Me and a friend discussed what would make a great Sci-Fi RPG. With our Game Developer minds, we came to the conclusion. We reviewed some of the greats out there with the Sci-Fi theme, like Dead Space, Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic and looked at what made them fun, inspiring and so great. Hello and welcome to this Collab with Issacclark332!
Character Design
Character Editors are fun sometimes and we would love to see this game give you the extent to do so with your character, giving the player a large set of alien races, human races and allowing you to create your long time friend in the game. With that said, we came to a disagreement with the personality design. Issacclark wanted to have a preset character already made for the player to love, like Captain Shepard from Mass Effect. It adds some worry and a compassion towards the character you're playing as which makes it hard to let go when he dies or leaves the Military or adventure. I was thinking the player could add his own personality for the character, like what Wasteland 2 did. You choose to be the loyal, kind hearted hero or the *** everyone kind of loves to hate (giving the player some roleplay aspect).
Along with that, adding deep story with each race, each one coming from a planet and giving the player something to know about before they pick the race. With that, the race you choose will determine how you and your friend meet, either first hating each other or already being friends. We both thought this would be a risky thing to do, so we put that on the maybe list.
Multiplayer Aspects
We both love Co-Op player, so we thought that adding a friend that would follow you, could be fun to put as a second player. You can create characters of your choice and your friend can follow. You can play either online or splitscreen. With that said, the characters the player creates will still be there, you real life buddy will be playing as the friend character you made (Basically sharing games), but each play has control with their character's decisions and leveling.
How Will it Begin?
We discussed this and we came to the conclusion that there should be many type of prologues according to the race you pick at the beginning of the story, and depending on the species you choose, your character’s path on the main campaign will start at a different point on varying planets. Say you picked a race known to be enslaved and you begin alongside your friend as you’re thrown into a coliseum and you and your friend would have to fight for your freedom. That's one of the ideas we had, but I think this would make the game more unique from other games. Regardless of which race you choose, every branching origin story eventually converges on the same primary storyline.
As you progress after the Prologue, you join a Military and are given trust mechanic where you have to rank up to be able to use certain weapons or to buy a starship and can progress from there. We talked about how we would combine each planet for everyone to every planet in the game and not miss out on different adventures. Well, you would have to work the main mission to the end and you will be given a starship to be able to continue the adventure.
What are the Battle Mechanics?
We thought turn based battles would fit the game perfectly. KotOR did that with it's battles and it has become a loved game. We thought about how weird it is that the characters just stand there and take the hit and wait for their command, so we thought it would be a good Idea for the game to stop time when you are choosing an action, making everything feel more fleshed out and real. After a combat encounter comes to a close, the scenario is replayed for the player to watch in real-time and you get to see how quickly it all went down. Of course, you would be able to skip these recaps and the one thing that would be great is if every battle was saved in a document for the player to review and see what he did wrong and improve on it, either having to pay more attention to the enemy to discern his weaknesses, or change the way you situate your partner on the battlefield.
I was thinking that it would be perfect to have a skill required weapon system, where certain types of players, Berserker classes uses heavy weapons and Thieves uses light weapons, but each class has a counter class, delivering more damage to the counter and less damage given by the weaker class. This would have the player and his buddy (If he has one) to think more on the battlefield than just making sure he has that 79% chance landed. That attribute would be selected during the character creation.
The player would have partners as well, but will be assigned to the players individually, having one team to control for your buddy, instead of a partial inclusion of the second player. Along with that, we were thinking about a luck system with the regular chance on hit or success, but the weapon you carry will have certain pros and cons of which to balance the battle. For example: A weapon has massive damage, but has a low accuracy do to the spray-like firerate. You can also have weapon set where each weapon’s pros affect the team’s weapon pros as well as the cons, having a balanced positive affect and negative affect that would work for specific battles.
Character Interactions
Character interactions would be individual to say the least. You would be able to persuade someone with the bad cop good cop method or have you and your partner to be able to give someone the better hand by making the character hate you and like your buddy more. Partners, on the other hand, you are given without this interaction. You can make them like you more or have them trust you as a leader. When talking, your partners can give their own opinion on things, either going against your say or for your cause. This doesn’t have any luck attached to it, just sway the partner to think like you.
With that said, in order to convince someone to think like you, we thought you would have to know their character. There is no Charisma type of skill to it, only relating to the character to get what you want or simply for them to like you more. Charisma would only be a trait chosen in the character creation as a personality.
Eventually, your character will be placed in command over AI characters. Rather than going on ''loyalty missions'' where you instantly gain someone's trust and allegiance, you have to work really hard at encouraging, training, and critiquing your subordinates dynamically, punishing them as needed when they mess up, and rewarding them when they do well. But if you do too much of either, you'll either get a lazy officer who maybe tries to overthrow you, or an officer who becomes reckless and gets themselves killed.
Both players compete to get more team members under their command whom they can control during battle. These team members will act on their own (in accordance with the idea of ''training'' your recruits to perform well), and then you observe their strengths and weaknesses. There is always a minimum number of teammates for each player (maybe one), and they can accrue more for themselves as they grow in rank and esteem.
Anyways, these are our thoughts on how a Sci-Fi RPG should be. I hope you liked this, it was fun to write this with a pal and I had a great time discussing this Again, I hope you liked this and 'til next time...
Play More Games!
who the f**k invented facebook?