Chris Avellone's Blog

Dear Mr Avellone,

 

First off long time big fan thank you for all the hard work. Really mean that.

 

I have few ideas; ill be brief but i am gonna stick links in to help you visualise my arguments:

 

First off new IP or previously untouched one;

 

A swashbucklar/ piratey Fantasy Tactical turn based party RPG along the lines of this excellent but unfinished work by Tom Proudfoot: http://www.proudft.c...x.php?topic=7.0 -Download is legit try it.

 

It may be possible to make it isometric or pan camera style re NWN or top down or both!. But I was thinking that a good idea would be to make a game that has a map similar to warband POP 3.4 (found here: http://forums.talewo...c,126952.0.html ).

 

The beauty of my idea is to make it a Very large sandbox game and to release (for sale) modular narrative story archs in the multiple city's / kingdoms on the map. Very similar to NWN 2 SOZ, but with much more potential character development depth. For example a more skill based system where roleplay of skills helps with the parties development. i.e. the party travels over land (Mapreading skill) a ranger skills are use as 'team leader', over water (Seamanship) Sailor, captain naval officer as leader, underground (Stoneworking, dungeon delving skill) Dwarf adventurer works as leader etc this allows for the EXPLORATION of large areas and scratchs that sense of awe we first had playing D'n'D or cthulu or whatever.

 

My second idea is to make a Sci Fi version with a galaxy map that is Sandbox but obviously one narrative story arch which is also modular based on these two previous ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFK4SI_RNw0

 

mixed with: http://en.wikipedia....28TV_series%29. The main game would follow something similar to matrix cubed but have Pirates /privateers in space instead of a fantasy world.

 

The main purpose of these games is tactical party play with the ability to ride horses into battle, sail ships into pirate fights or sci fi space battles like matrix cubed where you can pillage and capture enemy boats etc. Find spells books to cast more not only in combat but also out of combat. Make alot (not all) of dungeons (ships) randomly generated, loot can also be random for the most part allowing for the 'party' to gear up and progress by dungeon looting (REWARD) and skilling up (ACHIEVEMENT) like how Tom Proudfoot worked it in Pirates of the Western sea. It literally can take ages to explore the whole world.

 

The goal for you guys at Obsidian would be to base the game in a stable 'Sandbox world' then add in in DLC's or content patches Modular Story /campaign archs with set dungeons, storys and loot on top of the sandbox world which encourages narrative campaign conclusion and doesn't remove the parties from the world.

 

Furthermore I would say to make the atmosphere similar to Darklands the old isometric game with spooky lighting for dungeons. Or like dead space hulks floating hauntingly in space. Add in oldschool item weight / bring a mirror lockpicks and food with a little adventurous dungeon delving with backpack space restriction hand held torches and a switch for perma death or work in hero point death buyout as reward for completing the narrative or large tough dungeons etc.

 

Finally you could scale the depth and intricacies of gameplay down according to who is playing. Kinda like -game system spheres of difficulty. You could work it like a slider that would take me from POWS skill based complexity up to and passed diablo style hack and slashers (which i personally hate due to their game system simplicity). So i choose when i start the game how the game functions kinda like the tweaks for which NWN dnd rules were implemented according to difficulty. (CHOICE).

 

I hope you get my drift anyway, my best idea would be for you to try POWS on Tom Proudfoots website and play the game... its buggy and unfinished but you'll get the idea of sea based party adventure that i'm talking about (I hope!).

 

Anyway I hope you read this in the throng of other posts, re The CAPS are emphasise what is offered to the gamer in generic game design in a sense to help sell it hehe.

 

Anyway thanks for reading.

 

P.

It would have to be a party-based rpg. As far as style goes I loved the realtime with pause that the IE games used. I would love to see a modern equivalent of the gorgeous 2d backgrounds that were the IE games as well. I don't like clear cut good/evil storyline progression, so something similar to the Witcher as far as decision making goes. Finally, I am absolutely sick of the fantasy and sci-fi settings. I'd love to see another vampire rpg. Vampires, or something completely original that no one has done before at your discretion. Those are the criteria for which I would absolutely get behind with funding.

I was about to type a rather long-winded, slightly bitter, but ultimately hopeful reply, beseeching Obsidian to ignore the calls revisit old territory. To instead go boldly forth, free from a Publisher's financially-motivated whims, and unbound by existing licenses or memes of genre.

I wanted to ask them fondly, humbly, and longingly to produce something which really involves and challenges the audience, by leveraging their core strengths as a studio...

 

But some smart bastard already did it.

So I've truncated it here, for easier consumption:

 

A thing I have learned from this thread: The majority of people have no creative vision whatsoever.Obsidian could do something really interesting and all you can think of is either a sequel to an ancient game that wasn't actually all that great anyway, or an isometric RPG with such obfuscated mechanics.

 

If we gave them the creative freedom, they could do something really amazing. I want to see them change the game, I want a paradigm shift that will help alter how people look at RPGs in general, and what I do not want is Ancient Game That Belongs in the Past VI.

 

Obsidian has never been an 'impenetrable bog of numbers' developer.What Obsidian does well is storytelling and world building! They give us plots which make us think and feel, they give us choices which challenge us emotionally and intellectually, they create games which linger in our memories because they were so unusual.

 

In fact, I'd love to see them do purely what their good at: Strip the math right back, let the computer handle the number progression of a player character, and concentrate purely on world, story, narrative, and choices. These are the areas where Obsidian excels.

 

Move away from what the mainstream wants and stop appealing to hte lowest common denominator. And isn't that precisely what this is about? I'm sorry, but the lowest common denominator in this case amounts to number fetishists, and people screaming for Ancient Game VI. We need to move beyond that. We really do.Give your imaginations a workout. Go beyond sequels. Forget IPs. What do you truly want to see?

 

I want to see the brightest and darkest corners of the imaginations of the people at Obsidian printed into the very fabric of this game. I want to see what they can do when their creative leashes are removed, when their restrictive harnesses are unbound, and they can do whatever the heck they want. This is a chance for Obsidian to write stories which really screw with the minds of the people playing.Why would we not want that?

 

Dear god yes.

KOTOR 3 for sure.. who cares about the MMO Old republic..

/the background story/

 

In the near future, the earths resources are rapidly running out and mankind desperatly needs to find a new home.

The United Nations funded project, Dawnstar, (totally unrelated to the April fools prank), is rushed through development as the way of finding a new planet to settle.

 

Project Dawnstar is a Long Range, Faster Than Light, Scout/Survey/Settle spaceship with a crew complement of 100 souls. A Dawnstar will carry accomplished explorers with enough materials to start a colony while the (not so necessary) people will follow on the Noon Arks.

 

The project is haunted by accidents, unconfirmed rumours blames the Global Dusk terrorist group. Dawnstar 1 and 2 never even make before they are destroyed. Furious by the lack of success certain nations in the UN threathens to veto the project unless Dawnstar 3 shows results.

 

Dawnstar 3 must not fail or humanity will perish.

 

Everything runs smooth until the pre-ignition tests of the FTL. An electric overload in the secondary Hawkins coil threatens to destroy the ship unless the energy gets drained rapidly. Quick actions by senior technician Schafer saves the ship by activating the still unfocused FTL drive...

 

A brigth light, then darkness, quiet.

 

Someone stirs. Lights,screens and people start to wake up. On the external view monitors there is only darkness. No suns, no stars, nothing. The radar screens are full of disturbances. After several checks the radar is revealed to be working fine. Careful explorations leads to the discovery that they are stuck in a mass of different spaceships. Now they must repair their ship to save mankind....

 

/the game/-(It'd be awesome with a WH40K license.)(I'm thinking a game a little similar to UFO: Extraterrestrials.)

 

You'll start with a few crewmembers awake while the rest are in stasis pods. Your base will be the Dawnstar 3. It will have several different rooms. Labs, workshops, stores, sleeping quarters, schools, food processing plants and such. Upgrades should make rooms more effective so with an upgraded food plant you can have more people 'awake' and working without starvation.

 

Every crewmember should have a unique personality, with stats,skills and primary occupation (soldier/engineer or researcher).(Maybe like/dislike certain other crewmembers.)

 

The main part of the game should be the exploration of the other ships you're stuck with. (I'm thinking isometric view, maybe turnbased but most likely real- time tactics.)

 

You should pick some crewmembers and equip them and start exploring/scavenging. You should encounter/fight aliens/humans/orcs and similar. Find lost people/creatures to add to your crew. Avoid Tribbles.

 

Advances in bioengineering have enabled people in stasis pods to be scanned and 'saved' so if something should happen them then they're able to be cloned and 'restored' but their dead body needs to be present due to a 'clone army fail safe'.

 

Maybe 'Head of Departments' to give you quests?: "Our scans have revealed a 'component X' in a ship some distance away. Retrieve it!"

 

Maybe an overhead map where different ships are different zones so you'll start at entry point in the zone you want to explore (after you've found an entry point from another zone)?

 

Maybe zones should switch due to instability in the ships?

 

Maybe other 'civilized' areas to trade with?

 

Maybe co-op/multiplayer by players controlling different crewmembers or by switching entire ships next to each other?

You should be able to survey/protect zones by motion sensors/camerar and gunturrets.

 

Maybe small mothership so you _have_ to colonize other zones for labs/workshops/foodplants? Ship switches should be announched ahead of time by quakes in the ship.

Planescape: Torment remake or Baldur's Gate Balck Hound. And no one else is woth money.

My dream as far as licensed properties go: the idea of Obsidian bringing Eclipse Phase to CRPG format makes me horny. I think that would be a hell of a setting and a hell of a game system with which to take a crack at another NWN-type, toolset-and-DM-client RPG.

 

Which is ultimately what I would want from Obsidian, regardless of the setting/system. But it being Eclipse Phase would be one awesome bonus. I think we really need transhuman RPGs that aren't Deus Ex.

Like a lot of fans here, I'd like an another good written RPG in the Planescape setting.

But maybe a D&D licence would cost too much, isn't it ?

I WOULD LOVE TO SEE FAALOUT 4

FALLOUT 4 ..YESSSSSSSSSSSS

I'd love for it to be something original. Planescape setting is good, but with the AD&D license in Atari's hands, it's a long shot (unless the PS license is issued separately).

 

When it comes to settings, the modern world is relatively untouched: apart from Alpha Protocol, I have trouble recalling other games that'd focus solely on modern-day politics, intrigue and espionage.

 

So, one possible game to create would be an RPG set in the modern world, focusing on, for example, the Iraq and Afghanistan war, or the current spree of revolutions in the Middle East or even Europe fraught with economical problems. This would also give the freedom to accomodate various ethnicities and both genders, with the current more or less egalitarian treatment (at least in the first world).

 

Another possibility is an RPG set in or immediately before the Great War (1914-1918). The First World War is often ignored by people and rarely features in games. But there's so much potential to be had there! The Great War started a revolution in warfare and marked the transition from 19th century ethics, technologies and society to the revolutions of the 20th century. There's so much themes to tackle with events such as the introduction of the tank, chemical weapons and trench warfare, the Great Game, changes in the political landscape (1917 revolution, US dropping isolationism to aid the Entente nations, the fall of the Ottoman Empire etc.)

 

Or do something like Meantime

Thanks for asking, and I hope that this project gets real, I'll support you.

 

First as for the type of game, I think we pretty much agree that it should be some kind of RPG.

 

About the gameplay, I loved the style of infinity engine's games some of you at Obsidian worked on, and I would love to play more of that kind.

The stuff that matter for me is :

- Party based, with control over all the characters

- Real time with active pause combat system.

- Tactical view with free camera.

- There should be other options than combat sometimes to beat an encounter: dialog, stealth, corruption, poison... With different rewards and results long term. The choices within a dialog are not the only choices that matter.

- NOT an action-RPG

It does not have to use D&D rules

 

 

About the setting of the game, I'm OK with anything : fantasy, sci-fi, post apocalyptic...

However I thought about 2 games I'd like to point out for their original settings, you probably know about them (and may be worked on them) it is Arcanum and LionHeart : legacy of the crusader, from Troika and Black Isle studios. I like that style, part historic and part fantasy.

 

Thanks for reading

I don't think a lot of people here are understanding the scope of what this would be. If they're raising funds via kickstarter they won't have any left over to actually make the game if they go with a license (Planescape, Arcanum, Fallout, etc.). So it has to be an original IP.

 

In addition to the swashbuckly colonial conquest type I mentioned earlier, a base-building space mercenary type action rpg would be sweet too. Start as a mercenary and as you gain experience and such you can recruit companions to build up a mercenary company. Use funds to upgrade your headquarters, recruit researchers/engineers/etc to get new equipment and take on new mission types.

 

Something based on norse mythology where you travel the nine realms and such would also be awesome, or something set during the Roman empire. A historical fantasy type maybe dealing with celtic mythology and the conquest of Britain.

Alpha Protocol 2 - more polished but with the great Choice-engine. I'd buy ten copies.

Alpha Protocol 2 - more polished but with the great Choice-engine. I'd buy ten copies.

 

:|

 

Sega owns Alpha Protocol, don't they? Thus Obsidian can't make a sequel unless it's at Sega's behest.

 

So... no, then. Unless they can convince Sega to do a follow-up, which is unlikely. But they could do that anyway. If they're going to go to a publisher, then they can do that for any game.

 

This project, I thought, was about being free of publisher shackles. Much like the Double Fine one is.

 

---

 

@Oerwinde

 

I've said this tens of times. It falls upon deaf ears.

 

Sigh. People, eh?

People seem to forget that making most of their ideas will cost well above what fun support can fund. You have to think small, you have to think oldschool.

 

I would personally love to see a modern reincarnation of Planscape: Torment, done on modern engine, maybe with more voiceover and a few additional quests here and there. I think almost everyone will agree that PST is one of the best games of all time, but right now graphics are what is keeping many people from discovering this gem. Think of how many people could enjoy it if it had Dragon Age (1) graphics... Full voiceover, I'm not sure if it would do lines justice but hell, it's worth a try.

Aurora engine is super easy to code and use. That said, give me infinity engine. It was a great one.

 

Oh god please no! Anything but Aurora!

People seem to forget that making most of their ideas will cost well above what fun support can fund. You have to think small, you have to think oldschool.

 

Nnnnno...

 

No you don't.

 

In fact, what you've described would cost far, far, far more to make than a simple four hour game on the Unity/Gamebryo engine, in 3D (with abstract/cartoony graphics), based on a brand new IP (or a lesser known IP which could be cheaply bought).

 

So... can I stress this?

 

It's so incredibly costly to license something famous/well known that it's outside of the scope of what they'd be able to do.

 

That means no Plumscope 2, no Magery 4, no Penultimate Fantasia XIII's, and so on. If Obsidian come forth and tell us that they think they could afford it, then fine, but I don't think they'd be able to. So all of these "JUST GIVE ME PLUMSCOPE 2!" posts are detrimental to the thread.

 

---

 

Anyway, back to being constructive.

 

I also think that a 2.5D side-scroller would be really interesting. Something along the lines of Fortune Summoners but not with those aesthetics. It would be something completely new, and it would mean that fully detailed environments from all angles wouldn't be necessary.

 

Plus, 2.5D RPGs are rare, we could really use more of them.

People seem to forget that making most of their ideas will cost well above what fun support can fund. You have to think small, you have to think oldschool.I would personally love to see a modern reincarnation of Planscape: Torment, done on modern engine, maybe with more voiceover and a few additional quests here and there. I think almost everyone will agree that PST is one of the best games of all time, but right now graphics are what is keeping many people from discovering this gem. Think of how many people could enjoy it if it had Dragon Age (1) graphics... Full voiceover, I'm not sure if it would do lines justice but hell, it's worth a try.

 

What are you babbling about? Planescape has gorgeous graphics, 17 times better than Bland Age. There is also a widescreen patch available.

Wulf. If you want to be constructive how about by starting to not trying to discredit everyone else and holding your own opinion up high despite of what you think of them?

 

Because that's REALLY not constructive nor are such posts any more "detrimental" to this thread.

 

I mean, it isn't wrong to discuss opinions here (and I don't agree with that poster myself. At least about the Planescape part) but don't do it like a ****.

I have long hoped for a game based on Stephen King's Dark Tower series on the Fallout 3 engine. Of course, that's probably never going to be an option for a number of copyright related reasons, but the mechanics of FO3 would work so well in that setting.

Something good unlike the other AAA **** that's fed to us lately. It doesn't even have to be turn-based or isometric as long as their are meaningful choices and the game actually recognizes your actions and puts them to use. You guys have a good track record so far keep at it!

1. An RPG based on being a "Gothic Fiction" archetypal type monster. Werewolves, Vampires, Ghosts, Skeletons, Mummies, Reanimated Corpse (Frankenstein), and stuff like that.

 

2. An RPG of something you've wanted to make, but publishers didn't buy off on it.

 

3. An RPG based on time traveling.

 

4. I have another idea, but I think it would bore other gamers to tears. It also would require a Star Wars license.

Doungen Kepper!!!! 3!!!!!

Please you have to make another Doungen Kepper!

 

I demand you make another one!

 

Lol thanks!

FF9 meets Fall Out.

 

I'd love to see a turn based RPG that takes a bit of a different turn. What if the combat system followed a rock, paper, scissor style. Attack, Counter, Fake, Block. Counter would be used when someone attacks, negating the effect and causing damage to the attacker. Fake would be a fake attack, followed by a real. Attack < Counter < Fake < Attack. And block would block against all. These could also be added to with special options the Player gains through mastery of his chosen weapon.

 

EXAMPLE: This is what a fight in game would look like, time would stop and the player could enter in the amount of options he can. Here's an example of two fighters that can use up to three moves.

Jack: Fake, Counter, Attack

John: Counter, Attack, Counter

Outcome: Jack would land the first hit, the second hit, and be hit for the third action.

 

The purpose of this would be to give the characters more of a real fight sort of animation, as opposed to the character jumping up, striking, and the points above the damaged.

 

As for the story and content of the game, i'd like it to be reminiscent of FF9 with large air-ships that the player can fully customize (certain engines give the ship certain moving capabilities, different canons, defenses, etc. . .) But open world like Fall Out. The open world would be large airspace, devastated surface of the planet, floating islands.

The story would focus on warring factions, that use Summons to fight each other. The twist is that Summons are gathered from the floating islands. Every time the player conquers or wins the favor of an island, the inhabitants and the piece of land itself can be transformed into a summon that fights for you, until you want to convert it back to it's home land. The way the summons would level up, or gain power would be through modernizing the islands, making the locals happy, and increasing the population. The mechanism for this could be similar to the one found in Assassins Creed II where you can purchase, and improve your castle. So it would be up to the player to forge a peace between the nations so no one has to be used as a weapon of war.