Concepts That Should Be Games? 203
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.
What i would like to see (Score:3, Interesting)
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
MMO War Game (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Hitchhiker's Guide (Score:3, Interesting)
A few ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
More heterogenous games (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Games made from non-obvious sources (Score:2, Interesting)
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*
Total Annihilation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Shadowrun or something cyberpunkish (Score:2, Interesting)
SPOILER Re:Stupid writer (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Paranoia RPG! (Score:2, Interesting)
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!
Bab5 good, Culture better? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Nation Sim focusing on culture (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [nationstates.net]. 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 [uplink.co.uk]
Something like that would definitely be worth my money.
Gi Joe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ringworld (Score:3, Interesting)
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.