Go go go! will always be downsampled in my mind.
I miss playing this game. Sometimes a lot. It’s been one of the funniest game I have ever played with Bomberman and Mario Kart of course.
It’s not about killing. It’s all about situations. It’s all about player stories. Collaborative gameplay, in the best immersion setting you can have: First-Person-View.
When people say that these games are all conveying violence. Of course there are bullets, headshots, blood (I would have put less of this one in TF2) but looking at these games from that point of view is wrong because you can judge any game with moral and none are made with that in mind. Otherwise, what the hell means a plumber eating mushrooms and getting stronger with it while jumping like crazy? A subliminal go-get-some-drugs message that’s right. Or not.
At the last Indiecade there was a panel around FPV games, encouraging wacky concepts. The only concept I have for a FPV game is something like that:
AV-98 Ingram
I don’t want a human scale anymore, neither a little one. I want to be a GIANT. And not in a realistic slow painful way like MechWarrior, but in a way where I can move as fast as a human would, but in a robot of 12 meters for example.
So of course you would run in streets and manage to avoid cars, trucks and not to destroy everything in the city.
I would set a police procedural background (and other secret stuff) where you have to team with pals to arrest crazy robots like in the Patlabor serie. I loved how it describes the boredom of a little team of people sent to fix stuffs in the city. It’s really different from the simple plot of conflicts and wars you have in the Battletech world. Here, it would just be driving a robot, team up with friends and being careful to the city while wondering what the government or the army are up to.
You would be severely punished if not being careful, or rewarded if the mission was worth the damages (tough gameplay balance to set up!). You would be downgraded in the leaderboard if doing a mission would kill citizens and or making the city look like a battle field.
Of course it would be a MMO with destructable environments. Like in CS, I would emphasize action or combats on ressource scarcity, pushing people to work together. Want to capture this crazy robots? Make a plan because it’s not gonna happen by bunny jumping and railgunning the sucker.
The main problem of FPV games now is that you’re not responsible at all. They all have this “survive, whatever is happening” design. L4D makes it legitimate with zombies. TF2 makes it legitimate with a cartoon-ish style sending the message that “it’s all for fun don’t worry”.
I know, this PatlaborMMO is not very wacky, but I really have hard times to believe in really weird stuff with this immersive setup that is the FPV. Throwing kisses to others? Mmmh, no. A gun that create things? It works with 2D even in non- fast paced action game (Sprout Gun from Grim Fandango) but in FPV? Too weird..
Sometimes I really feel that we can’t go crazy producing games in some specific technical settings.
Still, we need to keep searching.