My Ideal Game Ideas #1 (involving Pirates and Wrestlers)
By davepegg10 5 Comments
Feel like I should write something here, rather than let it sit here unloved. So, with a lack of ideas for anything else, here's the first of what might be a semi-regular series...numbers 1 and 2 of my ideal game ideals. Basically ideas for games that I'd love to see made. I'll try and keep the ideas brief, so as not to bore.
Peg Leg Redemption
Two facts about me:
1. I love Red Dead Redemption
2. I love Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Stands to reason then, that a pirate game made with the same care, ambition and attention to detail as Rockstar’s last great offering would be something that I’d get behind.
Where Red Dead presented you with plenty of open ground, Peg Leg would offer up the open seas. Imagine Just Cause 2’s large open world, with its numerous villages, only spread that out a bit and fill in the gaps with procedurally generated seas. Due to it being pirate times and everything, the locations could be much smaller in size, allowing for a higher number of unique camps and settlements. There’s no need for GTA-sized cities here. Similar to Sid Meier’s classic title, these locations could be used to recruit, barter, sell your booty or, if you’re so inclined, just sack the damned place.
Choice would play a massive part in my idealised Peg Leg title. Choice in your appearance, choice in your crew, choice in your actions and allegiances, choice in your ships, choice in basically every aspect of the game. The world is an open one to explore, and the choices you make result in your being either feared or respected on the ocean. Help an English transport get from island X to island Y, conspire with the Spanish to intercept it and take your share, or play the two off against each other and simply roll in and pick up the spoils.
A big part of my vision for this title would be a dynamic customisable appearance feature, so your adventures have a direct impact on how your captain appears. You’re the kind of pirate guy who prefers direct combat and swashbuckling? Chances are that your body will end up scarred and, in extreme circumstances, missing a limb or two. It’d be a right bitch if the game didn’t allow you the opportunity to become the eye-patched, hook-handed antihero that you’ve always dreamed of.
Sure, there’s a lot of ambition in a title like this, and the budget for such an open title would be on the large side, but the cries of disappointment online when Disney’s Armada of the Damned was cancelled should suggest that there’s a big enough market there to be a success.
Plus pirates are great.
Real Wrasslin’
Yeah, yeah, it’s a wrestling game, but WWE games got me through university, with battle royals for the Intercontinental Championship being the perfect break from essays. They didn’t require much attention, didn’t take my mind completely off the topic and provided a way to make Scotty 2 Hotty a 6-time champion. Admittedly, I didn’t watch any WWE television at the time, so my knowledge of the superstars involved was minimal (hence Scotty being my go to guy), but the 15/20 minute bouts were perfectly timed slobberknockers to give me a break from the rigmaroles of writing.
I haven’t spent much time with WWE games since graduating, but I’ve recently started watching the shows again (yeah, yeah, there’s not much else on at 2am when you’re trying to get a baby to sleep), and it’s made me realise that there’s a massive part of the industry that the offering from THQ and Yukes! is currently ignoring, most likely due to the WWE license.
The game I’d want to see wouldn’t be so much as breaking kayfabe, but destroying it. The exhibition part of it wouldn’t be particularly different from current games, other than being more like Fire Pro Wrestling or WWF No Mercy in order to please those who have been clamouring for a game like that to return, but it’d be in the career section that this game would stand out.
Starting as a jobber, it’d be your role to play the hometown hero against the professionals whenever a big promotion rolled into town. This would involve making the superstar you faced look good in their squash match against you. You’d allow them to get in big hits, pull off either highflying or hard hitting moves and basically throw you around the ring. It wouldn’t be your job to win the match, it’d be your job to tell the story of the match and, eventually, get the crowd behind you.
Every match would provide you with a number of “expectations”, ranging from charisma/personality-based goals such as “work the crowd with taunts throughout the match” and “get yourself over by hitting your signature move followed immediately by your finisher” to “get busted open” or “allow your opponent to put you through a table”. By giving you these incentives, the match changes from a race to hit your finishing move to a more goal-based experience with specific spots that need to be hit throughout the match. Similar to you, your opponent also has his “expectations” and it’s up to you to help him pass by putting yourself in the right kind of situations.
Once you get yourself noticed by the big promotions, it’s time to get yourself over with the crowd. This would be done in a couple of ways:
1. Putting on a good match, hitting all required spots and expectations
2. Interacting with the crowd (taunts, etc)
Rather than using a life bar or stamina system, the game would measure health by crowd reaction, and finishing moves would be given to the player by either getting the crowd worked up to a frenzy with moves and taunts, or by kicking out of a pin attempt yourself. The kicking out of a pin-route allows the player to be able to hit a finisher out of nowhere, which would then work the crowd to a frenzy, allowing the player to either go for a pin themselves or dish out further punishment having now recovered.
The bottom line of this would be an attempt to reflect the storytelling aspect of the wrestling shows, rather than simply settling for a subpar simulation of the real thing, that feels nothing like the real thing.
5 Comments