Books you believe would make awesome video games...

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Jay444111

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#1  Edited By Jay444111

Now I love books just as the next man, but there are some which are so awesome that I think would work amazingly as video games. (movies like to butcher the source material to damn much IMO, just read about WWZ. I know, more movie industry bashing from me. I'll stop now.)

WWZ BASED ON THE BOOK!!! *end caps* Sorry for yelling that, but honestly, imagine dead island, but with a good story and a very interesting gameplay ideas such as playing as different people the main character is interviewing by visiting flashbacks. We could go from astronauts in space trying to detail what is going on to ground control to African soldiers having to bomb bridges with deadly gasses to kill the zombies. I would pay ALOT for a game like this. ALOT I SAY!

Robert R MCcammons Swan Song. You know the fallout series? Well Swan Song helped inspire it along with Stephen Kings The Stand. There is a HUGE debate still going on as to which of these books is more awesome. Many consider Swan Song better, it takes place about a couple days before WW3 then after. The characters, the action scenes and the story would easily make it one of the best games due to story alone. But with a good gears/alan wake type gameplay along with some freeroam could make it a GOTY easily. I also sugguest buying the book on the fact that it is completely awesome.

Good Omens, Basically, the antichrist is about to awaken, a angel and demon decide they like humanity as the motercycle riders of the apocalypse ride through the country side... that is just THE BACK OF THE DAMN BOOK! This would make an amazing point and click game like those made by tell tale. I want this BAD!

What books do you believe would make AMAZING video games and how could they be made into them?

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FancySoapsMan

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#2  Edited By FancySoapsMan

Neuromancer.
 
Sure, there already is a video game named Neuromancer, but it's way too dated to be enjoyable.

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Taefarinas

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#3  Edited By Taefarinas

Other than Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books, you mean? ;) I think the Hunger Games trilogy could be nicely adapted.

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GreggD

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#4  Edited By GreggD

Basically anything directly based on H.P. Lovecraft's stories. I know we've seen things inspired by (Quake, Alone in the Dark), and even directly based on, like I said (Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth), but I'd like to see anything modern and well done.

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iam3green

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#5  Edited By iam3green

tom clancy......o wait a few of his books are already made into video games.

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Hailinel

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#6  Edited By Hailinel

The Xanth novels range between cheesy and stupid and are littered with bad puns and pantie jokes. Naturally, they'd be excellent fodder for an adventure game in the old Lucasarts or Sierra style.

Also, Battle Royale would make for a fine survival game.

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SSully

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#7  Edited By SSully

A Game of Thrones game, that isn't like the one coming out. My ideal Game of Thrones game would be like Civ, where you have a big focus on both combat and diplomacy. You would start as a small lord and choose your sides with the many different families of the universe and play accordingly to rise in power. Also a game based on the Nights Watch alone would be very interesting.

Also a game based in the Foundations Universe. You could literally make a game of almost any genre in that damn universe.

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ArbitraryWater

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#8  Edited By ArbitraryWater

A Game of Thrones. Oh wait. Well, you know what I mean. Those books seem like they would work very well as RPGs, and I'd like to see a fantasy RPG with balls. Yeah, it's clear that Dragon Age cribs heavily from A Song of Ice and Fire, but their idea of edgy is to have blood splatter and the occasional hilariously awkward puppet sex scene. I want everyone to murder everyone else, and I want them to do it all naked. While also having sex. At the same time that they're murdering people. And Sean Bean dies at the end.

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benpicko

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#9  Edited By benpicko
@ArbitraryWater

A Game of Thrones. Oh wait. Well, you know what I mean. Those books seem like they would work very well as RPGs, and I'd like to see a fantasy RPG with balls. Yeah, it's clear that Dragon Age cribs heavily from A Song of Ice and Fire, but their idea of edgy is to have blood splatter and the occasional hilariously awkward puppet sex scene. I want everyone to murder everyone else, and I want them to do it all naked. While also having sex. At the same time that they're murdering people. And Sean Bean dies at the end.

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Dany

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#10  Edited By Dany

Crime and Punishment. It is played kinda like amnesia with Royda sometimes fainting under pressure.

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Yanngc33

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#11  Edited By Yanngc33

The Road, all you do is walk down a road, dialogue trees appear where you have to lie to your son to make the future look brighter.

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Dany

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#12  Edited By Dany

@Yanngc33 said:

The Road, all you do is walk down a road, dialogue trees appear where you have to lie to your son to make the future look brighter.

Dude yes!

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You play as lisbeth as your investigate a murder while also surpressing your own past.

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W0lfbl1tzers

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#13  Edited By W0lfbl1tzers

The Bible. The Great Gatsby.

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Dany

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#14  Edited By Dany

Genesis. You play as the serpent.

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PurpleOddity

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#15  Edited By PurpleOddity

Hyperion by Dan Simmons would make a pretty incredible game. It's essentially a series of short stories set in the same universe framed by an overarching plot. You could make it an episodic adventure game.

Shrike is OP.

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Grissefar

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#16  Edited By Grissefar

Monster Manual - all bosses SotC style, including gelatinous cube.

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deactivated-5a46aa62043d1

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Halo: The Fall of Reach

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BisonHero

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#18  Edited By BisonHero

Anything by David Gemmel. His first book, Legend, would be a natural start. He's not my favourite author or anything, but the main character in any of his books tends to have enough badassery and cunning to rival Batman. The video game adaptation would work well, because the pacing of most of his books is already pretty video gamey, in that they alternate between battles and plot advancement pretty regularly. They're fantasy books, so the gameplay could be something like The Witcher 2, only with occasional RTS/tower defense elements, since a lot of his books seem to have a "defend a village/city from an enemy that vastly outnumbers you". Though shit, the more I elaborate on this, the more afraid I am that it would just end up being Dynasty Warriors.

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card, is one of the books that always seems to come up as needing a video game or film adaptation. The main character is the most badass boy to ever live. The only problem is that the gameplay would be hard to implement. Coming up with a control scheme for the zero-g battle room stuff would be tough. And Ender plays a weird video game that sort of psychoanalyzes you and then improvises new scenarios depending on what you do, which is cool in concept but would require a lot of work on the part of the developer.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, would make a phenomenal video game. It's later cyberpunk, and lightly satirizes the genre by making everything just a little too over-the-top badass, but it still takes itself seriously. I would compare it something like Metal Gear Solid, with its preposterous villains that you ultimately have to just accept because there is a hell of a lot of story to absorb. In fact, Kojima would be ideal to make the book into a video game; the book is all about memes (the broad concept, not Internet memes), controlling information, ridiculous villains, guys being utterly badass with katanas, and absurdly long exposition scenes. Also nukes.

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HandsomeDead

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#19  Edited By HandsomeDead

Is there a book that's just hundreds of pages of 'and then he shot a guy and he shot a guy and he shot a guy and he took cover and reloaded and then he jumped mout of cover and shot a guy then he shot another guy and then he picked up the shotgun and used that to shoot a guy.' That would work.

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dbz1995

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#20  Edited By dbz1995

Eragon and the rest of the Inheritance series, TBRPG style.

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IBurningStar

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#21  Edited By IBurningStar
Irene Iddesleigh would make a fantastic game. A game based upon the writing style of Amanda McKittrick Ros would be...interesting, to say the least.
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SomeJerk

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#22  Edited By SomeJerk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man

Stephen King's The Running Man ()

edit: jesus christ fuck parchment v2 editor

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StingerMK2

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#23  Edited By StingerMK2

i always though you could make a really cool game based on Iain M Banks' culture universe, not necessarily basing on a specific novel, but, just in the universe,

also the Night Watch series, i really like the idea of controlling a sorcerer in that universe

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deactivated-5f9398c1300c7

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Andrzej Sapowski's The Last Wish.

OH WAIT

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Levius

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#25  Edited By Levius

A Lord of the Rings total war style game would be very cool, it's the only series that could properly do the battles.

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Rheinmetall

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#26  Edited By Rheinmetall

Goethe's Faust. It would make a brilliant pc adventure game.

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phrosnite

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#27  Edited By phrosnite

Eisenhorn by Dan Abnett. It's basically Mass Effect before Mass Effect.

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Tennmuerti

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#28  Edited By Tennmuerti

None.

Games butcher books just as much as movies do. It never ends well. Seeing the Game of Thrones game on Steam personally disgusts me. I prefer my books to stay books. Games to be games. And movies be movies.

Humble edit of my previous statement: Adaptations into other media are never as good, I find.

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JCTango

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#29  Edited By JCTango

I'd actually like to see if it's at all possible to have a Farenheit 451 based game. I loved that book.

Also wouldn't mind seeing some hard-boiled detective stories like those written by Hammett.

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Hailinel

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#30  Edited By Hailinel

@Tennmuerti said:

None.

Games butcher books just as much as movies do. It never ends well. Seeing the Game of Thrones game on Steam personally disgusts me.

I prefer my books to stay books. Games to be games. And movies be movies.

Mixing shit up has so far never produced a compelling result imo.

Counterargument:

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Gonmog

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#31  Edited By Gonmog

There was this book i read as a teen, forget the name maybe someone can remember. But it was about how kids where stolen/raised and given powers of some kind and forced to fight each other in massive wars. When i was reading it thought it would make a for a awesome story driven RTS.

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FateOfNever

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#32  Edited By FateOfNever

Maybe not directly, but, I'd just like to see more Lovecraft games in the vein of Dark Corners of the Earth. That game did a fantastic job of taking the Lovecraft universe, taking an established story of his, and then blending it and the rest of his universe together into a good game (well, save for the game breaking bugs on the PC version), and a good story. But then they were shut down. I'd love to see another game like it though.

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Animasta

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#33  Edited By Animasta

@Tennmuerti said:

None.

Games butcher books just as much as movies do. It never ends well. Seeing the Game of Thrones game on Steam personally disgusts me.

I prefer my books to stay books. Games to be games. And movies be movies.

Mixing shit up has so far never produced a compelling result imo.

hmm...

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JCTango

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#34  Edited By JCTango

@Gonmog said:

There was this book i read as a teen, forget the name maybe someone can remember. But it was about how kids where stolen/raised and given powers of some kind and forced to fight each other in massive wars. When i was reading it thought it would make a for a awesome story driven RTS.

For some reason this reminded me of the book, The Chrysalids. It probably isn't the same story at all xD.

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butano

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#35  Edited By butano

@AmatureIdiot said:

A Lord of the Rings total war style game would be very cool, it's the only series that could properly do the battles.

There's a mod, but a damn good one at that. Assuming you have Medieval II + expansion.

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penINC

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#36  Edited By penINC

@Tennmuerti said:

None.

Games butcher books just as much as movies do. It never ends well. Seeing the Game of Thrones game on Steam personally disgusts me.

I prefer my books to stay books. Games to be games. And movies be movies.

Mixing shit up has so far never produced a compelling result imo.

I understand were you are coming from, and have a hard time seeing a book successfully make the jump to game myself, but are you seriously saying there has never been a good movie based on a book? It's your opinion and I can't take that away from you, though when you consider just how many movies are adaptations of novels, I can't believe you've never found a single one "compelling".

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Elusionar

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#37  Edited By Elusionar

Hustler for sure.

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matthias2437

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#38  Edited By matthias2437

Metro 2033..... oh wait.

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deactivated-5ba16609964d9

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Now that I think about it an RTS based on Watership Down would actually be kind of awesome.  All the elements were in the book what with your base building, gathering resources, and epic battles.
 I would love to see Koreans spending all their time playing a game about cute cuddly bunnies then space dudes and aliens. 

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aragorn546

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#40  Edited By aragorn546

well, not surprising considering my avatar, but The Stand by Stephen King

It would be an action RPG in the vein of Mass Effect, split into episodic chapters exactly like Alan Wake was.

The first half of the game has you choosing either Randal Flagg's Side or Mother Abigail's side. You then play through the events that lead to all the characters from your faction getting to Boulder Colorado from wherever they were in the country. Each act can be from a different characters point of view. You would have to survive by finding food and weapons like Dead rising and fight other survivors until you get hooked up with your faction.

At that point it becomes a matter of both factions crashing against each other in the final half. Imagine being able to play as Trash Can Man as he goes insane and drives the Nuclear bomb across Nevada. That would be awesome.

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Animasta

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#41  Edited By Animasta

@aragorn546: I really don't think that'd work; first of all, that'd be a LOT of assets just to create a bunch of different starting areas. second, there wouldn't be all that many survivors anyway... there's a bunch of reasons. I'd almost rather see It as a game, or 'Salem's Lot.

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WickedFather

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#42  Edited By WickedFather

Tek War.

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Tennmuerti

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#43  Edited By Tennmuerti

@Hailinel: @Laketown: @penINC:

Hmm I guess I expressed myself a in not exactly the way I was trying too (should not have spoken in absolutes). You are all correct, there have been good adaptations. However I would still find them lacking compared to the original work. Yes even in both your examples given.

Even decent transfers such as Metro 2033, IHNM, hell even Lord of teh Rings movie adaptations, are still in my opinion inferior to the real thing. Even the good faithful ones are still mere copies and slightly inferior versions in any case. As such I find this detracts from the actual work and it's shall we say, glory? It's just that adaptations into other media are never as good - might be a better way to say it. Not that there are no good ones period.

And that's the best of the best of the best. I think the reason this frequently brings up some angry feeling in me that cloud rational judgement is because of the actual 99% of the other products that end up in way worse places.

Tip of the hat to you fellas, for reigning me in :)

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Kyreo

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#44  Edited By Kyreo

Rainbow Six... oh wait.

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MightyDuck

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#45  Edited By MightyDuck

@Jay444111:

A WWZ book would be pretty cool. You simply could play the stories that are told via the other characters. It'd be a bit disjointed, but I think that'd be a pretty cool idea.

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Deusx

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#46  Edited By Deusx

@aragorn546 said:

well, not surprising considering my avatar, but The Stand by Stephen King

It would be an action RPG in the vein of Mass Effect, split into episodic chapters exactly like Alan Wake was.

The first half of the game has you choosing either Randal Flagg's Side or Mother Abigail's side. You then play through the events that lead to all the characters from your faction getting to Boulder Colorado from wherever they were in the country. Each act can be from a different characters point of view. You would have to survive by finding food and weapons like Dead rising and fight other survivors until you get hooked up with your faction.

At that point it becomes a matter of both factions crashing against each other in the final half. Imagine being able to play as Trash Can Man as he goes insane and drives the Nuclear bomb across Nevada. That would be awesome.

No. Stop ruining the books I love.

The only book I think that could have an interesting gameplay is Ender's Game but... naww... Most books should stay as books.

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SSully

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#47  Edited By SSully

@HandsomeDead said:

Is there a book that's just hundreds of pages of 'and then he shot a guy and he shot a guy and he shot a guy and he took cover and reloaded and then he jumped mout of cover and shot a guy then he shot another guy and then he picked up the shotgun and used that to shoot a guy.' That would work.

Your posts depress me, every. single. time.

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lockwoodx

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#48  Edited By lockwoodx

I want to see what Grasshopper Studios would do with the Bible.

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Hailinel

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#49  Edited By Hailinel

@WickedFather said:

Tek War.

Already been done.

Note that I didn't say it had been done well.

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jaqen_hghar

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#50  Edited By jaqen_hghar

@Jay444111: You just made me order Swan Song. I need that money for food. Thank you so much.

But seriously, I ordered it, and I am probably going to love it.

As for your question: Would be neat to have a game of Malazan Book of the Fallen, in the style of Oblivion. Some guys was looking to make a mod for some game or something from that.

Essentially you would be able to choose a class, country of origin and all that when making a character. Since magic works weird in those books, you would have a lot of chances to make different characters. You should be able to join different military factions, guilds or just be a freelancer. Should also have a more realistic combat model. A mix between Mount and Blade and what I have seen of Demon's Souls would be cool. A persistent world that changes, and you can get married and get kids. If you die you can choose to play as one of your kids. This is something that would never be made, but I think it would be neat.