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[Koah]

A post-apocalyptic Mormons vs. Scientologists RTS.  The setting is post-apocalyptic, I mean, not the Mormons.  Well, if they're in the setting they'd have to be too, but so would the Scient- well, you get what I mean.

[Bongo Bill]

Post-cyberpocalyptic.

[Büge]

Post-infocalyptic.

 

[Bongo Bill]

In The Future, everybody in the world will have an indestructible Internet-enabled handheld supercomputer with an automagic operating system, a million billion well-functioning add-ons, and a battery life longer than God's dick.

The game that people play using these devices will be Take Pictures Of Animals. Whoever has the most species in their Internet gallery is the winner. People can also rate each others' pictures. Don't get caught putting pictures in your gallery that you didn't take.

[Bongo Bill]

okay dudes this is a good one

think Pokemon Snap meets Audiosurf... in space

maybe with guns

Edit: Hmm, maybe Take Pictures Of Guns for the NRA crowd....

[Büge]

Now I've got an idea!

You play as a recently-dead Chuck Heston, armed with his trusty Smith & Wesson and a fat bankroll. The object of the game is to use your charisma and political clout to influence American policy before your corpse rots away. Your ability to influence people will change over the game. For example, early on, you can use your gun, but people will respond more to your words and deeds. As time goes on, however, you'll need to resort to violence, bribes and intimidation because your decaying body will horrify and repulse everyone. There will be weapons upgrades and embalming fluids you can buy too. Eventually you'll collapse into a pile of dust, but if you play it right, you could end up the first zombie president!

We'll call it Cold Dead Hands.

[Bongo Bill]

I can't wait to see the sorts of simple, stupid game that people make with Google App Engine. I came up with a really simple, really stupid one.

Distributed tic-tac-toe. It has a shitload of concurrent games. When you go to the page, it looks for one that isn't finished yet, and sometimes it serves you up a fresh new one instead. You get to make one move on that board, and then it goes back into the pile to be served to somebody else. When a game is finished, it is discarded after incrementing the value for "X Wins" "O Wins" or "Cat's Game" as appropriate.

[Superface]

MMO FPS with a General

Hah, I was just looking at this a week or so ago. You're basically describing Savage 2, the almost-MMO FPS where you can play as a General and RTS with human-controlled players, or you can FPS as one of the grunts, meleeing or casting spells and leveling up. It's free to play the single-player and tutorial, but a multiplayer account requires buying it for a one-time fee of $29.99.

It's more World in Conflict than World of Warcraft in terms of persistence, meaning there really isn't any. There's in-match levelling, but once the match is over everything's reset. The rest of the stats get tagged to your persistent character for a player ladder, but I don't know if there's even so much as a 3D representational lobby. Supposed to be great fun though, and pretty much exactly what you're talking about: fantasy FPS with RTS elements for the commander.

savage2.s2games.com

Also notable for having a native Linux client, which is why I was looking at it in the first place. Someday my dream of Linux exclusively on my desktop will be realized...

[Kazz]

Planetside did a few things right: having 3 sides to balance combat and keep the situation nonbinary, the squad/platoon system as well as the overall Command Point structure, and making your average newbie grunt just as dangerous as a veteran.

My biggest concern was of scale: the battle was split up over like 12 different worlds, and in the game's wane, only one or two of them actually saw any combat.  Depending on how many of each empire was logged on, one empire could go around capturing entire continents uncontested (this was called "ghosting" and it took hours).  The real trouble with that is that the game reset every day.  What the hell was the point?

If you're going to have persistence, make it really persistent.  Give me 100 nations in a massive, contiguous world and let's fight until one nation rules everything (players in defeated nations re-choosing their allegiances or remaining in their homeland as rebels and attempting to retake their territory).  Make it take six months to a year.  I want today's battlefield success to matter tomorrow.  I want commanders whose orders go beyond "Leave there, fight here!"  And I definitely don't want tanks to just appear out of the damned ground; time and money should be invested in them and they should be driven to the front lines.

Arglebargle farts.

[Bongo Bill]

Planetside did a lot of things right in the time that I played, but it seemed to become too much about vehicles and also seemed to be too big for the number of players. I did like that two guys crawling slowly across a continent could just capture towers until the other side noticed and suddenly you had a large-scale battle erupting, though.

[Disposable Ninja]

Competitive Survival Horror.

At the start of each round, up to three out of a maximum of eight players get to be the bloodmonsters that feast on the warm innards of helpless civilians (either at random, in turns, through votes or what-the-fuck-ever) while the other five get to be the helpless civilians with delicious organs. The civilians are slow and can't aim worth a shit, and the bloodmonsters are almost invincible and can kill any civilian in at most two hits. Civilians win if they can reach designated escape points on the maps, bloodmonsters win if they kill the civilians. For every civilian killed, the bloodmonsters get a point -- and for every civilian that escapes, the civilians get a point. Whichever side has the most points at the end of the round wins. If the Bloodmonsters kill all civilians, bonus score and other neat things.

On each map there are several "Slaughter Pits". If a bloodmonster can drag a still living civilian to one of these pits and chuck him in, the bloodmonster gets extra points and a new toy that makes killing the other civilians that much easier. If a civilian can knock a bloodmonster into the Slaughter Pits, he'll only gain a few points, but no weapon, but the bloodmonster will be removed from the game for the rest of the round. If all the bloodmonsters die, civilians win.

[James Edward Smith]

I was thinking today that for MMORPGs to ever appeal to me ever again, they have to not be WoW, RO, GuildWars, or Starwars Galaxies.

I do not what to play an other MMORPG where you gain levels and make you character more powerful solely by participating in combat.

Some newer MMOs coming out are trying to at least make combat different than the same damn, click icons to use skills while your character auto attacks system that every MMORPG since Everquest still seems to use. Age of Conan for instance, although I cannot confirm this first hand, seems to actually be proposing a new combat system to us. But I say, too little too late.

I thought today of a game like the MMO + RTS that people had been discussing for the last little while in this thread but where the uber players who were made the commanders of the RTS component did not have to be players who had gotten to that level through fighting in combat. A character could perhaps have built a guild around him by creating a successful trading company. At the beginning of the game he had to defend himself a few times with weapons or with magic because the world he lives in is a dangerous place. But once the Bartz Company had grown to the point where he had enough guards with him whenever traveling and so forth, there was rarely need for him to have to defend himself with his own abilities.

An other player was a great scholar or inventor.

An other player was a great politician and thrived in that area of the game.

I think something along these lines would get my excited about the genre again.

...

Then Zara MSNed me and we joked about why nintendo hasn't cashed in on the idea of an RTS or Strat/RPG where you were Bowser and you commanded the koopa troop to victory with log tanks and airships and the whole nine yards. When the going got tough and the evil new badguys that you were facing seemed to be getting the upper hand on you, Mario and Luigi would join your army as super units to sway the tide back in your favour. Of course, Bowser would be to proud to accept help from those meddling plumbers, so they would have to disguise themselves as Hammer Bros to successfully join the Koopa Troop.

It would be a good excuse to bring Jinx back into the continuity of the series as a mentor and troop trainer too.

[James Edward Smith]

Mobile sim/civ MMO

I've probably just been playing Dwarf Fortress too much, but I like the idea of a mobile game where you are in command of a big naval ship, airship, or fortress that sits on the back of a giant colossus or something.

You have to build your moving the fortress by collecting resources from the surrounding country-side/ocean Which you can only do when you are landed/anchored. Landing or anchoring or whatever is done whenever you start the game. When you leave the game all your crew strap themselves in for hyperspace travel or whatever and their highspeed travel is linked to your actual travel outside of the game world, your body is the mobile fortress if you will, or in the colossus model, your mobile device is the fortress and you are the giant it sits on. Whenever you start the game up, the fortress lands/anchors at your current global position based on your GPS location. The game then generates terrain based on your actual global location or if you have no GPS functionality on your phone, then it just randomizes it.

Using various resources around you and learned over time crew skills, you can construct thingslike:
-crew quarters
-various workshops
-storage areas
-fisheries/butcheries
-farms perhaps
-research libraries
-better fortress components (defences, propulsion)
-barracks
-hangars/bays

This last building type would be used for the construction and maintanence of "scouts", small vehicles that you can upgrade or replace as your fortess gets better that you can use to ferry people and goods to and from your fortress with the world around you. One of the big problems with multiplayer mobile gaming is that over the air comunication is to disjointed to allow for any sort of real-time interaction. Bluetooth and wifi do a much better job and make real-time possible, but are not always availiable. So the idea is that your scouts would be used in a sort of action/response capacity to allow you to interact with other players of the game in your area without too much annoyance from latency. However, more realtime interaction could be possible if you actually "docked" your fortress with someone else's by literally walking over to them and setting up a bluetooth connection. These interactions could be for trade purposes or combat. Scouts could also be used to send envoys to NPC towns and castles and such which could be randomly generated or based on map locations of real town and city centers.

[Bongo Bill]

A big part of the appeal of online games is that you can interact with others regardless of geography. So give in-person communications a privileged status but keep normal play possible with people who are like six thousand real miles away.

So I think it'd be better to allow the player to establish his own correspondence between real-world locations and in-game locations, so that logging in from a particular place makes you start off docked there (but of course you can move while in the game, as well). For example, you might set it up so that if you log in from home, you appear in Upper East Hypotheticaland, whereas logging in from work drops you off in New Azeroth or whatever. Log in from an entirely new location and you get the option of being assigned a random unexplored destination or transferring one of the older in-game locations to the new real-world location.

You can't land anywhere you don't have map data from; however, the only thing that you can't exchange across the Internet is map data. Passive communication is automatically initiated with anybody in the real-world vicinity, and map data is exchanged. For all the rest of it you have to explore it yourself.

Perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding you, of course.

[James Edward Smith]

You can't land anywhere you don't have map data from; however, the only thing that you can't exchange across the Internet is map data. Passive communication is automatically initiated with anybody in the real-world vicinity, and map data is exchanged. For all the rest of it you have to explore it yourself.

Perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding you, of course.

Perhaps, but I can't be sure because I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Why can't you exchange map data over the Internet? exchange it with who? What the hell are you babbling about?

My idea was that anyone that is connected to your service provider and is playing the game would send out a passive message that they are playing the game to other people. They would show up on a sort of fortress radar you could build that didn't show a real location (or maybe it would but only for people who have GPS on their phones, others would just be shown as "near" you but not have an exact location) but that just told you they were within a scout's flight radius. You could then send and receive scouts to and from these people facilitating limited trade, communication and warfare. Actually walking up to someone with the game running would let you dock with them through blue tooth and have less limited contact. For obvious reasons, docking may have to happen under a flag of peace or at least truce because no one is going to stand there while you pillage them and I don't want actual fist fights to develop as interesting of a game component as it could be.

The point of the whole fortress movement while game is off was just to give the player a way to find new areas with new resources and things in them just by playing the game in different places, but I suppose I could allow you to warp to places you have been in the past while playing. I sort of like the idea that I think you were getting at where players could trade maps as part of their trading. That way you could get access to new areas that you hadn't actually travelled to.

[Bongo Bill]

I think maybe you should start from the very beginning, here. Are you thinking more along the lines of Dwarf Fortress plus GPS-powered social networking, or are you thinking more along the lines of World of Warcraft on a cell phone and instead of an avatar you have a crew?

[James Edward Smith]

The former, where sieges and trade envoys can come from other players' fortresses as well as from NPC cities and you can perhaps attack certain "enemy" NPC cities with your fortress, employing the aid of other players if they are near you in person.

[Bongo Bill]

So there's no persistent world?

[James Edward Smith]

Well, there is, but it's based on the real world and the map data that is pushed to smart phones from google maps.

[Bongo Bill]

So there is a persistent game world, but you can only move around in it by moving in the real world?