Thanks a lot for making this thread Metz! I've had a lot of thoughts on this subject rolling around in my head lately, and it'll be nice to get a chance to write them down (even if it might end up sounding boring to everyone else).
I have been conceptualizing my idea of a next gen MMO for quite a while, and I think I have hit on a formula that, while probably unrealistic from a butget perspective, seems like it could be incredibly engaging.
The game would be set in a Fantasy world, but hopefully one removed from most of the generic stuff (no orcs, elves, etc). So far so usual, with two big exceptions.
1.1: You are playing in your world. Your actions will have real impact on the lives of the NPCs living in your version of the world setting. Much more on that later.
1.2: The world is huge. Using some kind of procedural generation tech (such as the one in No Man's Sky) the world would be the closest to "proper scale" of basically any fantasy game to date. Most of that space would be boring, of course. Huge tracts of farmlands with only the occasional villager, deep forests, etc. More on why this isn't a problem to follow.
The game would be built on a few core concepts, some of which can be described in terms of other games.
2.1: The parallel worlds and lore-connected game mechanics of the Souls games.
This is in a sense the very beating heart of the game. As a player you are a unique individual in your world, defined by your ability to magically travel through time, space and dimensions. This explains why you can fast-travel between cities that are hours apart, and ties into the way multiplayer works. When you fall in battle during a quest, rather than dying you "desync" (in the style of the Assassins Creed games), dropping out of that timeline. The consequences of that failure remain, however.
This is the core of how your world belongs to you. Friends and strangers can join your quests (optional, of course), but the choices and consequences belong to you. They can, however, choose to let the outcome of your actions echo in their world (enemies killed, people liberated etc.) I imagine there being a sort of "world tendency" or attunement system in place, described further below. Multiplayer thus basically works in one of two ways, either you "synchronise" your worlds, fighting together to achieve a goal across all of your worlds, or you simply aid another player in their world or them in yours, sharing personal rewards but only affecting the world progression of one player.
The story significance of this wouln't necessarily have to be that big of a deal. I imagine some kind of mysterious figure explaining your powers to you, after which he basically says that you will be needed to save the world some day, but what you do until then is up to you to decide.
2.2: Strategy elements and world progression
Essentially, each zone in the game is based around a single city or outpost of the player's faction. At the start of the game these places are threatened from all sides by enemies. The actions of the player (mostly through procedurally generated quests) will strengthen the cities forces, increase its prosperity and weaken its enemies. Each city shares its zone with other NPC factions, including other races as well as rogue elements such as bandits and intelligent monsters. The kind of quests that are available at any point depend on the state of the conflicts between these, with each major faction in a zone being driven by a very simple strategy game-style AI. They all want resouces, which will cause friendly factions to generate quests to take over resource points, and enemy factions to attack friendly resource points which will in turn trigger defense quests. Other missions might include caravan raids, hunting down patrols or raiders, destroying outposts and watchtowers, killing faction leaders and so on. As an enemy faction starts to lose ground they will become more and more aggressive, but as your faction secures resources and strategic points it will grow stronger and more prosperous, allowing the city to literally grow as the strategic AI plonks down more buildings as people and industries move in.
Every zone is made up of dozens (probably hundreds) of sections, each containing one or more points of interest. This might be a resource node like a mine or a farm, a strategic point like a hill or fort, or some magical or unique location. Most of them will be controlled by some kind of faction, or a potential ally. Beyond those there would of course be random patrols and wild animals.
This would essentially give a player two ways of travelling the world. Firstly, they can simply go to the city and see what kind of quests are available. Each quest unlocks a fast travel point they can use to bring themselves and any allies they might want to bring straight to the section they need to be. Secondly, they can simply ride around in the world until they happen upon a point of interest, which would automatically unlock a quest related to it. For example, finding an enemy watch tower would automatically give a quest to report back to the marshall in town (giving a minor reward and a minor improvement to the city's safety rating), which would then trigger a quest to neutralize/destroy/capture the watch tower (giving larger rewards). Similarly, finding a neutral faction would trigger a quest to make contact, which might branch off into quests to befriend or destroy the faction.
It would also be possible to ally with some of the major factions. Sometimes two NPC factions might be in conflict with one another but neutral towards the player faction, allowing you to ally one at the expense of antagonizing the other. In other cases a faction might start hostile with the player, but become neutral or even friendly if the right kinds of quests are followed (perhaps by killing monsters attacking them, rescuing individuals from other factions, etc. Any kind of coexistance would of course mean less resources for the player faction, but the alliance built with a friendly faction and increased security from peaceful coexistance might make this a price well worth paying. Once friendly with a faction, it would of course start generating quests for you. These faction conflicts would offer plentiful opportunities for multiplayer cooperation, but also PVP, allowing players with different world tendencies to join in on quests where they have opposing goals.
2.3: A wider application of the nemesis system from Shadows of Mordor
With so many NPCs in the world there is potential for some really interesting world building by letting players build relationships with NPC's, both hostile and friendly. When it comes to hostile NPCs it would work much as it does in Shadows of Mordor. Nearly every quest would include some kind of leader among the enemies, pulled from a pool of randomly generated people. Whenever one of them survives the mission they are rated for how much they interacted with the player. Talking to you, getting seen by you, killing you or NPC's friendly to you, all of it would add to their score, which would in turn increase the likelyhood of them being promoted up their factions power structure, and their likelyhood of appearing in further quests. If encounters could be designed in such a way as to regularly allow enemy captains to escape, you would start to recognize a few of their faces, even to the point where you might start to hate some of them.
It would work in a similar way when it comes to friendly NPC's. If you save a patrol of friendly soldiers from enemies, chances are their sergeant will show up in a later mission, or giving you quests after being promoted to captain. You might get sent to protect a farm from raiders only to find the farmers slaughtered, including a woman that had given you a whole series of quests when you first entered the zone.
2.4: The player as commander
Finally, a player might eventually gain enough standing with the leaders of a town to be given some say in how it is run. The idea here would be to futher increase the players agency and investment in the world by letting them directly control their factions military and people. Think of a mix between the war table in Dragon Age Inquisition and the garrison from Warlords of Draenor. Each quest a player could potentially be given would also work as a potential military action. Instead of clearing out an enemy outpost yourself you might want to send a squadron of soldiers. You would choose an officer from the cities roster (which would most likely include several soldiers you have personally fought beside), and a number of soldiers (drawn from the cities military resources). The officer might die even if the mission succeeds, but if they live they will get more experienced, and if they don't one of the other soldiers might earn a promotion. The player could also join in on the mission they order, allowing those who don't want to play multiplayer to finish some of the bigger and more difficult quests by using NPCs as allies.
Of course, making just one area of a game like this would be an order of magniture more complex than most of the games I have mentioned as inspiration here. That said, I think some of these concepts could be incredibly cool if fully realized. Imagine the following sequence of events:
Riding through the forest of a brand new area, you are suddenly attacked by a small patrol of bandits. You are knocked from your horse and forced to fight, when suddenly a lizardman hunter joins the fray and helps you drive them off. The defeat of the patrol triggers the lizardman to give you a quest to meet his tribe, and he also tells you that he had been tracking you for some time (basic dynamic dialogue and behavior, the NPC was triggered to follow the player when it encountered their trail, and making mentioning that fact one of the most likely dialogue options.) The player is grateful enough that they decide to meet the lizardmen, at which point the hunter they had becomes their main liason and questgiver among them (which in turn causes him to rise in the ranks of his faction).
Much later the player returns to the village and finds their friend gone. When asking around for them they find out that they have been captured by the very bandit captain that led the attack that started the whole sequence, except since then this captain has been promoted to the second highest rank of their faction. Suddenly the player has an epic quest to invade one of the bandits strongholds to save one of their favourite NPC's from an enemy leader they might have faced off against half a dozen times before, of which perhaps neither had appeared in any of their friends worlds.
Most of this isn't even that complicated scripting. The big problem would be the sheer size of the game and the number of dynamic systems that would have to work together without breaking everything.
i want a game kinda like skyrim but a bigger world, and also the climbign around stuff in liek an infamous game, but with a detailed character creator and a magic system that isn't poop.
I love realistic gun stuff in games. And we're currently going through a renaissance of real life imitating fps so I'm actually pretty happy with a lot games. It's not the guns themselves that make it for me, but the feeling of inhabiting another person. That's why the dream game I posted earlier was a FPMMORPG. I love games where your view and your actions are linked. Not some Skyrim weapon swinging bullshit. So I'm really interested in what some indie games are doing. Crypic Sea's physics based A New Zero and Sub Rosa fpses are cool and along the lines of what I'm looking for.
Also, I'd love a multiplayer game with Wolfire's Receiver's gun handling. Where the gun is a physical object that you have to interact with to make it do things, not a bullet wand.
0
LuvTheMonkeyHigh Sierra SerenadeRegistered Userregular
Platinum Games/Dragon Age mashup. Your main character is a mage trained in combat, and you have party members with fixed skillset but unique properties on their attacks. For weapons you can switch between your ranged magic attacks(or bow,) dual blades, two handed sword/axe/hammer, and sword/mace/axe paired with a magical shield.
Throw in some Bioware writing as you delve into the horrors beneath Kirkwall in the wake of the events of Inquisition, with party banter, romances, and some really flexible character based choice and consequence.
Or write Mass Effect 4 with the Vanquish combat engine.
You start off with just a sword and shield, but some of the bosses are other magical girls who have been brainwashed by the power of darkness. After defeating them and cleansing them of the brainwashing, the device that lets you transform into a magical girl gains the ability to morph into their signature weapons (gauntlets, giant hammer, two-handed magic staff). It differentiates itself from other Platinum character-action-games by having a greater emphasis on aerial combat.
At the end of the game the main character defeats the last, gigantic boss when she and her girlfriend form a sword of Gurren-Lagann-esque hugeness through the power of love.
Hey
I'm an artist, game designer, and a little bit of a programmer. I really like this thread, thanks for making it.
My game ideas that I've thought of, in summary form, are:
Squeak By = As a mouse in a post apocalyptic world it's up to you to survive, find food, and use your wits to stay alive in a world full of gigantic threats.
Dragonoir = In a city full of mystery and no sun you play the role as a hotblooded dragon private eye. Find a clue, follow a lead and stay alive.
Rookery = You run a business of hatching eggs, raising creatures and selling them to different character types in a RPG fantasy world. For instance a Knight would want a mount to ride of certain specifications, a Villain would want minions or a boss monster, and a child would want a pet.
Ferryman = You're the titular ferryman who ferries souls across the river Styx and takes their money. Although, take this and combine it with Crazy Taxi and SHMUP spell mechanics and you've got what's in my head.
Hero Slayer = Three heroes come out from a cave and onto a cliff. They face a giant being of indescribable power who promises the end of all things. You are the end boss. You fight the heroes. They might win, you might lose, but you're on the evil side of the battle. Basically Final Fantasy where you play as the bosses the heroes fight.
Why haven't I made any of these games? I get depressed easily and lose motivation and being bipolar doesn't help.
I've worked on these for about a week and then I just get burnt out.
Again, thanks for making this thread so I could share.
+11
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I forget who formed that idea but they are a literal genius and should probably call Rockstar and tell them what's up
+3
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I guess the scuttlebutt is that Rockstar has actually been working on a followup to Bully, or at least has plans to. Which would be cool because it's literally my favorite game ever.
Civs competing based on player accomplishments. Massive open world. Loads of classes and sub-classes for players to play. Artists uploading their real-world and in-game work. Farmers farm-simming their hearts out. Crafters crafting with an in-depth crafting system. Military for expansion, defense, and resource acquisition. Merchants. Scouts. Spies. Engineers. Navy. Airforce. Siege weapons and destructible player-built cities. An ambitious mish-mash of the casual farmville shit some people like and the front-lines PvP/PvE others enjoy. A true genre grab-bag for players, yet all tied to the advancement of their Civ (guild? server?).
i wrote a letter to hyper magazine when i was a kid expressing how awesome it'd be if there was an open world paparazzi game where you had to hunt down different celebrities. the more compromising the setup, the better.
having recently watched nightcrawler i still think there's a great game to be made in an open world LA setting where instead of shooting dudes you get mad points for honing your camera on the right scenes and getting it to an outlet
I've jotted down some notes for a hypothetical multiplayer cross-genre game. Each player generates a 'bubble' containing their genre. Within each bubble, different rules apply: e.g., a thief-bubble makes players invisible in darkness; a modern military shooter views the map as urban; a superhero-bubble allows the player to fly. Genre-appropriate weapons and items exist within the bubble.
As players move around, the bubbles intersect and cause super weird physical, mechanical, and environmental changes.
Bubbles would be loosely grouped - "realistic", "comic book", "sci-fi", "high fantasy", "low fantasy", and so on. A mage from high fantasy tossing a fireball into a genre where magic doesn't exist might not work out so well. It might turn the fireball into a jet from a flamethrower (realistic), or dissipate (low fantasy).
The bubbles themselves would have a power value (so one can overwrite another) and a radius. A superhero with a low power / low radius bubble might find themselves only able to hover in spot as other genres close in.
I'd like to see a game in the style of Just Cause 2 where you play a wizard in a fantasy setting. Toss in a bunch of Discworld humor and remove any notion of reason and restraint. I want to turn into a giant and knock down a city, then fly on a broomstick through the sky shooting laserbeams at dragons, then fight an army of goblins by summoning falling cows from the sky.
So basically just a huge open world game with varied enemies, outpost capturing and a huge amount of weird weapons (spells) to unlock.
A much less watered down version of Rune Factory, on the PC, with a much more expansive RPG system.
I want my inventory overflowing with crap to upgrade my life with, and being faced with the decision of having to get rid of one of them so I can upgrade the backpack.
Me and @stilts had brainstormed a game idea a while ago where you're an embedded photo journalist in Iraq (or fictional equivalent)
And you'd be with a squad of soldiers that frequently take part in morally questionable missions and it'd have pokemon snap style gameplay and at the end you'd have to decide which photos to send back to America, and depending on how your photos depict the soldiers and the enemy combatants, it influences how the American public perceives the war and how much the soldiers trust you, and it's be a balancing act between keeping the soldiers happy enough to keep getting access while still truthfully reporting on what's happening
An Elder Scrolls style game, but where the "main quest" is basically a 4X game that AI factions are playing against each other. As the player, you can merc out to them as you wish, or align with one faction formally. Questing involves stuff like attacking forts and clearing out dungeons to boost the faction you're working for while weakening others. As factions gain control of tons and villages, the NPC content changes (particularly guards), and as they control various resource locations (mines, etc), their shops upgrade. Getting end-game equipment means you have to help one of the factions secure a large amount of territory. This system would grant tons of replayability and make your in-game choices matter a lot more. If this makes you think "AAA fantasy Mount & Blade" then yeah that's basically it.
An MMO where you run a family, clan, or organization instead of a single character. It's EVE-like in that your main goal is achieving economic dominance. Players can still choose to run characters that are of the typical adventurer type, but instead of doing menial jobs for static NPCs, you complete tasks for other players that are on the management / sim side of things. Completing objectives (either at the adventurer or sim level) boosts your whole account, not just the character you're controlling when you complete the task. This is important because character death is permanent; you'll lose a lot of characters, but everything they accomplish boosts your overall power, and there is no "level grind" anyway (there would be some sort of individual character power level that can rise, but it's the account / family-level boosts that are really important).
An MMO where players can be both heroes and villainous spirits. Villain players can inhabit monsters, getting points for chipping away at hero players. You're not generally expected to actually beat a hero (unless you get to control a boss), but the better you do against them the more XP / rewards you get (letting you do things like, well, control bosses). Bonus points if the game uses instanced dungeons where the villain players can control the entire dungeon (some multiplayer arena-style games are exploring this, but I'd like to see it with persisting characters).
A Romance of the Three Kingdoms game in the vein of X (RPG-heavy) that actually gets everything right. Particularly the AI.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
Posts
I have been conceptualizing my idea of a next gen MMO for quite a while, and I think I have hit on a formula that, while probably unrealistic from a butget perspective, seems like it could be incredibly engaging.
1.1: You are playing in your world. Your actions will have real impact on the lives of the NPCs living in your version of the world setting. Much more on that later.
1.2: The world is huge. Using some kind of procedural generation tech (such as the one in No Man's Sky) the world would be the closest to "proper scale" of basically any fantasy game to date. Most of that space would be boring, of course. Huge tracts of farmlands with only the occasional villager, deep forests, etc. More on why this isn't a problem to follow.
The game would be built on a few core concepts, some of which can be described in terms of other games.
2.1: The parallel worlds and lore-connected game mechanics of the Souls games.
This is in a sense the very beating heart of the game. As a player you are a unique individual in your world, defined by your ability to magically travel through time, space and dimensions. This explains why you can fast-travel between cities that are hours apart, and ties into the way multiplayer works. When you fall in battle during a quest, rather than dying you "desync" (in the style of the Assassins Creed games), dropping out of that timeline. The consequences of that failure remain, however.
This is the core of how your world belongs to you. Friends and strangers can join your quests (optional, of course), but the choices and consequences belong to you. They can, however, choose to let the outcome of your actions echo in their world (enemies killed, people liberated etc.) I imagine there being a sort of "world tendency" or attunement system in place, described further below. Multiplayer thus basically works in one of two ways, either you "synchronise" your worlds, fighting together to achieve a goal across all of your worlds, or you simply aid another player in their world or them in yours, sharing personal rewards but only affecting the world progression of one player.
The story significance of this wouln't necessarily have to be that big of a deal. I imagine some kind of mysterious figure explaining your powers to you, after which he basically says that you will be needed to save the world some day, but what you do until then is up to you to decide.
2.2: Strategy elements and world progression
Essentially, each zone in the game is based around a single city or outpost of the player's faction. At the start of the game these places are threatened from all sides by enemies. The actions of the player (mostly through procedurally generated quests) will strengthen the cities forces, increase its prosperity and weaken its enemies. Each city shares its zone with other NPC factions, including other races as well as rogue elements such as bandits and intelligent monsters. The kind of quests that are available at any point depend on the state of the conflicts between these, with each major faction in a zone being driven by a very simple strategy game-style AI. They all want resouces, which will cause friendly factions to generate quests to take over resource points, and enemy factions to attack friendly resource points which will in turn trigger defense quests. Other missions might include caravan raids, hunting down patrols or raiders, destroying outposts and watchtowers, killing faction leaders and so on. As an enemy faction starts to lose ground they will become more and more aggressive, but as your faction secures resources and strategic points it will grow stronger and more prosperous, allowing the city to literally grow as the strategic AI plonks down more buildings as people and industries move in.
Every zone is made up of dozens (probably hundreds) of sections, each containing one or more points of interest. This might be a resource node like a mine or a farm, a strategic point like a hill or fort, or some magical or unique location. Most of them will be controlled by some kind of faction, or a potential ally. Beyond those there would of course be random patrols and wild animals.
This would essentially give a player two ways of travelling the world. Firstly, they can simply go to the city and see what kind of quests are available. Each quest unlocks a fast travel point they can use to bring themselves and any allies they might want to bring straight to the section they need to be. Secondly, they can simply ride around in the world until they happen upon a point of interest, which would automatically unlock a quest related to it. For example, finding an enemy watch tower would automatically give a quest to report back to the marshall in town (giving a minor reward and a minor improvement to the city's safety rating), which would then trigger a quest to neutralize/destroy/capture the watch tower (giving larger rewards). Similarly, finding a neutral faction would trigger a quest to make contact, which might branch off into quests to befriend or destroy the faction.
It would also be possible to ally with some of the major factions. Sometimes two NPC factions might be in conflict with one another but neutral towards the player faction, allowing you to ally one at the expense of antagonizing the other. In other cases a faction might start hostile with the player, but become neutral or even friendly if the right kinds of quests are followed (perhaps by killing monsters attacking them, rescuing individuals from other factions, etc. Any kind of coexistance would of course mean less resources for the player faction, but the alliance built with a friendly faction and increased security from peaceful coexistance might make this a price well worth paying. Once friendly with a faction, it would of course start generating quests for you. These faction conflicts would offer plentiful opportunities for multiplayer cooperation, but also PVP, allowing players with different world tendencies to join in on quests where they have opposing goals.
2.3: A wider application of the nemesis system from Shadows of Mordor
With so many NPCs in the world there is potential for some really interesting world building by letting players build relationships with NPC's, both hostile and friendly. When it comes to hostile NPCs it would work much as it does in Shadows of Mordor. Nearly every quest would include some kind of leader among the enemies, pulled from a pool of randomly generated people. Whenever one of them survives the mission they are rated for how much they interacted with the player. Talking to you, getting seen by you, killing you or NPC's friendly to you, all of it would add to their score, which would in turn increase the likelyhood of them being promoted up their factions power structure, and their likelyhood of appearing in further quests. If encounters could be designed in such a way as to regularly allow enemy captains to escape, you would start to recognize a few of their faces, even to the point where you might start to hate some of them.
It would work in a similar way when it comes to friendly NPC's. If you save a patrol of friendly soldiers from enemies, chances are their sergeant will show up in a later mission, or giving you quests after being promoted to captain. You might get sent to protect a farm from raiders only to find the farmers slaughtered, including a woman that had given you a whole series of quests when you first entered the zone.
2.4: The player as commander
Finally, a player might eventually gain enough standing with the leaders of a town to be given some say in how it is run. The idea here would be to futher increase the players agency and investment in the world by letting them directly control their factions military and people. Think of a mix between the war table in Dragon Age Inquisition and the garrison from Warlords of Draenor. Each quest a player could potentially be given would also work as a potential military action. Instead of clearing out an enemy outpost yourself you might want to send a squadron of soldiers. You would choose an officer from the cities roster (which would most likely include several soldiers you have personally fought beside), and a number of soldiers (drawn from the cities military resources). The officer might die even if the mission succeeds, but if they live they will get more experienced, and if they don't one of the other soldiers might earn a promotion. The player could also join in on the mission they order, allowing those who don't want to play multiplayer to finish some of the bigger and more difficult quests by using NPCs as allies.
Of course, making just one area of a game like this would be an order of magniture more complex than most of the games I have mentioned as inspiration here. That said, I think some of these concepts could be incredibly cool if fully realized. Imagine the following sequence of events:
Riding through the forest of a brand new area, you are suddenly attacked by a small patrol of bandits. You are knocked from your horse and forced to fight, when suddenly a lizardman hunter joins the fray and helps you drive them off. The defeat of the patrol triggers the lizardman to give you a quest to meet his tribe, and he also tells you that he had been tracking you for some time (basic dynamic dialogue and behavior, the NPC was triggered to follow the player when it encountered their trail, and making mentioning that fact one of the most likely dialogue options.) The player is grateful enough that they decide to meet the lizardmen, at which point the hunter they had becomes their main liason and questgiver among them (which in turn causes him to rise in the ranks of his faction).
Much later the player returns to the village and finds their friend gone. When asking around for them they find out that they have been captured by the very bandit captain that led the attack that started the whole sequence, except since then this captain has been promoted to the second highest rank of their faction. Suddenly the player has an epic quest to invade one of the bandits strongholds to save one of their favourite NPC's from an enemy leader they might have faced off against half a dozen times before, of which perhaps neither had appeared in any of their friends worlds.
Most of this isn't even that complicated scripting. The big problem would be the sheer size of the game and the number of dynamic systems that would have to work together without breaking everything.
Hope that wasn't too rambly.
Also, I REALLY wanted to like Rome 2 Total War but... I don't know. It just fell flat for me. It just somehow didn't feel like a Total War game.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Where should I send this blank check?
Also, I'd love a multiplayer game with Wolfire's Receiver's gun handling. Where the gun is a physical object that you have to interact with to make it do things, not a bullet wand.
So basically Dark Souls: Mass Effect
you are in a junkyard that has nothing but cars and old TVs
and you have an aluminum bat
goodbye all other stress management products
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Throw in some Bioware writing as you delve into the horrors beneath Kirkwall in the wake of the events of Inquisition, with party banter, romances, and some really flexible character based choice and consequence.
Or write Mass Effect 4 with the Vanquish combat engine.
You start off with just a sword and shield, but some of the bosses are other magical girls who have been brainwashed by the power of darkness. After defeating them and cleansing them of the brainwashing, the device that lets you transform into a magical girl gains the ability to morph into their signature weapons (gauntlets, giant hammer, two-handed magic staff). It differentiates itself from other Platinum character-action-games by having a greater emphasis on aerial combat.
At the end of the game the main character defeats the last, gigantic boss when she and her girlfriend form a sword of Gurren-Lagann-esque hugeness through the power of love.
A new Evil Genius that lets you play the missions you send your henchmen out on.
Necromunda.
Teams of Scary Ocean Pokemon
I'm an artist, game designer, and a little bit of a programmer. I really like this thread, thanks for making it.
My game ideas that I've thought of, in summary form, are:
Squeak By = As a mouse in a post apocalyptic world it's up to you to survive, find food, and use your wits to stay alive in a world full of gigantic threats.
Dragonoir = In a city full of mystery and no sun you play the role as a hotblooded dragon private eye. Find a clue, follow a lead and stay alive.
Rookery = You run a business of hatching eggs, raising creatures and selling them to different character types in a RPG fantasy world. For instance a Knight would want a mount to ride of certain specifications, a Villain would want minions or a boss monster, and a child would want a pet.
Ferryman = You're the titular ferryman who ferries souls across the river Styx and takes their money. Although, take this and combine it with Crazy Taxi and SHMUP spell mechanics and you've got what's in my head.
Hero Slayer = Three heroes come out from a cave and onto a cliff. They face a giant being of indescribable power who promises the end of all things. You are the end boss. You fight the heroes. They might win, you might lose, but you're on the evil side of the battle. Basically Final Fantasy where you play as the bosses the heroes fight.
Why haven't I made any of these games? I get depressed easily and lose motivation and being bipolar doesn't help.
I've worked on these for about a week and then I just get burnt out.
Again, thanks for making this thread so I could share.
YES JESUS CHRIST SOMEONE MAKE THIS HAPPEN ALREADY FUCK
Lego The Simpsons
Fear Effect 3
Gitaroo-Man 2
Dark Cloud 3
All my great ideas are sequels to or permutations on existing games because I am not very imaginative
I feel like there's a good Spider-Man game in the last couple of bad Spider-Man games somewhere, it just needs to not be a movie tie-in
I forget who formed that idea but they are a literal genius and should probably call Rockstar and tell them what's up
The composer mentioned Bully 2 like back in 2010
Civs competing based on player accomplishments. Massive open world. Loads of classes and sub-classes for players to play. Artists uploading their real-world and in-game work. Farmers farm-simming their hearts out. Crafters crafting with an in-depth crafting system. Military for expansion, defense, and resource acquisition. Merchants. Scouts. Spies. Engineers. Navy. Airforce. Siege weapons and destructible player-built cities. An ambitious mish-mash of the casual farmville shit some people like and the front-lines PvP/PvE others enjoy. A true genre grab-bag for players, yet all tied to the advancement of their Civ (guild? server?).
Also Half-Life 3.
my favorite one was someone who made one for a game called Doggone It, which had the best summary i've ever seen on the back of the box
"You are a dog... BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO BE"
the premise was you were a person who wakes up one morning in an apartment that you don't recognize and also you are a dog
and you have to convince your apparent owners that you are a person
http://www.audioentropy.com/
having recently watched nightcrawler i still think there's a great game to be made in an open world LA setting where instead of shooting dudes you get mad points for honing your camera on the right scenes and getting it to an outlet
I've jotted down some notes for a hypothetical multiplayer cross-genre game. Each player generates a 'bubble' containing their genre. Within each bubble, different rules apply: e.g., a thief-bubble makes players invisible in darkness; a modern military shooter views the map as urban; a superhero-bubble allows the player to fly. Genre-appropriate weapons and items exist within the bubble.
As players move around, the bubbles intersect and cause super weird physical, mechanical, and environmental changes.
Bubbles would be loosely grouped - "realistic", "comic book", "sci-fi", "high fantasy", "low fantasy", and so on. A mage from high fantasy tossing a fireball into a genre where magic doesn't exist might not work out so well. It might turn the fireball into a jet from a flamethrower (realistic), or dissipate (low fantasy).
The bubbles themselves would have a power value (so one can overwrite another) and a radius. A superhero with a low power / low radius bubble might find themselves only able to hover in spot as other genres close in.
So basically just a huge open world game with varied enemies, outpost capturing and a huge amount of weird weapons (spells) to unlock.
It's goddamn magic. Get creative here.
I know, right? There's Air, Earth, Holy, shit somebody help me out here it's been a long time since I've played FFVII...
Cura!
I want my inventory overflowing with crap to upgrade my life with, and being faced with the decision of having to get rid of one of them so I can upgrade the backpack.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
And you'd be with a squad of soldiers that frequently take part in morally questionable missions and it'd have pokemon snap style gameplay and at the end you'd have to decide which photos to send back to America, and depending on how your photos depict the soldiers and the enemy combatants, it influences how the American public perceives the war and how much the soldiers trust you, and it's be a balancing act between keeping the soldiers happy enough to keep getting access while still truthfully reporting on what's happening
http://www.audioentropy.com/
An MMO where you run a family, clan, or organization instead of a single character. It's EVE-like in that your main goal is achieving economic dominance. Players can still choose to run characters that are of the typical adventurer type, but instead of doing menial jobs for static NPCs, you complete tasks for other players that are on the management / sim side of things. Completing objectives (either at the adventurer or sim level) boosts your whole account, not just the character you're controlling when you complete the task. This is important because character death is permanent; you'll lose a lot of characters, but everything they accomplish boosts your overall power, and there is no "level grind" anyway (there would be some sort of individual character power level that can rise, but it's the account / family-level boosts that are really important).
An MMO where players can be both heroes and villainous spirits. Villain players can inhabit monsters, getting points for chipping away at hero players. You're not generally expected to actually beat a hero (unless you get to control a boss), but the better you do against them the more XP / rewards you get (letting you do things like, well, control bosses). Bonus points if the game uses instanced dungeons where the villain players can control the entire dungeon (some multiplayer arena-style games are exploring this, but I'd like to see it with persisting characters).
A Romance of the Three Kingdoms game in the vein of X (RPG-heavy) that actually gets everything right. Particularly the AI.
I'm going to take credit for that