What would your perfect patchwork game be?

[thegooseking]

Ignoring the fact that I said that game mechanics are good or bad depending not on themselves but on how they interact with other game mechanics, and game mechanics can't always be easily transplanted into another game (taking your opponents' pieces in Monopoly would be shit; that doesn't mean it's a terrible mechanic in Chess), we all know that many games -- good or not so good -- have their good points and their bad points.

So if you could take the good points (mechanics or features or whatever) from several different games and mash them all together to make Frankenstein's Game, which we'll pretend would be the best game ever (which is to say, ignoring how well or badly those things would fit together), what games would you crib from, and what would be the good points you take from them?

After you've done that, I want you to think about how well those things would fit together, but just ignore that at first.

I'll tell you what my own patchwork game would be later, after I've had a think about it.

[Heliocentric]

Sims meets manhunt. Raise them, slay them.
Defcon meets peggle. everyone extreme fever dies
Metro 2033 meets Railworks
Tropico meets boiling point
Project reality meets pokemon snap (essentially war journalist).
edit:
hitman:blood money and democracy, arrange accidents, or implicate your enemies in your allies murders

[Whitmore]

X3's vast, intelligent game world with it's empire building mechanics expanded on from Gal-Civ, Precursors ground-level areas upgraded to be far more realistc and intelligent with squad commanding like in Republic Commando attached to a detailed and fun RPG system like DnD 3.5, every area of the galaxy explorable and visitable on a grand scale like in Oblivion/Morrowind and with a large amount of space combat and big-arse-ship-battles-while-flying-a-snub-fighter like in Freespace 2.

That or Force Unleashed 2 + Way Of the Samurai 2 + Oblivion/Morrowind. :D It would be known as Push-that-guy-hilariously-off-the-edge-and-get-XP-from-it.

[redox]

If Half-Life 3 ever gets made/released and Valve includes the portal gun then that would be perfect. It's got to happen right?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKg3TUPQ8Sg

[westyfield]

Project reality meets pokemon snap (essentially war journalist).

I think there was either a mod or a community that played ArmA2 this way - a few people would be a news team, they had to get as close to the action to get the best pictures/videos of the fighting, whilst staying alive and avoiding being captured. They were pretty serious about AARs and so on.

[TillEulenspiegel]

X3 meets X-Wing, where you're building up resources and doing missions that make sense in an ever-changing struggle against the Empire.

[Xercies]

ASctually I would love a proper war journalist game to be honest, that would be quite cool. In fact lets put that even further, it involves sneaking into compounds and snapping pictures of stuff and trying to get out alive, trying to take down some corrupt and dictatorial government while also trying to get lots of hits on your website.

[hamster]

FPS with proper fully fledged strategy control options. Sooo imagine at mission planning you have a bird's eye view of the mission area (say a complex). You would then have to plan what units goes where and how and then the mission starts and you'll just roll in there while teammates follow your pre-orchestrated plan and the whole thing comes together and you clear out the entire complex without stopping to move. And maybe to give the whole thing some choreography, the level is split into multiple sections (some elevator down to UG for example) which could not be seen during planning phase and only permits you personally and maybe a few teammates entry... this way a mission wouldn't be over if you "do everything perfectly" and there would be dynamic FPS firefights rather than the whole thing being strategy. Yeah so basically a hybrid of sorts. And of course it would be cool if you had to purchase/hire units with money so you could really customize your approach.

edit:

basically what i imagined Deus Ex to be. Imagine storming the warehouse for the bomb (i think that's what it is) but you are the one who dictates which units goes where. Maybe you have a chopper and can get guys to rappel down from the top while you have a team of guys on foot to come up from the bottom. Stuff like that!

[nuh uh no way]

the direction i would like to see games go in, and this may only be possible with an MMO framework, is for a game to consist of many different genres, playable by different people. that CCP Dust game being an upcoming example. here's a made-up example: what if i played a city building game but had people playing a Sims-like inhabiting it? what about throwing in a FPS for the non-citizens that want to be bad and the law enforcers that are there to stop them?

i don't think we're near the point to make things like this possible, and yes with the gta example it would likely be way too chaotic, but i'm just spitballing here. it's an idea i think about a lot

[Anthile]

FPS with proper fully fledged strategy control options. Sooo imagine at mission planning you have a bird's eye view of the mission area (say a complex). You would then have to plan what units goes where and how and then the mission starts and you'll just roll in there while teammates follow your pre-orchestrated plan and the whole thing comes together and you clear out the entire complex without stopping to move. And maybe to give the whole thing some choreography, the level is split into multiple sections (some elevator down to UG for example) which could not be seen during planning phase and only permits you personally and maybe a few teammates entry... this way a mission wouldn't be over if you "do everything perfectly" and there would be dynamic FPS firefights rather than the whole thing being strategy. Yeah so basically a hybrid of sorts. And of course it would be cool if you had to purchase/hire units with money so you could really customize your approach.

edit:

basically what i imagined Deus Ex to be. Imagine storming the warehouse for the bomb (i think that's what it is) but you are the one who dictates which units goes where. Maybe you have a chopper and can get guys to rappel down from the top while you have a team of guys on foot to come up from the bottom. Stuff like that!

So... basically Rainbow Six?

[Heliocentric]

just to follow, not rainbow six Vegas but rainbow six 3. it has some subtitle I forget. You can just set up your allies like turrets, but having them synchronized is the ideal.

[hamster]

So... basically Rainbow Six?

No, you can't run through the whole map with the planner. The game would also be designed so that the other squadrons would never be too far away from you i.e. off shooting tangos two blocks away. You would basically make an entrance and clear the immediate area with the planner then make your way through the rest of the level, with occasionally interludes of outside support. This would require levels to be sort of segmented so you wouldn't have the entire team exploring huge swathes of the map and doing all the work for you.

It would also necessarily have far more diverse units. In Rainbow Six you had soldiers with guns and different stats. I'm thinking more along the lines of distinct purchasable units, such as guys with flamethrowers, heavy mech suits, invis cloaks, melee only units, units that can rappel down from above...stuff like that.

[BathroomCitizen]

I'd like a Minecraft total conversion of Ultima Online. You know, fully fledged open-world in first person, with PvP and full-loot, along with all the crafting and the skills of UO.

It's one of my secret dreams.

[sinister agent]

A game world like oblivion or fallout, but you're not a big hero and probably never going to be. There's a real economy, real danger, anything worth having is damn expensive, and if you see a bandit you're probably better off running like hell. Big important events do happen, but you're unlikely to be part of them. Armies could move into a town, taking all the accomodation and putting up local prices, and a famous hero might wander past and ask you for directions, but mostly, you'll just be trying to get by. There could be little missions here and there, but nothing really heroic. Though it'd actually make more sense for people to ask you to go and look for their lost dog, as opposed to some super soldier.