought that the XBOX needs an American Final Fantasy, which I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't tried (Diablo series coming pretty close already). Basically, XBOX doesn't sell well in Japan, and they've only talked about (never even delivered) MMORPGs. They need a classic RPG, a headliner, to pull in at least some curious hardcore Japanese gamers. I think they really missed their chance with the original XBOX.
Needless to say, I have plot, gameplay and marketing hook in mind, AND I'm not sharing them.
I would like to see a game with a dynamic system based on all kinds of sociology and psychology (basically culture in general) including religion. The probem with a lot of the games that involve culture is that the 'cultures' in them are preset and unchangable.
A game where you get to mold the details of a culture and see how it develops and how it interacts with other cultures would be fantatic.
A primitive version of what I am thinking of would be something like NationStates. With that, you just set up a style of government, and you deal with issues that it sends you every day. I am thinking more along the lines of something realtime where you not only delt with issues that it gives you, but also initiated events yourself, actively influencing the culture.
The culture would have various subcultures in it: religious, intellectual, militant, pacifist, apathetic, civil-rights-loving, and others groups of that nature. There would also be a counterculture element, if the culture moves in one direction, a certain low percentage of the population would move in the opposite direction.
In the real world, naturally an individual person can belong to more than one subculture. But of course in the game we are looking at the cumulative effect, not at individuals.
Some subcultures might work well together and a person could easily be a member of both, like intellectual and freedom-loving, while others are almost entirely incompatible in the same person, like pacifist and militant. Subcultures like that would even be aligned against each other.
There would be two numbers attached to each of the subcultures, one would be the number of people in that subculture (the sum of all of these could very well be greater than the population, since an individual can be in more than one subculture). The other would be how strong that subculture is, perhaps what percentage of the 'Ideosphere' (for lack of a better term) the ideals of that culture take up. For instance, if two subcultures have approximatly the same number of people, but the people in one are more vehement in their beliefs, then that subculture would have a higher percentage.
The player would decide what kind of government the country would have: democratic, totalitatian, theocratic, etc. I am thinking that a good way to do this is instead of selecting a pre-defined type of government, all the various types could be broken down into thier defining elements, and the player could modify those elements at will, perhaps even mid-game.
The user would deal with issues that are raised (or that he raises himself) involving economy, education, censorship, foreign policy, how the government works, civil rights, the government's attitude toward those rights, and other things of that nature. How the player deals with the issues would define how the culture changes and develops.
I think that if there are going to be wars in the game, then they should be fought automatically. The player would be more concerned with the affect of the war on the populous. Although the player would be able to divert resources to the military; this would also have an affect on the culture, as would where the resources came from.
I am not sure what kind of interface the game would have. If nothing graphically representational can be though of, it might just be a series of menus, charts, and dialog boxes, kind of like the game Uplink
Something like that would definitely be worth my money.
Technoli
I would love to see a game (quite likely an RPG though I suppose a FPS would make more sense) that takes place in Stephen King's Dark Tower universe(s). King touched upon many interesting ideas and locations that unfortunately could not be explored to their fullest conclusion, and it seems that a video game would be a nice way of doing so.
World of Starcraft, an MMO FPS/RTS similar to Savage in style with a hint of Guildwars in instanced battleground with constructible structures.
Set on a ship where the speed of light is 10 meters per second. It's easy to exceed the speed of sound, and a good run will shift colors and cause objects to bend. Everything you see is at least slightly in the past.
An FPS would be very interesting (and educational, even!) but doing multiplayer would be extremely hard if you wanted to model time dilation too...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
For those not familiar with the Scifi short story by (I think?) James Blish, _Surface Tension_ is the story of a human colony seedship (an interstellar colony ship which specialized in creating genetically engineered humans that can live in environments where normal humans could not) which crashes on a planet where the only life is microscopic and lives in various ponds and puddles.
:-)
The survivors manage to create microscopic humans that could successfully compete in a microscopic environment with various local creatures, and they engraved a significant amount of their knowledge databases on a series of microscopic metal plates before they died.
The short story (and the game) takes place in the context of those microscopic people who are living in a puddle and wondering what "space" and "stars" are.
Individual servers could be puddles, etc.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
How about a MMO GI Joe game. Then I can send a trainee home in an itty bitty ditty bag. Maybe each server only has the exact number of characters open, so when you join a server you get assigned one of the title characters until you die. Join a different server and get someone different. Eventually you get to play destro or snakeyes or the ultimate - Road Block the rhyming chef.
I wanted to play a game that featured those scrubbing bathroom bubbles, or one which featured the booger-like characters on the Nerds candy boxes!
I'll toss out some ideas that, when trying to actually flesh out, probably fall appart very quickly, but here they are anyways.
First, the extension of genera.
Online dueling. Idea is mostly spawned from jedi outcast.
I'd like to see the dueling aspect improved upon. Take it back to a classic medieval setting. Have guys with minor sorcery powers. Things like being able to manipulate the enviroment and a few minor acrobatic moves. This way the focus is on weapons dueling, but you can make it more interesting with the sorcery to help along.
Examples to use with the sorcery would be throwing objects at an opponent to stun or do minor damage, shoving or pushing an opponent to drop their guard or make them fall over. Or jumpping higher for once, springing over an oponent, running up a wall.
I'd like there to be one hit kills similar to bushido blade. I want defense to be somewhat difficult to penatrate, but not too hard. I'd like the game to be mostly about timing and positioning then anything. Though, I do not want the pacing to be as fast as a typical fighting game. Slow it down just a bit from there to account for latency.
There would be a variety of fighters and weapons. The fighters might be premade with their weapons or, since we are dreaming here, each fighter can choose whatever weapon they want. There would be big strong characters and small fast ones and everything in between. Each character might be stronger with sorcery or more resistant to it then another. Like they might have a big strong barbarian who is resistant to magic who can shrug off attempts to knock him over or toss things in his path.
I'd like to see the ability to hack arms legs and the head, wrists, whatever, from your oponent. Not in pre defined locations but where the weapon made contact. I'd also like to see blunt hammers smashing shields and faces alike.
This is of coarse easy to say, but difficult to create. For a brief moment I thought iron phenoix might touch on this idea but it did not.
The main points of the game are, 3rd person view, momvement very similar to jedi outcast. But i'd like everybody to walk slower, run in small bursts maybe, but have it limited. Smaller arenas to reflect this, with lots of objects to move around and toss at each other.
Lethal weapons, if you take a direct axe hit to your head, you die. But if I am good enough, i'd like to take appart a foe piece by piece, hack off an arm, slash him a few times so he starts staggering, before you finally put him down.
There needs to be some way to improve the sword swinging technique beyond what jedi did. the problem with jedi was that if you wanted to slash horizontaly, you had to be moving left or right to initate it. There also wasn't much point to continuing the combo as it left you vunerable afterwards. So it needs to be refined a lot more if the focus is weapon fighting.
There should be a block button as well, and it should not be too reliant on the dirction the attack is coming to. I'd like to see a foe fall by blocking an attack behind him, leaving him open to the guy in front to swing at his expoded front killing him unless he dodges away.
Couple game modes, dueling and ffa melees. In dueling mode, winner stays. But spectators can choose to specatate, or join a little cage or something off to the side where they can just have a mini ffa while they wait their turn to duel.
Ok, other game idea, somewhat unique i guess:
Dead Colonist.
Basically the idea is you are colonizing some odd world. You crash land and have to fend for yourself. The world is different every game you start, things are randomized. You have to figure out how to survive, initial, feed your guys, reproduce, create tools, whatever.
The world will have an interesting ai colony of creatures on it. They will of coarse be very hostile until you figure out how to interact with them. But otherwise they will have a set patern depending on the game of what they do and when they do it.
I always thought you could do enjoyable games based on Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's so damn huuuuuge, you could have a series of games and have each take place in a different, unique locale. Towns, floating cities, plains, mountains, oceans, Mars map, etc. It could be MMO, but I would think a third-person game would be most flexible.
If someone were to take this one, don't just follow the books. Sure, sprinkle in some events from the books (we like to see that) but don't let it be about Louis Wu. What about the Hero who was walking the "Great Arch" (the Ringworld)? Let him be the central character. He could accept missions/quests from each town he visits, which would take him into the surrounding areas (forests, plains, mountains, etc.)
Since it's the Hero, I can imagine lots of swordplay and action. Maybe some platforming in between. Something like the 'Prince of Persia' games.
I would think a game company could do a long series of games following the Hero across the Ringworld without repeating areas.
"Small Wonder Online"
I read Slashdot for the articles
Check out the demo. I remember playing it for like a month, that's how fun it was. It gets quite interesting when there are quite a few players. The strategy is really the most important part, individual player skill I would say comes second.
Massively Multiplayer Elite. Serious, who wouldn't buy that?
I've always wanted to see an updated version of Wing Commander: Armada. It was the perfect blend of strategy and flight combat. Think Homeworld with the ability to pilot the ships.
How about an online game based on the ill fated Harsh Realm.
So you would be a person, playing a person, playing charater in a online game.... wow that makes my head hurt.
Whale Hunt.
Baby Seal Club.
Baghdad Sniper.
Zionist World Order.
Mega-Corp Butt-Rape.
hey, i think these'd be fun games to play, anyway
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Pitch Black would make a great game, oh wait, epic already ripped it off for Gears of War ;)
I'd love to play an RPG set in Niven's Ringworld. (I know there is/was a pen & paper version, though I've never played it.)
Even better might be an MMORPG set on the ring. With a surface area of 1.6 x 10^15 square kilometres, and myriad cultures one could play forever and never get bored! (Well, that's probably not quite true. ;)
Hell, even just a game set in Known Space, be it a Man-Kzin war RTS or space sim or FPS or what-have-you.
Maybe a strategy (think Civ) or RTS game where the player assumes the role of a Pak Protector...
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
I believe something like this had tried to come out at one point. Not sure whatever happened to it... (and can't remember what it was called... I hate getting old)
What I envision is a adventure/mystery "game" that has interaction not only online, but through email, SMS messages or automated phone calls. Kind of like an interactive mystery novel or sci-fi adventure
For example, if it's murder mystery to solve you would get an email starting out with the basic details of the crime. You could go online and view the scene (a la downloading a map from the server) looking for clues or you could reply to the email to have your "virtual crime team" search the scene. They would return some info about it, but possibly not as much information that you could come up with looking at the scene yourself. From there, you have to make a decision on what you will do with the info you have and what you will let your team do on your behalf.
While I have not thought out all the details, I do think incorporating technology outside of the PC or console could benifit gameplay.
Now this type of game would not play as fast as your typical frag-fest, of course. But there are many types of players out there and I could see this deep immersion-type game genre (if I can use that word) becoming popular.
We have "Pirates of the Caribbean" the ride and the movie.
I sugguest "It's A Small World" where you get to smash those freakin little dolls and blow up those speakers
I think that would rule. Snow Crash would be especially fun as you delivered pizzas in the Deliverator.
Battle Royale should be made into a online survival game. Each player starts off with their random weapon and then has to hunt for the others on the island while Beat Takeshi shouts over the loudspeakers!
Take something like World of Warcraft, and let players combat, level, and learn new abilities not only in normal mode, but when they're ghosts too. You could learn different kinds of abilities (like "Possess" or "Telekinesis" and have different sets of classes (like banshee, poltergeist etc) for the otherworldly side of your character at the same time you're building your normal abilities. So when you die, you go from Warrior to Poltergeist, and back to Warrior when you resurrect. It would be very interesting to see what people would do with it - some people might end up staying a ghost.
"That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you." -A. Whitney Brown
It's called 'Halo'
I love those Monkey Island style adventure games. They're some of the most fun ever.
What I've been waiting for in the ten odd years since I last threw a die in a role playing game is something that can encompass a global, or at least regional feel of social interactivity. I've spent a bit of time day dreaming how I think you could capture the feel of a traditional rpg fantasy world into a mmorpg and this is what I have come up with.
First, the game would have a distribution cap, that is, there would only be say 100,000 thousand licenses sold. Rather than raw sales the games profit would be based on subscription, which would be higher than competing games. If successful this creates a population cap of players, and thus the game can be better managed with the appropriate numbers of servers/support but moreso, it also provides a stable gaming environment and one that will mature with players. Ideally the subscription base is slightly below demand, which if successful makes even owning a license of the game valuable.
Second, the subscription buys more than just server time. A staff of game writers(overlords) provide a grand overture of the times and troubles throughout the land (hierarchy to be described below). A coherent story line based on the worlds extents would be worked out before release to provide a template of events for the writers. Bi-annual patches could be applied by the game writers's to help conform the world to the original story scheme. Ultimately the game would have a finite time limit of say five years.
The game world is a free-market, everything is for sale between independent players in world and out. The game would charge no tariff as subscription fees cover the lost revenue. This would further involve players into the game world as well as add a vital element of economic reality.
As an effort to create a balance, and stem anarchy, all licenses would come with a duality. A license would enable a typical player character of traditional adventuring fantasy type to exist, but in addition an NPC or a controlled character would exist. This is what I find to be the most interesting idea of this rant. The NPC, whether it be a shopkeeper, stone mason or guard or any other 'constructive' social occupation is what would anchor the world and provide true social interactivity. The way this would be accomplished would be by providing reward from hours logged as an NPC. This time would go towards overall account credits. What these account credits would be spent on could be a vast assortment such as: property, game power, or GM'ing rights.
I think that duality could be woven in to a fantasy game nicely too. The point isn't that hours would have to be spent on menial labor but rather living characters embody the entire world and those that participate in the running of the world are rewarded, whether this be for good or evil. Obviously, a character would only embody one game entity at a time.
Lastly, the GM would be brought back in to the game, controlling monsters and informing 'NPCs' of relevant story information. This would be accomplished through the aforementioned 'participation points or account credits' - the greater the NPC/GM participation the greater the GM's (or characters) power to manipulate world events. A hierarchy stemming down from the Game company to those with vested time/interaction would be given larger chunks of the game world story to enforce - or not?
So some years ago (right after SimAnt was released), I was playing a few games and realized that it sucked that you had to stay to a certain pattern of playing. You had no real control of the world around you. Your character was predetermined by the game, etc... I was quite young (around 12?) at the time, and had no concept of programming at the time.
So I had a brilliant idea for a game called Live a Life. You basically would just be a person. Go to work, have a house, have friends, go to the store, go to school, etc... You could have relationships, move things around, do anything you wanted. There was no real 'point' to the game or goal, but it seemed fun. So I called a few game companies in my ignorance, and told them that I had a game idea that would sell millions.
One of the companies happened to be EA, because I knew they liked Simulation games, and thought that it could be an expansion of SimCity. They said that they didn't need any more ideas for development, but that they would listen to me. I was young and very dumb, and told them my idea...
Now, the Sims, the most sucessful game that they have ever made. Up there with Mario, Zelda and Quake. Maybe a conincidence, but I'm not so sure.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
There WAS a game of "fahrenheit 451"! This article is wrong for suggesting that it never existed.
It was a text with graphics adventure game on the Commodore 64.
http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=2650&d=18&h=0
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
A group of us made a simple networked 3D Real Time Strategy game with sets from early 90's Lego Space themes (Ice Planet 2002, Blacktron II and Spacepolice II) as the units.
It was horribly inefficent, ran like a dog, and crashed 30 seconds into a networked game, but damnnit, it was the realization of a lifelong dream to see a fleet of Spacepolice Galactic Mediators and Rebel Hunters charge toward a fleet of Blacktron Allied Avengers and Aerial Intruders, even if it was just polygons.
I'd love for a company to do something similar.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
This is the only reference to TA I've found was there another that was better?
sorta steals off of disneys thing with toon town, but an MMORPG of south park could be pretty damn hilarious... Allow characters to interface with one another via chatting, bitch slapping, ro-sham-bo, and whatever else you can think of.. i think that would be pretty hilarious and dont forget some classic NPC's like CHEF the other idea, is a COPS MMFPS type of thing, think GTA4 meets LAW enforcement entirely online, so that you players on both ends of the game. i think it would be a nice change of pace, not to mention itd be fun to beat up some white trash :-p
last idea, although im sure its been thought of, but not done yet, is a field lacrosse video game... dont even mention Blast lacrosse, that was A. indoor box lacrosse, and B. crappy as hell, the control was miserable... anyhow enjoy
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
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