Supposedly Assassin's Creed 3 will have pretty cool forest gameplay. Not exactly what you meant, but it might be something you'd be interested in.Originally Posted by Splynter
Supposedly Assassin's Creed 3 will have pretty cool forest gameplay. Not exactly what you meant, but it might be something you'd be interested in.
I have heard something along those lines. I've been mostly ignoring AC3 news, as I'm not sure I have the dedication to handle getting sucked into playing another one of those games.
Yeah I wasn't a huge fan of any of the games after AC1, but AC3 looks pretty cool.
My point was though, regardless of how you explain the zombies, the concept is so overly familiar that it doesn't matter. It can go completely without explanation, as it has done in many movies and games. 28 days later went for the super scientific explanation, and that worked. But it also works in The Walking Dead, where half-devoured corpses of people who Can Not Be Alive are crawling around biting ankles. There might be some people out there who laud 28DL and ridicule TWD for these reasons, but I would guess they are in the minority
Rabies fulfils a lot of those, but I'd rather see someone try to do a syphilis apocalypse story!
Oh definitely! Forests are just amazing in real life, and they get such poor treatment in games. I'm sure it's down to limitations of collision models or whatever, but in games they're always behind invisible walls / have a huge path cut through them for the player. More of this please.
Something else I'd like in my ideal sandbox world: Procedurally Generated Content. I'd happily let me PC churn away for a day or two to build me a brand new world to play in.
I don't just mean landscape (although definitely that) but I'd like to see procedurally generated NPCs too. Human beings vary so much in the real world, but in games they're all creepily similar. Games like the Elder Scrolls series have introduced a bit of variation, but still everyone in those games is completely symmetrical. A (small) bit of asymmetry would go a long way to making more believable NPCs, along with them being randomly generated for each install of a game.
I want a primitive tribe simulator.
Survival, events, a council of advisors you appoint and demote, mysterious vision quests, diplomacy trade and raids.
Lots of exploration and discovery, encounter strange creatures.
Adjudicate conflicts within the tribe, often with difficult choices that disappoint a faction within or outside the tribe.
To avoid alienating your own and other tribes, you need to comport your actions with the tribal ethos and culture which is alien to that of modern society.
High level of challenge where "it's fun and interesting to lose"
There is a fantastic game hardly anyone seems to have played called king of dragon pass which formed my definition of the perfect simulator.
To me it is perhaps the best game ever made.
10 years later they came out with a new version but it's only for iphone and ipad.
I'd feel stupid getting one just for this game but it's tempting.
The game is only $10
http://a-sharp.com/kodp/ios/
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/king-...335545504?mt=8
Last edited by BenWah; 18-06-2012 at 09:25 PM.
This is an exciting idea. I will definitely be looking into King of Dragon Pass.
I think another setting begging to be simulated is ancient North America with native Americans and wildlife being the central components.
Oops. I didn't mean to restrict it to viruses in the first place. My point is that a virus or bacteria evolving to turn people into mindlessly violent thugish creatures is about as likely as the premise of Fallout to me--but to each their own. I suppose rabies and syphilis are about the closest thing we have, but they're still pretty far off; rabies kills pretty quick after the symptoms show up, and while it can make people socially aggressive and moody its far more likely to give them muscular spasms than bouts of aggression.
A syphilitic apocalypse is probably one of Phyllis Schafely's reasons for voting down the ERA.
Ooh, yes.What I would most like to see done properly is forests. Forests in games are pitiable husks of the real thing. I love forests, and have been in many. Most of us here probably have as well. I cannot think of any forest in any video game that looked or felt like the real forests I've spent time in. Video game forests lack the density and diversity of those in reality. Basically, a hiking simulator (no, not the Elder Scrolls).
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
I don't see what is unlikely about it, there are already examples of various pathogens in nature that exhibit similar symptoms, it would only take one odd mutation for it to jump to humans (or for a human pathogen to mutate beyond what it is now). Also bio-engineering.
Aside from the mutants and such in Fallout, I don't see why the premise of nuclear war is unbelievable. We were literally a finger slip or bad judgement call away from it during the cold war. I know the movies tell you that there are two fancy keys and a code from the president to launch nukes, but that's not how it really worked. Everyone from foot soldiers to fighter pilots were armed with nuclear weapons and were allowed to use them at their own discretion.
Even today all it would take is one country using a nuclear weapon to trigger a chain reaction that leads to all out nuclear war and with countries like Pakistan in possession of nuclear weapons it's really not that far fetched. No, I'd say that a nuclear war is more likely than not, in fact it's probably inevitable. It's more of a question of when than if.
As to the first bit, the similar functions found in nature are probably less similar than they appear on the surface. Do you have any good examples? All I can think of is rabies and a mind-control fungus that programs ants to find a high place for the spores to spread from. The trouble is that ants are much more simple mechanisms than the human brain and there's a direct benefit to the organism so the selection pressure for the feature is pretty stable. Rabies I spoke to previously--the aggression isn't really the most distinct or prevalent feature of the disease and it's more of a general neurally disruption than something that specifically creates aggression. The overall result in dogs is usually that they attack people more readily, but not really in humans.
I don't find nuclear war particularly implausible. What I find implausible is that we'd be quite so prepared for it. Such effective preventative precautions would have to develop under conditions in which we had enough time, research and money dedicated to the issue without ALSO becoming either desensitized to the threat OR deciding that it was so horrible we should put resources into getting rid of the things. In other words, a much, much, much longer version of the cold war at 1950s temperatures without significant further chilling or heating up. But the idea of a war or series of wars destroying some of our most prominent societies is certainly plausible.
Sort of a tangent, I'm not convinced that a country firing a nuclear missile automatically means nuclear war though. I think it's also entirely plausible that a nuclear strike would either cause only a couple of further strikes or would invoke an entirely different action. It would certainly be a declaration of war, but I think if the time came all countries involved would find more to the situation than "Well, we said we'd do it if they did so here we go!" It might devolve to that, but especially in a world more interconnected by direct communication than that of 50 years ago, I'm just not convinced the reaction would be quite so straight forward.
Last edited by gwathdring; 19-06-2012 at 12:44 AM.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
You seem to not understand that viruses can mutate. Paranoia, anxiety, and aggression are definitely direct symptoms of a rabies infection, even in humans.
Also what preparations are you talking about? You do realize that the events in the Fallout games take place hundreds of years after war, right? There are plenty of bunkers and fallout shelters around the US already for such an event anyway. In an actual nuclear war it's likely that only large cities and other major population areas would be targeted, people without such preparations in rural areas would probably survive.
As for the last bit, mutually assured destruction is the ONLY thing keeping nuclear arms from being used right now. If it wasn't acted upon after the first nuclear attack more would follow due to lack of retaliation, which would inevitably lead to nuclear war anyway.
Personally, I want a "Han Solo fantasy" smuggler game.
Ideally, it'd be a hybrid of Sid Meier's Pirates! and Freelancer. I'd take the basic structure of Pirates! and put Freelancer's combat and cinematic style on it.
The step forward I'd take is make the little quests and interactions that Pirates! has and make them semi-procedural, some parts random and some parts reacting to what you've done/doing. Maybe there's a bounty hunter you've evaded that finally catches up to you. Maybe he takes your little merchant girl/boy love interest hostage to draw you out. Maybe the love interest is in on the deal. Maybe the love interest dies during the event, killed by the bounty hunter. Maybe you killed the love interest. Maybe the bounty hunter escapes. Maybe you'll see him again. The idea is that these little quest bits give you some random/some calculated situations, and how you deal with them is the crux of the "telling your own story" gameplay. Borrowing the narrative style of David Cage's adventure games, the story and game continues even if you screw up, and rolls with whatever mistakes or bad situations the players find themselves in.
The random parts can be influenced by a system based on all the nebulous concepts of "luck" (pushing your luck, running out of luck, getting lucky, lucky charms, bad luck, etc), so that conversations, combat, and commerce have a balance of risk and consequence. Best I've thought of is a pool of luck that you can "invest" to not completely make something specific happen, but make it more likely. You can have one unlucky break, or you can run out of luck and start going the other way into bad luck. You could play an entire game of being jinxed and cursed by constant bad luck, and still somehow keep going.
Ideally, I'd like it to feel like you're just one step ahead at best, and three steps behind at worst. The ship you'd use for trading/smuggling doesn't fire on all engines, and have to spend some time either docked or in the middle of combat jury-rigging or fixing problems. Borrowing from Star Wars: Pod Racer, you can buy new or used parts to enhance that ship, but the cheaper used parts have a larger risk of not working optimally or not at all, depending on how lucky you are.
Borrowing money to pay for your ship from crime lords, taking questionable jobs with questionable cargo, trying squeeze as much payment as you can without losing the job entirely, or just running a freebie to get a connection with someone who'll pay better next time. Avoiding the law and staying off their alert radar, dancing a dangerous game with the unlawful knowing they might stab you in the back, finding a co-pilot you can kinda trust and possibly like to back you. Everything's a roll of the dice, but only some people can cheat a little. That's the life of a Smuggler.
I'd love a really deep and dynamic space sim. I don't necessarily want Newtonian physics because I know how boring they can be, though with some work and "magic" devices it could be interesting for sure (think jumpdrive or another similar relativity-breaking element to speed up movement and possibly rapidly change momentum without killing the occupants), but something more akin to having a futuristic galaxy with governments, evolving technology, procedural generation of uncharted and charted systems, wars, freelancing, missions, jobs, etc. Basically taking the best elements of EVE, X3 and Freelancer and adding some 4X to the mix. It'd be really nice if you could start as a lonely freelancer and work your way up to corporate magnate or president of a chunk of the galaxy.
For now, I'll just settle with Freelancer. At least the mods still make it worthwhile.
Viruses mutate, yes, but generally the mutations only stick around when they do something useful. This isn't as true in slowly evolving species, but viruses and bacteria mutate so quickly that they don't have to put up with vestigial mechanisms as often as we do. Making people into zombies is just so specific without benefits to match. If you'd proposed a mutation that turned the victim's skin Chartreuse I would respond similarly. I haven't read anything about rabies causing paranoia and physical aggression in humans.
I did a quick review of the NCBI and CDC databases in case I was misremembering, and rabies seems like a general nervous system shutdown--paralysis, hallucinations, confusion and comas are also common. To be fair, that does sound somewhat like a zombie on the surface, but in reality victims die very quickly and don't become anything near inhuman. The physical breakdown that also accompanies this mental breakdown is rather important, too. I see it as unlikely that the virus would maintain its ferocious attack on emotional control centers but lighten up the physical symptoms when it is perfectly successful as a lethal virus in animals far more likely to attack, fight, and otherwise spread the virus without such changes. An epidemic that straight up kills or physically maims is more what I'd expect from a viral apocalypse, without the whole violent regression bit.
By preparations, I was referring to the Vaults. But most people in the world aren't from vaults, so it's not a big deal, you're right. The essence of Fallout's apocalyptic landscape would still exist without the vaults.Also what preparations are you talking about?
That's the conventional wisdom, yes. I'm not convinced it's true. I wouldn't be surprised either way.As for the last bit, mutually assured destruction is the ONLY thing keeping nuclear arms from being used right now. If it wasn't acted upon after the first nuclear attack more would follow due to lack of retaliation, which would inevitably lead to nuclear war anyway.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
That would be awesome! I was recently in a tabletop campaign that your post reminded me of in which we played a smuggling crew. It was a little more explicitly fantastical than Star Wars, with magic users, shape-shifters, and vampires (no elves, though ;) ). It jumped the shark when the Space Celts called up Space Cthulu to win their war against Space Skynet, but there was some cool criminal goodness before the GM got a bit too excited.
What reminded me of it, and made me most excited about your idea, was the bit about rolling with mistakes. We got ourselves into so many horrible situations in that game, usually when our Infiltrator Prototype Android tried to do any reconnaissance. Before the aforementioned shark-jumping, we were on the wrong side of a massive experimental weapons firm that was feeding both sides of the war and had its hand in everyone's pockets, had several deals all going wrong and only one going right, and were considered public enemies by about half the governments in the cluster. I think we had the GM nervous he was going to toast the whole party just because we'd gotten ourselves into such a horrible web of lies and broken bargains no amount of meta-game fudging could have saved us.
Barely scraping by from one rough planet to the next as a hard-luck Mal Reynolds or Han Solo wanna-be? That sounds like an amazing sandbox.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
A virus like rabies kills it's victims fairly quickly, a mutation that kept the victim alive longer would definitely benefit the virus' reproduction.
This is true. Unfortunately for the zombie apocalypse, a lot of the other barriers between rabies and the zombie virus aren't as direct. Also it's a pretty successful virus as it stands and as humans aren't the primary carriers, lethality in humans hasn't been much of a problem for it. I'm not sure how common it is for viruses to soften like that either. I'm sure it happens, but now I'm curious how common it is.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
Only if it results in greater transmission. Since people with rabies aren't in the habit of biting other people, having it last a few months longer than it does wouldn't necessarily result in a greater transmission.
Good point. If the mutation never reaches a second host it's pretty useless.
I think of [the Internet] as a grisly raw steak laid out on a porcelain benchtop in the sun, covered in chocolate hazelnut sauce. In the background plays Stardust’s Music Sounds Better With You. There’s lots of fog. --tomeoftom
Correct, still plausible though.
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