Adam's Lair Forum

Some of your ideas are not that crazy.

indiemaatheus:
I'd assume a kind of Sims/Sim City crossover would be your game. It is feasible, and I'd even go as far as to point you towards an RPG, like Elder Scrolls, with jobs. The only thing missing there is the feeling of time. Unfortunately, such a thing is yet to happen.

Adam:
Isn't what EVE online is? Even X might be such an example. You can even float around in space without the ship.

But of course, what you want is a bit more extreme...

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They're all kind of going into that direction, but I think not in the degree I carelessly dreamed up back then, though I must admit that I stopped following the line of EVE and X games at some point. Maybe they're more elaborate on that level than I know

At least, Star Citizen is the first game I know of that actually does what I had in mind. Not that it takes a lot to have that kind of thing in mind, I think I'm really not alone with this idea.

So..

Hmm.. room for improvement

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Idea: An Adventure / RPG with a focus on story and multiple characters where you do don't play anyone but have the role of an observer who can interact the world - but only in ways that don't reveal your existence.

Depending on what you do, the story might unfold differently. You can act in a way that nobody will know you did anything, or more obvious so a character might start to wonder if he / she has a "guardian angel" or is "cursed". Would a player prefer to stay hidden or try to "be acknowledged"?

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Idea: This could apply to any story based game, but a game where NPC's react to the manner in which you play, in a substantial way. For example, early on you have a combat tutorial, and the guy teaching you teaches how you how to kick people when they're knocked over for extra damage, but warns that "Many find this dishonorable and unsavory, but it could save your life" Then you get into some kind of fight in town, if you chose to kick your enemy while he's down repeatedly, the towns people will fear you but not respect you, if you fought him 'fairly' then the towns people will respect you more, also the other characters would notice the difference between you almost winning a fight and you obliterating your enemy instantly. Even if this only changed minor dialogue it would have a huge impact on how people play, but it would also be really cool if being honorable unlocked side quests with a covenant and being dishonorable unlocked the criminal world to you or something. This is getting ramble-y but I think everyone gets the idea now

So, basically like a "Good / Bad" scale you often find in RPGs, except inferred by play style rather than based on explicit player choices?

Probably a lot harder to do, but definitely sounds interesting. There are a lot of implicit player choices (by which I mean "without mentioning to the player he made a choice") that could feed into this, starting from two seemingly equivalent, but differently phrased dialog choices, over whether or not the player steals all the NPCs stuff to the combat choices you mentioned.

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Idea : Fighting a war with monsters who are backwards in time.

The game starts with your side conquered and cornered and near defeat, this is how the war with these creatures begins, at the end. You fight back by driving the monsters back to where they entered your universe, everyone's wounds healing with every strike and the dead rising up to join the battle along the way. If the monsters start winning, your normal time reasserts and you're driven back towards your defeat, with wounds appearing and people dying.

You win when everyone lives and the monsters never arrived at all.

-ST

I like that one, has a bit of a consciously anticlimactic structure to it. If you do well, no one except you will know you did anything, or that there was a problem in the first place. Which I think is an interesting setting to play with.

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Idea: A story-driven RPG with a time-bending setting / plot elements, nothing fancy. Except that, without mentioning it explicitly to the player, all savegames are actually connected. When you reload a game and experience a situation again, characters might have a déjà vu, if you reload your game after a failed battle again and again, they might have "a bad feeling about this" beforehand, etc.

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That sounds cool. What happens if you overwrite a previous save, do the characters become clairvoyant or schizophrenic?

Idea:Two siblings selfishly fight over the causal outcome of merging parallel universes.

The bottom falls out of the universe in a vacuum collapse and the whole world sees it coming from far away. What is determined is that it's actually two parallel universes merging into one another as similarities between the two universes seek their lowest energy state. Whatever is the same in the two remains unchanged, but the differences go through a schism.

One of the two siblings is destitute and living a ruined life while the other does not in both parallel universes, but the successful sibling is different in each. The game play is your chosen sibling going around and trying to reinforce the causality that benefits them. An objective might be to go to a liquor store that your rich sibling robbed in the parallel universe, ruining their life, and asking the clerk about it, reinforcing its causality. The other sibling does likewise with the events that favor them. The winner is the one who reinforces the causality that benefits them over the other one, causing the opposing one to be erased.

EDIT: It could have a twist where long standing common enemies just decide to erase you both to test if merging parallels can be used to rewrite time.

-ST

Pretty much this, not necessarily objectively 'good/bad' because we all love our gritty moral grey areas in modern gaming amiright?

But it's definitely the implicit player choices that interest me a lot, basically anything that's designed to make the player treat the world as a world instead of as a 'game'. Even if their isn't a huge gameplay influence, if the player does something scumbag-y in a fight, and another a NPC calls you out or notices, then it rewards/acknowledges roleplaying.