Slashdot Mirror
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'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
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.
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.