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If You Could Combine 3 Franchises / I.p.'s / Other.. (Wall Of Text Warning)


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#1 Gwydion Ward

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Posted 16 September 2014 - 08:26 PM

If you could combine 3 I.P’s / Franchise’s that are either currently out, or in development (by this I mean things such as Final Fantasy, Gundam Wing, Battlefield, and Our beloved Star Citizen). What would they be? What would you take from each? And how would you combine it all into 1 game?

For me, I would combine:

1) Star Citizen
2) Planetside 1-2
3) Mechwarrior

Now, as for what I’d take from each, I’ll start with Star Citizen:

1) Its Flight Model (hey, someone has to fly those: Jumpships, Warships, Aerospace Fighters, Dropships, VTOL’s)
2) Its Damage States / Damage Modeling.
3) Its Universe (the planets, cities on those planets, ‘areas’ within those cities such as hangars, travel between planets, and the like)
4) Its Economy (the ‘time taken to replenish destroyed vehicles/ammo/equipment/ect)
5) The whole ‘death of a spaceman’ type of death/rebirth character management.

From Planetside 1-2:

1) The massive combat zones (continents).
2) Multiple combat zones per world.
3) Capturing, losing, recapturing of facilities.

From Mechwarrior:

1) The Mech’s (of course), Aerospace Assets (ships, fighters), and Ground assets (tanks, infantry weapons, VTOL’s).
2) Weapons used by all vehicles/players.
3) Possibly the Great Houses and Clans as ‘factions’, though how I’d manage the clan/is tech im not sure. Would depend on the ‘year’ I set the game to be during.

The Game Itself:

I’ll try to keep this more as a ‘story’ type thing, so that your own imaginations can run with the idea, and so that its kept slightly short.
You log into the game. Depending on where you were when you logged out:

1) You enter into your own personal Mech-hangar; your currently owned mech’s in various states of repair/re-arming lined up in a neat row a long one wall, while your grown/aerospace assets are lined up along the other wall.

2) You exit out onto the main deck of the dropship; the assets you were able to bring along (be it one or two mech’s, a set number of ground/aerospace assets, or something else, taking up the room you were allotted on the dropship’s limited carrying capacity/hangar capacity) are sitting in their assigned berth’s along the outer wall of the spherical Drop-ships hangar deck (Also in various states of repair).

3) You exit out onto the main bridge of a massive Jump-Ship, preparing to pick up dropships, preparing to deploy dropships, or preparing for the first 30 light-year jump on your planned rout.

As you walk around, you can check the status of your various equipment, make changes to their loadouts/weapons/ammo, climb up into those machines and look around inside their interiors or inside their cockpits. And even look at the still visible battle-damage/wear-n-tear on those machines.

Exiting the Mechbay, (on ground), either on foot, or in your chosen vehicle puts you into an open world city-scape. These cities are normally free of combat, and are central trade hubs, but combat CAN happen within them when they come under contestation (yes, these cities can be attacked and taken over by the ‘other guys’ ). Beyond the walls of the City is the rest of the open-world battlefield, the further out you travel, the closer to the ‘border disputes’ you come, until you finally come to the ‘no-mans-land’ of the combat taking place. And depending on the fighting, that walk might be a ‘lot’ shorter than you’d like. (This would be the tie-in from Planetside 1-2).

Exiting from a Dropship that is ‘landed’ on planet would be similar to the exiting from the Mechbay, only you’d either be at some point out on the ‘continent’, or at a space-port within the city.

Exiting the Dropship you’re in, or jumping in within a Warship, (while in space) Would put you into a setting similar to Star Citizen. With you flying freely in space in your Aerospace fighter/warship Where combat can happen at any time.

During all of this, you can enter/exit your vehicles at any time. Have your Mech Shot out from under you? Crawl out of the wreckage (it it doesn’t go critical and explode in mini-nuclear fire, or if your cockpit isn’t hit/crushed while your still in it). Get forced to ‘punch out’ (eject)? If you’re not shot out of the air, and land safely, get right back into the action or head back to base for another vehicle.

Bring your assets back from those combat engagements, and that real-time damage wont simply ‘fix’ itself instantly. That damage stays there, being repaired by the NPC Ground-crew over a time-based system. And that visible damage (and also game-mechanic damage states of components) slowly repairs itself over time to match those visual repairs. Take a half-repaired Mech out into combat? Don’t expect it to operate at its best. (Same goes for any other ground assets such as hover tanks, VTOL’s or Aerospace).

Completely lose a asset? Welp, you will not be ‘instantly’ getting a replacement. Depending on what you need to replace, it’ll take a while to find its way into your Mechbay. And lose something you ‘launched’ from a Dropship that was landed out in the boonies? Welp, the factories are not gonna do ‘house-calls’, you’ll have to go pick up that new asset of yours and bring it back to the dropship.

And while I have focused on the ‘vehicle’ aspect of things, Don’t forget about the FPS aspects as well, there’d be plenty to do for a grunt while all of the fighting is going on by the heavy machines.

Thoughts?.. Critiques?....

What would you chose?

#2 Tustle

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Posted 16 September 2014 - 09:57 PM

Ohhh man now that sounds like an awesome MechWarrior game...but I don't think I'd be satiated with just that.

I always liked the grease-monkey aspect to 'mech games like MechWarrior and Armored Core. Customizing your 'mech to suit your own tastes and skills, changing what it looks like, eking out as much performance as you could from your selection of parts and weight limits...hell I think that's one of the core reasons why I like MechWarrior Online for all it's problems (and consequently why I find myself liking my Inner Sphere 'mechs over the Clans' 'mechs *cough*). But I'd like to go a little deeper.

Maybe a lot deeper.

So let's look at Spore and Robot Arena for a moment! Both were games really heavy on customization...so what if we could take out the bits that were great about both of them and put them in a MechWarrior title that let the player build their own 'mechs, a'la the tabletop BattleTech?

It'd use the creature-creation aspect of Spore to change what the 'mech looks like on a visual level; players could take individual limbs, torsos, and different arm types, shape them how they choose, sculpt them how they want, then rig on details such as the cockpit (of course), ladder rungs, sensor housings, fins, stabilizers, spoilers, wings, slots for jump jets, tires, various protrusions...an entire grab-bag of parts if you will.

Then to really make it their own, players start adding parts -inside- of the 'mech by dragging chosen hardpoint housings around in a model of what the 'mech's internal skeleton and myomer structure would look like, much like the robot creation aspect of Robot Arena. In this mode players can also see and change out such components as engines, sensor suites, heatsinks, ECM, and ammo bins, and are capable of tweaking the location of these parts at will; moving the engine just enough inside the center torso, for instance, may allow a player to jam in a ballistic hardpoint capable of mounting an Autocannon/5 with some wiggle room to spare.

Once the player's done creating their 'mech they can further fine-tune everything by switching out engines, weapons in the hardpoints, switching to Endo-Steel internals or Ferro-Fibrous armor, and indeed, armor counts in component locations. This mode is more like a Smurfy mechlab than the other two creation modes, but combines both prior modes for further visual tweaking: mounted jump jets can be shifted in slots to achieve the effect the player desires, weapons and their hardpoints can be shuffled to one's pleasing, and components can be further sculpted/refined until the 'mech looks just right. After that it's just a matter of setting up weapon groups, activation buttons for onboard equipment, then a test run, and we can call the new 'mech good to go!

Oh such a glorious feature...that'd probably be only usable on a single-player game since if used in a multiplayer versus setting it'd get the shiznat abused out of it.

#3 Hex Pallett

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Posted 17 September 2014 - 12:17 PM

So if you're talking about a dream-game that is impossible to achieve....

1) MechWarrior
2) The Witcher
3) S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I'm a sucker for character-driven, atmospheric stories. I'm a big, pessimistic sucker for stories happening in settings where lives could easily vanish like dust in the wind. It is where lives are cheap that the light of humanity shines the brightest.

And you know where else people die all the time? Future space. :ph34r:

I want it to be a story-driven game. I want it to happen somewhere like Periphery, where borders cross over, countries once battled for planets but no one won, leaving plenty of infrastructures to be used, wrecks to be salvaged and resources to be discovered and exploited. It is a lawless land where all sorts of low lives thrive.

You, as the player, are given a background - space-trader got stabbed in the back, mercenary whose unit's last and final mission went horribly wrong, engineer who grew up on a jungle-planet and is handy with guns and repairs, orphans who were brought up by the church, financial analyst picking up his/her family's tradition after bankruptcy, sex slave who murdered his/her trafficker, survivor of some government's genetic modification/physical augmentation programs, etc., etc.

Each of them start off with a certain set of bonuses, like: traders are given a larger store backlogs when making purchases, engineers get a bonus for equipment-deprivation, financial analysts receive extra intel before missions, sex slaves receive discount in stores (charisma) and are given melee bonuses, etc.

And then you're thrown into a world. You could trade. You could raid. You could work your way up. You could join with a bunch of other small-time guns-for-hires to provide security details for a local convoy sending water to a nearby refinery, shooting feral wildlife on the way, or you could sell the security detail to bandits after being promised a load of money and experience points, only to discover that not only the bandits fired at you too despite your agreements, but also you gained a bounty on your head because the bandit sold your ID to some high-level security.

Or, if you're, say, a financial analyst, you join a band of space-pirates, gained their trust after a few raids. Then, you help them wash their money but you write yourself as the legal respondent. When the clean money plus profit came back, you use the money to hire a bunch of mercs, murdering everyone of the pirates and suddenly you have all the hardwares you need to start off a personal mercenary unit. (Basically Shawshank Redemption. Kind of.)

Either way, you do different missions, travel to places, meet people and listen to their stories. Until one day you have enough money to buy something decent, say, an 20-ton high-speed mech that, with a couple of gunners dangling at its side, could easily handle the security details that normally needs to be covered by a platoon of people.

Now things get really interesting. You could customize your Mech and arm it with small-caliber autocannons that are very effective against infantries, unarmored vehicles, conventional APCs and aircrafts, instead of arming it with lasers that are very effective against heavily armored, modernized vehicles and mechs but generates way too much heat and is more suitable for battlefield situations (because friendlies will provide you with cover when you need to cool down).

Your firepower is now another level, you began meeting with more interesting and resourceful people - remembering that financial analyst I mentioned before? You could band with him and form an actual merc unit. You expand, go to other planets, hunt down big-time bandit units, meet with more resourceful and interesting people, until one day you find yourself get involved with some major events, and your choice could to some degree the direction of how the game ends.

That would be my dream game.

#4 Napoleon_Blownapart

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Posted 18 September 2014 - 12:16 PM

can i be Chewbacca piloting a Klingon Mech?

#5 Rogue Jedi

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Posted 18 September 2014 - 02:16 PM

Star Trek, Battletech, Star Wars

Take the sub-light speeds and ship design from the Trek ships add a KF drive from Battletech, power it from the Warp Core so it recharges in minutes or hours rather than a week, modify the Intrepid class (Voyager) to allow disembarkation of Mechs and you have something with greater capacity than the Overlord drop ship, able to move from a Stars jump point to the Planets surface in minutes rather than days, able to travel 30 light years an hour using the KF drive, or at about 19 Light Years a week (based on Voyagers estimated 70 years to travel 70,000 LY) using the Warp Drive if not traveling from one star to the next. add Star Wars fighters (with impulse engines rather than Ion engines, so top speeds can be 25% speed of light, rather then around mach 3)

Just imagine a ship armed with weapons with thousands of times the explosive yield of a large nuke (photon torpedoes), able to accelerate at more than 500,000g (impulse drive) coming up against a Battletech drop-ship able to accelerate at 3g, and imagine a fighter squadron of X-Wings, firing 5 megaton Proton Torpedoes at the dropship, this could be amusing for the winner, less so for the Dropship.

then imagine the Battlemechs upgraded with Trek and Wars technology, e.g. JumpJets with enough power to get you into orbit (refitted Star Wars fighter engines), Phasers rather than the Battletech lasers, Proton Torpedoes, concussion missiles (or for laughs Trek Quantum Torpedoes, this would likely kill the firing Mech and create creators thousands of miles across but why not) rather than LRMs and SRMs, Battlemechs with shield generators (refitted from Trek Shuttles or Wars Fighters) and emergency escape transporters rather than ejector seats for the MechWarriors.

Seems good, but would be near impossible to balance and so overpowered I doubt anyone would be interested,
possible scenario:
call an airstrike (5 Proton Torpedos), 10 seconds and 20 megatons later the Mechs whose shields held then need to extract themselves from the glassy 3 mile wide 1 mile deep craters left by the blasts.

yes way to silly to be done





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