Assuming there’s no limits on number of polygons, time and effort needed and that you could have any video game you’d like, how would it look like, would it be an improved version of a game that already exists, a combination of different games, maybe something completely new?
Here’s mine, to sum it up it’s Gta with a realism level slider set on 9000, so Gta, but:
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with more RPG elements (real jobs (military officer, factory worker,…), several choices to talk with pedestrians, to ask them for directions, ability to buy&sell stuff from street sellers, etc.)
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realistic vehicle physics for everything, not just good car physics and bad plane physics
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several large cities and many smaller towns that are really far from each other (at least a distance of an hour or two in real time between large cities, so that when you travel to another city to do missions, it feels like a whole new journey)
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different countries with their own police and army factions. These factions can occasionally enter a war and fight other’s armies,etc. (think of gang wars in Gta San Andreas or Saints row 2, but on a much larger scale, this would also affect pedestrians, traffic,etc.)
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meaningful public transport in which you can ride in first person, trains, buses, subways, airplanes (so that you reach cities in 10, 20 minutes instead of driving for hours)
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police that doesn’t know automatically who and where you are if you commit a crime with no one around and police that doesn’t send dozens of cars and choppers on you, but also police that will keep passively searching for you until you bribe someone or escape to another country somehow. If you kill someone and no one sees it, you still might get wanted after some time (due to police investigations), stolen cars will not automatically have police chase them (unless you are seen breaking in), but if you drive a stolen car and don’t change the plates, the police will start chasing you when they see you. If chased by the police, you could hide and wait for them to go away and they won’t just spawn to wherever you are like they do in Gta, so it would be much easier to escape them, but they would come to your house or workplace, so you would have a higher incentive to bribe them, instead of the classical having 5 stars, hiding in a subway tunnel and exiting after a minute as if nothing happened. Wearing masks, being stealthy and so on when doing missions/robberies would make it much harder for the police to identify you.
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hundreds of military vehicles, weapons,etc, each with realism on Arma 3/DCS/Squad level
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ability to join armies as a soldier for a salary (to train for using various weapons, to participate in mil exercises and wars) or to even command armies at different unit levels (which you would be able to do by doing the real jobs rpg element and going to a officer academy to become an officer)
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ability to buy many different houses and objects and have bills&taxes related to them, the larger the property, the larger the expenses. If your wallet gets empty and you can’t pay, you are out on the street and you have to earn money from scratch to buy or rent a new house/apartment.
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real time duration
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optional food, drink and sleep system, you’d buy food at shops, street merchants, pick up fruits in nature,… and store food and drinks in the house or a backpack. If you somehow get broke and can’t afford anything to eat or drink, you progressively get sick (since it’s real time duration, it would take a few real hours), you could also sleep on the street if you have nowhere else, but weather, animals and criminals could disturb your sleep and you’d have a risk of getting sick, injured or mugged.
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construction system, you could buy a empty lot and build a house like you would in Sims, the more you earn, the bigger the house you can construct
There’s probably a lot more I could think of, but that’s most of it, a Gta type world that is much, much larger and that is much more realistic, where you can choose to be a criminal and have police on your back, police which is there to stay unless you bribe them, get arrested,etc. or a ability to live a life of a normal citizen and have different careers, earn to buy vehicles, properties, food,etc., drive in public transportation if you don’t own a vehicle (and don’t want to ride in a stolen vehicle) and much, much more.
As far fetched as this all sounds combined like this, each of these things I counted already exists in various different games, Arma 3 for example has gigantic terrains, AC Odyssey and even the old Scarface game have a system of passive chasing by the police (mercenaries) and bribing them to leave you alone, games as old as Mafia 1 from year 2002 (yep, almost 20 years) have a first person public transport system (a tram and a light rail system), many survival games have food, drink and sleep systems, many games have construction systems and ability to manage properties, there are a lot of strategies in which you command with various military units, pretty much all of those things have directly or indirectly appeared in games for years now, but haven’t been combined in a grand scale open world game, for now at least, but computers are becoming more and more powerful and games will only become more complex as time passes, so who knows, maybe some day we could see a game that has all this.