A faithful remake of X-COM with modern graphics, and not some Eastern European budget knockoff, either. I played a few, but none of them were any better than just running the original in DOSBox.
I never played EQ, but that does raise a question I’ve always wanted to start a thread on. It seems like everyone who plays video games has an idea for a game that’s usually fleshed out and generally awesome. I think I’ll start a thread about what games people would make if they had a million dollars and a lot of know-how.
Didn’t they -do- this already? I mean, it wasn’t exactly the same game, but I know there was an EQ titled console release. (Was it Champions of Norrath?)
Also, for people pining for Master of Magic (which, frankly, gets more love than it deserves. It was so hilariously unbalanced…) you may want to keep an eye on Elemental: War of Magic. Which purports to be trying to follow in the spirit of MoM.
For people pining for a sequel to MOO (Original MOO more than MOO2s “Civ in Space! Build a granery…er…Hydroponic farm in each cit…er…planet…” micromanagement) then I really can’t sufficiently emphasize how GOOD Sword of the Stars is.
What would I like to see sequels to? Mmm. Star Command from WAAAAY back in the day. Sci-Fi RPG with a nice mission based structure, and squad AND ship level battles, etc. Could do a lot with that. Also, Shining Force 3 needs a remake, in glorious newfangled 3d. And uh… I should wouldn’t mind a remake of Tales of the Abyss that looks as gorgeous as Tales of Vesperia.
Come to that, I’d love an Ultima sequel in the vein of Ultima V. Virtues. A party (the thing most sadly lacking from many modern RPGs). Heavy on the plot, light on the level grinding. Oh. And TURN BASED, darn you!
Hmmm, I don’t think I was aware of this (I quit EQ in early 2001, relapsed for a little while in mid-2003; haven’t paid much attention to it outside of that.) I knew there was Online Adventures for the PS2 (which got bad reviews IIRC and required you be online) and I seem to recall an RTS game based on EQ, but I don’t think I ever heard of Champions of Norrath. It looks like it was PS2 only, which I never owned. I’ll look into it and see how similar to the original game it was. I’m sure I can find an old PS2 for dirt cheap. Thanks.
Actually, just from watching a few videos on Youtube, Champions of Norrath seems to be a lot more like Gauntlet or Bauldur’s Gate than EverQuest. To be clear, I don’t want a game based on EQ. I want the exact same game, perhaps with updated graphics and a few tweaks to make it make sense as a single-player game (more linear storyline, ability to “solo” any enemy.)
I came in here to say this. SC2 desperately needs a real god damn sequel and not the one that came out without the direction of the original creators.
To their credit, they crafted a sorta plausible mystery for the Precursors, and they did leave us with enough questions about the Orz and who the Herald were working for.
As for the rest of it, the game’s total crap. SC3 had horribly unbalanced ships and terrible rehased abilities. 3D view was useless. The clamation figures were ugly and made the Syreen turn from sex vixens into 50 year old blue prostitutes. Add to that, many of the dialogue from SC2 races, notably the Spathi, were simply verbatim from the script of SC2! The fuel and spacefaring system was stupid, you get no sense of exploration at all. Dots on the starmap were hard to see and often overlapped. The voices didnt match (the Mycon sounded retarded).
The roguelike, Dungeon Crawl, already has a very good sequel, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. I’d like to play a professionally coded and up-to-date version with real time play like what I’ve seen for Diablo III, but possibly turn-based combat with eye candy like Knights of the Old Republic. The Diablo games and all the imitators are often very good games, but often way too narrow IMO in terms of equipment, classes, races, etc. Permadeath a must, of course.
I’d like to run around with a sludge elf transmuter and actually be able to see the blade hands tearing up an orcish knight.
For that matter, I think I’d enjoy a professional version of Dwarf Fortress, too. I enjoyed the ASCII prior to the introduction of the Z axis but I guess I was getting over it by then and didn’t bother relearning the new version. It would be nice if it was simplified, prettied up, and balanced out.
I’d agree with that, with the caveat that it’d need some changes made to stellar converters. Those were simply game breaking.
I’d also suggest: Deus Ex with improved graphics and pretty much nothing else changed.
Also, Duneon Keeper 2 with pretty much nothing done other than making it run properly in XP/Vista. Making DK1 run in XP Vista would also be awesome.
I’m kind of surprised they don’t give old games a graphics re-haul more often. People seem to really like playing their old games even with the old crummy graphics, so it seems like it would be a fairly cheap way for game companies to make more money off an old property.
About the only two examples of this happening that I can think of is Sid Meyer’s Pirates and (though it only half-way counts) the remake of Counterstrike for the Half-Life 2 engine.
So basically you want a game with outdated 3d graphics, a cobbled together combat engine, no economy to speak of, and with all the elements that make MMOs engaging removed?
I mean, speaking as someone who has been playing EQ since it launched, it’s -not- a very good game. It’s soloing hostile, 97% of everything that happens is only indicated in a scrolling textbox. It’s organic growth has resulted in very questionable balance trends and crazy mudflation. The “storyline” is questionable at best and frequently not explained at all unless you really take the time to seek it out, and a large part of it is told through 72 man raid events. It was not remotely solo friendly until the introduction of the new mercenaries.
It probably be easier to re-write the game from the ground up as an Oblivion mod than it would be to somehow rejigger the game so as to be solo playable in any meaningful way.
I think a properly done MOO2.2 would be a wonderful thing.
My main issues with MOO2 (possibly the entire MOO series):
Almost all races had the same desirable worlds – 1G, Terrestrial. Spaceward Ho! gave each player their own ideal world parameters – which always, to that player, appeared as 72 degrees F and 1.00 G. So in MOO2 if I terraformed a world, someone else could conquer it and immediately colonize it. In SWHo!, the other player would have to re-xenoform the world, or it might not even be worth their effort to colonize.
The “fuel” concept is really “range from nearest base.” Either call it what it is, or make it what it’s called. (Cf. SWHo!'s tanker ship, which I rarely used.)
Gameplay in MOO2 was extremely conducive to micromanagement. I understand that MOO3 limited the number of changes a player could make per turn – but as far as I’ve heard, there remained an ability to do a very detailed level of management on each change.
I seem to recall that simplified combat still required ship design.
A stand-alone ship design module would be a Very Useful Addon, with the ability to save designs for dropping into a game.
For that matter, why were there only slots for 5 ship designs? That seems like a limitation for the sake of legacy design.
They gussied up the graphics of the NES Mario games for Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES. The various incarnations of Bomberman have basically all just been increasingly prettified versions of the same game, at least until it went 3D.
Agree with most of your changes. Also would like to add that they need some way to surrender in battle more easily. Sometimes a bunch of ships would surround my planet but it would be almost impervious to their attack since I like to research planetary shields. I could set the thing to auto-battle for 5 mins and have to just wait around for the ships to give up and have a blockade or some stupid crap like that. Maybe an instant-battle mode where you don’t even see the battle happening to prevent stuff like that from happening
Heh. I say they should update the graphics, make it soloable, and flesh out the storyline, and you reply but the graphics suck, you can’t solo. and there’s no storyline! Makes perfect sense.
My point is that once you’ve done all that, it’s not EQ anymore. It’s just a game based on EQ, which is what you said you didn’t want. Obviously it needs to be designed for solo play, so any raid or group required events (90+% of the game) would need to be redesigned from the ground up if they could be kept at all. You say you don’t want the graphics, so throw all that away. The story is not cohesive, but rather made up in only semi-connected bits one expansion at a time, so that would need a complete re-write. What would you suggest including? The ancient and mostly non-functional stat and resist system? The mostly meaningless race selection? The excess of classes with poorly defined roles that would need to be entirely redefined in a game where soloing is the only option? What’s left? The tedious faction grind system and the alternate advancement?
Done in Sword of the Stars. All races have unique climate hazard tolerances that are randomized at game start. There’s no specific temperature vs gravity vs atmosphere vs radiation vs whatever. How livable a planet is for your race is expressed as a single number - Climate Hazard, which is also the measure of how much money and time you’ll need to pour into the world to make it self sustaining.
Fuel is handled as fuel in SotS. It’s a value that declines whenever a ship travels, and can be refilled by tankers, refineries or friendly colonies. You can even run out of it mid trip.
SotS abstracts out fidgety little colony level detail stuff to a few sliders, leaving more time for actually managing your empire and your fleets.
Not present in SotS for the simple reason that you can’t ever count on having the same techs handy. Ship design is, however, a simple and intuitive process.
Definitely not a problem in SotS. While I’m sure there is a limit to designs, it’s over 20 (Probably much higher. I’ve simply never explored it.) in each category of Destroyers/Cruisers/Dreadnoughts/Battle Riders (Drones, shuttles)/Space Stations.
SotS also includes a battle autoresolve, like YogSosoth mentioned, and the ability for both sides of a battle to agree to end it early (also similar to his suggestion). Battles can also be time compressed if you’re just sitting there smashing away at a planet or hiding in an asteroid shadow or something.
What it -doesn’t- have that MOO2 does:
Race design. SotS races are simply too different, compared to the cobbled together blobs of random bonuses that constituted MOO2 races. Star Drives, and Ship design/stats (A hiver Battlebridge/Armor/Antimatter cruiser will have different maneuverability, weapon mounts and mount placement, and durability than a Liir cruiser with the same sections, even assuming identical tech.), and tech chances that include unique racial technologies add additional uniqueness on top of the typical climate hazard tolerance and research rate sort of tweaks found in MOO2.
Leaders. Not really the most exciting MOO2 feature, but it has no analogue.
“Ability” to micromanage your colonies. Things like food production and individual buildings and specific planet level fortifications are absent. Planetary Economics are abstracted simply as Resources, infrastructure and income (which can be negative.) Defenses are limited to orbital Satellites, planetary missile batteries (the number of which are based on the population of the planet, and which are improved by various missile techs) and (sortof) space stations. Most space stations aren’t really designed for combat, but some do mount weapons and they can have their own small satellite rings.
So yeah. Seriously. I quite enjoyed MOO and MOO2, and SotS is a better game than either. Check it out.
Again you’re ignoring what I’m saying. I say UPDATE the graphics, and you reply THROW OUT the graphics. Makes no sense.
Look, it’s simple: Give the graphics a makeover-- updated textures of the same maps, buildings, and characters. Weaken the enemies to make them soloable (about the easiest thing to do and you’re making it sound impossible.) Make the quests give a lot more experience. Build in a major quest so the game has an end (quick example off the top of my head: kill Vox, Nagafen, Trakanon, and The Sleeper to free the land of some blah blah blah.)
I would of course trim down all but the original game and first 2 expansions to uncomplicate things and give it a reasonable playtime (no one wants a console game that takes 80 or 100 days of playtime to beat.) I’d probably axe Half-Elfs, Ogres, Halflings, Barbarians, Iksar, and Erudites (but keep their cities and keep them as NPCs.) Of course no cat people since that expansion wouldn’t be in the game. I’d probably nix Enchanters and Rangers, too. Gotta trim it down.
