Scots Taffer on 3/5/2009 at 02:17

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I remember playing the HL2 alpha and the battles/action had to be spawned you could literally drive the entire coastline without any real action (except for those rollermines but even then they didn't explode), I really loved it.

I'd like this as well but modify it into a post-apocalyptic survival game set in Australia. I was chatting with colleagues about pig-hunting and roo-shooting up in north Queensland. These guys can live off the land. They use small calibre subsonic weaponry to pick off their targets. They often have dogs they travel with, which can be armoured to survive the fights with wild boars they have whose tusks could easily gut them. These guys drive old beat-up 4x4s but collect all possible variations of parts for them so that if they ever break down they can repair themselves while on the move, because time==money to these guys hunting for a living.

I like the idea of a game that really separates out any combat and instead focuses entirely on environment, atmosphere, detail, crafting of minigames of sorts (say, the hunting of animals for food, collecting enough equipment for repairs/building/etc) as well as the occasional trek to a town where the apocalypse has left a ravaged desperate populous.

The other thing about this kind of game was that they can use CB radio to communicate with others of their kind, they could arrange to meet, trade, or pool resources for specific "quests" but then others could be listening who want to sabotage, attack or of course, pretend to be friendly just to attack.

A long sprawling story could unfold via newspapers, TVs with aerials that still work, truck radios, snippets from people you meet and so on. A story less about your part in the disaster and more about how you survive in the face of it. A small role in a big story as opposed to you being the person the world revolves around.


Back to this thread in general, what I'm noticing is that lots of people want really involving and detailed gameworlds that you can then inhabit in different ways and in different roles. I've been espousing for years that developers need to sit down once they have a good engine and just develop games with new ideas, stop pumping out new engines with the same games over and over but instead build a great core engine that can be used for multiple games with very different feels and aims.

An engine like a CRYSIS is a great example of an immersive engine used for a mediocre shooter that could be taken, wrapped around different gameplay dynamics and artwork and produce an infinitely superior game. Instead they'll probably spend 3 years developing an engine only slightly better and then put out the same game all over again. :(

demagogue on 3/5/2009 at 07:23

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It is interesting so many of our ideas are all hovering around such similar ideas, because I've tossed just these sorts of images through my mind so many times too ... though I'm not surprised because I think there's a reason we all stay around here.

I even had a dream where you're like a nightime predator (jaguar?) in a forest, though that's maybe too limited. Or homesteading on a new planet in its wilderness, though you have plenty of scifi gadgets, that's better ... scifi + western + some what you just described Scots, like the show Firefly I later learned but my idea was influenced by the book Time Enough for Love.

Lots of interactive fiction inspires me esp with the environment focus (strange maybe because there are no graphics). I loved this one (Shadows on the Mirror iirc) where the whole thing is just in a car driving down a freeway in the rain, in the future but no flying cars yet, and you're watching the vast futuristic countryside scenery go by, other cars, the rain coming in waves hitting the windshield, lots of nic-nacks & hints in the car to hint at what's going on, the mysterious driver. The story reveals itself in bits and pieces as you explore different things and ask different questions... Really atmospheric, pretty clever mysterious story, and just simple enough a single person might build it (maybe if you had a great skybox trick that was really fluid).

Or some of the surreal ones (Get a Grip, oops, it's called "Losing Your Grip") in really surreal but very fleshed out, atmospheric worlds rich with symbolic meaning.

And somethings I dream about are admittedly sort of fetish-istic, being drawn into sort of severe lifestyles if you did them in real life ... Like one time I seriously dreamt about living in an old Russian shtetl going to a yeshiva, or in medieval Japan learning the tea-ceremony. The game would let you go as deep as you wanted to go, not just physically (though there's that too; I like a big world that inspires you to explore it), but into some lifestyle very different from ours that still had a lot of depth, and into the real nuts & bolts of how that lifestyle worked (not just faking it with the scenery).

If I were to write a manfesto, it would be to not just talk about freedom and openness, but really have some games that bring some real freedom to life with a big, rich world that deserves it, particularly a world that's very different to ours but just as deep & real (which is why I'm really liking historical concepts these days, or surreal).

Edit: On another tangent, I may be over-optimistic, but I'm learning Darkmod right now with the thought in the back of my mind that I can coat-tail on it some of my more general ideas to actually make them myself (that's ultimately what these idea-fests are for, right?), since you've got a lot of elements already set up better tailored for immersive gameplay (at least in relative terms to a traditional FPS), like handling objects, the lightgem & AI, a powerful scripting and GUI system. Also, since I'm not expecting to make any commercial hits, the idea I could make a game open-source and release it for free download gives me the warm fuzzy that I could at least get the "hell, I'll download anything for free" crowd. Also, thinking about modding something like the Cysis engine, while I love the style, just seems too hard without a good gameplay backbone there.

Papy on 5/5/2009 at 02:59

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One thing I liked in high school was my morality class when we had to make moral decision based on some hypothetical situation (like the Heinz dilemma). We then had to talk about it and explain it, and the teacher added some comments. I would like a game like that.

Let's say you are the owner of a small nuclear shelter, a disaster occur and you must first choose who gets in, and who dies outside, based on biographies. You then have to live in this shelter with the people you chose, trying to adapt to different personalities and trying to solve different kind of conflicts between people (violence being one of the way to solve conflicts). We would see the shelter from our own eyes (meaning we would have incomplete information and some people could lie). We would see those people change because of the situation. We would see and be offered alliances. Ideally, the game should use a personality simulator instead of scripted sequence. Between two conflicts, some characters would come to you and ask you why you did or say things to someone else. They could also explain what they would have done instead. In the end, you'd get a description of the psychological health of each person inside the shelter, with a score based on their overall happiness level.

Chade on 5/5/2009 at 23:44

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As an abstract game mechanic, that's basically what most RPG's are, isn't it? Maximising (damage dealt / damage received)? I guess that's not really relevant to your post, though.

The Sims also does basically what you describe, if you choose to try and maximise happiness/career/whatever. Actually, back when my wife was playing my copy of The Sims, it wasn't unusual for a play session to lead into some discussion about the trade-offs and choices that we make in real life.

For games that do this to push some sort of message, I think the hard part would be balancing the message being pushed with the game difficulty. It's very common for characters in a story to make some decision that the audience knows is wrong, in order to push the story's message. With games, you need to rely on the audience making some bad decisions themselves or the game will be perceived as trivial, so your underlying message must be appropriately nuanced.

demagogue on 6/5/2009 at 01:09

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@Chade,

- Yeah, I guess it's sort of like the Sims, but for some reason I don't get into the Sims much. I don't know what it is; maybe the fact I associate it too much with being suburban, when the kinds of feelings I want to plumb are more ... drama-based? Also, I'm thinking in terms of an FPS that's more up-close and personal, maybe. I don't know; I'd have to think about it (and I've only played the Sims a little, so don't know everything going on.)

- On your second point, couldn't agree more. I hate when games push agendas into their mechanics. It goes to an old idea for me. Game-freedom should be like world-freedom, totally valueless. It shouldn't be like you can frob an object in exactly the way that solves your problem (frob rope to post, it ties in exactly the way you need for tightrope, or whatever). But more like every object has a valueless function that just does what it does, and they and the player are just there together in the gameworld, free to be whatever happens. So much more powerful and at times chilling that way.