Describe Your Perfect Game

The Game Room
1

Imagine you have 200 million dollars that you could only spend on hiring a developer or developers to work on the game of your dreams.

What would that game be like? How would you describe it to the developers. Would you even have a certain developer or two in mind to tackle your masterpiece? Is the the game something unique, or is it a blend of existing games? What would gameplay be like? What would the story be like, would there even be a story?

Do share!

My perfect game:

Developers: The original Bioware (none of this Bioware: Antartica BS)+ the guys at Obsidian + Todd Howard. (bet you already know where I’m going with this.)

Title: Dark shadows of inky black ancient Dragons of Flame: Origins.

The game is essentially a combination of Baldur’s Gate & the original Neverwinter Nights but with modern graphics and an open world a la Skyrim.

An epic storyline that unfolds differently based on a myriad of different options in the way you tackle and ultimatley solve a number of twisty, turny, interesting quests and adventures, in addition to the way you handle the relationships between your character, various party members, and other factions that exist in the world. I want Obsidian and Bioware at their best here.

The gameplay is a mix of exploration and real-time but pausable, party based, tactical combat. Loot and a vast array of abilities team up to add depth and replayability to every encounter. Lots of enemies and lots of factions which might react differently to your party. The world needs to be filled to the brim with ancient secrets, political mischief, and interesting nooks and crannies.

Finally, I want an easy to use, but powerful toolset with Steamworks and Steam Workshop integration that allows others to create multi-player based co-op adventures to run through with friends, as well as new single-player content.

This game would keep me busy for the next few years. Unfortunately, the closest real-life candidate, Dragon Age 3, doesn’t look like it’s going to be up to the task of satisfying my RPG-laced drug craving :frowning:

2

Good topic, too bad nobody’s posting anything-I thought most Dopers had a vision of their perfect game.

[Stupid search engine hamsters…]Here’s mine. Essentially a MMORPG for adults, with tons of gameplay freedom and the core concept that the players will enforce play balance by their own actions, and not via fiats and artificial restrictions on high from the devs. No carebear horsehockey, factions can most certainly win and lose. Tons of depth, with treachery, cunning, actual (you know) role-playing, and subtleties galore.

Not a chance in a million years that any dev anywhere ever makes anything like it.

3

I would get Squaresoft, no question, and it would be the most epic of Final Fantasies.

This would be a huge 100+ hour main story, multiple branching options, many endings. Once you beat it, you can play from another character’s perspective. The entire game would consist of several full-length quests all together, and each wouldn’t simply be the same areas plus one or two unique scenarios for your characters. For example, different characters would start on the other side of the world, or in a different time, and their quests would rarely share the same locations.

Plus, mini-games! Ones so well done they are their own games in an of itself! One reason why I loved FFVII is because of all the variety of mini-games. These aren’t just Quick Time Events like many action games are working into their battle systems, these are actual games with actual rules and controls. From Cloud’s bike racing game to the snowboard to the submarine battle, and all the little games in Gold Saucer, my game would have things as diverse as a Tetris clone that you could play forever or a fighting game like Street Fighter.

And unlike many games which gives you a good ending, a bad ending, or a true ending, there would be clues to what the real ending would be. Maybe one character would hate bananas or something, and at one part, she would either be eating a banana or an apple in the background. The real version of the tale of course has her eating the apple, but you’d have to spot the subtle differences to figure it out. And I’d leave parts of the storyline open because fans would extend the life of the game by debating what’s real and what’s not for years afterwards

Also, it would have tons of secrets and optional quests, good ones, not ones that you do and then the rest of the game is pretty much pointless. Games that barely take the time to add in secret doors or a room behind a bookshelf bugs me. It takes almost no effort and gamers love finding those things! Just sprinkle them everywhere. If people don’t care for them, they don’t have to find them, but for people like me who will look for them, we love discovering them.

And good secrets would be ones that supplement the main game instead of being pointless busywork. Random pointless weapon upgrades are bad secrets. They add nothing to the game that you couldn’t just sell in a store. A good secret for a weapon would give you some background story and work the weapon into the main quest somehow, like an upgrade or a long-lost weapon from some advanced civilization or something.

And maybe because I enjoy MMO’s, I would love to add some MMO elements. I really like FFXII and its MMO influences. In my game, there would be some grinding elements for the truly hardcore. Farming rare drops or looking for monsters that appear in areas only at certain times in certain conditions. Things that a normal player would ignore but some would love for completion.

Of course no company would do this. Its one game, why bother to integrate so many different game engines into it? And unless you can sell one game multiple times, it wouldn’t be cost feasible to have completely different quests that share no locations with each other spanning 100+ hours. This game will never be made unless its kickstartered and really cheap and done in 8-bit.

4

A perfect simulation of poker, limited to 5CD, 5CS, 7CS and maybe a few minor variations like Shotgun and Chicago. In which you are allowed to shoot any player or sim who utters the words “Hold 'Em,” “flop,” “river” or “blind.”

I’m a simple guy.

5

I want a small-squad fantasy-ish tactical wargame (basically Battle for Wesnoth) married to an open-ended RPG-ish campagin - basically you are the leader of a small mercenary company, you travel around making various decisions about who you want to help or what jobs you want to take, buy various upgrades et cetera, and gradually get drawn into some kind of world-shaking war or whatever; I’d want multiple different starting points for different starting characters, multiple ways you can go with each character, not too much obvious railroading, et cetera.

In particular, I would want to have the ability to betray my starting faction and go over to one of the others (start as a human knight/paladin type, go over to the dark lord of the undead, or vice versa).

6

I guess I’d like to see the best parts of Bethesda games (big open worlds, lots of different equipment and leveling options) combined with the best parts of Bioware games (engaging stories with good decision-making trees, great companions, more entertaining combat systems, solid voice acting).

Throw in robust creation toolkits for making your own full-length quests that can be run multiplayer. Add the ability to make real changes to the world both through quests, combat, and building/creation. Let players host their own servers so that their friends can play in a persistent world, almost like a mini MMO.

7

Some combination of Thief + Deus Ex + System Shock. Lots of stealth and non-violent approaches to mission success. Deus Ex: Human Revolution came close to this, except for those damned boss fights. I’d also like to see some form of open world, with optional side quests for k3wl l00+, but only if it doesn’t detract from the main storyline.

8

Best parts of Mass Effect Trilogy* + DeusEx/Bioshock + Wing Commander + Space Strategy game. Based on Mass Effect gameplay, you have to decide (based on information acquired, but not spoon fed) which planets you need to explore, and in which order, to complete missions. Arriving at a planet you could find yourself in a space combat sim - either at a fighter or dreadnought level. Following that you land onthe planet to conduct your mission (your success at the space combat level may determine difficulty, or type, of mission) as a squad based, first person shooter - but with character development/skills ala DuesEx/Bioshock. Repeat for multiple planets until you assemble an army (ala ME3, but your level of success at each planet would determine how much “war assets” you obtain). Final conflict would be dependant on your war assets.

*actually you could stop there, but this is a dream game - right?

9

Actually, I’d be happy just to have City of Heroes back.

10

Hmmm. The open-world/sandbox of the GTA games (and the humor of the GTA games except for ‘srs bzns’ GTA IV). A dieselpunk setting. The stealth of MGS or Dishonored. The mind-fuck of a Philip K. Dick novel.

I think that’d do it.

11

Spore, but good.

12

Twenty-seven up, 27-down.

I never was into video games. :wink:

13

This is, to the best of my ability to remember it, what I dreamed of when Battlefield 2 started getting old. What I hoped Battlefield 3 might be.

First-person shooter
128 or more players
Multi-purpose jets
Choppers
Appropriate anti-air and armor weaponry
Maybe a plane to parachute-drop from
Various ground vehicles and armor
Boats and an aircraft carrier, maybe other ships (battleship for artillery strikes?)

Maps would be huge, and there would probably be only one at release: any others would likely be an added-charge DLC, due to the massive size, or as I’m sure they’re anxious to go there anyway, monthly subscription. Yeah, probably monthly subscription.

Instead of jungle maps, desert armor maps, air maps, city cqb maps, etc, everything would be on one map. City over here, one border has jungle, another leads to the desert, etc. A river with tributaries runs through, with boats on it, that leads to the sea, where there’s an aircraft carrier and other ships. Get tired of one area, move to another area, maybe fight where two areas meet. Areas would open up or close off as players joined & left. The victory would be achieved by holding areas and draining tickets, I suppose.

BF3 didn’t quite scratch that itch.

14

Seconded.

In fact, I would combine Planetary Anihilation, Homeworld / Sins of a Solar Empire, Simcity, Civilization and Spores designer interface to make a massive multi-player galaxy spanning 3D RTS game of civilization building.

Other ideas:

A GTA style open world game set in the dystopian future of pre-Matrix 80s and 90s sci-fi cyberpunk films like Blade Runner, Escape From New York, Mad Max, Robocop, Johnny Mnemonic, Freejack, Max Headroom and so on.

15

Ok, this is now my perfect game, too. I can only think of one thing to add right now: Sometimes you will get pulled away from a game for some amount of time, and especially with these very long, open-ended games it can be hard to get back into it if you don’t remember where you were going or what you needed to do. But you know you’ve put 40 hours into it already, so you don’t want to start over. So I would also add the option to have a recap of major plot points and recent events. More than just reminding you of what your current quest is, it would be helpful to get you mentally and emotionally invested in the game again. Why am I in this dungeon? Why do I care about finding this ancient artifact?

16

That would be a really great thing to add to some of those big long RPGs, maybe with some button you could hit to “add the last N minutes to the recap”. I have a 70% finished (I think) play-through of Dragon Age Origins that’s sat abandoned for basically this reason.

17

XIII-2 kind of did this. Every time you loaded up the game they did a “previously on Final Fantasy XIII-2” sort of thing with a quick montage of old cutscenes. It didn’t work super well, but they tried.

18

I’d like a game like Skyrim with the strategic gameplay options of Civilization. The fog of war should encircle your character; you wouldn’t know what was happening in the next town/castle unless you sent a trustworthy runner or went there yourself or used magical means.

19

I’d like an isometric RPG that has elements of Diablo 2, JRPGS, Baldur’s Gate 2 and Dwarf Fortress.

The game would be called “Dwarves” and you would play a dwarf, roaming around an endless, dynamic, underground world.

The action would be real time like Diablo and you could mine, craft items and build structures.

There would be enormous, intelligent, random generators for everything: NPCs, dialog, complicated multistage plots & quests, events, monsters, stores, items, buildings, and areas, so that you would almost never do the same thing twice in the same way.

The world would change and evolve over time, both from your input and from other elements such as plot, NPCs, monsters and world events.

There would also be a lot of humorous elements such as goofy names and odd items and creatures.

Then there would be expansions once a year: Gnomes, Elves, Knights & Wizards, The Deeper Darkness and finally Dragons. You could play other races/classes and start in other lands, or maybe make your own race.

Like Diablo, your friends could hop into your game.

20

Me and a friend have had some ideas over the years, and if I someday got a lot of money I’d try to get three of the created…

The first is a truly free, post-apoc sandbox rpg, with no restrictions on how to play. It would have to be big, partly desolate, no fast-travel, with a reastricted inventory to encourage use of vehicle transport of goods, Lots of different cultures both at the outskirts of the deserts, in the big, run-down cities etc.

We wrote up a very complex mechanic for hunger, thirst, insanity/sanity and damage(incorporating modifiers for direct damage on different parts of the body, illness etc.). Funny thing, to delay the onset of serious mental illness while travelling alone through deserts, or just lack of human contact in general, one could create a plank-buddy.

We had several intricate story lines planned, with context-specific music, wich was supposed to drive parts of the story by itself.

But yeah, no way two lazy people busy with school could pull that off.

The second is an open-ended, three-part zombie-zurvival, with focus on survival, game.

You start at the onset of the apoc, in your apartment in a medium-sized city. From there you do whatever you want. You can block your door, you can gather a band of hysteric people, and take lead, or just do as you are told, join another band etc. The worst idea in this scenario would be to go head on against zombies, because they will most likely kill you.

The second part, if you survive, will be some months after the initial confusion has died down a bit. You’ll lay down strategies for raiding, getting fuel, food, drinkable water, medicine, firewood etc. To survive, you will also have to build or set up ways to get in and out of your base quick and safe. You will after a while get hints to get building supplies to build your way over to neighbouring blocks. You can choose to ignore it, but supplies will become more and more scarce, and it will become impossible to stay put.

In the third part the game will become more like an open-ended rpg of sorts. A makeshift city has built itself onto the city, from block to block, leaving travel by ground almost unnecessary. The new city will be randomly generated, with different bands of people having set up camp here and there. Now the game becomes more of a ur-political, tribe-warfarish game were the goal would be to eventually get some sort of peace between the survivours. Zombies will still occur, and be just as hard to kill, but not nearly as prominent a feature as in the previous parts.

The third game is an adventure/puzzle/exploration thing. It is very difficult to explain, but it will have several different perspectives incorporated as a feature, sometimes forced. It will also seem mostly incomprehensible at first glance, or by explanation, but I’ll try. I’ll describe it as a mix of myst and killer7 heavily inspired by the residents, RATL, and expanded cinema. It heavily focuses on atmosphere, with sudden changes all over the place, but usually fundamentally subtly disturbing.

The game will end by the player character entering an italian post office for a reason the character does not quite remember. The character takes a que-note, with the number visible. From then the player can interact with npc’s and check the note or write, doodle, whatever. There will be references to the earlier parts of the game, r other things, hidden here and there. If you try to interact with an npc, he/she will yell at you in a language you do not understand. Everytime the player checks out how many people are ahead of him in the que, the number on his note will have risen. This lasts for ever, in loop. It’s the italian post-office limbo.

None of these will probably ever be made, but one can hope…
Btw, John DiFool, I read through the thread, and some of the ideas were interesting, but I will have to say one thing: When making a balanced mmo, IMO is seems complicated structures would make for complicated solutions, which make complicated problems, which again make other complicated solution that may bring up other even more complicated problems.

Why not make simple structures with simple solutions? F.ex: The problem of feeling like the hero of the story, making a difference etc. There is a very simple solution… Nobody matter unless they themselves put in the work to be regarded as one, ala Ultima Online, EVE etc. Everybody is a nobody, unless they interact with the world in a way that makes other players recognise them as someone.