Plus, if you make the passage of time in the game match the passage of time in the real world, what if your character gets ambushed while traveling, at 3 AM? You don’t want to be dragged out of bed just to deal with some game. And if you abstract away “well, you can wait to play out the ambush until after you get up/get home from work/finish dealing with your kids/whatever” (which might be several days, for a player with a real life), then why not abstract away the travel time entirely? Set out on the road, then a screen comes up for a few seconds that says “Five days elapse”, and then show up in the new city.
And if I don’t want to spend my time managing trade agreements, and instead prefer to focus on whacking people on the head with a sword, can I still finish the story? Or will I be forced to do things I don’t enjoy doing?
Sure, but the consequence is that it might be more difficult. The tradeoff is that with low leadership skills you wouldn’t be able to command a very large army and with low kingdom skills it would be harder to strike alliances, but on the other hand your character should be a formidable force on the battlefield after all that combat training.
Ah, I see. That game sort of exists, then. It’s called Mount & Blade:Warband :o. And it’s pretty janky, but still pretty fun. Admittedly the “kingdom management” portion is a bit threadbare from what I understand (never made it that far myself), but I’m sure there are mods out there, it’s a pretty popular niche game.
Yeah, I see that more as a battle sim. It’s fun, but there isn’t a whole lot more to it, and you can only ever have the one army.
Actually with the diplomacy mod it has everything you listed. You can recruit lords and outfit them with armies of their own. Give them general orders. You set up businesses and trade with other kingdoms. You can get married and forge alliances. You set your tax rates, social polices, and chose things like how centralized vs decentralized you want your economy to be. You can hold feasts and invite all the other major players to your castle so you can schmooze. You take over towns and cities and you have to decide what to do with them. You can keep them for yourself but your nobles underneath you won’t like that. Or you can choose which person to give them to, which can make the others jealous to the point where they rebel against you. You can take other nobles prisoner and ransom them off.
All of this starts from just your guy in a strange city holding a cheap short sword. It’s up to you how far you want to progess in society. You can avoid all of that above stuff and just amass a small but extremely skilled and well outfitted bandit gang of 25 or 50 people if that’s all you want to do.
Well, I played the game as released and it had none of that. Anyway, that user interface is pretty clunky to begin with, so I can hardly imagine it does well with more complex options.
Oh, here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for years whenever people talk about video game ideas:
I’d love to see a large-scale sci-fi FPS shooter where each player spawns with a squad of AI-based teammates. You spawn as the sergeant with a customizeable squad of various roles. You can assign some basic commands and behaviors. If your character gets killed / disabled, instead of being out of the game or respawning, you take over another soldier in the squad (MAYBE you can switch at will, too, but I actually suspect the game would be better without that).
The combat can occupy big maps with tons of soldiers, but only needing a handful of live players. The problem of coordinating individuals online would be minimized, but coordinating between players could still be extremely beneficial. Obviously getting the AI right would be a huge challenge, but, if done decently, I think it could result in a shooter that has a profoundly different feel than most and allow battles that are much bigger but less frenetic than other large-scale-combat games.
In my dream vision, I usually picture this game being Warhammer 40k branded, and players having the options to spend personal resource points to spawn things like vehicles or mechs as well.
I’d play that- although I think that a game like that would have to have careful game design so that the inherent tension between having to command other players as well as participate in a first-person shooter isn’t just frustrating.
Mainly what I’d like to see is a military-themed FPS with actual risk. As in, you get killed, you don’t respawn for like 2 rounds, or five minutes in real-time, or maybe best of all, you permanently lose your most recent gear acquisition, be it purchased or earned.
The idea is that it would force people to play conservatively, not like spazzy jack-in-the-boxes who do stupid stuff secure in the knowledge that they’ll just respawn in 20 seconds anyway.
Oh, that and make sniping HARD. Like nearly impossibly hard.
I’m big on a decent story line for a fantasy RPG. And I’m a huge Tolkien fan.
Fortunately Lord of the Rings Online already exists!
I realise it’s an old game (2007 :eek: ), but I’ve been playing it for over 8 years and intend to keep going (especially as they keep adding new areas.)
You’re not commanding other players; in the proposed game the other squad member are AI-controlled. They’re NPCs that you can give commands to.
The game Star Wars: Republic Commando played that way. It was a FPS where you ran a clone trooper commando squad (I think a 4 person group). Each member had specialties and you can swap between them. If someone went down they could be revived if a squad mate got to them in time. It was a single player game though.
I don’t think long re-spawn timers would work well with capture-the-flag or other objective-based game modes, lest those modes reduce to team deathmatches. Neither would it work with an open world, although these are not usually thought of as belonging to the first-person shooter genre.
In deathmatches, there is also a question of what happens when the player dies. You have to keep the player occupied somehow - if players can’t re-spawn at all they usually join a new match instead of waiting for the current one to finish. Do you think it is a good idea to make a casual player sit out five rounds because they aren’t good enough? If you don’t want casual players, your target audience shrinks drastically. We’re talking a hundred-fold decrease, at least.
~Max
What about a ‘consolation arena’? You have to sit out of the main game, but meanwhile you can jack around with other players who are also waiting to spawn back in to the main game. Heck, you could even throw in game-within-the-game where your performance in the consolation arena gives you a buff when you get back, or lets you earn a quicker respawn.
There’s a modern Star Wars game that plays like typoink is describing, too. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I’ve watched my nephew play it (on Playstation). Star Wars: Battlefront, maybe?
That could work, but the alternative is to kick losers back into the matchmaking system (or spectator stands if they wish) and sell the second game separately for twice the profit.
It wouldn’t work for some players who get really focused on their shooting game. Getting killed and then forced to do some totally unrelated mini-game can mess with your groove. Sort of like chess-boxing.
Although, getting killed should throw off your groove…
~Max
There was a point during the closed beta where MechWarrior Online had some of this. No respawns and there were costs to repair your 'mech before dropping into another match and it made players massively more cautious on the battlefield. As expected players hated it so it was dropped after a short time. I loved it and it added real tension to the game.
They still kept the no respawn policy though so if you die early you have to wait for the match to end to use that specific 'mech again.
That’s my point- most military themed FPS games have an extremely short respawn time, even when on their “realism” mode. So it tends to pay to do some absurd stuff that would (and does) get you killed most of the time. But since you respawn in 20 seconds, it doesn’t matter.
I’d just like to see something a little bit more realistic, that would make players play like, you know, mortal people, not superheroic action movie stars.
And the point with the sniping being really, really difficult is that it IS really, really difficult in real life. Again, the game should reflect that, instead of letting any dipshit player with a sniper character class rip out 400 yard shots with a minimum of practice.
I can’t say I’ve played a first-person shooter in about a decade so I’ll take your word for it. But I know there are some games where snipers have to press a button to hold their breath. Wind dynamics might be harder to do in a multiplayer scenario.
~Max
Why ? It’s also really hard to shoot full auto, and the player can do it. It’s hard to run all the time with full battle gear, but the player can. It’s hard to lug around 500 rounds of ammunition, to toss grenades in a millisecond etc… The player can do all that because he’s supposed to be a trained soldier. Well, when he’s playing a sniper class, it can be assumed that their character take wind and distance and earth curvature and whatnot into account, it’s just abstracted. Just like weight and fatigue are abstracted, kick is simulated but not really (and neither is its effect on endurance) etc etc.
That’s essentially how it’s done in Sniper Elite, which isn’t an FPS (or multiplayer) but has you playing a crack sniper. Well, in that game you can learn how to read the scope, approximate distance and bullet drop and play it the “hard way”… or you can just push the button that triggers “sniper mode”, which puts a big red target where the bullet will land depending on distance, calculating the drop etc… Because you’re playing a goddamned nazi nutsniping god who can do that on the fly, and the game’s mechanics reflect that.
This is exactly how sniping in an online FPS should work.
I got turned off of playing FPS a long time ago, and I assure you it was never because I got pissed off to get mowed down by a dude 20 yards away hosing me on full auto.
Getting picked off from the other side of the map by some douche who’s found a camping spot somewhere he’s damn near un-hittable and thinks he’s Carlos Hathcock because he’s playing a ‘sniper’, though, is fucking bullshit and way too easy.