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Author Topic: Games you wish existed  (Read 11073 times)

Idiom

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Games you wish existed
« on: July 29, 2008, 07:28:31 pm »

This is not a thread about "games by other people", as none of the main subjects in this thread should be "by" anyone. So it's in various nonsense.
List non-existent games you dream of here, and note what influenced you to think of them.

After seeing it on nearly every "Greatest games" list, I got around to playing Chrono Trigger, and, well, ... damn. Try to understand I HATE JRPGs, but this one was actually pretty good.
I was smiling as I
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Awesome. 1992, and I see some great innovation that today's market lacks. I really like the way the game could be played. You can beat the game at nearly any point, and the plot and everything else are more or less side quests to change the game world and the ending. It didn't really follow a hero's story so much as it followed a world.

The whole time travel thing was nifty,
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
I've of course also read The Time Machine by HG wells. Got to thinking about what I enjoyed most in Chrono Trigger. Messing with people. You could alter people's lives and completely change them. Although this was severely limited in the game as it had to be in a handful of side quests.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Anyway, now I have a dream of a game. Simply a people simulator. They go about their daily lives interacting and making their life stories. The player is granted the power of time travel. Not the chunky era selection like in Chrono, but like in HG Well's book. Hold down a button and you disappear from the world to watch everything around you fast forward. Hold down another button, and everything reverses in real time. This would be the trickiest part, as nothing would ever be completely deleted and everything would have to keep a record of it's own actions. It's a sandbox if anything. You go about and shape the world as you want it by intervening the people and events, and the world reacts. Through time travel loopholes and tricks, you're character you'd more or less be a deity.

DF is more or less a "people" simulator, but unfortunately the hardware and programming required for this big of a 'suggestion' would take at least 10 years in the best case scenario and a load of miracles. I recall I did have an earlier suggestion that was actually in the suggestions forum which involved the player being an ethereal force, merely possessing or directing individuals/people.
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lumin

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #1 on: July 29, 2008, 08:28:53 pm »

A game like Cantr II, but with a better interface, magic and monsters.  It would be really cool if they had a real family system, where every player is born into a family and grows up.  It would also be cool if the game tracked the world history like Dwarf Fortress where major event would be recorded for the whole world to see.

Yeah, that would be awesome... ;)
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Duke 2.0

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #2 on: July 29, 2008, 09:21:55 pm »


 Quite a few things on this list:

 
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 EVERY RPG needs to have the Lufia II system for monster encounters. You can see them all move around the dungeon, you can see their type, and weaker ones will flee instead of attack you senselessly. Of course, this only works for TBS's.

 As for other games, it's best to see that list.
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Aqizzar

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #3 on: July 29, 2008, 09:57:37 pm »

Forget that namby pamby list, now I want this game dammit.  As a total news junky, I desperately want a real strategy game that accurately models just how screwed up and mutable real warfare is.  There is a real logic in this - the big problem with virtually all RTS's, expecially in single player, is that once you've figured out the path to achieve your objectives and get the ball rolling, victory is only a matter of time.  A game where you have to maintain public support while balancing gruesome necessities of conflict and murky political goals (that you don't need to know) in a truly living environment would be phenominal.

Some of my favorites-
Quote
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.

I want a hazy, brown "Fog of Bullshit" layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over. I want CIA field agents that operate completely on their own agenda, the little units spreading clouds of brown wherever they go.

I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.

I want mutinous units that chain smoke hash and frag their seargents and sell heroin on the side and rogue commanders who go mad and shave their heads and set up fortresses in the jungle decorated with human skulls.

 want to share the map with powerful forces who are not friend or foe or anything else, a news media, private corporations, asshole allies and friendly enemies, everyone jockeying for their own interests and me unable to bend over at any moment without turning my codpiece around first.

I'll stop now to not break the page.  This really is the game I've always wanted.

I had an idea some time ago for such a game, though turned on it's ear a bit.  If any of my get-rich-quick schemes pan out, I'll shipwreck my life to fund it.  The idea is an Afghan Warlord simulator circa 1985.  Spit in the American's face for his heathen ways, or talk up a good line and get awesome weapons?  Use them on the hated Russians, your rival warlords, or sell them to the Iranians for mad cash?  Grow opium, mine copper, or just ransack people?  Give women equal rights and get journalist brownie points (and respect from 60% of the population), or enforce Sharia law so the Wahabists will stop trying to kill you?  A game where there are not only no good answers, but where there are nothing but bad answers.  I think it could really teach people why such areas hemorrage geopolitical problems.
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Idiom

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2008, 10:12:50 pm »

Quote
A game where there are not only no good answers, but where there are nothing but bad answers.  I think it could really teach people why such areas hemorrage geopolitical problems.

Most of my favorite games had no "right" solution to the problems they presented. A lot of games I see now, they say "It's realistic! Be evil or good! You have the choice!", when really, no, it's not like that. They give you the choice of Mother Teresa or baby eating to end a problem, while in real life solutions are always in the gray area.
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LeoLeonardoIII

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2008, 10:59:18 pm »

SNAFU looks like the best, as Aq suggested in Duke's link.

Quote
By level 12, you're trying to kill a target who's two miles away, on the sixth floor of a locked office building. By level 30 you'll be studying the TV watching habits of your target, realizing he watches baseball every afternoon, then sneaking onto an airfield, reprogramming a plane's flight path so that it crashes into the stadium where his favorite team is playing, the sight of which will give him a fatal heart attack.
Killchain looks like an awesome puzzle game. Quite likely the best puzzle game ever.

Besides that list?

I want an MMO with actual, complete character customization. Based on character skills you can make your own felt hat for example. If you want the brim just so, you can deform it realistically. There are no NPCs. Players own things, they want you to do things for them, and so fetch quests are basically built into the player community by the player community.
And the dedicated RPers out there will make cool RP quests too.

High level wizards can splice animals to make horrible monsters, for various reasons. Maybe you want to make a monster with a tough hide so you can harvest it to make armor. Or maybe one with acidic blood or poisoned spittle to use for experiments. Or a weak-willed fire-resistant one to help you explore that volcano over there.

Priests are part of an organized religion, which has goals delivered to the highest priests to disseminate through the ranks. But are these high level players telling the truth of what they hear? And what if a lowly acolyte begins hearing the voice of his god and it's telling him that the high priests are wrong?

Thieves have gangs and guilds, again player-run. If a player wants to he can intimidate and take control of crime territory, but he's going to have to intimidate actual players. Will these players gather friends who can defend them from organized crime?
Do you want to pick a pocket? Just walk up and figure out what you want to take. Objects exist at all times, meaning if a player wants to put something in his backpack he must take it off, which takes the backpack object off his back and sets it on the floor. The you can open the flap and pull items out or put them in. You're limited by volume and by container weight - after all, filling a backpack with gold will make it split apart at the seams.
Or maybe you want to be a highwayman, robbing the coaches of rich merchants as they move from city to city?

Maybe you want to be one of those merchants. Or own land, and hire people to work it. You might claim a mine, hire mercenaries to defend your claim, and hire miners to mine it. You'll need to set up a supply chain where player employees will pick up the ore in wagons and bring it to the smelters, where your metal is processed and sent to your warehouse in town by another courier.

But here's the fun part: you start with nothing. The world is an untamed wonderland of natural resources, rich prairie, endless bountiful forests, and sparkling clean rivers. When the first players show up, they are members of an expedition from a dying land. They have with them only the most basic of tools, and new arrivals are shipwrecked immigrants. So what is there to do? Well:

1: There are no towns. You need some kind of shelter, right? So start making bricks from clay and sand, start making teepees from animal hides, start chopping down trees to make log cabins. Cut the sod of the prairie to make sod houses.
2: There is no economy because there are no goods. Go out and figure out how to make a bow and what to make it out of. Fish, forage, and hunt for food. Once you have shelter and food, you can get started on clothing.
3: There are no domesticated crops or animals.
4: Once you get a lot of players, you can trade goods to them for raw materials that they bring in. You can specialize, being a farmer or a carpenter.
5: We start to see trade guilds and towns develop. Maybe petty warlords gather and try to control people. There might be an uprising. You see the first eddies of the tides of history unfold and human struggles against human.
6: Scams and trickery. "Let's use my trained ferret to steal that diamond"
7: Exploration. Just to see what beautiful things are out there. To find minerals to mine and new animals to slaughter.
8: Religious organizations. Politics.
9: Your city is a bunch of stupid wooden houses on a mud road. There is no bridge over the river and a bridge would really help everyone. Can you say public works?
10: Huge monuments, tombs, etc.
11: Family lineages, robber barons, industry barons.
12: Invention of machines and magic
13: What happens to a small pond when everyone is shitting in it?

I can see the game evolve from wilderness survival to wild west, through ages of enlightenment and darkness, through graceful stone architecture, steel and concrete, and twisted post-apocalyptic wasteland. The environment would change dynamically in small patches based on what happened to this tree or that bush, so that when zoomed out to see the big picture you can watch deforestation and desertification spread. I can see the players moving through a sense of infinite resources to be exploited to environmental collapse and recovery. Or maybe they'll save themselves, who knows?
What happens when someone has their finger on the button of a fleet of nukes, and decides to press it? What if everyone dies?

Well, you see, if there's a disaster and your land is dying, you can always send out an expedition to find someplace new ...
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Fishersalwaysdie

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2008, 11:09:00 pm »

Did you ever consider playing MUDs?
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LeoLeonardoIII

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #7 on: July 29, 2008, 11:21:18 pm »

Yes. I have played them. The trouble is that, even with all their potential, the fact that to code a new room all you have to do is write a description of it, the fact that the entire game is code and you don't have to worry about anything else, they still can't get their thumbs outta their asses long enough to just DO IT. Instead they create something with the complexity of Zork II and slap together a bunch of ill-conceived races and classes. There's a reason nobody pays to play those things.

I guess my requirement is that the backend physics of the world have to be so well developed that you no longer need to code for special circumstances. You don't need to script anything, because it's all already there. Results flow realistically from actions, so that gameplay is unexpected only so far as your knowledge of real-world physics or status of the game world can fail.

For example, in a MUD they might create a room with a "forest" type, so forest creatures like it. And they might have forest creatures mate and have babies, so you can eventually render them extinct if you try hard enough. And they could have the forest rooms spawn trees and such realistically. But if you wanted to climb a tree, they'd have to code that especially. Or if you wanted to not cut down the tree but instead hollow it out as a house, that's a new special exception.

No special exceptions. Just robust physics and a complete game world.

For example, I would want people to suddenly realize they can take a shovel and dig down to bedrock if they get bored. And when they invent tools or magic that can dig deeper, they can just dig and see what's down there. But poisonous gasses, flooding, lack of light and air, the effects of hypothermia if you get wet down there, and collapses of the tunnel would all happen on their own. If they outwit all those barriers, they could dig down until it got too hot. And then until they breached the crust and magma welled up. And if they invented magma-proof vehicles they could create a civilization on the underside of the crust to harvest geothermal energy directly from the mantle.

And all that would require no extra development from the team.
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Wooty

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #8 on: July 30, 2008, 07:42:23 am »

I would want pretty much what leonardo suggested: wurm online X 1,000,000,000.

Build whatever, do whatever, shape the land, build cities, destroy the hostile animal population, have hundreds of players doing massive projects like bridges, and slowly advance 'technology' from mud huts to stone buildings to steampunkish machines and suchawhanot, all in a ridiculously large map with finite but renewable resources.

Wars and pollution and the enemy dumping salt on your burned fields a must =)
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qwertyuiopas

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #9 on: July 30, 2008, 10:23:55 am »

Since nobody else mentioned it, DF 1.0 or higher.
It WILL exist, but doesn't, and the sooner it exists the happer this forum will be....
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LeoLeonardoIII

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #10 on: July 30, 2008, 10:42:27 am »

Since nobody else mentioned it, DF 1.0 or higher.
It WILL exist, but doesn't, and the sooner it exists the happer this forum will be....

That would rock pretty hard
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Helmaroc

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #11 on: July 30, 2008, 01:21:15 pm »

A game like Cantr II, but with a better interface, magic and monsters.  It would be really cool if they had a real family system, where every player is born into a family and grows up.  It would also be cool if the game tracked the world history like Dwarf Fortress where major event would be recorded for the whole world to see.

Yeah, that would be awesome... ;)

It would. I'd prefer magic and monsters be kept away, but a complex family system, more depth, a better interface...not as though I'm not hopelessly addicted already. I just checked my chars before posting this.
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Cthulhu

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #12 on: July 30, 2008, 06:37:09 pm »

I'd like to see an FPS with real teamwork.  Squad-based, of course, with each member filling a specific role, maybe two or three riflemen, a medic, a support guy, and a radioman, maybe a demolitions guy if that was needed, with stuff like real off-map support, not the generic "Everyone Dies in the Area Air Strike", something like where there's another player controlling support, and the radioman has to tell him which building or area to bomb, by giving coordinates, or a description of the offending building, and then the support guy has to find where he means and send whatever support he requested, with multiple different forms of support for different situations.  Naturally, everyone involved would have to be paying attention/speaking coherently or teammates could get hurt.  Also, leaning, sprinting, and iron-sights, these things should be elementary FPS stuff, and yet an infuriating number of otherwise top-notch games forget about them.  Yeah, that'd rule.  Oh, and Red Orchestra-style vehicles, where you need teamwork for them, too.  I should really get that game.

They give you the choice of Mother Teresa or baby eating to end a problem, while in real life solutions are always in the gray area.

You got that from Yahtzee's BioShock review...
« Last Edit: July 30, 2008, 06:55:11 pm by Cthulhu »
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Pnx

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #13 on: July 30, 2008, 07:25:46 pm »

Yeknow I actually planned out the details for a game that involved time travel, it would involve you traveling through time over a 600 year period of time in a colony in deep space. It would have been similar to a roguelike and the entire history of everything over that 600 year period would be mapped out, you would be able to shape the entire destiny of the colony any way you liked. The only thing I wasn't sure about was how to manage interacting with your past self. I mean it's simplistic to say that you get time paradoxes when you interact with your past self but imagine what would happen if say there's a girl you run into that saves your life. But when you go back further in time again you accidentally kill her grandmother. How would I handle that? I think the only solution would be to say that you exist outside of time and can't interact with yourself, then I'd have to have some kind of weird code to handle past interactions while you're there or something.
The point is time travel can really give you a headache.
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Fualkner

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Re: Games you wish existed
« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2008, 08:01:46 pm »

Leo, I'm working on a game that will allow you to do things like that. Things like all wooden objects burn, metal objects conduct electricity, etc. will be in there. Unfortunetly for you, it's a roguelike. But I've long imagined a game like that, where you can do anything you could do in real life with little to no real consequence, except for the obvious extinction stuff. I've always wanted to rob people blind.

Well, as I mentioned before, the game I'm making is what I feel the perfect game should be. Strategic combat, very customizable (In important and unimportant ways.) Everything can be effected, stolen, moved, or broken. Businesses can be opened, anything from assassins to zebra breeders (Okay, monster breeders. Sell them to zoos or alchemists.) Things can be built, and the world around you reacts in a believable and completely modifiable way. Of course, this will take a very long time to code and such. I'm doing it in Python, if anyone would like to speak up as a reference. I'm learning the language to program the game, so still rather new to this whole thing.
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