Games you wish they would make

[ajbera]

Mommy and daddy didn't want me. Grrrrrr!!!!

Seriously, the prison game just occurred to me out of the blue. Given the (now) proven marketability of huge, open-ended rpgs, a good game of this type in any setting would be welcome. I love fantasy rpgs as much as the next geek, having grown up on Ultima, Phantasy Star, and the SSI AD&D games, and there is always room for a decent title in this genre. But it's not like the fantasy rpg genre isn't a tad overrepresented. Just like WW2 shooters.

But the very first time I played Civ2, I thought it would make an awesome organized crime game. While we have plenty of action crime titles, ranging from the brilliant (GTA) to the excruciating (25 to Life), the only true strategy game with this theme were Gangsters 1 & 2, and they were mediocre at best. So hope springs eternal that a truly great crime strategy game will be made.

But, to show I have more on my mind than prisons and extortion, howzabout this: a game where you play as an "angel" or "demon", set upon a Sim-like world. You don't have control over the Sims, but you influence them to be good or evil. As an angel you try to inspire hope, charity, decency, resistance to temptation, etc. As a demon you would inspire despair, vice, total selfishness, etc. At first you would have responsibility trying to influence one Sim, while your opponent (demon if your an angel) would try to counter your influence. Your Sim would go about his/her life, and you can see their actions and how they respond to your influences.

As you grow more successful, you are given more Sims to influence. It then becomes a huge game of keeping track of your Sims and keeping them on the straight 'n narrow path while the demons of the world try to lead them to sin.

To keep it from being strictly black & white, you can have a third path, Balance, whereby you compete against angels & demons and try to balance the light & dark parts of the Sim's nature.

(Okay, maybe some crime will be involved anyway. I can't help it - it's in my nature. )

Another game - a free-range driving/action game, similar to GTA, except set in the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max & The Road Warrior. That would be sweet.

[ajbera]

Another - a PC game based on the Illuminati collectible card game. Magic: The Gathering was successful, having spawned a couple of games, but the Illuminati game is much more interesting and funny, IMO. Y'know, this could probably be done pretty easily by a small company (or even dedicated fans), it's just a matter of designing a decent AI for computer players.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by ajbera
Seriously, the prison game just occurred to me out of the blue.

Sure, sure.

Originally posted by ajbera

But, to show I have more on my mind than prisons and extortion, howzabout this: a game where you play as an "angel" or "demon", set upon a Sim-like world. You don't have control over the Sims, but you influence them to be good or evil. As an angel you try to inspire hope, charity, decency, resistance to temptation, etc. As a demon you would inspire despair, vice, total selfishness, etc. At first you would have responsibility trying to influence one Sim, while your opponent (demon if your an angel) would try to counter your influence. Your Sim would go about his/her life, and you can see their actions and how they respond to your influences.

As you grow more successful, you are given more Sims to influence. It then becomes a huge game of keeping track of your Sims and keeping them on the straight 'n narrow path while the demons of the world try to lead them to sin.

To keep it from being strictly black & white, you can have a third path, Balance, whereby you compete against angels & demons and try to balance the light & dark parts of the Sim's nature.

(Okay, maybe some crime will be involved anyway. I can't help it - it's in my nature. )

Sounds a bit like B&W to me. Suggesting anything Simsy makes me even more suspicious of you, anyway.

[Urban Ranger]

Dungeon Keeper is an interesting idea, though I really don't like the RTS execution. Make it more XCOM like, that should make it more fun.

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by ajbera
A strategy game of Civ-like depth dealing with organized crime. You play one of several crime families trying to expand territory, competing against the other families, upstart gangs, and the police & feds, while you exploit the citizenry.

You ever play "Machiavelli the Prince" by our good old friends Microprose?

[El_Cid]

Originally posted by snoopy369

You ever play "Machiavelli the Prince" by our good old friends Microprose?

Quite tricky looking at first, but of that era that saw some excellent strat games released

To get you in the mood for that game you might like a translated version of the 'Machiavelli, Volume I:The Art of War; and The Prince' text? its mighty interesting reading

[Elok]

While you're talking about the next step in MMORPGs, why not make one that requires actual skill to play? You know, as opposed to the current basically-identical systems with autocombat and ludicrous levelling. The majority of those stupid games seem to follow the system I see in World of Warcraft:
A. repeatedly killing the same freaking easy monsters over and over again to gain levels/money
B. repeatedly killing the same freaking moderately difficult monsters over and over again to gain reputation with some faction so they'll sell you their Advanced Stick of Pain.
C. repeatedly killing the same freaking extremely hard monsters over and over again in the hopes of getting the superpowerful poisonproof jockstrap they drop about .03% of the time.

I'm sure the exact reason for repetitive slaughter varies from game to game, but the only skill required seems to be having a butt of adamantium and quick fingers with the number keys for the occasional special ability.

As a result, the games attract a stunning number of mouth-breathing fourteen-year-old schleps who lack social skills. Almost all the problems mentioned WRT mmo's--abundance of jerks, abundance of cheaters/griefers, abundance of bots and Chinese gold farmers, server crowding and spam, eyeballs bleeding from people absentmindedly "playing" for ten straight hours trying to get a few levels--are caused by their emphasis on patience over skill or strategy. Yes, they get more customers that way, but when a lot of said customers wind up being total douches and morons...

[DrSpike]

What do you mean by skill though? You can include FPS elements (and I'm sure some games will use this more), but that does change the nature of game.

I'd argue that some online RPGs do require skill to play well. Guild Wars is a particularly good example. It's not FPS aiming style skill though - it's about choosing appropriate skills for an encounter and using them wisely, reacting to what has occured. It seems to me that is what 'skill' should be in this genre.

[Skanky Burns]

Eve has a very large tutorial that takes several hours for you to learn the basic interface. It also has learning skills that take ages to train, meaning you don't get to train useful skills straigh away but later get to train everything 2.3 times faster. Between the two of them, it is a pretty good firewall against the ADD generation.

[Elok]

Well, first of all, autocombat is just...no. You shouldn't be able to go to sleep while fighting and still have a chance of winning. Generally, I just mean it should be challenging in a way that doesn't get overridden by collecting experience and cash for hours on end.

I've been emulating Warsong for the Genesis lately; that's an extreme example. You can get stronger, but mostly in the sense of having more options to play around with in battle. You're never so much stronger that you can laugh at the final boss completely with 987 Health, 300 armor and a Doomsday Spell of seven consecutive 300-point hits that ignores defense which you can only get by killing lots and lots of high-level monsters and hoping they drop it. Even using the level-repeating cheat just makes you hit the ceiling earlier with your existing characters. It's hard as all hell for a beginner to pick up, and rather simplistic since it was made in 1990 or so, but all the "skill" is in the player, not in some automated killbot characters.

Changing specializations is definitely a good start, yes. That would enable players to power up a good deal by playing, but without turning into automatic-superman. Levelling up just gives you more options to customize with for any given individual run. Selecting the right options still matters.

I'd also recommend a much lower item carrying capacity than most games seem to have, and less emphasis on accumulating crap (whether physical items like armor or rare spells and skills, whatever) in general. I've heard some games have much lower experience caps, which is probably for the best.

Extremely high class specialization might be good too; it encourages teamwork in dungeons or raids or whatever, and avoids the balance problems of making Class X's power buff cost slightly more and last a little longer than Class Y's, and Class Y in return gets a higher-powered healing ability and a 3% higher critical hit rate with blahblahblah. This can be complemented with a variety of different ways to win any given objective (I'm told the original Fallout was like that). The character with invisibility powers can sneak through a mission, the one with superspeed launches hit-and-fade attacks, etc.

[DrSpike]

From your posts I don't think you have played modern MMOs/online RPGs. The days of auto-attack wins have been gone for some time. Even the simplest MMOs make you choose from a selection of skills, so there is skill in picking the right ones to learn and in picking the right ones in battle at the right times.

[Elok]

Eh, I've watched my roommate play WoW a good deal, and base most of my remarks on some of the incredibly lame crap I've seen there, and on my last roommate playing Everquest, which is the same gameplay experience only with uglier graphics due to its age. A quick scan of GameFAQs reinforces the same impression for other games.

Which is why I don't play any of them. I suppose I am ignorant on the subject as far as personal experience goes, but I'm not going to spend that kind of money to confirm a bad impression. Maybe it would be more exciting and challenging if I had to actually press the keys myself instead of watching the roomie do it, but I doubt it.

The use of skills appears to amount to: "heal when low, attempt to stun/use attack spell if mana is high enough to heal afterwards, use item to recover mana/health, allow character to autohit the rest of the time." In other words, the same crap console gamers have been doing since Final Fantasy 1, just sans ATB. And in online games, about half of the dumb NPC townspeople have been replaced with dumb real people who spam the chat channels.

With Rogues it's a bit more frantic due to the rate their energy recovers at; with Mages the part about healing is omitted and fights are a bit more brief one way or another. Difference between classes just affects the kind of overpowering you can do; a Rogue sneaks up and hits with a bad status then frantically slashes away before the enemy can recover, whereas a Priest just lasts forever due to buffs and plentiful healing abilities (my roommate's favorite char is a priest, hence the routine given above as the "default."). The Druid gets to choose between three different routines but isn't quite as good at any given one.

The combat proceeds in a mechanistic fashion a good trained monkey can handle, which is why experience-gathering bots are possible. A fairly set routine will work against any given enemy provided they're anywhere near your level, and if they're not, there's basically squat you can do, their stats just overpower yours. Autocombat should not exist AT ALL. Even autocombat punctuated by occasional taps of the number keys to activate abilities in response to fairly obvious cues. This would necessitate a much more sophisticated enemy AI, of course, which is why I guess such a thing hasn't been tried.

By selecting skills I meant the ability to modify characters before starting a run and sticking with the consequences, not just the lame talent builds which determine which kind of overpowered character you have after seventy hours of grinding. If there is a game like that, I apologize for the overgeneralizations, but I've never heard of it.

[Sandman]

Games you wish they would make

An RPG with no levelling whatsoever. An RPG with an emphasis on lovingly-crafted set-pieces. An RPG where you start out with a million gold and it's difficult to get more.

[DrSpike]

Hehe, well I'm not going to argue that combat in WoW requires an immense amount of skill (because it doesn't), but it is more than autoattack. Your last post is much closer - there is energy management, use of items, and a large number of attack and stuns skills to choose from.

The distinction is important, because this is an area MMOs have developed in in the last couple of years.

IMO Guild Wars requires the most skill to play.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Elok
The majority of those stupid games seem to follow the system I see in World of Warcraft:
A. repeatedly killing the same freaking easy monsters over and over again to gain levels/money
B. repeatedly killing the same freaking moderately difficult monsters over and over again to gain reputation with some faction so they'll sell you their Advanced Stick of Pain.
C. repeatedly killing the same freaking extremely hard monsters over and over again in the hopes of getting the superpowerful poisonproof jockstrap they drop about .03% of the time.

That's a problem that a lot of RPGs suffer from. Not only they are combat centered, but they cater to cheesy type of combat. This is especially problematic with MMORPGs where monsters and critters respawn.

They can be designed much better. For example, they could make the game task/quest oriented. IOW you get the good stuff when you complete tasks or quests. Fighting monsters should be just a means to that, so, fighting monsters shouldn't yield much and the gain should diminish rapidly.