Battlefield 4 had the capability for someone to play the commander in some modes if I remember right, but didn’t have any kind of reprimand ability for the commander- basically you were some guy who issued orders, but your people could entirely ignore you without repercussion.
There were no powerups in L.A. Noire so not that kind of thing, no. But things like offering cigars or drinks to certain people during a discussion would absolutely have an effect. You don’t want to offer a Cuban cigar to someone who’s a vehement anti-Communist. You don’t want to offer a drink to someone who can’t handle his liquor. Or in some cases you DO want to offer a drink to try to manipulate the client or whatever, but it could backfire if you don’t do it the right way. And yeah there would absolutely be some kind of meter that would measure your credibility at the office, your reputation or whatever, and you could play the game with different playthoughs depending on whether you want to be a straight arrow or a cocky asshole…it would dramatically change what outcomes you’d get, sometimes better, sometimes worse.
As a fan of both Mad Men and LA Noire (maybe you can read a client with facial cues like you read suspects in the original game) I would love to play this.
In other words, “The Old Republic,” but way better.
The Old Republic was pretty good, in all honesty, but not good enough to crack WOW’s hold on that genre. I went back to it a few months ago and had a little bit of fun, but it felt dated already, and was so insanely easy - I guess they nerfed it - that it seemed pointless.
If you had the world’s best designers, a billion dollars, and supercomputers, yeah, that is my ideal game.
Yep. I was excited for that one, but the truth is that I find MMOs to be inherently un-fun. The goals and design philosophies of MMOs are completely different from other games.
A game like Skyrim but with a fully modeled economy and world where you can gather allies and affect things politically, economically, religiously, or militarily. You only get to see what is immediately around you, anything else you will rely on messengers to tell you what’s going on. But if you so desired you could travel there to see/participate yourself. I know there are a few mods like this for Skyrim, but what I mean is a fully realized and functioning game.
My biggest disappointment with SWTOR is that it was far, far too similar to other MMOs, and that’s even accounting for the fact they did do a number of new things with it.
It is interesting how much in RPGs and MMOs, conceptually, is totally unchanged from things David Arneson, Gary Gygax etc. invented forty or fifty years ago. Virtually all RPGs, either single player or MMO, rely on a core mechanic of eXperience Points contributing to a player’s progression in discrete overall levels (most games) or discrete ability levels (Elder Scrolls.) More levels equals more capability against adversaries of a fixed level, and usually additional abilities granted at discrete levels achieved. I’ve NEVER played an RPG that did not work this way; it’s just an assumed thing now.
Fuck designing adverts - make it a full business sim. You’re the CEO of the Widget Company. You have a perpetually limited time to invest in research every time you release a new Widget - you can research your banker or your possible investors, or your consumers (possibly personnified by journalists/reviewers/instagram “influencers”), or the media, or the political regulators… Learn their tells, their triggers, their personal principles and absolute fuck nos ; or just gamble on reading them at the big meeting. Hire people to do it for you, or trust in your gut and invest in Widget-making infrastructure instead, or simply paying Widget-making employees a living wage if you so choose (they might even become Widget consumers as a result)…
And so on.
There are a few business games out there (although none did it better than Capitalism+ back when I couldn’t grow a beard) and many 4X empire building games ; but none emphasize or even consider the simple albeit dreadfully important human element of it all. Who you know, and how you can play them. Who will slip your card to someone else, and in exchange for what. Who you can trust and who’s out to fuck you. Who’s in your pocket, who owes you, who just likes you, and who’s in it for the paycheck and will jump ship at the earliest opportunity. And so on and so forth.
And to be honest, I’m not sure which studio *could *actually pull that one off competently - **Rockstar **has the human simulation & acting down pat but couldn’t business sim if you business simmed them in the head. **Paradox **can sim anything, but they wouldn’t know about hu-mon inter-action if you made them watch The Wire. **BioWare **of course would only make every business contact fuckable…
Have you checked out Chrono Trigger? It’s pretty much FFIV with choices, non-random battles (no enemies on the map screen and you can see enemies in “rooms”) and special combo attacks (uses two party members turns for extra power).
There aren’t too many choices but there are at least two major game-changing choices you have to make, knowingly or not. There are also a few funny false choices which I won’t spoil.
~Max
Not a full game, but a crafting system I’d like to see in a Diablo-like or an MMORPG:
Monsters drop reagents, and you can put a bunch of reagents and a base item in a crucible or something to make a new item. So far, pretty standard. But the catch would be that item creation is procedurally pseudorandom. Every possible combination of ingredients would make something, but most of them would just be something so bad it wasn’t worth bothering with, and even the developers wouldn’t know what the good combinations were, except by experimentation. And some items would have a curse associated with them, and most (but not necessarily all) of the best items would have a curse, that you’d have to decide if it was worth it.
To elaborate: Every ingredient would have a “random” (but guaranteed unique) item code, a mojo level, and a list of attributes it could give (some of which would be positive, some negative). You’d take all of the ingredients, add up their item codes, and use that as the seed value for a PRNG to generate a set of attributes for the item, then determine the strength of each of those attributes based on the amount of mojo. The chance of getting curses would increase with the amount of mojo.
For instance, you might get a Tongue of Flame as a drop from killing a firebreathing monster. Stick that in the crucible with a weapon, and you’d have a chance of getting +fire damage on the weapon, a boost to fire-based spells, a halo of fire whenever the weapon is equipped, a penalty to your fire resistance stat, or your attacks now damage friendlies as well as enemies (the last two would be the curses). Just those two ingredients, and you’ll probably get a weapon that adds a little bit of fire damage, or boosts your fire spells a little (though you might still get the curses). Stick a bunch of other high-mojo ingredients in there, and you might get a weapon with a whole bunch of fire damage, or possibly a whole bunch of whatever else the other ingredients have on their list, but you’re likely to also get friendly fire, or a big penalty to your fire resistance, or whatever curses the other ingredients can give. Or maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll find just the right combination of ingredients that gives a super-powerful weapon without any curses, and you get to be the one to go online and tell everyone about the godly combo you found.
If I had any programming skills whatsoever I’d make a game that grows with the player. So you’ll start with a character who owns a rusty shortsword and the shirt on his back, and over time you’ll slay monsters and build a reputation and people around you will see you as a hero. Some of them are willing to follow you into battle, and with experience they too will become heroes.
At this point you’ll be able to base yourself in a settlement and attract more followers, and gradually equip and train an army with which to fight and conquer other settlements. You can either command battles yourself or send your lieutenants to deal with things, and also upgrade settlements as necessary with the gains from your conquests.
Once you conquer an entire area, you’ll form your own shire, with trade, taxation and diplomatic relations added to the previous layer. You’ll no longer be dependent on loot to finance your endeavours, but you also need to be careful not to make larger kingdoms declare war on you, or to get drawn into someone else’s conflict. You’ll form your own dynasty and shape the growth of your realm into a kingdom, or maybe even a great empire.
The difficulty with that, Telperion, is that different people will enjoy different parts of the game, and even someone who enjoys all of them might just be in the mood for one type or another at any given sitting. So it’s better to just make them separate games, possibly set in the same universe.
It wouldn’t be good game design to take things away from the player so a king who enjoys exploring dungeons should of course be able to keep doing that, only thing is that their heir would take over the kingdom if they die. And kings would get different benefits depending on their playstyle, so a combat focused hero would gain fighting power, a leader who’s out on campaign a lot would gain leadership skills, and a leader who focuses on administration would gain administrative skills.
I’d like to see an RPG with a morality system where the entire third act was dependent upon the player’s morality. For example, a good player would be the Righteous Hero and embark upon a great crusade to banish the Evil Ones to Hell once more, while an evil player would become the Avatar of Darkness whose goal is to remake the earth in Hell’s image and rule as it’s new dark lord. An option for neutral players would be cool, but I can’t think of an example right now. Not just different abilities and gear and dialog options, but completely different quests, enemies, locations, followers/friendlies, everything about the endgame would change based on the PCs morality. And, since the OP said “no limits” I’d like adult content built into the game. Graphic violence, sex, language, all of it. Make it dark in places.
Sick Ate,I was with you for the most part, but you lost me with this bit. I really don’t want a game where I can’t advance the story for days at a time because I’m travelling through an area that’s not worth fleshing out.
I don’t want a game that lets me do anything, because most things a person can do are boring. I want a game that only lets me do things that are fun.
But there will still be ‘stuff’ and ‘people’ and ‘places’, they just won’t be directly connected to the main story. Which would make sense, because none of the big factions have bothered with Madison County, Iowa, for obvious reasons.
I don’t want to have to sit for 9 days holding down the “W”, but I also don’t think that in a game as expansive as I’d like it would be reasonable to go from one side of the map to the other in an instant, especially in an MMO when there are major conflicts going on between real factions.
That’s why I threw in the “encounter” part. Yeah, if you decide that Nashville sux and you want to go to Boston, you can. But that’d better be a pretty solid decision, because it’s going to take you out of the big picture of the game for a couple days/weeks.
And now that I think about it, it would be a great opportunity for modders. Do you WANT Madison County, Iowa to be a real place? Mod it in. If I also want it to be a real place, I’ll install the mod and stop there on the way to Omaha.
Yeah - brings *Spore *to mind, which tried to be something like that. Starting off as a bacterium in a kind of bullethell thing, then a weird sort of survival simulator, then a simple RTS, then a civ game, and finally a space conquest 4X. Each stage not really fleshed out and underwhelming and too simple to hold much attention because, well, none was the real focus of the game. Nothing seemed to have been, really ; except perhaps the walking cock, I mean the creature builder/evolver. *Spore *was a neat concept in theory, but in practice it was pretty naff.
It would be nothing like Spore, which was disjointed and detached from itself. Instead it would be a game that expands with character growth. Picture a game that starts out something like Dungeon Siege, with a large map filled with dungeons and settlements. Eventually you’ll be a famous warrior and build up a warband and the gameplay expands with features from Powermonger, where you can attract followers and equip them with weapons to fight other settlements. Eventually you’ll have built up a sizeable and experienced army and be a famous conqueror, at which point other rulers may take you seriously and will possibly accept trade agreements or other treaties, and you can carve out a region to call your own.
This would be something that is an added layer to the game, not a separate part. So you’ll still have the dungeons and the battles throughout the game, but it would be a good deal more complex than an RTS. The idea is that there should be tangible results from your actions and you have to earn being a king.
Agree.
Real Life is often tedious and complicated. The more a game emulates Real Life, the more the game becomes tedious and complicated. The problem then is that you end up wasting a lot Real Life trying to play a game that is emulating the worst parts of Real Life itself. Sandbox games already suffer from a lack of focus.