I wish Cavedog had made Total Annihilation II in 1998 or 1999, it would have been really something.
Games you wish existed
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Whoa, that's an amazing signature. I love it. TA is one of my favourite games.
ARM 4 LYFE
**** man, I'm going to play TA right now!
David Dire said:
Red Orchestra 2 has that. I was playing just the other day with a friend. He was the commander/gunner, while I was the driver, and some randomer was our machine gunner. Absolutely mowed down Russian infantry in our Panzer IV, especially when we found the exit to a tunnel that they apparently spawned on the other end of somewhere. We just sat outside of it and machine gunned or HE shelled them all to bits. It actually feels pretty authentic, especially with tank on tank combat. You're all yelling "Adjust turret to X!" or "Left! Left! Engineer with satchel rushing left! BACK UP!" It's nice.
What I've always wanted is an open-world game legitimate guerrilla warfare. Not something where you go on one off missions to blow up a convey, not something where you have a one-time objective to shoot some colonel, not something where you just go from objective to objective with no purpose other than to complete the objective. What I want is something where you start off the game leading a ragtag group and very gradually work your way up to a slightly less ragtag group while your enemy's strength declines in proportion to the amount your's grows. The chief concern should be damaging the enemy's moral and supplies, not blowing up a base or body count. If you ever go up against the enemy fairly you die, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you stay in one place too long, the enemy calls in reinforcements and you have to melt back into the countryside. Maybe later in the game a proper friendly military comes in and you spend the very last few hours in big traditional video game battles, playing a very small roll alongside the trained soldiers.
It should have named characters that are randomly generated with light backgrounds and permadeath for them. No one on your team should be a faceless soldier that just gets blown away without any further consequence. There should be a meta-game outside of fighting where you manage supplies and interact with the civilian populace. It should be completely up to you whether you're a noble freedom fighter or a desperate rebel who goes to win by any means necessary, even if it means civilians get caught up in the crossfire. If they do, the populace is more inclined to inform on you and view you as the bad guys, rather than the occupation force. If you play it safer, they're inclined to let you hide out in their houses and to share supplies and information with you.
Morale should be crucial, both for you and the enemy. Your guys can get disheartened and melt away as they give up hope if things go south. The enemy is confident and aggressive at first, but as you damage them and the allied professional army gets nearer and nearer, they become less combat effective. While it may occasionally happen at the very start, if you hit somewhere really hard and cause enough confusion in a short time, the further you get, the more likely the enemy is to throw down their weapons and run for the hills. They could even go so far as to mutiny and frag commanding officers and make for the border, while the officers may start executing cowards. In the late game you may roll up to an enemy base you've been preparing to assault for in-game months armed to the teeth and expecting to lose half of your band of fighters only to find it deserted, the supplies burned up in a scorched-earth retreat. Or maybe you shoot one or two shots and the garrison puts up a white flag. If the enemy surrenders or there are wounded after a battle, it's up to you what happens to them. It can be anything from stripping them of relevant gear and sending them off, taking them captive, (though of course, you're not going to have a place to put all of your prisoners in the back of the dank cave you hide in, let alone rations for them) to straight up executing them. The former options raise sympathy and lower morale for the enemy, as they begin to mentally humanize you, but they just eventually end up back in the ranks of the enemy, to fight again. The latter option means the enemy comes down hard with reprisals, coming after you, and, if they are unable to find you, the civilians suspected of aiding you.
You should have to move around constantly, and not have a permanent base of operations. If the enemy happens to find where you're hiding, they're going to bombard the **** out of it and follow up with a brutal assault. If you manage to escape, you've lost all of your supplies that aren't cached elsewhere and probably most of your comrades, and the enemy gains intel on your operations.
The game could have an ending, eventually, once the very last enemy has been driven out, and the end screen could be something along the lines of Fallout: New Vegas's slideshows, telling how your group couldn't adjust and took up arms against the new government that liberated you, became respected senators in the new government, were summarily executed for war crimes committed against the civilian populace, or went back to normal lives as well as they could, depending on what you did throughout the campaign. The campaign should last for several hours, something on par with a moderately-paced Warband run.
I don't even mind if a good portion of this is in menus and expressed on stat sheets. Of course, most of it should be interactive, but I understand it's not really feasible without a huge budget. It'd be super neat for it all to be just first person in-game roaming around and interacting, but that's an unrealistic expectation. I don't mind what era it's set in, be it modern, medieval, or classical, just so long as the components are in place.
I've tried to scratch this itch so many times and can't manage. As you can probably tell, I've spent a long time dreaming up just how this game would be. Several games have managed to do various aspects to varying degrees of success, but none of them have done them in exactly the way I wanted and all together.
In modded Fallout: New Vegas with huge 30+ person battles and bleedout and wound systems and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, you can roam around after gunfights and execute/loot/revive/abandon to die survivors.
In King of Dragon Pass you can launch brutal raids on your enemies that have long-lasting consequences on their ability to survive, or you can hop the border and try and grab a few cows before they notice.
In Mount and Blade you can burn enemy villages to the ground to mess up the enemy's economy and recruiting potential, but it's so underdone as to be largely pointless. You devastate someone's lands only for them to come back a week later with a new army. I guess they recruited a bunch of knights from the ragged peasants who hid in the forest while you slaughtered their neighbors and burned their food.
In Sid Meier's Pirates! you can drive a town to ruin by blockading it, but as far as I know that really only changes prices, and that game's focus isn't even on persistent warfare against a specific enemy.
In Far Cry 2, you can get missions where you lay IEDs and ambush a convoy from the forest or as they drive through a canyon.
In Crusader Kings 2, you can capture enemy commanders in battle or by sending spies to drag them out of bed (at least in some mods) or burn down certain buildings if an event triggers to severely hamper their war effort.
In the Total War games, you can send in a ninja/spy/whatever to burn down the stables, incite unrest, or open the castle gates. If all of these could come together in a coherent system, that'd be it for me.
In the new X-Com, you're a group of guerrillas, but only in a superficial sense. Same with Mosby's Confederacy.
I'm hoping Bannerlord can do this to a large degree by really improving the world map half of the game and making raiding something that is just as important as pitched field battles and sieges. I want to be able to decimate the countryside and watch as the enemy's starving militia deserts or starves en masse as my army marches on their city for the climatic siege of the war while the ragged survivors go down with ease due to lack of equipment and morale.
It'd be great if this game happens someday.
So... a Valkyria Chronicles with more guerrilla-style ops and less linear gameplay?
Captured Joe said:
No, not really. From what I played of Valkyrie Chronicles, it doesn't mesh with what I have in my mind for the game I want.
TheFlyingFishy said:
Is this is similar to what I suggested but with more gorillas?
jacobhinds said:
I would sell all my possessions and vital organs for a game like you described. The open world genre (which has now become a genre and not a medium) is so infuriatingly underwhelming and unambitious. Even moderately sized developers can render 100 square km maps with tons of simulation, and Just Cause 3 even has supply trains which resupply bases with soldiers, but it's always the same awful ubisoft formula if you actually want to enact change in the open world. Just boring bases.
It wouldn't even be hard to add even a tiny bit of fluidity to how the enemies are eventually toppled but nobody's ever done something like that, from what I know. It's always just infinite enemies that keep spawning until you kill the stupid bases, which makes killing absolutely meaningless and ruins the fun of going on a rampage. Even something like a body counter where you win the game after killing 10,000 guys would go a long way to scratching this itch.
I hate missions in games, I usually hate stories in games, and I definitely hate core mechanics being meaningless because I have to do one of the former first.
Yea, magne. That's my problem with Just Cause 2. I go around the country blowing up oil pipelines and airbases and assassinating colonels, but only because it looks cool. The army still comes at me full force if my wanted level gets up. It's like their vehicles run on air and their soldiers are led by a collective hive-mind.
MechCommander 3. I still love some elements of the first one in terms of the salvaging, almost as fun as diablo 2 or warband when you salvaged clan mechs in that game.
Better AI. Something with more realistic individuals. Fallout 3 and all make a show if intelligence, but it would be good to have a more interactive world, maybe with the depths of story telling you get in planescape, or at least all the massive text that turned me off it.
Don't have the time to get into planescape, but I remember getting stuck in a long text conversation with the first npc follower... That was good...
Better AI. Something with more realistic individuals. Fallout 3 and all make a show if intelligence, but it would be good to have a more interactive world, maybe with the depths of story telling you get in planescape, or at least all the massive text that turned me off it.
Don't have the time to get into planescape, but I remember getting stuck in a long text conversation with the first npc follower... That was good...
F.F.C._fritz said:Also, a sequel to Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway set in the Bulge, as it was hinted by the end of that game, with Baker going on with his descent into madness. It's almost ten years I've been waiting for it.
Sign me up on that.
My funniest/stupidest idea for a video game would be an epic open-world action-RPG in the grand style of the Witcher/Elder Scrolls/Fallout, set in the magic and expansive world of... your backyard. An insect open-world in which you play as a scout ant, maybe with some overarching plot about the giant pink abominations, but mostly about exploring and open-worlding. Towns and factions are different colonies of social insects with their own routines, supply lines and all that, beetles and spiders are giant bosses, defeated in Shadow of the Colossus-esque ways and/or by throwing at them dozens of nameless companions. You gear up by upgrading your exoskeleton, your mandibles and your acid-spitting ass, and your social interactions and stealth are based on pheromones, like sneaking into an enemy colony to kill their larvae or something. It would have some scientific grounding but that shouldn't get in the way of fun and mostly it would take the piss of fantasy RPG tropes. Of course it would need vertical gameplay, like climbing walls or blades of grass. It would need brutal, dismemebering combat, and battles with hundreds of insects would happen, either as part of the plot or as an open-world conquest mechanic à la M&B. It would be like a hybrid SimAnt/Elder Scrolls/M&B.
Some great ideas here, I could die for a good Victorian-era combat focused game.
My dream game would be a M&B with far better mechanics all around, but especially in the campaign map. Also your army should be a lot more dynamic, as well as your companions, retinue what you want to call them. I liked the idea of getting scars in Fable, though it was too random there. Oh, and everything would be set in the historical 10th century Europe, North Africa etc.
My dream game would be a M&B with far better mechanics all around, but especially in the campaign map. Also your army should be a lot more dynamic, as well as your companions, retinue what you want to call them. I liked the idea of getting scars in Fable, though it was too random there. Oh, and everything would be set in the historical 10th century Europe, North Africa etc.
ThegnAnsgar said:
+1 for bronze age games in general,especially late bronze age. It's such a fascinating period and we do have records so we're not even in the dark about how it was like. A game set at the time of the bronze age collapse would be interesting. Apocalyptic atmosphere, chariot combat, bits of history here and there etc.
The only bronze age game I can think of is chariots of war. I never played it but it seemed interesting. I wish there were more
Hidden & Dangerous 3. Seriously, H&D 2 is one of the best games ever, and probably on my top 5 of ww2 games which isnt an easy task.
Imagine it with some Crysis engine graphic but the gameplay remaining the same and just new commando and long range desert group missions. PERFECT.
Also: a W40k Project Reality/Arma type shooter. Basically what i wanted Eternal Crusade to be. WIth mumble and heavy teamwork in squad, just how any space marine is supposed to act, with giant maps like PR too.
Imagine it with some Crysis engine graphic but the gameplay remaining the same and just new commando and long range desert group missions. PERFECT.
Also: a W40k Project Reality/Arma type shooter. Basically what i wanted Eternal Crusade to be. WIth mumble and heavy teamwork in squad, just how any space marine is supposed to act, with giant maps like PR too.
