Like many, my ideal game is a hybrid of multiple genres. At its core it is an open world RPG grounded in a real world thats still gamey enough that it doesnt bore the player. Think the spirit of Just Cause but the depth of The Witcher. It would also incorporate aspects of FPS, world-building, driving, horror, survival, sports games, roguelike and many others each aspect of the game world would take the best from each of those genres and execute them in the game world within the relevant environments.
Reincarnation: from Birth to Death, and back again. The point of the game is to live a life as you see fit. While the game has a day/night cycle, long-term time passes by hitting specific points in the overarching storyline. The overarching storyline is just a framework for progressing through your life there is no overall goal except what you decide to do with yourself. The meat of the story is on the interactions you have in the world, and the activities you choose to do for people (or not). There will be multiple overarching story arcs that result in you aging, including getting married, having children, going to prison, suffering a debilitating illness, losing a loved one, or simply deciding you want a certain length of time to pass in-game.
In the beginning, you are born. At birth you get to choose certain key characteristics you would like your player to focus on (though these can be changed later if you arent happy with your choices). So far, so Fallout 3.
From birth you begin interacting with the world, and its how you choose to interact with other characters and NPCs that determines the type of person you become as you grow older. In the early stages, for example, you can either be contented with the treatment your parents give you, or act out and be cantankerous and disobedient all the time. You can throw tantrums constantly, or coo and smile and attract people to you. While your parents backs are turned, you can misbehave, or be good. You can even do harm to others
but if youre caught, you may be forced to grow up in a mental institution, if what you've done is bad enough.
Once you start school, you can choose to be a good attentive student or a rebel without a cause. You can interact with everyone and your interaction allows any NPC to be elevated to the status of friend/companion (with a huge database of potential characteristics to randomly create these characters, which dont need to be voiced because fuck you they don't need to be). You can treat companions well and earn a reputation as a pleasant person, and that in turn opens up opportunities to you. Alternatively you can be a mean manipulative bastard and stab people in the back, and that might mean you catch the attention of less savoury characters who offer you different kinds of opportunities.
As you get older, your ability to explore the world broadens at the start when youre a baby its just your playpen/cot, then its your home. Then its your home plus your parents car or the school bus, and the school. Eventually you are old enough to walk to school so you can explore the neighbourhood.
At any time you can either get immersed into the world at the age you are and explore everything it holds. Your world at each time period has a minimum set of content you can complete or bypass, but bypassing it gives you less control over how your character turns out. If you do want to bypass it, you can skip time to progress to an older age (the game will randomise your progression). When free-roaming there is a day-night cycle active, however if you are involved in specific missions you may be locked to a certain time of day. Progress at school is determined by a Bully-style learning process (because Bully is brilliant). You can explore your neighbourhood but remember if you stay out after dark there will be consequences your parents worry you know. However if you sneak in your bedroom window and climb into bed and pretend you were there all along, maybe your parents will wonder if they are going crazy
Each period of your younger life baby, infant, early school years, late school years equates to about 5-6 hours of (skippable) gameplay to complete, with at least a couple of hours of additional content if you want it. Once youre an adult, the overall game content will easily be several hundred hours, though it will be possible for you to reach old age and die much sooner than that just by playing through the game. If you die of old age, the game is over, but you have the opportunity to reincarnate back to any age in your life and carry over the experience youve earned up to that point. Different choices increase or decrease your life expectancy. If you die of unnatural causes (eg you decide to go on a killing spree and are taken out by the police) you can respawn to any age in your life within your original life. The more often you reincarnate, the more experience you will have, and consequently the more abilities you will have. For example, in your first life, you may be a farmer, or an explorer, or a thief, or an assassin. In your second life, you may have the opportunity to be a property tycoon, or a gang boss, or the leader of a crew running major heists. In your third life, you can become rich and powerful enough to influence politics and in turn what gets funded and unfunded in the game world, leading to in-game enhancements or damage to infrastructure. You might want to focus on creating a biohazard that kills off large numbers of the population and causes others to lose their minds. It will then be up to you to arm yourself to protect yourself. Alternatively you may want to invest in renewable energy and leave the world a better place.
By the time you are grown up, you are a well-established character in the game world, known by many people locally but few beyond that. You may have driven your parents insane; one or both of them may have died due to your actions; they may have divorced due to your actions; they might be growing old and happy together. Once youre old enough to drive, the entire (fictional) country opens up to you. Bear in mind though if you do go on a road trip for weeks at a time, your family might freak out and you may be classed as a missing person. Police may or may not be on the lookout for you, it depends how much youve led the game world to care about you.
You could stay local, build up your reputation as a dependable person, and take on the role of a police officer, or anything else you like there will be a multitude of jobs available to you depending on the types of skills you are interested in developing. It will be possible to quit a job to learn new skills, and your old skills will be retained. However you cant have ten different jobs at once. You can stick to the straight and narrow and do good by your community, and get involved in activities that allow you to help people. Alternatively you can learn lots of underhand things like how to become a good thief, and enrich yourself by profiting off others. In any one area, people will know who you are and know your reputation, and it will be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to change that. However, it is entirely possible to be a good player in one region and be a bad player in another region, so for example in your home town you could be a poster boy for old fashioned values, while 50 miles away you are known to the police as a cat burglar and will be reported by members of the public and chased by police unless you wear a disguise to hide your looks.
Other info:
Every building in the game is enterable. There are no loading screens. The only weight restrictions you have will be on directly equipped items your inventory is limitless. Activity is persistent, unless such activity is game-breaking, in which case respawning can occur after a certain amount of time has passed in-game. You can abuse substances such as drugs or alcohol, but there will be consequences to your health and possibly to your interactions in-game.
Tone: Majority of the tone will be light but occasionally bitingly satirical, somewhere between GTA, Just Cause, Portal and The Stanley Parable. However the tone will change in response to the environments you enter eg you might enter a spooky area where the survival horror element of the game comes to the fore, and the tone will change to reflect that.
Gameplay: FPS point of view, though the S part of the game is entirely optional and violence is only one aspect of gameplay that can be ignored completely if desired. You can play through the whole game as a good guy if you want, though exploring certain areas of the map is going to warrant weapons if you want to stand a good chance of survival. Early part of the game will focus more on comic violence like Bully. I havent worked out how levelling up would work.
Music: the music will vary depending (i) on the players actions and (ii) the environments the player is interacting with. Good or indifferent actions by the player keep the tone light. Unpleasant or evil actions bring the music more downbeat. Environmental cues set the tone for the player eg exploring a creepy old house will set the requisite level of tension.
Graphics: the game will be primarily developed for PC with a focus on making the game run 60fps at 1080p on current high-end machines (baseline: GTX980, recent Intel CPU). Plenty of room for future PCs to make the game look amazing. Game may be ported to console in future.
The game will not be multiplayer in the traditional sense, however it will use the No Mans Sky concept of other players activities influencing your world in some ways. For example, you can write on an in-game chalkboard things you need, and select from your inventory things you have that you dont want that you are willing to share with other players. Players can see this and either give you the stuff youre looking for, or take the stuff you have made available.
Be right back, just giving Peter Molyneux a call.
