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.

Comments

MMO War Game

[skyman8081]

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.

Everyone's a game designer.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Everyone's a game designer.

[Shaper_pmp]

"Any game that is fun can be marketed because people will buy any game that is fun. The primary virtue of a game is it's level of fun. So unless your original concept was not fun, that assertion is false."

With the greatest respect, that's the biggest load of idealistic Utopian horse-pucky I've ever read.

"Build it and they will come" works when you only need a tiny fraction of the whole audience to make an endeavour worthwhile. Nobody, but nobody sinks millions of dollars into a game and relies on word-of-mouth to spread it.

Word of mouth might get you many things (respect, a hard core of gamers who passionately love your game, and lots of blog-coverage), but it won't get the game in stores, it won't push the game to Joe Sixpack who's too busy drinking beer to read gaming blogs (but who nevertheless represents 50%-99% of your market, depending on the platform), and it certainly won't allow the game to break even.

It is possible, I'll grant you, for tiny cult games, movies or books to achieve mainstream success, but this is a mixture of 5% excellence and 95% pure, dumb luck. For every one you see, there are literally hundreds of thousands that die cold and lonely deaths, unmissed by anyone.

I long for the day when this is true - when you can just produce something great and it'll automatically translate into wealth, fame and success - but even with the advent of the internet, that day is years (if not decades) away.

And still relies on luck, even when it arrives.

Total Annihilation

[supabeast!]

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.

Bab5 good, Culture better?

[Shaper_pmp]

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).