Let me give you an elevator pitch for this one: Hitman meets Oblivion in a GTA like open city environment. Or to put it another way, I’d love to play a game that would essentially be the Oblivion’s Dark Brotherhood quest line, but set in modern times, and with drivable vehicles. Does that make sense?

The game would take place in an open city environment that would be open to the player from the start. All areas would be accessible, all buildings would be explorable. Just like in Bethesda games you could go into people’s houses and steal their crap and then sell it at pawn shops scattered throughout the city. Unlike the pedestrians from GTA, the inhabitants of our city would be able to interact with you. Many of them would have names and interesting lines of dialogue. When you start a mission, new dialog options would open up for the appropriate NPC’s somewhere in the city.

You would be playing an elite assassin who would obtain quests either via drop-box locations of from elusive contacts in the city. You would probably have more than one person you could bother for new contracts, and also some very shady employer that would contact you via cell phone and drop off your orders somewhere in the city.

Just like in Hitman games targets would have a set routine, and your task would be to learn it and then plan a hit around it. You would be able to do it in many ways. For example, you could just follow your target around. By default most targets would not know who you are. On many missions you would simply be able to walk up to your target and question him about his or her routine. You could also talk to their friends or people they work with. Of course some targets would expect an assassination attempt and perhaps even have your picture making things more difficult. Fortunately just like Agent 47 you would have the option to put on a disguise and sneak past the guards.

All of your targets would live in the city. They would be club owners, business men, organized crime bosses. You will bump into them every once in a while. You could kill them ahead of time, but then your employers would simply notify you they were just begging to negotiate that particular contract for you and you just screwed yourself out of a reward and experience point bonus.

Unlike the Hitman games, all the hits would happen within the city sandbox, and not in some specially designated areas. Unless specified otherwise you would be free to choose the method of assassination. For example, you could train your character to be an excellent sniper and take out every victim at a distance. You could also train in stealth and subterfuge, then get close and slit your targets throat while no one is looking. Or you could make a sabotage/demolitions expert and rig the victims car to explode, cut their break lines, puncture the gas pipe in their apartment and etc. Most missions would not specify the method of assassination for you. Some would ask to either make it look like an accident or make it obvious to send out a message. They wouldn’t actually specify the exact method, and there would usually be many different ways to do this.

Most hits would not have a deadline either – so you could stalk your targets for as log as you needed. You could take your time and pick a perfect spot to commit the crime. Doing hits in public would carry a lot of risks – it would make people freak out and call the police. Then you would have to evade capture in a GTA style car chase.

I’d like the police AI to be more realistic than in GTA games. For one, the Police would be forced to chase and arrest anyone who pulls out a gun on the street – not just you. Furthermore, if the policeman walking around in the street have not personally seen you commit a crime you could try to slip past him by walking slowly and blending into the crowd.

On the flip side, running around with a gun out on the street would be reckless. NPC pedestrians would often snap pictures of you with their cell phones for example. Or they would describe you to a police artist, and your characters face could eventually end up on a most wanted list. This would trigger police to chase you on sight, unless you were in disguise of some sort.

Finally, I’d like the game to have some sort of main story arc that would probably involve getting to know some of the NPC’s in the city, helping them out, then being forced to betray them or be betrayed yourself. You know – something with lot’s of well written dialog and convincing voice acting. The story would of course be completely optional – just like in Morrowind and Oblivion and you would be free to just take contracts from various NPC’s who work for corporations, criminal syndicates and other shady organizations.

Would you play a game like that?

Freelancer (actually Elite/Frontier but no one remembers these games) meets Morrowind/Oblivion. How does that strike you? I think it could be loads of fun. The game would essentially consist of two different modes. Parts of the game would be played “on foot” from a first person perspective. This is how you would do most of your trading, acquire quests, purchase equipment, parts and/or new ships. Then there would be “ship” mode where you actually get to steer your one-person space freighter, explore, dogfight with pirates, mine asteroid fields and do all sorts of other crazy stuff.

Before you say that this sort of thing would be an impossibly complex project, let me explain my idea fully. I gave it some thought and you are right. Making something like this happen on a scale you have seen in Freelancer, or Darkstar One (not even mentioning good old Frontier) would indeed be virtually impossible. My idea is to scale the game back a bit in order to make it work. How do we do that? We borrow the premise from Firefly!

Instead of an immense universe to be explored, lets confine the game to a single solar system or a network of 2-3 solar systems connected by wormholes. These systems have few dozen inhabitable planets in total, twice as many small moons some of which have been terraformed (fully or partially) and some of which are used for mining. There are also bunch of space stations, and asteroid mining stations scattered all over the place.

Naturally you won’t have to make the whole planet surface accessible to exploration on foot. In fact that would be crazy. Good assumption to make would be that the player would only be allowed to explore the space port area, and adjacent locations. This can be easily explained through the game’s narrative. For example, the rich core worlds would be extremely paranoid and xenophobic (see Firefly again) and thus their space ports would work as closed, self sufficient ecosystems. Only citizens would be allowed to leave the area, and only after being subjected to thorough identity tests (DNA test, retina scan, etc). The player would be locked out.

On the other hand the Frontier planets would either be partially terraformed and have lethal atmosphere or simply be desolate. So even if the player managed to leave the space port, he would find himself in an endless dessert, steppes or even bare rocky plain.

Since we would only have a dozen or two of planets, we could design a unique space port for each of them. Available locations for exploration would be the docks, adjacent bazaar or trade district (depending on how “civilized” the planet claims to be), living areas (or hotels of offworlders), bars/taverns, and on major planets even some features like community parks, libraries, governmental buildings and etc. Same goes for major space stations, and large terraformed moons. Mining stations on the other hand could be tiny – perhaps even only few rooms, and occupied by 8-10 NPC’s each.

If you think about each planet/moon/station as of a Morrowind/Oblivion town you can easily see the scale of the project would be feasible here. Especially since you wouldn’t need to create walkable, interesting, scenic routes between these locations. They could exist in perfect isolation since all the travel would be done through space.

Since we are working with small scale universe I would not include any kind of hyperspace jump capability. In fact, I’d make traveling between planets semi-realistic in that it would take you weeks or months of relative in-game time to reach your destination. Of course you would be able to skip the boring travel parts by hitting the auto-pilot button which would either speed up time or instantly skip to the destination barring any random encounters with pirates an/or police patrols.

What usually kills me in most of the modern space sims is the fact you cannot actually land on your own or enter the planet’s atmosphere and fly around like it was possible in Frontier. I’d love to have this option in the game. Your planets could have nice, procedurally generated landscapes appropriate to the planet type and climate. It wouldn’t have to be anything special and/or complex. Just simple stuff like lakes, plains, forests, mountains and etc.. We would make the planets on a smaller scale so you wouldn’t actually have to generate millions of miles of landscape.

Some people would complain, but Freelancer got away with planets that were smaller than some of the space stations that orbited them so I don’t think this would be a problem. Besides, there would be nothing more rewarding than dropping down onto a planet, and circling the space port few times checking out the area before touching down.

You could restrict flying over the highly populated core worlds with many cities. State that it is illegal to do it, and send overwhelming forces against the player to discourage him. For example, say that these planets have long range ground defense lasers which are triggered long before you would be in range to shoot at them. So flying into the atmosphere of a core planet outside of designated airspace is suicide. The proper way to land on these planets would be to ask for landing permission, then switch on auto-pilot and wait.

Also, core planets could have thousands of cities but only some of them would contain space ports open for off-world traffic. Remember, the core is paranoid, xenophobic and downright hostile to outsiders. It adds character to the game, and it helps us to make the game smaller and less overwhelming to make.

Let’s say the player visits one of the less populated worlds. What would stop him from flying by the spaceport or the nearby city and blasting away at the buildings? I say, let them. Make some of them destructible for that very purpose (maybe even make them objectives for some quests). Just have bunch of SAM sites, defense lasers and police/military ships buzzing in the ari at each port making sure that such behavior doesn’t go un-punished. Also, attacking a space port, or civilian buildings from above would set the planet hostile to you so you would no longer land there, and their ground, and orbit defenses would attack you on sight. Any allied colonies would follow suit and also target you. The player would then have to switch to a new ship, and then purchase fake identity somewhere to get rid of his outlaw status.

I’d also have different factions like in Freelancer. Some of them may be hostile to you initially, but by taking certain quests you could become friendly with them. So if you would want to play a space pirate you could, and at some point you would be allowed to trade with other pirate groups and land on their stations and etc.

Because the game would have two distinct modes of play, it would offer much more varied assortment of missions and quests than the average space sim. There of course would be courier missions, escort missions, seek and destroy quests and etc. But you could also have traditional RPG stuff like assassinations, theft (corporate espionage), extortion, demolition and skirmish combat that would be done on foot.

The game is already getting complex as it is, but I’d love to also have an RPG element where you could actually upgrade your character. You would have set of skills, some of which would be useful on foot while others would help you while in your ship. For example, I’d definitely have something like the Mercentile and Speachcraft skills from Morrowind/Oblivion which would allow you to haggle over the price more effectively and/or charm the secrets out of various NPC’s.

I’d probably keep the combat simple and similar to what is done Morrowind/Oblivion though I’d cut it down. Since we are playing in distant future I’d probably completely remove melee, maybe with the exception of fist fighting (minimal damage – with a chance of knocking someone out, especially if attacking from stealth). I’d also stick with only few types of basic armor and weapons – some of which would be unique to specific planets. There would be some unique items with special bonuses to keep the player interested in exploring and taking quests.

I’d also make the game aware of what the character is wearing. I talked about this idea before at length. Essentially, expensive clothes would give you bonuses to mercentile and speachcraft and make NPC’s react more favorably towards you. Some exclusive establishments would even require you to wear a tuxedo to enter. Conversely, walking around in full combat armor with bunch of guns strapped to you would attract police attention and make people scared of you. Some secure areas would have metal detectors at the door, prohibiting you to enter in combat gear.

What do you think? Would you play a game like that? What would you change in the design above? What kind of features would you like to see in that game? Let’s bounce some ideas around!

How about we make a game in which you can’t shoot zombies/monsters but instead you need to hide or run away from them. I’d envision it as a combination of your usual Survival Horror stuff with stealth based game play that we all know and love. But instead of hiding from guards, you would be hiding from monsters. And instead of being some sort of assassin, commando-ninja-special-forces type you would be an ordinary guy. Your equipment would be a zippo lighter (or a small flashlight) which would be your source of light in dark rooms, and a small swiss army knife which can be used to cut ropes, pry open ventilation panels, or act as a makeshift lock pick. You would be able to push and pull things, kick things over, and pick up small objects to be thrown (as a distraction). Sometimes you would find a wrench or a heavy pipe you could use as an effective melee weapon sort of like in Condemned. You could use it to bash the monster on the head, but it would likely only daze him giving you extra time to run away and find a hiding place. Of course, after few uses your makeshift weapon would break or bend, so that you don’t get a false sense of security by dragging it around the whole game.

I envision couple of interesting mechanics that could play into this sort of theme. For example, if you are running away from the monster you might throw chairs, or other objects behind you to block it’s way giving you extra time. I’d make the monsters chase you based on visual cues so you could shake them off by jumping into a dark corner, and then slowly sneaking away. Monster would loose sight of you, and go into roaming mode, sniffing around and perhaps making noises to spook you out of the cover. So normally you would want to skulk in the shadows, and stay out of well lit areas because you can be easily spotted this way. This could later be inverted by introducing Grue like monsters which lurk in the shadows but won’t step into the light.

The game could benefit from Half-Life 2 like physical puzzles which would let you push or pull things to gain access to different areas, or for example temporarily incapacitate a monster by luring it into a stairwell, and then pushing a refrigerator down on him Home Alone style. You could also lure monsters away from you by making noises. For example, turning a radio on in a room would pretty much cause every monster in range drop everything and run to investigate it. And while they are at it, you could access areas that were previously blocked off or inaccessible to you due to their presence.

The plot is of course the most difficult part here – but perhaps keeping it simple would make it beneficial. You find yourself in an abandoned building and discover that it is haunted/infested by monsters. Now you need to get out – and perhaps discover what happened there. I’m not entirely sure that talking NPC’s would be necessary – bits of information could be fed to the player via various other methods – such as documents he finds, notes, warnings painted or scratched on the walls, and etc. I’d keep it fairly vague at the beginning, and slowly unveil pieces of the puzzle to keep things mysterious, and keep the player guessing. I don’t have a specific explanation or theme in mind, but I guess it would either be a science experiment gone wrong (and in that case the player would be trapped in some sort of lab complex), or some occult ritual that backfired (in which case the game would probably take place in some mansion or a hotel).

I’d keep it a FPS for immersion sake, and make the character silent mute like Gordon Freeman. In fact, the whole thing could probably be done using just the HL2 engine and some clever scripting. What do you think? Would you play a game like that? What would you add/remove from the above to make it more interesting/creepy?