Gameplay - Core Goals

Listed here is Shit that Must Go Into the Game:

- Great atmospheric effects / lighting. Think Shadow of the Colossus. Vital for sense of scale in world, as well as setting tone of various areas.

- First-person. It's the best, most immersive view. Evidence = Half-life 2.

- Combat must be engaging, immersive, fun, addictive, etc. At least as good as Oblivion, hopefully better. Combo systems, targeting (if console game), etc. Perhaps throw in a little Devil May Cry sort of action? Interesting to see how that would work mitigated by virtual skill (i.e. character stats)

- Any block text should be out-of-the-way, optional. Elder Scrolls pulls this off quite nicely with its book system. Background detail is there for those who want it, others can be on their merry way.

- NO STUPID BINARY MORAL CHOICES. There are SO MANY better ways of handling these kinds of issues. Take Fallout 3's buddy system. You can't hire certain people if you aren't good or evil enough. Seems good on the surface, right? Only for some reason, everybody knows exactly how evil/good you are, even if you have zero reputation. It stands to reason that an evil guy would have no trouble with two-facing it to look like a good guy, anyway. We can do better. See http://www.youtube.com/user/kirithem#p/a/u/1/6_KU3lUx3u0 .Faction ratings are a particularly good solution, to my mind.

-Imagine this: A town starts out at a 'normal' state. Things are ok there. The player character does a series of quests, making various moral choices as he goes. By the end of this series of choices, the state of the town has changed significantly. The player is never outright given an understanding of the end results of his actions -- like real life, the consequences of your moral fuckups/glories are NOT CLEAR. However, we want the PC to feel powerful, so his actions should have powerful consequences. Should he act not in the town's best interests, but rather in his own or in the interests of a third party/faction (call this approach 'evil' for the sake of clarity), the town will end up in worse shape, say by being laid under siege by same third faction. If PC works for the town against that faction, than the opposite occurs, etc. This approach allows player choice to have meaningful moral AND gameplay ramifications, hopefully without the same sort of ignoring of any kind of meaningful choice for the sake of power-gaming that we see now. Hmm. I need to think more about this.

- No cutscenes. Maybe one opener/one closer. The less, the better. We're making a videogame, not a movie.

- CO-OP. THIS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE.

- Examples of well-written games that have sold well that We Can Probably Learn From: Bioshock, Half-Life 2 (/anything Valve), God of War...and in limited amounts, Oblivion. Despite the hate, I'm going to throw Halo in the list, too. Not particularly innovative story, but well-told, for the most part. Except Halo 2. But that was a rush job. Yeah.

- Mostly in reference to story, but this works for a multitude of other things, too: "It's just a game" is NEVER A GOOD EXCUSE.

- Satire and humour. Taking the game too seriously will be fatal. References might include: Current politics, Bobby Kotick, Gabe and Tycho, Yahtzee, LRR, Amerikah, Perez Hilton, Gordon Freeman, facebook, the holy land, stupidity of current educational system, Glenn Beck, B'Oreilly, Sarah Palin,