It is a common practice of gamers to sit around and imagine some awesome new game or mod that will never actually be made. So let’s do it again.
I have two ideas for game that I think would be great but I doubt will ever be made. They would both be somewhat like GTA, in that they had a huge city sandbox for you to play in.
The first would be a Romero like Zombie game. I imagine that the first part of the game would not even have any zombies. You would see the city safe and full of people as you performed various tasks (perhaps as an ambulance driver or police man, so that you would be amongst the first to encounter the zombies). You would see as the city quickly falls into panic with folks running all around you looting stores and starting fires. The outside authorities would cut off all bridge access to the city, thus keeping the city from emptying out (and getting boring). There would probably be different gangs of survivors that you would have to navigate through. Mini-quests, like trying to get needed medicine from a hospital, food from abandoned restaurants, or ammo and weapons from police stations and sporting good stores, and all the time you are trying to find a way out of the city. You would always have to keep moving or you would find yourself surounded by zombies. You would try your best to save innocents and get them to safe-houses that you set up. One important detail is that the game would have to be done from a first-person perspective. Part of the terror of a zombie scenario is the being surrounded and not knowing what is behind you. A third-person perspective would ruin a lot of the atmosphere and fun.
Second would be a Batman game. Imagine a fully realized Gotham city, (probably using the maps from the No Mans Land series) You as Batman making patrols of the city, spotting crime from muggings to robberies, all the while having other quests (like in GTA) to stop a major bank heist or the Joker from poisoning the cities water supply. I imagine that swinging between the buildings and driving in the Batmobile would just be incredible. This game might be able to be done from a third person perspective, but I think that first would still be better. It would make it so that you feel that you are Batman and really add to the game and the sense of exploration.
Maybe not something that will never be made, but…
I’d like to see a racing game where you start out in the 1920’s and progress up to the preasant day as you play through a career mode where you play a dynasty of race car drivers. Available tvehicles/racetracks and music should all be appropriate to the current game time.
How about a game of Unbreakable? It would cover the difficulties that an invulnerable man would face in the real world, while trying to become a vigilante.
I want a real time game version of “24”, where you are Jack Bauer and have to uncover a mystery and stop the terrorists before they can strike. It could involve all of the time you need to research certain clues, figure out the connections, etc. all with the help of CTU backing you up (i.e. you scan a dead enemy finger print and they get back to you with a match and information on that person and their contacts). It would likely have to be pretty linear, but it’d still be a blast.
I’ve always wanted a game that combined GTA with an NBA basketball game called NBA: Night and Day. The premise would be that you are a thug NBA player and you have to spend the days doing missions like pimping your ride, buying drugs, recording your rap album, etc. These things build up your “street cred” which lets you sell more jerseys and albums which translates into more money.
But then at night you have to play in the basketball game as yourself. If you don’t do well in the game because you did too many drugs or didn’t practice enough, your street cred goes down and you’re less likely to get signed, etc.
A railroad sim set during the mid 1800s. Instead of being a straight-up business simulation, you have several train companies vying for contracts to and from cities. In order to get to a city someone needs to lay a track, but you wouldn’t want competition freely using the track you spent so much time and money building. This would lead to bands of company marauders running around tearing up rails, trains specifically meant to abuse a competitor’s services (run one shipment, but destroy the track behind it as it goes), and in the case where two companies run tracks parallel to each other: broadside cannon assaults on locomoties! All this while doing the standard business deals in order to afford all these wonderful toys (and live like a robber baron).
I’d like a FPS a laDoom or Halo with no particular plot or missions, just one where I could walk or drive around an ordinary modern city with the usual formidable array of weapons shooting the people and things that bug me IRL - Asian students yapping in the library, people who take trolleys through the “12 items or less” checkouts at the supermarket, suburban whiteboys revving their engines while pumping 50 Cent through overpowered speakers at the lights, small dogs, Lladro porcelain…with no recriminations whatsoever. It’ll never get made, but I suspect this game would be hugely popular.
I would have liked to have made “The One Room Mystery.”
The idea was to release a single highly detailed rendering of room that users could piece over, then you would have a series of “witnesses” (actors) on an internet radio/chat thing who the players would be able to ask questions to at scheduled times. And from this they would have to decide who the murderer was and provide enough evidence for a successful conviction.
Probably you would release a new room every other month or so.
I would like to see a space based MMORPG, where your avatar is a capital ship. It would play like privateer/homeworld. You would start off in safe zones, building and modifiying your ship as you level up.
You would have to choose tactics paths for yours ship. Do you want to be a ‘battleship’ type with heavy armor and big guns? Maybe you want to be a carrier type with a whole bunch of fighters? Maybe light armor, and heavy shields which would kick ass unless you pvp a ship with heavy projectile weapons that pass through your shields and rip through your hull.
The galaxy would be split up into empires each with it’s own style and large unclaimed areas where it’s a pvp free for all.
You can solo and pirate, set up trade routes, swear allegiance to an empire, or join a guild and try to set up your own small empire in the unclaimed space.
There would be galaxy wide events. Wars between empires where pvp between empires is allowed and boundaries are allowed to change. Tech advances which force you to modify your tactics.
Galactic invasions that will require cooperation by all players.
Several years back, I envisioned a game I dubbed Five Alarm. It was a first person simulation (similar to Doom) but the viewpoint was of a fireman in a burning building. You had to go around inside the building, rescue any occupants, extinguish the fire, coordinate with the rest of the crew, and of course keep your own character alive. The fire itself would add a built-in time element. Different buildings would have different levels of difficulty.
A combination of ADOM and Master of Magic. You start as a dungeon-crawling fantasy hero, but as you gain levels and become more and more famous you start to gain followers. Then eventually you build a castle, and start a town to provide services to your followers like stables and farms and blacksmiths. Then as your town grows and your influence grows, you reach a point where you can either accept new dungeon quests yourself or farm them out to your best underlings. Eventually the game becomes a full-blown empire-building sim: you raise armies at your castle and use them to defeat evil armies while your initial followers, now full-blown adventurers in their own right, continue to scour the world for useful artifacts and intelligence.
I can’t believe this game will ever be made, simply because of the time factor: a full game would take at least as long as a game of ADOM and a game of Civilization combined. You’d have to be a really hard-core geek to consider playing it.
I’d like to see an RPG where you get to be Hannibal Lecter. You have to avoid the police, of course, but you also commit extravagant murders and atrocities along the way. Cannibalism, too, of course. The game would need lots of NPC’s.
You think the Star Wars franchise has been completely mined out videogame-wise? I’ve got one I don’t think has been done yet: A tekken/Soul Calibur style fighting game. 3-d destructable environment. Play as the Jedi or Sith of your choice from any of the movies. (Heck, throw in anyone bad-ass enough that they might have a chance against a Jedi too. Jango Fett, a Rancor, maybe even Han or Chewie, and an unlockable Ewok or JarJar, just for fun.) Ideally, lightsaber battles would be very defensive. One good hit gets through and you lose. (or lose an arm!) But that might not sell real well, so you might need to throw out realism and make it more like most fighting games, where the fighters can take multiple hits from deadly weapons before going down. If it were me, I’d make the “deadly saber” variant an option you can turn on or off.
