I was thinking about the Shadowrun game the other day (haven’t played it, probably won’t) and how much they could have done with the license. So, I decided that Shadowrun would be best captured by a Jagged Alliance style game. You are the head a of a shadowrunning team (you get to create a character and everything). Different corporations hire you to infiltrate rivals and gather information, as well as actual attack jobs, hits, etc. You can recruit team members from any of the classes/races available in the PnP game. You then get a general layout of where you are headed (ideally, this would be a better blueprint if you have a better decker). Your rigger then tries to get you there (vehicular combat along the way…optional, if you don’t want to do it, but there are bonuses for doing so). You decide where to start (that’s where your rigger drops you off…his drones can accompany you, if you can afford them).
The mission is then JA style, with action points, etc. You can summon spirits, if you have a the proper shaman, or elementals with a mage. You have a decker that can help you get through security and shut down cameras. You have cyber guys for straight fighting…all of it.
I think this would capture the PnP experience quite well, and it’s a game I would love to play.
So what is your ideal licensed game? It doesn’t have to be your favorite license, obviously…just a game you think would be cool because of the flavor of the license and how it would be best captured.
Freeform, gta/r6:vegas/deadrising/oblivion/robinson’s requiem mishmash with free run over say, the state of pennsylvania, based on NOTLD/DayOTD/DwnOTD with 50,000 zombies on screen at once.
And the zombies have to shamble. And have some kind of inventory management and simplistic economy, trade or barter for stuff scavengened, etc. Make vehicles have gas and the ability to haul around gas cans.
Oh yeah, thats why the mention of oblivion, every little item needs to be pickup-able and every item must have a way to use it on the zombies, even if its just throwing it (dead rising)
Gas/food/medicine/etc… are all musts, even regular infections / sickness, broken limbs etc… survival/roving gangs are the real dangerous hazards, zombies are the setting, unless you get careless.
I didnt go TBS because waiting for 50,000 zombies to take their turns would get a bit dull. And I like seeing headshots through scopes.
Oh and since I’m talking ideal, lets say 50,000 UNIQUE zombies.
Game ends in a couple years gametime, when the food runs out or all the medicine is expired and you eventually starve or die from a flu, and that is the GOOD ending. I guess a dash of oregon trail is in there, hehe
My ideal licensed game is a Shadowrun game that’s the complete opposite of yours. First person based action/RPG, keep the spirit of the game without making it a slave to dice rolls (which have no place on a computer when you can simulate everything instead).
Have a completely simulated city. Have a randomly generated political/corporate setting, where runs are procedurally generated based on the current state of the system.
Allow AI sidekicks, but build the game to be co-op, and allow an option for competing shadowrunners in your game on your mission. Blur the line between multiplayer and singleplayer.
A city-based Vampire: The Masquerade game would be great fun though I might lean more towards a Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII/VIII model for it.
You could start off as street scum just trying to survive from night to night and working odd jobs for different patrons in hopes of rising in the ranks of the unliving. Or you could take on the role of a factional leader, one of the Primogen, trying to take control eventually from The Prince (the Prince may or may not be a playable position along the lines of The Emperor in RoTK games). Or you could be trying to topple the whole works as a Sabbat Priest or play all sides to your own advantage as an Anarch leader.
Just drawing from canon you’ve got all the social structures you need as tools. Prestation, generation, Elysium and the various city resources that can be turned and used to your own ends like politicians, underworld figures, police, media and so on. Outside threats could change the entire complexion of games. FBI investigators, Inquisition hunters, Werewolf “barbarians at the gates” and so on.
Pulling from the broader WoD, you could also include all kinds of entities and minor factions as “random events” factors that could shape the course of play.
Yeah, I’d go for the strategy and character-oriented gameplay of a Romance game but include the taking over of businesses and manipulating authorities of a Mafia design and weave King of Dragon Pass/Crusader King conditional random event trees all through it so the “board” never is the same twice. The characters should also be randomized so the pieces are never the same and always have different motives, strengths and weaknesses (along the lines of a Romance ‘random/fiction’ campaign setting).
While the new WoD is certainly different I suspect you could get basically the same effects and use the same design concepts with it just fine.
Ok, if we are sticking to the licensed theme, take every Marvel (or DC, but Marvel has a bigger pantheon) hero ever made. Stat balance them all to each other. I.e Hulk has a strength of 500, whereas Namor might be 80, a policeman might be 10. Throw in a character creator as detailed as Freedom Force and City of Heroes. Let you save any hero build combination/point value.
Now, throw all this into a Hulk: UD type environment, with third person control. Have a simple storyline (or not, I don’t care, really) that can be played co-op in a free roaming city/area ala Crackdown/San Andreas (actually San Andreas would be better since you have distinct big cities and large wilderness areas, like deserts and forests). Fully destructible environments, trees, and even the ground. Bridges can collapse. Have destruction be permanent until reset by the server admin. Oh yeah, and have it be both co-op and deathmatch, against humans or bots or a combination. Have the police and fire/ambulance come and clean up the wreckage. Have matches, say, Captain American vs. Batroc in Times Square. Thanos versus the NYPD and military. Hulk versus 10 random heroes. Or let people pick points, like Combat Mission (or Freedom Force).
Hey, you want to play a game with a fully rendered Millennium Falcon which you and your buddies can crew online?! It exists! Best evar toy in gamingdom and the developers included it but neglected to give it a damned function in the game. So you can fly around and shoot stuff but there’s no cargo, no legitimate trade, no smuggling, no blockades to run…
shakes fist “Damn you, Star Wars Galaxies!”
Maybe with the upcoming Space update they’ll do something. Even a Privateer style trading mini-game outside of the economy would be nice…
David Brin’s Uplift series, done as a 4x. Basic premise: galactic civilization is millions of years old and predicated on the idea of Uplift, which is genetic modification from a pre-sentient state by a patron race. Sentience does not arise on its own, according to their dogma, which causes a bit of trouble when humans appear. The game I’d make would have nothing to do with the human storyline however. IDue to the nature of the universe, it wouldn’t really have a victory condition. It would have to work like Tropico, just scoring you after a certain amount of time. You’d start out in a backwater, surrounded by civilizations of roughly equal power with a few Great Houses looming over you. You’d take control of a race just released from its clienthood and do your standard 4x thing. Shit-tons of techs, pseudo-turnbased fleet combat (you can pause and issue orders, but orders deplete a resource pool that replenishes in real-time), a subgame where you can adopt client races and shape them to your purposes…
Anyone remember that thing a few years back where Tom Hall and John Romero were teaching game design classes? I wrote up this game as a design doc for Hall’s class and I have been seriously jonesing for it ever since. Only the glory that is QT3’s Zombie Apocalypse X-COM comes close in terms of craving for a thing that will never exist.
One has to keep in mind, that Moore is not just into zombies. He’s so into zombies that he crafted a special custom head for LIVE face mapping. The first time I saw his face in a Rainbow Six: Vegas game I thought they had modelled grusome damage to skins and he had taken a burst to the face.
It’s kind of eerie choppering down onto The Strip with a crew full of guys and looking over, one of them has a rotten jaw and an empty eye socket.
Warhammer 40,000 hybrid fps/fighting game/action-rpg. Multiple campaigns with different protagonists, enemies, and settings, so you can play as a gun-toting guardsman who has to take cover and make use of his mobility or a melee-oriented ork who has to get stuck in. The FPS mechanics of Call of Duty adapted to fit a universe with armored supermen and the fighting & combat specialization of Mount & Blade without the inconsistent graphics and weak AI. A really good portrayal of the setting’s major powers, reflected in the combat taunts and storyline. And pretty graphics and physics so I can gawk when I smash people across the map like the commander units in Dawn of War.
