Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.
Oh shit. That does actually sound awesome.
Sign me up. That sounds like a really excellent way of making motion controls central to gameplay, both in terms of what you do to progress and in how information can be presented to you.
You could have the triggers mean 'grip' for each independent hand, even. So if you had to rip a rotten bit of wood out of something, you grip the rotten bit with your left hand, and the rest with your right, and rip.
It could affect gameplay in other ways too. If you play one character as a huge robust dude, he can get past obstacles more easily. In contrast, playing as a child would mean you COULDN'T rip because you don't have the physical strength, and you would need to find a knife or something. You may not be able to reach places if you're short, so you could go and grab a stool and climb up on it. Hand to hand combat would be clumsy - which is pretty accurate, considering the types of characters you play in Eternal Darkness.
This thread is, if I may say so, KICKIN' RAD. RAAAD.
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
A Space Sim/Stragtegy/OpenExploration game. You start off with a template ship, one empty deck broken apart into a grid. You can travel the galaxy to mine ores and other matrials to add rooms to your open deck. Science Labs, Marine bunkers, Wepon emplacements, navigation computers, etc. As you add sectors to your decks you can research ship enhancements (like research in civilization) and depending on what kind of ratio you have going on with the amount of science, exploration, military rooms and sectors you've built it unlocks trees of total ship upgrades. So if you put a ton of marine bunkers into your ship and lots of weapon emplacements you would slowly become a war-ship as your continue to travel the galaxy.
As your ship you would be able to explore an open galaxy with worlds to explore (you wouldn't actually travel to the world ala FPS, but you would orbit the world and send crews down. And could transport materials or bombard areas with cannons.)
You would fund your ship kind of like EVE where you could take contracts from various 3rd parites or simply mine and sell your materials. You could even make your ship into a giant manufacturing plant where you mill out tons of vehicles/weapons/food/etc. and sell them across the stars.
This thread is, if I may say so, KICKIN' RAD. RAAAD.
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
:!:
Wasn't this a Discovery Channel or Nat Geo special not too long ago?
jeddy lee on
Backlog Challenge: 0%
0/8
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
This thread is, if I may say so, KICKIN' RAD. RAAAD.
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
:!:
Wasn't this a Discovery Channel or Nat Geo special not too long ago?
This thread is, if I may say so, KICKIN' RAD. RAAAD.
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
:!:
Wasn't this a Discovery Channel or Nat Geo special not too long ago?
There was one about a small town outside of Chernobyl where they followed a few animal families that had moved in to the abandoned area (and their storylines amazingly culiminated together in the end).
Imagine the Anthony chapter where you're slowly being zombified and you have little tooltips showing up with like "You pick up the vase but your hands are weak and clumsy." Imagine instead if you 'reached' with your hands and noticed a mottled rash going up your wrists, and when you picked it up the controls suddenly stopped working.
Oh shit. That does actually sound awesome.
Sign me up. That sounds like a really excellent way of making motion controls central to gameplay, both in terms of what you do to progress and in how information can be presented to you.
You could have the triggers mean 'grip' for each independent hand, even. So if you had to rip a rotten bit of wood out of something, you grip the rotten bit with your left hand, and the rest with your right, and rip.
It could affect gameplay in other ways too. If you play one character as a huge robust dude, he can get past obstacles more easily. In contrast, playing as a child would mean you COULDN'T rip because you don't have the physical strength, and you would need to find a knife or something. You may not be able to reach places if you're short, so you could go and grab a stool and climb up on it. Hand to hand combat would be clumsy - which is pretty accurate, considering the types of characters you play in Eternal Darkness.
This needs to happen
METAzraeL on
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
So does anyone remember the first three Rainbow Six games and how well they managed close quarters room to room fighting? Remember how they could very fluidly move from a slow-paced stage of preparation and anticipation to fast-paced room clearing?
Do you remember the original Ghost Recon, which did very well at slow-paced incursions into a variety of outdoor areas, both urban and wilderness and how you creept through the woods or between ruined buildings and through narrow alleyways with hesitence and care because a single bullet could end all your plans?
Do you remember Dark Forces, where you had all the same weapons as nearly every Star Wars shooter since, but the weapons had power and when you fired your weapon, they had real kick and then slammed into their target with a meaty blast, both in sound and in graphics?
Well, I want a Star Wars tactical shooter set during the Galactic Civil War casting you in the role of a stormtrooper. But not just any Imperial Stormtrooper. In the movies, we see the Stormtroopers used as the standard foot soldiers of the Empire, but you'd be one of the elite. Much like the Storm Commandos (and I shy away from them because I think they look stupid and they're stupid EU shit), you undertake special operations both alongside other Imperial forces and by yourselves.
You'd operate against enemies of the Empire both from within and without in extended campaigns across the galaxy.
And there would be a real sense of progress during the campaigns. In your first mission upon landing on a jungle world, your armor is pristine. As some time has passed, you may have removed your helmet, wearing a simple radio headset instead and removed the armor from your forearms and hands and cut your bodysuit's sleeves above the elbow to help deal with the heat and smeared your pretty white armor with mud so it doesn't shine quite so brightly and you can blend in better.
And you and your squad move and shoot far more realistically than the stormtroopers of the movies. I'm sure everyone here has probably seen special forces operatives move somehow. And I'm sure everyone realizes that they don't generally hold their weapons at their hips and shoot wildly inaccurately all over the place while they get picked off one by one.
Well, the stormtrooper's E-11 blaster rifle doesn't have to be! You and your squad would move with their blaster rifles' stocks extended and shouldered in the ready position. Oh, yes, the E-11 does have a folding stock.
The weapons would be very, very powerful. One shot to most body parts would kill a person, and that includes you and members of your squad, though perhaps there could be some sort of revive mechanic like in Republic Commando. Either way, the weapons would need sounds and graphics to match their power, just like Dark Forces did.
The members of your squad and your character would be very well-defined and rich characters that you'd hopefully get attached to to some degree at least and that you'd hopefully find interesting. I'd think that between missions there could even be non-combat portions of the game where you could interact with your squad and other Imperial personel around the Star Destroyer you're based on or around the base of operations while on an extended operation.
In the end, it would play a lot like the old R6 games (without the planning) and the old Ghost Recon, though perhaps from a third-person perspective. The one thing that always bothered me about FPS games is that I can see my squad doing all sorts of cool things, but I can't see myself doing similar things. And you and your squad would be moving like they know what they're doing. Unlike their movie counter-parts, these stormtroopers are utterly competent.
If I could be critical for a moment, it seems like the biggest problems the majority of these ideas have is that they're too unfocused.
The very best games do one thing and they do them well. In Super Mario Brothers, everything is pretty crap except jumping, but jumping is a hell of a lot of fun. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's running. Metal Gear Solid focuses on sneaking.
Figure out one thing in your game that's fun, and make it kickass. Everything else comes second.
If I could be critical for a moment, it seems like the biggest problems the majority of these ideas have is that they're too unfocused.
The very best games do one thing and they do them well. In Super Mario Brothers, everything is pretty crap except jumping, but jumping is a hell of a lot of fun. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's running. Metal Gear Solid focuses on sneaking.
Figure out one thing in your game that's fun, and make it kickass. Everything else comes second.
No, the best thing you can do is take every game you've ever loved and smash them into one game!
There seems to be a lot of love for tactical combat games, and I've had this idea in the back of my head for a while:
forget story and plot and characters, I'd love a tactical team combat game that's thematically more like chess, in that each level is a puzzle and you are trying to defeat the other team because it's fun, not because you're saving the world. You could even make it a tactical paintball game for all I care, with paint grenades and flashbangs and "you now have to pretend your left leg is useless because it's been hit by a paintball" and all that. With Raving Rabbids for soldiers.
The most significant innovation, though, would be enemy and teammate AI that's actually good, and an after-action replay/review feature that will show you what each person is thinking at any given time, so you can see why they acted the way they did.
What does "actually good" mean? Second-order and third-order reasoning. Games like FEAR had good AI but still used first-order reasoning: the character knows its own plan, in the context of the player's current position and recent past, and a character director executes actions based on that plan.
Second-order reasoning would require each AI character collect what it observes about the player and consider a set of possible next player moves, both short- and long- term. It would then consider possible actions in that context.
Third-order reasoning goes a step farther: the AI is also aware of the situational picture it's presenting to the player (and also what it's probably not presenting -- what is probably hidden from the player) and tries to consider what the player will likely do in response to this.
Higher-order reasoning is easy to implement in chess, where the set of available moves is so limited, but not quite as easy to implement in a real-time squad-based tactical combat simulation. This would be a significant technical challenge, but the new gameplay experiences would be interesting to some players. Probably not enough players to attract a publisher with a budget, though.
One of the biggest problems with this kind of reasoning in a tactical shooter is it messes with the feedback the player receives. Games are exercises in rapid low-cost failure for players, and fun games refine the player process of trying something, failing, learning from that failure, and trying something new.
The problem, then, is that this kind of AI encourages more real-world responses. In a traditional game you're walking along trying to stay out of sight, an AI character sees you, and the AI starts shooting. With this kind of reasoning, you're walking along, an AI character sees you, the AI character hides, tries to contact his peers and coordinate an armed response -- and if you suck you don't see any enemies for several minutes, when suddenly a surprise explosion decimates your team, and twenty enemies pop out of cover on all sides and clean up the survivors.
If that happens and all you get is "you are dead! retry?" you don't learn much. You may never know who spotted you and what happened next. Controllers get thrown. That's why the replay-with-thought-bubbles feature is so critical to this idea working well.
Thoughts?
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
If I could be critical for a moment, it seems like the biggest problems the majority of these ideas have is that they're too unfocused.
The very best games do one thing and they do them well. In Super Mario Brothers, everything is pretty crap except jumping, but jumping is a hell of a lot of fun. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's running. Metal Gear Solid focuses on sneaking.
Figure out one thing in your game that's fun, and make it kickass. Everything else comes second.
Well to be fair this entire thread is in part dedicated to pipe dreams that'd be possible only with GTA-esque funding and a team of monstrously talented developers. Assuming they're even possible at all, really.
Although we have had a few MMORTSFPSRPGS, I'll admit. Massive gestalts are jacks of all trades and masters of none!
Hey, mine can be done with a couple grad students (including me?) and XNA. Unless you want it to LOOK good as well.
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
My first idea was undoable because our bands aren't broad enough yet, but what about this:
A dodgeball game for the Wii using the Dodgeball movie rules and mechanics?
I can picture it. Move with the nunchuck, throw the ball away with the remote, raise both the nunchuck and remote at the exact right moment to catch the ball, swing the remote sideways when not in possession of a ball to dodge...
It'd be awesome. You could even have 4 players co-op. Why not add some online play?
Perfect for non-gamers too, as almost all the moves are doable with the waggle. It doesn't need to be complex in its execution, but with mechanics deep enough for "hardcore" players to compete. Also, the matches in the movie are very short due to the rules, so it'd be good for quick gaming sessions.
You could make it either a liscenced movie-to-game game, or go the Tecmo route and use the Riki & Kunio cast.
Hey, mine can be done with a couple grad students (including me?) and XNA. Unless you want it to LOOK good as well.
Fair enough. If every proposal had blocky placeholder graphics, no voice acting and Jellycar-esque mouth+microphone sounds, I'd concede they'd all be a lot more realistic :P
Fixed that for you. :-P
Also don't forget "levels made of simple collision meshes splattered by orange paint"
mspencer on
MEMBER OF THE PARANOIA GM GUILD
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Combat should be realistic and utterly brutal, and fighting should range from one or one to full blown war.
This is why you won't get your game. It's a good idea, and a great niche/budget/indie game. But if people won't buy it without DX9 graphics and engines supporting thousands, then nobody will make it.
To get decent innovative games, you have to forget about amazing 3Dness.
Operation Flashpoint didn't have the best graphics but it had great gameplay. It's proof that games can sell without amazing graphics.
He has a fair point though, getting full blown war to run would be probably too intense to program. Still, I'd like a way for the peasants that you turn into militia to fight. Maybe a sort of total war-lite mode for the large scale battles, your knight acting more as a leader than an individual combatant.
My idea isn't even possible then, really. Need a great engine for an MMOFPS/RPG, great netcode, massive area's, etc.
That's why the focus shouldn't be on believability but on "oh holy crap that'd be awesome", ala Corporate MMO or that crazy ED game Cass wants on the Wii.
Because we'll just get our robot overlords to craft these titles to keep us subdued in 2050.
My idea isn't even possible then, really. Need a great engine for an MMOFPS/RPG, great netcode, massive area's, etc.
That's why the focus shouldn't be on believability but on "oh holy crap that'd be awesome", ala Corporate MMO or that crazy ED game Cass wants on the Wii.
Because we'll just get our robot overlords to craft these titles to keep us subdued in 2050.
To be fair, my idea is fairly viable if you had a good, professional team. It basically just takes previous concepts(Age of conan, WWIIOL, EVE) and wraps them in a different setting with some of the better parts of each.
So does anyone remember the first three Rainbow Six games and how well they managed close quarters room to room fighting? Remember how they could very fluidly move from a slow-paced stage of preparation and anticipation to fast-paced room clearing?
Do you remember the original Ghost Recon, which did very well at slow-paced incursions into a variety of outdoor areas, both urban and wilderness and how you creept through the woods or between ruined buildings and through narrow alleyways with hesitence and care because a single bullet could end all your plans?
Do you remember Dark Forces, where you had all the same weapons as nearly every Star Wars shooter since, but the weapons had power and when you fired your weapon, they had real kick and then slammed into their target with a meaty blast, both in sound and in graphics?
Well, I want a Star Wars tactical shooter set during the Galactic Civil War casting you in the role of a stormtrooper. But not just any Imperial Stormtrooper. In the movies, we see the Stormtroopers used as the standard foot soldiers of the Empire, but you'd be one of the elite. Much like the Storm Commandos (and I shy away from them because I think they look stupid and they're stupid EU shit), you undertake special operations both alongside other Imperial forces and by yourselves.
You'd operate against enemies of the Empire both from within and without in extended campaigns across the galaxy.
And there would be a real sense of progress during the campaigns. In your first mission upon landing on a jungle world, your armor is pristine. As some time has passed, you may have removed your helmet, wearing a simple radio headset instead and removed the armor from your forearms and hands and cut your bodysuit's sleeves above the elbow to help deal with the heat and smeared your pretty white armor with mud so it doesn't shine quite so brightly and you can blend in better.
And you and your squad move and shoot far more realistically than the stormtroopers of the movies. I'm sure everyone here has probably seen special forces operatives move somehow. And I'm sure everyone realizes that they don't generally hold their weapons at their hips and shoot wildly inaccurately all over the place while they get picked off one by one.
Well, the stormtrooper's E-11 blaster rifle doesn't have to be! You and your squad would move with their blaster rifles' stocks extended and shouldered in the ready position. Oh, yes, the E-11 does have a folding stock.
The weapons would be very, very powerful. One shot to most body parts would kill a person, and that includes you and members of your squad, though perhaps there could be some sort of revive mechanic like in Republic Commando. Either way, the weapons would need sounds and graphics to match their power, just like Dark Forces did.
The members of your squad and your character would be very well-defined and rich characters that you'd hopefully get attached to to some degree at least and that you'd hopefully find interesting. I'd think that between missions there could even be non-combat portions of the game where you could interact with your squad and other Imperial personel around the Star Destroyer you're based on or around the base of operations while on an extended operation.
In the end, it would play a lot like the old R6 games (without the planning) and the old Ghost Recon, though perhaps from a third-person perspective. The one thing that always bothered me about FPS games is that I can see my squad doing all sorts of cool things, but I can't see myself doing similar things. And you and your squad would be moving like they know what they're doing. Unlike their movie counter-parts, these stormtroopers are utterly competent.
Hey, uh...
Ever play Republic Commando? Because that's pretty close. Unfortunately, the only weapons with real power are the anti-armor and sniper attachments.
The pistol ranks a close third.
But the only people you interact with are the other three squad members.
My idea isn't even possible then, really. Need a great engine for an MMOFPS/RPG, great netcode, massive area's, etc.
That's why the focus shouldn't be on believability but on "oh holy crap that'd be awesome", ala Corporate MMO or that crazy ED game Cass wants on the Wii.
Because we'll just get our robot overlords to craft these titles to keep us subdued in 2050.
To be fair, my idea is fairly viable if you had a good, professional team. It basically just takes previous concepts(Age of conan, WWIIOL, EVE) and wraps them in a different setting with some of the better parts of each.
And since my idea is pretty much just a realistic Katamari minus the ball and plus a combat system, I don't think it'd be super hard to do.
Ever play Republic Commando? Because that's pretty close. Unfortunately, the only weapons with real power are the anti-armor and sniper attachments.
The pistol ranks a close third.
But the only people you interact with are the other three squad members.
Yeah, uh, did you see me mention it?
And it was good. One of my favorite shooters of last console generation even though I played it on the PC. It was more of a tactical shooter than other Star Wars games, but I don't think it went nearly far enough with the idea.
That is to say that the type of game it was trying to be was not the kind of game my post was about. Or was supposed to be about. I went on about aesthetics a lot, but I also mentioned Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon more than once and those are a far cry from the sort of game Republic Commando was.
And it was good. One of my favorite shooters of last console generation even though I played it on the PC. It was more of a tactical shooter than other Star Wars games, but I don't think it went nearly far enough with the idea.
That is to say that the type of game it was trying to be was not the kind of game my post was about. Or was supposed to be about. I went on about aesthetics a lot, but I also mentioned Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon more than once and those are a far cry from the sort of game Republic Commando was.
Oh man. You and your opponents start off building a large city with near-photo realistic graphics. You build up your cities until they're sprawling, and then World War III breaks out and it's every man for himself. I'm terrible at Sim City, Defcon, and any form of RTS, but I would buy that game THREE TIMES.
You're a new-made angel, and the End of the World is nigh. God's wrapping up his creation and everyone has to take sides. Will you choose to reign in Hell or serve in Heaven? Either way, you'll be battling an assortment of demons, gods, elementals, dragons, mythological figures, Biblical characters, Lovecraftian monstrosities, monkeys pirates ninjas and of course Giant Robots (TM) in the greatest action RPG since Genesis. Choose Good and save babies from demon possession. Choose Evil and possess babies, then make them kill. Or choose Neutral. Side with Man in the Greatest Battle. Lead a fighter squadron against the Heavenly Host. And the Final Boss might be the Finalest Boss of alll... by which I mean God.
Hm, just had an idea while flicking through the Zombie Survival Guide. I'd like to play a strategic tactical zombie fps, where you control a secret government zombie-eradication squad that neutralizes outbreaks before anyone can notice. Early missions would involve practicing methodical search and destroy tactics on rural farmhouses. While the public would later see a small newspaper blurb about two thieves breaking into Old Jim's place, in actuality it was you dealing with zombie Jim after he'd shot a trespassing zombie and been bit. The gameplay would be, as I said, methodical - since you are a professional squad dealing with highly dangerous individuals - and failure to be precise and quick would increase the chance of squadmates, or even you, being infected. Of course, the story would escalate due to an increase in outbreaks, leading you on bigger and bigger missions.
I guess this would basically be the RE people doing a Rainbow 6 game.
METAzraeL on
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
This thread occasionally pops up and I always say the same thing - I don't want to reveal too much because, one day, I honestly will make these games.
But I do have two game ideas, both of which came to me in dreams. Without revealing too much:
NINJA vs PIRATES
A modern Earthworm Jim. gameplay wise it'd be Shinobi (16-bit) meets Ninja Gaiden (8-bit), but with all the seriousness and tone of earthworm jim. It'd have a contra Hardcorps style branching path system.
SCUBA DANCING
My secret project for about 7 or 8 years now.
I had an idea for a sci-fi shooter set on a derelict colony that was very inspired by a night of BioShock and the fact that FPS' rarely have full-body interaction, just a floating pair of arms and a camera (occasionally some legs). It may be only graphical, but sprinting and watching (and feeling through controller rumble) your rifle bouncing heavily against your character's chest, or seeing him look down for the drop-holster on his thigh when you switched weapons, looks awesome in my head.
The shining moment would be the completely zero-gee Delta Sector of the colony, and how the controls would change to reflect the character's limbs -- trying to sneak around your enemies since discharging a weapon would shift your weight and send you spinning.
I wonder how well Dead Space is gonna do the zero-gee.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
Money. If you have money, you can start your own company and be that guy.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
People have to plan, right? We have to fit in somewhere.
My game ideas never get off the ground because I have a wonderful imagination (I can visualize everything), no grasp of math for programming and no real art skills.
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
People have to plan, right? We have to fit in somewhere.
I'm pretty sure they get people with other talents to do the planning.
Posts
It could affect gameplay in other ways too. If you play one character as a huge robust dude, he can get past obstacles more easily. In contrast, playing as a child would mean you COULDN'T rip because you don't have the physical strength, and you would need to find a knife or something. You may not be able to reach places if you're short, so you could go and grab a stool and climb up on it. Hand to hand combat would be clumsy - which is pretty accurate, considering the types of characters you play in Eternal Darkness.
Okay, this is a really vague idea, but, imagine all humans are dead!
The game is basicly a screensaver.
You can watch a city like Paris or Chicago or anywhere really turn into a wilderness. You can interact with the city by changing the weather, popping a bunch of animals into existance and throwing some seeds down, thats it.
:!:
A Space Sim/Stragtegy/OpenExploration game. You start off with a template ship, one empty deck broken apart into a grid. You can travel the galaxy to mine ores and other matrials to add rooms to your open deck. Science Labs, Marine bunkers, Wepon emplacements, navigation computers, etc. As you add sectors to your decks you can research ship enhancements (like research in civilization) and depending on what kind of ratio you have going on with the amount of science, exploration, military rooms and sectors you've built it unlocks trees of total ship upgrades. So if you put a ton of marine bunkers into your ship and lots of weapon emplacements you would slowly become a war-ship as your continue to travel the galaxy.
As your ship you would be able to explore an open galaxy with worlds to explore (you wouldn't actually travel to the world ala FPS, but you would orbit the world and send crews down. And could transport materials or bombard areas with cannons.)
You would fund your ship kind of like EVE where you could take contracts from various 3rd parites or simply mine and sell your materials. You could even make your ship into a giant manufacturing plant where you mill out tons of vehicles/weapons/food/etc. and sell them across the stars.
I think it would be fun.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Wasn't this a Discovery Channel or Nat Geo special not too long ago?
PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light
I have no idea!
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
I lol'd
Do you remember the original Ghost Recon, which did very well at slow-paced incursions into a variety of outdoor areas, both urban and wilderness and how you creept through the woods or between ruined buildings and through narrow alleyways with hesitence and care because a single bullet could end all your plans?
Do you remember Dark Forces, where you had all the same weapons as nearly every Star Wars shooter since, but the weapons had power and when you fired your weapon, they had real kick and then slammed into their target with a meaty blast, both in sound and in graphics?
Well, I want a Star Wars tactical shooter set during the Galactic Civil War casting you in the role of a stormtrooper. But not just any Imperial Stormtrooper. In the movies, we see the Stormtroopers used as the standard foot soldiers of the Empire, but you'd be one of the elite. Much like the Storm Commandos (and I shy away from them because I think they look stupid and they're stupid EU shit), you undertake special operations both alongside other Imperial forces and by yourselves.
You'd operate against enemies of the Empire both from within and without in extended campaigns across the galaxy.
And there would be a real sense of progress during the campaigns. In your first mission upon landing on a jungle world, your armor is pristine. As some time has passed, you may have removed your helmet, wearing a simple radio headset instead and removed the armor from your forearms and hands and cut your bodysuit's sleeves above the elbow to help deal with the heat and smeared your pretty white armor with mud so it doesn't shine quite so brightly and you can blend in better.
And you and your squad move and shoot far more realistically than the stormtroopers of the movies. I'm sure everyone here has probably seen special forces operatives move somehow. And I'm sure everyone realizes that they don't generally hold their weapons at their hips and shoot wildly inaccurately all over the place while they get picked off one by one.
Well, the stormtrooper's E-11 blaster rifle doesn't have to be! You and your squad would move with their blaster rifles' stocks extended and shouldered in the ready position. Oh, yes, the E-11 does have a folding stock.
The weapons would be very, very powerful. One shot to most body parts would kill a person, and that includes you and members of your squad, though perhaps there could be some sort of revive mechanic like in Republic Commando. Either way, the weapons would need sounds and graphics to match their power, just like Dark Forces did.
The members of your squad and your character would be very well-defined and rich characters that you'd hopefully get attached to to some degree at least and that you'd hopefully find interesting. I'd think that between missions there could even be non-combat portions of the game where you could interact with your squad and other Imperial personel around the Star Destroyer you're based on or around the base of operations while on an extended operation.
In the end, it would play a lot like the old R6 games (without the planning) and the old Ghost Recon, though perhaps from a third-person perspective. The one thing that always bothered me about FPS games is that I can see my squad doing all sorts of cool things, but I can't see myself doing similar things. And you and your squad would be moving like they know what they're doing. Unlike their movie counter-parts, these stormtroopers are utterly competent.
The very best games do one thing and they do them well. In Super Mario Brothers, everything is pretty crap except jumping, but jumping is a hell of a lot of fun. In Sonic the Hedgehog, it's running. Metal Gear Solid focuses on sneaking.
Figure out one thing in your game that's fun, and make it kickass. Everything else comes second.
No, the best thing you can do is take every game you've ever loved and smash them into one game!
Like Universal Combat!
forget story and plot and characters, I'd love a tactical team combat game that's thematically more like chess, in that each level is a puzzle and you are trying to defeat the other team because it's fun, not because you're saving the world. You could even make it a tactical paintball game for all I care, with paint grenades and flashbangs and "you now have to pretend your left leg is useless because it's been hit by a paintball" and all that. With Raving Rabbids for soldiers.
The most significant innovation, though, would be enemy and teammate AI that's actually good, and an after-action replay/review feature that will show you what each person is thinking at any given time, so you can see why they acted the way they did.
What does "actually good" mean? Second-order and third-order reasoning. Games like FEAR had good AI but still used first-order reasoning: the character knows its own plan, in the context of the player's current position and recent past, and a character director executes actions based on that plan.
Second-order reasoning would require each AI character collect what it observes about the player and consider a set of possible next player moves, both short- and long- term. It would then consider possible actions in that context.
Third-order reasoning goes a step farther: the AI is also aware of the situational picture it's presenting to the player (and also what it's probably not presenting -- what is probably hidden from the player) and tries to consider what the player will likely do in response to this.
Higher-order reasoning is easy to implement in chess, where the set of available moves is so limited, but not quite as easy to implement in a real-time squad-based tactical combat simulation. This would be a significant technical challenge, but the new gameplay experiences would be interesting to some players. Probably not enough players to attract a publisher with a budget, though.
One of the biggest problems with this kind of reasoning in a tactical shooter is it messes with the feedback the player receives. Games are exercises in rapid low-cost failure for players, and fun games refine the player process of trying something, failing, learning from that failure, and trying something new.
The problem, then, is that this kind of AI encourages more real-world responses. In a traditional game you're walking along trying to stay out of sight, an AI character sees you, and the AI starts shooting. With this kind of reasoning, you're walking along, an AI character sees you, the AI character hides, tries to contact his peers and coordinate an armed response -- and if you suck you don't see any enemies for several minutes, when suddenly a surprise explosion decimates your team, and twenty enemies pop out of cover on all sides and clean up the survivors.
If that happens and all you get is "you are dead! retry?" you don't learn much. You may never know who spotted you and what happened next. Controllers get thrown. That's why the replay-with-thought-bubbles feature is so critical to this idea working well.
Thoughts?
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Well to be fair this entire thread is in part dedicated to pipe dreams that'd be possible only with GTA-esque funding and a team of monstrously talented developers. Assuming they're even possible at all, really.
Although we have had a few MMORTSFPSRPGS, I'll admit. Massive gestalts are jacks of all trades and masters of none!
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
Fair enough. If every proposal had ASCII graphics, no voice acting and MIDI sounds, I'd concede they'd all be a lot more realistic :P
A dodgeball game for the Wii using the Dodgeball movie rules and mechanics?
I can picture it. Move with the nunchuck, throw the ball away with the remote, raise both the nunchuck and remote at the exact right moment to catch the ball, swing the remote sideways when not in possession of a ball to dodge...
It'd be awesome. You could even have 4 players co-op. Why not add some online play?
Perfect for non-gamers too, as almost all the moves are doable with the waggle. It doesn't need to be complex in its execution, but with mechanics deep enough for "hardcore" players to compete. Also, the matches in the movie are very short due to the rules, so it'd be good for quick gaming sessions.
You could make it either a liscenced movie-to-game game, or go the Tecmo route and use the Riki & Kunio cast.
Also don't forget "levels made of simple collision meshes splattered by orange paint"
XBL Michael Spencer || Wii 6007 6812 1605 7315 || PSN MichaelSpencerJr || Steam Michael_Spencer || Ham NOØK
QRZ || My last known GPS coordinates: FindU or APRS.fi (Car antenna feed line busted -- no ham radio for me X__X )
He has a fair point though, getting full blown war to run would be probably too intense to program. Still, I'd like a way for the peasants that you turn into militia to fight. Maybe a sort of total war-lite mode for the large scale battles, your knight acting more as a leader than an individual combatant.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
It would make an interesting expansion, at least. :P
That's why the focus shouldn't be on believability but on "oh holy crap that'd be awesome", ala Corporate MMO or that crazy ED game Cass wants on the Wii.
Because we'll just get our robot overlords to craft these titles to keep us subdued in 2050.
To be fair, my idea is fairly viable if you had a good, professional team. It basically just takes previous concepts(Age of conan, WWIIOL, EVE) and wraps them in a different setting with some of the better parts of each.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
Hey, uh...
Ever play Republic Commando? Because that's pretty close. Unfortunately, the only weapons with real power are the anti-armor and sniper attachments.
The pistol ranks a close third.
But the only people you interact with are the other three squad members.
And since my idea is pretty much just a realistic Katamari minus the ball and plus a combat system, I don't think it'd be super hard to do.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Yeah, uh, did you see me mention it?
And it was good. One of my favorite shooters of last console generation even though I played it on the PC. It was more of a tactical shooter than other Star Wars games, but I don't think it went nearly far enough with the idea.
That is to say that the type of game it was trying to be was not the kind of game my post was about. Or was supposed to be about. I went on about aesthetics a lot, but I also mentioned Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon more than once and those are a far cry from the sort of game Republic Commando was.
I guess I missed it then. Oooooops.
Oh man. You and your opponents start off building a large city with near-photo realistic graphics. You build up your cities until they're sprawling, and then World War III breaks out and it's every man for himself. I'm terrible at Sim City, Defcon, and any form of RTS, but I would buy that game THREE TIMES.
You stole my idea from the first page! :P
Battle Room!
Yeesss. I really would love that, it wouldn't matter if it was Wii or DS or PC, it just works. :^:
I guess this would basically be the RE people doing a Rainbow 6 game.
dream a little dream or you could live a little dream
sleep forever if you wish to be a dreamer
But I do have two game ideas, both of which came to me in dreams. Without revealing too much:
NINJA vs PIRATES
A modern Earthworm Jim. gameplay wise it'd be Shinobi (16-bit) meets Ninja Gaiden (8-bit), but with all the seriousness and tone of earthworm jim. It'd have a contra Hardcorps style branching path system.
SCUBA DANCING
My secret project for about 7 or 8 years now.
The shining moment would be the completely zero-gee Delta Sector of the colony, and how the controls would change to reflect the character's limbs -- trying to sneak around your enemies since discharging a weapon would shift your weight and send you spinning.
I wonder how well Dead Space is gonna do the zero-gee.
Its not going very well.
猿も木から落ちる
So I don't even know where I'd fit into game development.
You're pretty much like me and I don't think we fit anywhere.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Money. If you have money, you can start your own company and be that guy.
People have to plan, right? We have to fit in somewhere.
I'm pretty sure they get people with other talents to do the planning.
http://www.audioentropy.com/