Stats: about 30. Really. In some sort of tree, having for instance Strength, divided into upper body strength and lower body strength. Charisma divided into Beauty, Natural Leadership, and Likeable. Agility has Balance, Dexterity (eye-hand coordination), Speed. I made a whole tree in Google Docs and forgot to save it. Need to redo that.
Character: Procedurally generated from a base-form. Having high strength will accentuate muscles. High intelligence will move the hairline back. High/low speed, agility, strength, balance will affect all animations. People often recognise friends from a distance by their "gait", the way they walk or move. I want to recreate that. Some stuff can be chosen by the player, but most visible characteristics will be dependent on stats.
Objects: Every object will have a prototype. Take a cup-with-handle. The prototype has a few definitions that a cup-with-handle needs. Other than that, a player can design his own cup, from any material, and make that a blueprint. Blueprints will need my/enough other peoples approval before it can be made. I'm really bad at designing stuff, having a spore-like editor for every object can create a wealth of design never seen before. Textures of materials are already in. A picture-editor, taking snapshots of finished products and using that as a texture for that object could create more textures without having to resort to tens of textures per object.
Persistent world:World is persistent, procedurally generated, practically infinite and malleable. Carving a great hall in a mountain, live there, go away, come back later, it's still there. Areas will have ecologies and populations. Entering a forest with a few wolves, you have a small chance of encountering them. Forest with lots of wolves, large chance of encounter. Populations are abstracts, like probability fields, so not every rabbit in the world needs separate tracking. The size of the population is dependent on the size of the population of their food. Killing all deer in a wood will starve the wolves there, and they might start raiding your village, and they're more likely to attack humans. Extermination of species is possible.
NPC's and friends:You may attract followers based on Charisma, and assign them tasks. These tasks will continue to be performed while you are offline. As well, you may post jobs, and offer pay for those jobs (eg, I need 200 logs to be cut, at $2 per log or something, I need this-and-this area dug out for my Great Hall, this wheat field needs tending). Jobs can be taken by NPC's or players. NPC's with money will want to increase their quality of living, allowing you to rent out houses to them, having them eat in your inn, etc. Higher skilled NPC's and players may have to be attracted by setting higher wages. Eventually you might end up with an entire city to call your own.
NPC's will retain a memory of you, gossip about you or other players (fun: having them re-tell other player's conversations. 'And then Siquo said to Urist:"Come on, what's the hold up?" and then Urist said "One second, just putting my armor on"' 'Oh really?' 'Yeah, how about that?'). Building relations with NPC's should be possible. I want this to be perfectly playable for a single player, just in case I can't get the networking to work
Comfort:Comfort will play a large role. Being cold, hungry, thirsty, too hot, walking for too long, eating the same stuff over and over again will decrease comfort. Having high comfort will dramatically increase your chances of success in anything, as well as allow you to do more complex stuff. Sitting in an inn, ordering the best wine in the house, and a good plate of food with a nice bed afterward will actually make sense, and sleeping in the stable hay with old stale bread for dinner will make a real impact, negatively. This goes for NPC's as well.
Combat:Combat moves may be designed using an editor. Design a starting stance, make a move that starts and ends there, and you've created a new "style". Choose moves from your style, put them in a hotkey-slot, and fight! Combat will be toribash-style, where blocking and attacking make sense. This means fighting needs skills, and tactics, and you'll need to anticipate your opponent. To make it more playable, when in combat you and your opponent both enter "melee-time", a slow-motion time bubble around you, for as long as the combat lasts. Amputation, piercing organs, should all be done semi-realistically (semi as in it should still be fun and noone likes to be one-shotted by a lucky newb).
Exploration:Terrain is generated, and therefore nameless. The first trained cartographer to discover a forest, lake, mountain, desert gets to name it. Exploration should be fun again. Endless wilderness with no encounters or features shall be avoided at all costs.
Plants:Plants (trees, shrubs, herbs, grasses, moss and fungi) will be randomly generated, choosing structure, shape and colors randomly. This means that a trained botanist may discover new plants, and he gets to name them. Alchemical properties are also generated randomly. Currently I have no idea how to implement believable, generated alchemy yet.
Minerals:Same as plants. Most standard stuff will be in, but there will definately be exotic rare minerals and ores, that may be useless or very useful. A trained geologist may name a newly discovered mineral as well.
Renaming plants (after their later-discovered alchemical effect), minerals (the "adamantium ore" turns out to be useless junk when smelted), and terrain (the "Great Forest" turned out to be a small patch of trees) is possible by democratic voting. That happens in real life as well.
GriefingNo. I'm willing to take every possible action to prevent it. No stealing from PC's, player-killing, messing up someone's project, etc.