What video game would you make if you had the know-how?

If we’re allowed console games, Eternal Darkness 2 for the Wii. Keep it third-person action. Create a slightly larger central location, such as an apartment complex that used to be a sanatorium that was built over a portal to the beyond. Devise very, very cruel insanity effects. Insert maniacal laughter here.

“Thank you for playing our game so far. ‘Eternal Darkness 2: The Ending’ will be available soon in the Wii Shop.”
“Eternal Darkness 2 requires 500 memory blocks. Erase all (Y/Y)?”
“Connection with the Wii Remote lost. Again. Forever.”

For those who want to play a RTS / FPS hybrid, download Savage http://www.mofunzone.com/download_games/savage_the_battle_for_newerth.shtml. It’s free to play and there is usually around 30-40 people on the USA server at any given time.

I’d like an X-Com sequel where the humans are the invaders, taking the fight back to alien controlled star systems. You start with a ship and a fixed number of crew members. You’ve got to divide them up between soldiers, sailors, engineers, and researchers. All four have experience trees that can make them more effective in their roles, with the emphasis on multiple paths for soldiers, allowing for tactical specialization. Resupply, at least initially, is very difficult. Ship damage doesn’t repair instantly, and you’ll occasionally be forced to raid outposts just to get enough material to repair and resupply. As you liberate alien worlds, though, you can start recruiting from the local populations, giving you mixed alien/human forces, and access to alien tech. When a soldier is “killed” in the field, depending on how advanced your medical tech is, he might be revivable. But it depends on what sort of weapon took him down, and how much damage it did. If he stepped on a mine and had his legs blown off, you need to research cybernetics to get him back in the field. As your medical tech increases, you can do more radical reconstructions, up to putting a human brain in a walking tank at the highest research levels.

I’d like a remake of Master of Magic, using the Total War engine.

I’d like to see a sequel to Gladius, with more emphasis on the idea of building up your own gladiator training school. Galdiatorial combat should be potentially fatal (which was the biggest flaw in the original - fighting in the arena was never deadly). There’d be a BioWare style “two path” RPG plot, where the “good” versus “evil” plotlines depending on how brutal your gladiators are in the ring. If you routinely slaughter your opponents, you get a reputation as a bloodthirsty and cruel school. If you’re more careful about not using high-damaging moves on weakened opponents (thus knocking them out) or accepting surrenders, you’re seen as being the good guys.

An MMO crossed with an FPS. You run around shooting and killing things and gaining levels like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Mobs would wander the countryside and you could pick them off at your leisure and skill. To prevent rampant Player Killing, players would fight in designated arenas, and other areas would only open up for killing during specific times. Bosses would have insane defense, unavoidable blast radiuses, multiple forms, and only tiny areas of vulnerability.

Battlefield 2 had a Commander role, who could give orders, launch artillery and drop supplies. I never played the game much, so I’m unsure as to how well it worked.

Tribes 1 had the ability to monitor the game field and issue commands, it was a pretty cool feature, it even had one feature I have never seen since where you could literally click on one of your team and watch them from a sort of over the shoulder camera that was cool as hell.

for me, Tribes 1 redone with a full on modern engine for both improved physics and graphics and keeping some of the customizable features from the original game.

for totally never been done before.
I want to take an mmorpg style game like say WoW and merge it with say CoD4, you dont level up playing the game WoW, you level up killing people just like in CoD4, as you level you gain access to better gear and other options but its still more of an fps than rpg. the only reason you play is to fight other players. have a full range of classes available and gear selections for each, it would be a bitch at first but leave everyone say 10 slots for favorites and you should be all set.
or take a big assed sand box like GTA San Andreas, add in a cool assed fps, perhaps bump up the flight aspects of the game and make it mmo, where players can just run around the country side doing whatever they want.

Works great. A good commander can more or less win the round with just one decent squard while a bad commander can lose the round with even 3 or 4 decent squads. Dropping arty, vehicles, spotting enemies behind enemy lines, etc is a very important part of the game.

I play as a commander in Battlefield 2 often. It’s an interesting break from playing as a normal soldier but it can get kind of boring. Scan, artillery. Scan, artillery. Scan, artillery. UAV. Drop a vehicle here. Order these guys here. But mostly scan, spot, and UAV. Frequently you have to hide away in a really out-of-the-way location so as not to be killed.

The game “Vietcong” - I don’t know if anyone still plays it - by the same people who made “Mafia” had a really good artillery system. There was no “commander” of the squad, but one man on the team could choose to be a radio operator. The radio operator had a primitive map and compass with magnifying lens - you’d literally see the arm holding out the piece of paper and the compass - and you could call in an air strike or an artillery strike by selecting a point on the map. (You would see the hand actually take out the handset for the radio and hear the radio commands.) There was no way to “scan” the map and see where everyone was, like in BF2, so this required you to actually get in a position where you can view the enemy and figure out where on the map they were. I found this to be more fun than the commander system in BF2. But it’s still a great game.

I know a million copyright issues and 20 years are against it, but…

I would like to see the proposed sequels to Lucasarts Loom. Brian Moriaty proposed the idea but apparently everyone moved onto other things before it could get off the ground. Called “Forge” and “Fold” it would continue the story(left on a universe wide cliffhanger) from Loom but each would focus on one of the other characters in the series.

Still, I occasionaly hold out hope that some fan game is secretly in the works somewhere, which, when completed, will be released on the internet and go viral before lucasarts has time to notice it and shut it down. Particularly since Lucasarts has long since abandoned it.

It’s a bit older (Playstation 1), but check out the Unholy War. The fighting mode is 3d not 2d.

I’m gonna go a different direction. I would love to see an educational game. Something along the lines of The Amazing Race meets Berlitz. A travel around the world, seeing major sights and learning the languages to communicate with the locals to advance. The harder the words and phrases, the further you go (and vice versa). Barter with the locals for a souvenir, tell a taxi driver which way to go, decipher a clue.

Great OP.

I’d make an add-on pack to Civ IV packed with tons of historical and factual ‘what-if’ scenarios. I’ve lurked on CivFanatics for 6 years or so and most of them are a disappointment somehow because the designers didn’t put enough work into it or the AI is just too weak.

My wish is a 1400’s discovery/empire builder scenario where the European powers actually compete with you. So far it’s been either scripted builds or the AI’s crushing advantages that give it any expansion power. I want an AI to beat me to the new world because it was smarter, but because I was handicapped.

I’d make a sequel to Chrono Trigger that isn’t Radical Dreamers or Chrono Chross.

Darklands II. Because Darklands is a freaking awesome game, hobbled by a couple of bugs and by being from the dawn of time (at least the computer gaming dawn of time).

C’mon, man. Details. :slight_smile: It’s not like EA wrote all the code, then unchecked ‘Make this game good? Y/N’ box before compiling.
To be fair, I suppose I should have put this in the OP, but let’s add another constraint: you can’t use any IP that isn’t already in the public domain.

I figure since the thread’s going strong, I should pitch in my wall-o-text contribution. I want a city-building and resource managing game with sporadic combat, a bit like the* Total War *games, set in this guy’s vision of the 21st century. But instead of a generic Mad Max or Fallout setting, it’d be set in Canada and Alaska, where crops could still be grown and small cities could survive.

I really like games where the story’s impetus comes through in the actual gameplay, rather than from a cutscene or pop-up window. More importantly, the story you create by playing creates new challenges for you, so you’re playing one continuous campaign where every hour brings you something completely new, rather than fifty disconnected missions that vary nothing but the scenery. Like in Rome: Total War, where becoming large enough to steamroll your enemies would spook the other families and start a civil war, setting up a final battle that’s more sensible and more justified than any Mecha-Hitler fight. The best game in this regard has to be X-COM, with the smooth escalation from fighting tiny UFOs to responding to terror raids to defending your bases until you can build up enough strength to take the offensive before too many countries fold to the aliens.

The game would start in the present, with you monitoring your carbon emissions and practicing social responsibility, but with less and less diligence as transportation costs increase and domestic problems get to the point where the national government has no ability to enforce the laws, and the corporations who’ve been buying up land and building factory towns and hiring private security become the de facto authorities. As the corporations expand, they set up subsidiaries to administer towns and farms and provide border security, which slowly devolve into self-sufficient fiefdoms with military obligations to the head office squabbling over the best farmland.

I could probably write about this for a lot longer, but I don’t want to divert the thread to make it all about me, and my roommate is about to go to bed at any rate.

I’ve been wanting a real lacrosse game for about 8 years now.

I’d make the ultimate presidential election game of my dreams. There have been a few low budget political sims that were OK, but playing them only makes me long for the perfectly balanced, fully featured, big budget history nerdgasm that exists only in my head.

This would include the ability to play as any major candidate in any of the presidential elections in U.S history, complete with appropriate statistics and campaign strategy’s for each period. There are also loads of special challenges to find ways to change the course of history by taking over the campaigns of the losers and turning their fates.

Too bad this wouldn’t be commercially viable enough to exist outside of my daydreaming.

Ok, I’ll be in back in this thread to add more to what I said, but in the meantime, here’s a relevant link: The Ultimate War Simulation Game.

[QUOTE]
I want a war sim …

  1. … where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a “nuclear missile silo,” only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage. I want little celebrities to show up on the scene and do interviews over video of charred teddy bears, decrying my unilateral attack. I want congressional hearings demanding answers to these atrocities.

  2. On the very next level I want to lose half of my units because another “orphanage” turned out to be an enemy ambush site. I want another round of hearings asking why I didn’t level that orphanage as soon as I saw it, including tearful testimony from a slain soldier’s daughter who is now, ironically, an orphan.

Ok, I’ll be in back in this thread to add more to what I said, but in the meantime, here’s a relevant link: The Ultimate War Simulation Game.

A game reminiscent of Diablo 2, with lots of randomized gear drops, levels, etc, only it would be a sci fi game. You would use WASD to move, and the mouse to aim your gun, but it would still be a top down shooter. There would also be several distinct classes with differing playstyles, such as an engineer who makes turrets and field fortifications, or a dude in a gigantic exoskeleton with huge weapon and really thick shield.

You’d fight a variety of natural, mutant, cyborg, robotic, and alien life in a plot to uncover the antagonist and destroy it.

I even have an idea for the best mission in the world… You are being directed by a friendly AI(think cortana of Halo) in your quest, excepting she’s actually the evil AI protagonist, and is using you as her pawn to activate her systems so she can do Really Bad Things. She gradually corrupts you more and more during the first half of the game, to the point where you no longer see reality, only what she wants you to be. At some point, a few good AIs back on earth figure out whats going on, and are breaking through her firewall to come and intervene, so she sends you, saying someone is attacking her core or something. You fight towards the ftl comm, which she intends for you destroy, while a clock ticks down. She gets increasingly agitated towards you, and in the final few minutes, downright hostile, insulting you, belittling you to hurry else she will die, etc. Ultimately, you fail, and she gets PISSED. The friendly AIs breach the firewall, and clear your vision. Its at this point that you see that the area you are invading is the main base where you start, and mutants/cyborgs/bad guys are not actually bad guys, but are all your friends and such, and are laying broken and bloodied on the ground from your rampage, having been trying to stop you. You’ve been helping the bad guys all along, making things worse instead of better.

:smiley: