Well, title says it all, I guess.
I was thinking, from conversations here and with my friends, about how so many people have some crazy awesome idea for a video game that they’ve spent the longest time thinking up. What’s more, for every person who wants a shooter where the space marines are more surly and macho or a WWII game where the historical accuracy is even more historical and accurate, there’s two who’ve thought up something original which sounds fun and even workable.
So, suppose you save Gabe Newell’s life in whatever improbable circumstances you wish to posit, and in a show of gratitude, he gives you his computer wizards to do with as you see fit and build your magnum opus. They can’t build holodecks or plug your brain into anything, but if it could feasibly run on a desktop computer, they can build it. You don’t need to know a lick of coding or modeling or AI, and money is, for whatever reason, no object. Whaddaya gonna make?
I’d make a sequel to Zombies Ate My Neighbors.
It would not be a first-person shooter. Nor would it use the damn Gears of War engine and graphics. I’d keep it simple, probably 2D and with the Top-Down perspective.
Imho, I think once you have a working engine, then you need good, compelling stories.
Other than that, I think RTS games are sorely lacking. Personally, after playing Castle Wolfenstein 3-D back in the day, I’m happy if I never play a first person shooter again. We just don’t have games like Master of Orion anymore.
I also think it’s time for another Autoduel game.
Originality wise, I suppose the idea I like best is a stealth RTS. Essentially pitting you up against an enemy who, should they be able to bring their full power down on you, will likely obliterate you easily. Set in basically an abandoned urban setting, you’d be hiding your buildings in other already there buildings, sending out units to salvage needed gear from around the area whilst avoiding patrols and the like. Luring foes and staging combat in areas elsewhere so they think that’s where you’re hiding out; setting up plans to eliminate a patrol all at once so none get a chance to get a message off.
Either a strategic level wargame in the B5 universe, or a Wing Commander style fighter pilot game in the BSG universe.
You may want to take a look at “Sins of a Solar Empire”
I am all about conquer the galaxy games. I would love to see one with alot more detail, alot more flexibilities, alot larger scale, and alot slower development. I would like to see a large game scenario take up to a year to play out. Shorter ones won or lost in a few weeks.
Things to include:
Detailed ship designs and damage models. Ships should be able to be crippled but not killed, maybe even salvaged and repaired.
Crew experience. Rookie crews should be lucky to dock safely let alone fight effectively. Everything from flight prep, jump plotting, cargo loading and unloading, to gunnery and damage control should be heavily influenced by experience. Ships should take a long time to gain experience. Elite ship crews should not happen with less than say 20-30 hours of combat time. Loss of experienced ship crews should be seen as a bigger loss than the loss of the ship.
Planetary invasions should play out more like a surface RTS, capturing or destroying cities and critical industries. Planets should be able to be in a state of flux as to who owns them. A planet falling should be a huge deal.
Multi player options for each “player”. People can form empires and tag team command multiple fleets, invasions, etc for the same empire/team. This way a huge star spanning empire does not become overwhelming to a single player.
Diplomacy should be handled between players in chat and be allowed to develop as they see fit without being enforced by game mechanics.
Scanning a solar system should take a long time, things that are not applying thrust, firing weapons, actively scanning, or expending energy in other ways should be very hard to spot. Kinda like how Alliegance handled detection, weaponfire and sheilds lit you up on sensors like a flare in a dark room.
Thousands of different manufactured items should be available and require various subcomponents and prior processes from at least 20-30 base resources. Every planet should have no more than 80% of the possible resources available.
Things like growing food should be harder/more expensive outside of an optimum environmental range, after all, corn don’t grow on venus and potassium mines on an all water world would present certain “challenges”
Just a few little details.
A Gorkamorka or Necromunda (including the ash wastes) MMOFPS/RPG.
If it’s just “create whatever game you want” and it doesn’t require me doing anything, I’d have them make a new Deus Ex that’s actually good. Or maybe Duke Nukem Forever.
If I had to actually handle creative duties, I’d probably make some sort of RPG-Tactics-Fighting game hybrid. Something with the tactical level of Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics (i.e., controlling battles between forces made up of 5-20ish guys) but some sort of fighting game aspect to it. The Chronicles of the Sword mode in Soul Calibur 3 was sorta a step in this direction. You’d have to find some sort of way to balance it so that ability in the fighting game portion doesn’t outweigh the tactics (which is usually the downfall of those types of games) but I’m sure someone could come up with something. And I’d set it in medieval China, just 'cuz it’s my fav.
I really liked the premise of Star Wars: Empires At War. You have RTS space combat which moved to RTS on a planets surface to decide who controlled it. Unfortunately both aspects were completely uninspired. Had the space aspect been more like SoaSE and the ground combat been more like Supreme Commander with some squad based Xcom style raiding… Maybe throw in a tech tree the size of Civ4 and a complex espionage system.
I’d settle for the much maligned Star Wars: Supremacy/Rebellion but with a large budget, modern technology and in real-time.
I’d also settle for Space Empires VI created with a budget of more than £2.50.
A version of “Spore” that was actually good.
A mixture of Civ and Sim City, with a much more complex resource, diplomacy and trading model.
And I’d want things to take time. If I’m in the medieval ages I don’t want to know what my explorers find out untill they come back; or if a distant valley gets attacked, I shouldn’t know untill someone reports to me about it.
Basically, I want a City Builder in which I controll an entire country and develop it Civ-style.
With awesome graphics… since I’m a sucker for those.
While you’re at it, throw in a flight sim, so you can fly around your cities in 3D. Start with a Da Vinci looking one, then move into different real planes as the technology was developed.
A MMORPG based on Bioshock. Setting is Rapture before Bioshock. The buildings are distributed on differend servers. No different shards/realms. The game would be very Eve-like, with as much real economy as possible. Every player has a home that’s customizable, and has a fixed location in a certain building. Big Corporations might be able to construct their own buildings.
A system of politics would be implemented, every player has a vote. Political parties (probably locally based on buildings) will try to gain power by making laws and decisions that benefit them and harm others. Votes might be once o month or something. Not as boring as in real life, but buildings that are oxygen independent because of their own production might want to raise the tax on public air, decisions on electricity etc. The whole thing would constantly be on the edge of civil war. And if I’m not mistaken, the usual people you can find in online games would make this very much like the original Rapture in no time. 
A game that blends RTS and FPS perfectly; you toggle back and forth between an RTS interface and playing as a foot soldier running around on the battlefield.
Remakes of TIE Fighter and X-Com, and a final installment of Knights of the Old Republic.
An MMO where players play very different “levels” of the game, so to speak.
So you would have one or a few Generals, who play a Civilization type game (though I suppose it would have to be in real time), and order troops around, deciding which town to attack, etc.
Then there would be the level below, who play something like Starcraft, attacking areas based on what the General orders, and set up the more detailed strategies.
The lowest levels people would play a FPS, or something similar, and they would take the roles of the units ordered around by the RTS-playing guy.
There may be quite a few problems with this idea, but if you could make something like it, it would be totally sweet. 
FWIW, the original version of Team Fortress 2 had a “commander” slot for one player per team, whose job was basically to oversee and direct all the other players. They ended up cutting it because it wasn’t workable… but I always thought it would be a cool idea and I’m sure some sort of game could make it work. (I think they said it mostly didn’t work because teams without a decent commander would be severely hamstrung, so it wasn’t an option for a public-centered game… but a competitive game would be perfect).
I’d make a sequel to Hacker, where you are actually required to hack a company rather than having a malfunction give you the keys to the kingdom. Of course, the problem with that is if you make it too hard people will get bored with it very quickly, so it would require some thought as to how to make that happen in a manner that is conducive to good gameplay.
Not that the original game was bad, mind you.
Well, I’ve had a silly, gruesome little thing I’ve pondered over for awhile.
Sort of a squad-based, 3rd person shooter. The player is fighting in a civil war…in Hell.
The main character is probably based on Leon Rom. The other squad members are worse—one steals Baron Samedi’s hat if you manage to defeat him. It looks quite natural on him.
Armament includes many of the worst weapons in history…both as in “infamous” and as in “badly designed.” You’ll probably end up having to club imps to death with a jammed chauchat on more than one occasion.
Levels planned so far include a Petersburg/Somme style trench breaching…with an atomic mine; a commando mission to capture murrain-armed V-2s hidden on a skeleton farm, and retarget and launch them yourself; and one of the last sections involves piloting a transport ship loaded with political prisoners to an escape across a sea of blood. Halfway across, you start to run out of coal…
Bellum Impium
“Hell is War”
Coming to PC and home consoles…as soon as I can get my cross-genre literary career off the ground. 
I really prefer Sword of the Stars. Sins feels very shallow by comparison.
Are you actually planning to -sell- this game? Because I don’t think most folks have the attention span for that.
Done already in SotS, though probably not to the extent you’d like.
While I think this is interesting and realistic from some perspectives, it’s unpleasant and unrealistic from others. The realism stems from how you build your game - let’s assume you’re doing a standard “research technologies, explore the galaxy, reign supreme” sort of 4X game ala MOO, etc. Now, ask yourself. How long are your game turns? A month? A year? How many radical new technologies should a civilization be able to come up with in how much time? How long does it take to go from fusion propulsion to antimatter? It sounds like you’re plotting towards the longer end of the scale. Okay, so now what happens when your ship full of elite veterans has been around for 10 turns, each of which lasts a year or two. How many of them are still on that ship? How many of them have retired? Now 10 turns isn’t real long for a lot of 4X games, and you might expect a ship to be in service for 20 or 50 turns… even moreso if your game includes refitting ships to new techs. Does your XP degrade over time? If so, you may run into problems with ever actually getting enough XP to get any bonuses.
From a pleasantness/fun perspective, ship XP is very much a “rich get richer” design decision - the guy who is winning the battles is going to be the one getting the crew XP, which helps him win more battles, which gets him more crew XP… etc. It’s a dangerous mechanic in that regard.
I think this is an interesting idea, but I’m not actually certain it could be implemented in a way that would be fun to play. Historically, it hasn’t generally worked, though certain obstacles that face real world game developers aren’t present here, so we can safely assume that your surface combat will be as detailed and fun as your space combat. But the question returns to being one of scale. If you have to play out an RTS battle (lets say it takes, I dunno, 30 minutes?) to conquer each major city on a planet (let’s say most planets aren’t as developed as earth, so you’ll only need to conquer, say, 10 locations to take it over entirely) you’re looking at a 5 hour investment…scattered over… how much game time? It’s difficult to interlock with the grander scale of starships and tech research.
I’m concerned this would result in a lot of waiting. “Hang on Jim! You can advance to your next star-turn just as soon as I conquer this city! It’ll only be a few more minutes!”
Well, certain amounts of mechanical simplification is necessary to keep the game playable.
I think this is why MOO3 failed. It turns into a spreadsheet exercise that even very hardcore gamers don’t have the patience for.
Where do you draw the line? Do you want to be able to overrule the decision of the planetary governor who decides to plant more corn for export this year? The military recruiter who is having trouble getting enough cadets to fill the list so he “forgets” about a few tests or standards?
Abstraction is your friend.