tentacle

Ok so here's mine: An RPG that has as its base a living, believable world that reacts to your actions and exists DESPITE you, not FOR you. A focus on realism. Like Darklands, but 20 years more advanced. Create good AI and game mechanics instead of scripted events. Non-linearity and a world you explore because its inviting, not because it's the only direction you can walk in. A grey world without clear good/evil choices or people, where everyone has a plausible motive for their actions. Use that as the backdrop for intense, personal relationships and challenges with consequences. Adult themes and problems, not teen fantasy. Quests about solving believable problems, not finding the lost gem of supahpowah. Relationships more like Torment with some lessons from the better japanese so-called dating sims. Real consequences, in the game world. Not just in a cut-scene or in a karma meter, but really, like if I don't save the village's water supply, they die or move out, and that village is gone for the rest of the game. I want to be crippled by difficult choices and even have not making a choice be a choice, instead of just 'pausing' that quest until I come back 2 game years later to finish it. That feeling of being involved in the world like Star Control 2, or A Mind Forever Voyaging. And not this hand-holding easiness so popular these days. Let me lose, let me make choices that suck. Let there be enemies I simply CANNOT defeat without massive preparation and planning. I would love to be able to really affect the game world, not just in scripted ways. If I rob all the trade caravans, let the town's money run low, affecting the population, shops closing, famine, all leading to crime, possible invasion, etc. If I ignore the growing monster threat, let them start terrorizing local towns, instead of just waiting for me to come deal with them. Let me hear news about such events through realistic channels with realistic delays (word-of-mouth via traveling salesmen) instead of on an omniscient world events screen. No magic universal karma: if no one sees me kill farmer joe, then let me go and get hired by his son to find the murderer, and frame someone else. And no gamey crap like artifically blocked-off areas or scaling enemies. I'm not against 3D, but 2D is so much easier to make pretty, leaves more to the imagination, and doesn't take such a huge chunk of the budget. I always wonder how awesome something like Skyrim might've been if the resources spent on graphics and audio were invested in creating the living AI world that Derek Smart always talked about but never delivered. Combat has to be turn-based, but WEGO. Realtime with pause and giving orders while paused is basically fine. I like fantasy, but it's really overdone. I'd like to see a rather fresh setting, maybe a rarely used area of sci-fi (cyberpunk perhaps, or colonization of new worlds, think mines of titan, gateway, the aldebaran series). Or zombie apocalypse. OOooooorr, a remake of IT CAME FROM THE DESERT.... Actually, not kidding. It doesn't need a massive budget, very story-centric, offers lots of opportunities for great writing, non-linear gameplay (if done right), and is peppered with lots of (hopefully) fun short mini-games and tactical elements that are part of the story and make sense instead of being totally absurd QTE's.