Y’know, I’ve heard of people looking towards similar things, but as far as I know, it just never quite happened. What about an FPS San Andreas style.
Yeah, c’mon, I know you played GTA3. If you haven’t, you should.
But wouldn’t that gang war concept be especially awesome with some strong RPG elements and open-world gaming with a San-Andreas-style battle royale?
Think of it this way. You start the game and the first hour or so is the “usual” FPS intro section, getting you aquainted with the territory and factions and story of “what the hell has been going on here.”
But then the game plops you down as one of the commanders of a faction. You can ask people to follow you as you go around whacking enemies. OK, so far nothing special, right?
Except the game world is divided into various zones. You can conquer zones by attacking and taking out the enemies, and ally with various other factions around the map. Each faction hs its own types oif gear, and since so start out with bloody near nothing, you may need some allies to get going. You dont’ have to wipe everyone else off the face of the earth, either: you can get the faction rating so high they join your side, perhaps with some special quest-related work to seal the deal. You get money to buy more equipment (both for you and your soldiers) by conquering zones with some productive assets. (Yay for Jagged Alliance 2!)
Sounds like Command & Conquer with an FPS attached. That much action combined with micro-management can be a recipe for fail, though. That’s how most people, including me, felt about San Andreas. It was the weakest entry in the GTA3 cycle because it relied too much on those RPG-style elements. Most people either want straightforward action or intense RPG micro-management. It’s hard to marry the two successfully, but it can be done.
The key is to keep the RPG stuff minimal and simple, or it’ll take away from the action parts. The game can’t really have a learning curve, or it’ll turn off the people who like the action-oriented parts.
It’s a neat idea. You could develop it yourself with some of the engines out there.
“Factions” feature predominantly in games like GTA3, Mercenaries 2, FarCry 2 and Fallout 3, but I haven’t really seen it executed to my satisfaction.
Most of the time, you just pick which faction you want to run a mission for and for that mission the other faction is your enemy. The next mission, pretty much all is forgiven. And generally no matter what you do, it all sort of converges on one end boss.
What I would like to see in a game where the story is driven by which faction you help or hurt. To use an anology from Mad Max, depending on how you play, you can either end up as loner Max, Lord Humongous leading his band of gay biker mutants or as Papagallo leading his band of settlers, and each faction would have it’s own conditions for “winning”.
That’s fair enough. The concept I had was no micromanagement at all. You just strap on some guns and start the killing, and you’d still win. You could pretty much do anything from conquer all zones to joining half the map into your faction* to just making so much money you won by default. I guess the big change would be the fun in conquering zones instead of just rushing through them to the next Plot Point.
*You couldn’t join everyone because some groups were mortal enemies. You could gain faction (making hostiles to neutrals) by killing and conquering zones of one side, then maybe do a quest to gain the new neutral as allies, then mergin factions through more killing and questing. But the actual "quests in the game would still be low, maybe 30 in total.
Meanwhile, I figured you could customize by choosing various “frames” (read: powered armor yay!). You start out with a basic “worker” frame, which is decent but not great. As the ame goes along and you kill or join factions, you get access to more and more gear. Some factions, and their gear (like the better mercenaries or the military dudes) wouldn’t arrive till later. Some would have downright weird, but effective, frames available, like those from the science labs dude. Weapons work the same way. While you can easily change gear at one of your bases, you can only carry a few of these weapons (they require hardpoints on your armor).
There was at least one flight sim that did this in a rudimentary way–I wanna say it was Tachyon: The Fringe (highly underrated game, btw, if you like that wing commander style)-- where after a certain point depending on your actions in the early missions you were locked into one of the two faction’s story trees for faction missions.
Thinking more about RPG elements, perhaps it would be better to simply give the character some attributes that get better the more you use them, but which aren’t really required. It would make sense as the MAIN CHARACTER wasn’tneccessarily supposed to be a butt-kicking killing machine from day one.