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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.
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).
It may not be *massively* multiplayer, but the folks of the
Babylon 5 : I've Found Her
project have done some marvelous work. Its in progress right now, but I had quite a bit of fun with the (free) prequel campaign. It is one of the few space fighter sims that seems to understand that momentum is conserved. They have both 'controlled' flight, where the corrections are made for you, and 'free' flight where you can gather enormous speeds.
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'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
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 have two words for you: Shadowrun MMOG
;)
That's five words!
One good turn - gets all the covers.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Seriously, though, there's a game for PSP called Mercury, I think, where you're guiding an amount of mercury through a level, monkeyball style, but the blob can split up (and often has to) and you have to accomplish certain things (switches, etc.) with separate portions of the mercury. That sounds like something you might be interested in. Reviews have stated that it's a very interesting concept and works pretty well, but the learning curve is apparently very steep and later levels can be extremely tedious. I've actually considered getting it if I can find it anywhere.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
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.
Want a challenge?
Try getting women to sleep with you.