Humanity has expanded into space and met with thousands of alien races among the myriad solar systems. Eugenics and cybernetics have become vital to the success of the human race. The only way they can hope to compete with the physical power or intellectual acuity of the alien races. Hybridization between human and other species and races also is common among the denizens of the colonized planets.
But there is a great risk to messing with the building blocks of life without fully understanding the possible consequences. Millions of creatures have been created which not even the forsaken gods would wish to bear witness to. When the creator of such an abominations realizes what he has created, he can risk trying to enslave his creation, but more often than not the monstrosity is sent to one of the abandoned worlds. Life is precious, and though eugenics is the order of the day, with the new capabilities that unravels come greater responsibilities. He who brings a being to life cannot kill it simply because it is unsatisfactory—after all, human beings would have been destroyed long ago if extraterrestrials had not had a similar law.
The player takes on the character of one of these outcast mutants right after its memory has been whiped and it has been deposited naked on a planet's surface. The world that the mutants inhabits is an ancient world where great civilizations once ruled—but now it is in complete ruins, desolated by the ravages of the exiled monstrosities. In the beginning of the game, the world is completely free and open and the player can do any crime free of the game stopping him. Players can also change the environment by digging into the ground, knocking down walls, and other actions made available by different items found in the ruins.
The primary goal for the player is survival. Permanent death is a central mechanic. Players are responsible for sustaining their character. That means characters become hungry and thirsty. They must find food to keep themselves strong and water to stay alive. Depending on the mutations the character has, they may need more or less food and water—or they may be able to consume metal, plastics, stone, dirt, or they may be able to use photosynthesis (but then they must find a light source if they’re indoors for extended periods of time). Players also need to deal with the other mutants that they encounter—this means either fighting or engaging in diplomacy.
That’s a basic outline of the idea behind a game I’d like to design. I’m going to make posts discussing the mechanics needed to make such a game possible as I think more about it. If a game similar to this has been done before, I’d love to know about it.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
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7 comments:
It could either be very good, or very bad. Very bad would be the goonswarm coming in, taking control of the largest river or food source, and starving all of the other players out. Very good would be players allying in a balanced factor focused on the preservation of their fragile lives.
I'd play it though. I like the idea of being castoffs trying to survive as opposed to heroes.
Before I stomp viciously on your dreams, I just want you to know that I really respect you for putting your thoughts up to discuss. I tire of people who criticize other games without putting forward their thoughts.
I'll also say that this is a nice, original concept. You definitely can't say, "It's like Game X only with a twist!"
The big problem I see is the high chance of failure and the steep price for such. While challenging games are cool, failing in front of others is embarrassing. You'll need to balance it so that the choice upon failure isn't to just quit the game if you want people to stick with it in the long term.
The other big problem is negative collaboration, as Dblade states. Getting a bunch of people who make an already tough situation worse is going to be a big problem. Unfortunately, PvPers have repeatedly shown they aren't afraid to shit where they eat, such as it were.
Finally, the mutations have to be managed carefully. If they're randomly assigned, I could see people going through characters until they found one with a "good" mutation (like eating dirt or rocks). A customizable system would probably result in people picking an "optimal" setup, and all characters being fairly similar.
Those are the big problems I see, off the top of my head. I hope you can think of some ways of addressing these. :)
@Dblade: Anything can fail. I accept that. Thanks for the encouragement, though.
@Psychochild: I was concerned about many of the same issues. I thought I'd just throw the concept out there, though, and see what kind of interesting mechanics and dynamics can emerge. Perhaps we can learn something!
"The other big problem is negative collaboration, as Dblade states. Getting a bunch of people who make an already tough situation worse is going to be a big problem. Unfortunately, PvPers have repeatedly shown they aren't afraid to shit where they eat, such as it were."
The point of the game is that any relationship between characters is tenuous. I doubt you'd play any one character for more than a month. The game world would have to be large to accomodate a reasonable number of players without them all competing over one fertile area. It's mostly going to be a solo survival game that occasionally includes chance encounters with other players in a similar situation. I don't think that player settlements should be a big part of the game--at least not for the first 6 months of a planet's exposure to the PCs.
"The big problem I see is the high chance of failure and the steep price for such. While challenging games are cool, failing in front of others is embarrassing. You'll need to balance it so that the choice upon failure isn't to just quit the game if you want people to stick with it in the long term."
The concept relies on the mutations to be significant and diverse enough that players are often seeing new mutations used in creative ways (and new combinations of mutations that may lead to some nifty emergent solutions). When a creature dies, the player will see it as an opportunity to mess with the cool mutations he saw on another mutant--perhaps even the one that killed him or lead to his death.
"Finally, the mutations have to be managed carefully. If they're randomly assigned, I could see people going through characters until they found one with a "good" mutation (like eating dirt or rocks). A customizable system would probably result in people picking an "optimal" setup, and all characters being fairly similar."
Players choosing their mutations would be the entire character creation process. There will also be alien races with different properties that can be leveraged by different mutations. Hybrid alien races would also have a role to play. It may be a nightmare to test, but a tiered balance would probably develop that wouldn't bother most people.
If you make it a sandbox, you can't really say "it will be a solo survivor game". That's the dark side of freedom, they may very well ignore your intent and do things the way they want. I don't think you get how players can really screw the heck up your ideas.
I do think it is a cool idea, but players are expert at ruining them or taking them into wild directions, cause they really have no sense of proportion. Ask mots about that in FFXI sometime, about colibri especially.
Kind of inspiring me though to think of what I would do if I designed one.
If the sandbox is big enough, it could easily be 80+% a solo game. Many many people play WoW as a solo game and WoW's world isn't that big at all.
This concept may be more tailored towards a single-player game with co-op online play. A lot can be done with procedural terrain generation to make each game world unique. Imagine playing in the same game world for several characters and learning about the history of its ancient civilization as you crawl through the ruins of wrecked cities, fighting off wargs and raptor-like creatures in close combat. I think that would be incredibly fun. Just drop the player into the game world and tell them "You are hungry and thirsty. You have 2 game days to find water and 5 to find food or you die. Watch out for the raptors!" No need to spend time expositing the story, let the players discover it as they wander the world. Harness human curiosity and encourage trying out new ideas and plans.
One thing to add: if you're using permadeath, you need to either give players a benefit for dying or keep the losses low. This couldn't be a standard DIKU grind where time investment could get sucked down the drain and preening is the point, it would have to be all about the gameplay and exploration and experimentation.
To that end, is there enough exploration and experimentation to keep the game interesting and fight the natural exit points generated by the "oh, crap, I died again" moments and the resulting "Do It Again, Stupid" (see Shamus' Twenty Sided article on that) "Nintendo Hard" gameplay?
In other words, I like the idea on first blush, but how much would it become like work, and how quickly, and what reason do I have to keep playing after my character dies?
I think it would be better to isolate that survival aesthetic that originates from the evolutionary desire to stay alive and embody it in a different mechanic. Foraging for food and water is quite boring. It would be interesting to observe, but not all that engaging.
A simple arms race would work toward this same end, I believe. Rather than say "you have 5 hours to find some food or you are going to have to watch your character starve to death", make the imperative "you need stronger armor or that guy over there is going to kill you".
I don't want to spend my play session logged in to some Spore-esque minigame where I need to suck peaches through a straw. zzz
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