Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Don't games like Crossout, Robocraft, Autocraft, etc. qualify as those though, since you can build mechs in them?

50/50--mechs aren't the main focus, the shape is generally defined pretty arbitrarily by blocks or a smorgasbord of unrelated parts, and there's not... that much game there??? They're just battle arenas--which are fun--but itd be nice to have a little more meat (experience/story/world-wise) behind the mechanics of mechs.

EDIT: Chromehounds had a nice exterior modification system... so kind of like that??? but way deeper. Im trying to think of similar existing games rn

EDIT: Also for anyone curious, M.A.V. exists as a spiritual sccessor for Chromehounds currently under development.

[NRDL]

I made a comment on Reddit about the Evil Dead franchise, regarding what my ideal Evil Dead video game would be like:

"I would love an Evil Dead game that starts off as a super scary, tense survival horror game where you can't fight back and have to just run and hide ( like Outlast ). This would be the darkest, most harrowing part of the game. You're not playing as Ash, you're just a random first person camera protagonist.

As the game progresses, and your character's mind starts to snap from the stress and fear, the gameplay shifts. Your character is now able to attack the Deadites, usually only with sneak attacks, and one at a time.

Eventually, as all hell breaks loose, the camera perspective becomes over the shoulder third person, and your character becomes a full horror action hero, using makeshift weaponry, being able to craft shit that should not work like cybernetic parts for themselves, jury rigged guns and tools, etc.
Killing Deadites should still be difficult, but with some planning and lots of crazy, entirely possible. And bloody fun.

A cameo from Ash near the end is mandatory. Maybe there'd be a survival mode where you play as full Chainsaw hand and boomstick Ash, trying to survive against an endless Deadite horde for time, and points."

[Egan_BW]

A game which slowly morphs from Amnesia into Dead Rising would be amusing indeed.

[Naturegirl1999]

A game which slowly morphs from Amnesia into Dead Rising would be amusing indeed.

haven’t played either but saw videos of both, and I agree this would be amazing

[pikachu17]

A First-Person- maybe a shooter- game where the PC has control over time.
They can turn back time, roll time forward to turn things to dust, can roll back injuries, stop time, Etc.
The saves are like Undertale, in which the PC knows everything you/they did even if you time-jumped/savescummed.

[Naturegirl1999]

A First-Person- maybe a shooter- game where the PC has control over time.
They can turn back time, roll time forward to turn things to dust, can roll back injuries, stop time, Etc.
The saves are like Undertale, in which the PC knows everything you/they did even if you time-jumped/savescummed.

sounds cool. My brother played a game called Quantum Break with involved time shenanigans, but I don’t think the time shenanigans were as free to do as this game in your head. I would love to play your head gsme

[pikachu17]

https://xkcd.com/873/
I want this in a game.

[Aoi]

https://xkcd.com/873/
I want this in a game.

How about https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/07/02 instead?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Warhammer 40k: Armageddon BUT it's an MMO where you are either Imperial or Chaos fighting over a sector during a crusade with multiple planets and multiple maps on each planet.

Everyone is a commander of some sort, generally a Colonel or equivalent rank of an unincorporated battalion (as are sometimes formed adhoc) or medium size regiment (500-8000 men). You can gain influence used to summon small Space Marine detachments (or Daemonic allies if Chaos) or requisition better units, etc. Likewise there would be a rank and sub-faction system, Colonels can become Major Generals, Lieutenant Generals, Marshals, and eventually lord Generals (which can make sense, given the IG's flexible general staff structure) and allow you additional requisition or roster sizes. Ranks like Colonel-Commissar or PDF officers would also be available, imposing certain restrictions and giving other bonuses.

A clan system would allow for army groups or the huge regiments of certain worlds, like the Krieg siege units that number in the hundreds of thousands.

Finally, there would be different types of regiments themselves. Heavy or Light infantry, Armoured, Siege, Mixed, etc. etc. And each player could decided if they wanted a conscript or elite/volunteer regiment. A trade off between bigger size and higher stat bonuses or something.

[Naturegirl1999]

This sounds interesting

A game I wish existed would be an MMO where everyone can time travel, and through the process change/create timelines, when you first join, you join an existing timeline. There could be portals (rare) that can take you to a new timeline (or old timeline). Example, if you helped the USSR beat the USA during the Cold War, and find a portal, you’d be able to travel to a timeline where you did something else and caused a revolution in Ukraine instead. But once you travel through a portal to a different timeline, you won’t be able to go back to a timeline you were in before. Players might be able to interact with future/past selves in the same timeline, and through that, create a new timeline. (Think branches, you can travel back towards the trunk of the time tree, or towards the tips of the time tree’s ever growing leaves/new branches, but only portals can take you to branches from a different point)...I can make a picture to try and explain the portal thing better

Spoiler: Tree of Time: A branching timelines graphic: Black lines is time travel, red lines is portal (click to show/hide)

You can of course travel backwards and forwards in the new timeline too, but you can’t ever go back to timelines you portaled away from. Since this would be an MMO, everyone is always making new timelines.

[Reelya]

The idea of time-travel games is very interesting. I believe there's at least one time-travel based RTS game.

However, the mechanics of such games are very complex. Also for multi-player games the main limiting factor seems to be that the central time-travel fiction of jumping timelines doesn't really work once you're trying to facilitate multiple players. That's because all players actually exist in this shared external timeline, and trying to justify in a time-travel game why there's this external clock (the real world time) is both complex and heavily limits the "rules" / time-travel "system" you can have in your game world.

So, a multi-player time-travel games requires that all players are effectively godlike entities that actually exist in single external absolute timeframe (the timeframe of the real world). For games that have linear time, this is no problem at all, since time can just go faster or slower in the game depending on what you're trying to depict. But for any sort of "non-linear" time, the fact that we actually exist in real linear time gets in the way. If you have a single player then time travel is no barrier to narrative, since you're effectively Marty McFly jumping back and forth, but with a single linear perspective of time. But if you had, say, someone playing as Marty, and someone playing as Biff, and Biff stays in 1955, Marty suddenly can't hop forward 5 years to see what Biff is doing, since both Biff and Marty actually exist in a sychronized time frame, which is our world.

Yeah, so time-travel game is a great idea. But you can either do a free for all time-travel thing with a single player, or you can do a much more limited type of time travel with multi-player. It's the MMO part that breaks the idea. So, each player could be a "time agent" and time agents exist in "meta-time" or something, which is our world's real time, and they can travel to different places and times and enact events.

Another core problem with time-travel games is one of scope. Games currently have a lot of problem giving meaningful differences when you go "off the rails" even in small ways in their linear narratives. Having a non-linear narrative where you can go back and forward in time would not be practical to create detailed scenarios for. So, you'd have to use procedural generation to generate events / story. The best you're going to do is something like history mode in Dwarf Fortress, but the player can jump around in time and mess things up.

[Skynet]

You might want to look at Millennia: Altered Destinies, a single-player time travel game where you are modifying a single timeline in an attempt to rebuild a galaxy after its destruction by the Micords. The reason it's close to your MMO idea is that they is also another NPC faction that is modifying the timeline (The Hood) as well, and you have to fight against their timeline modifications - I've even watched an LP where The Hood winds up modifying a timeline while the player was in mid-dialogue with one of their proxies over a crisis, destroying the planet they were on centuries ago, and that timeline modification inadvertently terminated their proxy they were talking to.

Millennia uses procedural generation for coming up with its history, and one strategy for dealing with a random crisis is to introduce a minor change in the timeline a century ago, thereby forcing the procedural generation to run again - which may lead to the erasure of the random crisis in question. I call this strategy the "Butterfly Effect tactic".

[Reelya]

Larry Niven wrote a nice little time-travel series, of which Rainbow Mars is a collection. In his one, there are multiple possible futures, but each specific future also has multiple possible pasts that could have lead to that future. The main character is an agent in a devastated future, and he's tasked with things such as bringing back a horse from their "pre-history" and accidentally brings back a unicorn. That sort of thing. They don't quite catch on that the "past" they're traveling to isn't "the" past, each time it's one of the possible multiverse-pasts for their current timeline, so the odds of actually traveling to the specific past of their world are actually effectively zero.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

You might want to look at Millennia: Altered Destinies, a single-player time travel game where you are modifying a single timeline in an attempt to rebuild a galaxy after its destruction by the Micords. The reason it's close to your MMO idea is that they is also another NPC faction that is modifying the timeline (The Hood) as well, and you have to fight against their timeline modifications - I've even watched an LP where The Hood winds up modifying a timeline while the player was in mid-dialogue with one of their proxies over a crisis, destroying the planet they were on centuries ago, and that timeline modification inadvertently terminated their proxy they were talking to.

Millennia uses procedural generation for coming up with its history, and one strategy for dealing with a random crisis is to introduce a minor change in the timeline a century ago, thereby forcing the procedural generation to run again - which may lead to the erasure of the random crisis in question. I call this strategy the "Butterfly Effect tactic".

That's pretty lit for a game made in 1995, I'll check it out!

[Reelya]

That's extremely lit for a DOS strategy game that I never heard of despite living through the 1990s and playing a lot of DOS strategy games.

I feel like I've entered a different timeline where someone went back and made that game.

All I can say is that perhaps that one got lost in the shuffle since around then things were shifting towards Windows.