Video game ideas that you're sure others would think are a good idea

A Harry Potter game in the style of Persona 3.

The protagonist wouldn't be a canon character, but instead would be a new first-year customized by you. The story would take place during Year 3 of the HP series (mainly because not a lot happens that year). After a tutorial section in Diagon Alley (which, based on the choices you make, determines which house you're sorted into) you travel to Hogwarts to begin your classes. The game would, like Persona 3, have a day-to-day structure with multiple activities available each day. Going to classes would allow you to learn first-year spells, but also build a stronger relationship with teachers, who (if they like you enough) you can spend office hours with learning high-level magic. You could also build relationships with other students; hanging out with the Hufflepuff Quidditch captain could boost your flying skills and eventually net you your own broom, while extending the hand of friendship to the creepy second-year Slytherin bookworm could cause her to teach you powerful dark magic spells you wouldn't be able to learn from teachers. Of course, Hogwarts is interesting enough in itself that you wouldn't be only completing social links; you could spend days exploring different sections of the castle as well and looking for secrets. All kinds of other stuff would be available as well: Quidditch practice, Wizard duels, raising a pet owl, fighting bullies, even sneaking out to the countryside and Hogsmeade if you have the necessary magic (or get on good terms with Fred and George).

Anyway, that would be the normal cycle of life at Hogwarts. But three weeks in, something STRANGE and MAGICAL and PLOTTY happens: you wake up in the middle of the night to find that Hogwarts is severely messed up. The walls are ash-grey and severely fractured, paths and alcoves full of ghostly items and statues branch out where none existed before, and eldritch creatures walk the halls. Everyone human has disappeared... except for a certain blonde second-year Ravenclaw girl hiding in Ravenclaw Tower who insists she could always see the monsters. You and Luna hide until morning, but morning doesn't come; eventually you're forced to fight your way out of Ravenclaw dorms and explore the new sections of Hogwarts. Your travels take you to a room lined with stone statues of snakes with a Pensieve in the middle; once Luna pours the memories into a vial you return to the real Hogwarts at sunrise. From now on, though, you can see ghosts of monsters hiding in corners, signs vandalized with ghostly writing to say things no one else can see. Every month or so, it happens again, though with more people remaining awake each time. Your goals are to a) figure out what's going on and who's fucking up the school at night, and b) to become skilled enough at magic during your awake hours that you don't get killed the next time Hogwarts goes grimdark.

Every social relationship in the game would be designed to benefit you somehow. In some cases, doing things with people (mainly the teachers) would give you new spells, while in others (Fred and George, Luna) they would allow you to find secret rooms and passages in Hogwarts or learn more about the monsters. The game would be designed so you wouldn't be able to max out every Social Link (unless you completed an extremely hard Guide Dang It! quest to get a Time-Turner during the second-to-last month at Hogwarts). You would have to make trade-offs: do you want to spend your time as a student studying and being tutored by professors, or spend it playing with friends, or exploring the castle, or playing sports, or experimenting with forbidden magicks? It would be your choice, but every option would end up helping you during the nighttime quests in one way or another.

aaaaaa textwall. tl;dr: customizable Harry Potter + Persona3 with a bit of John Dies At The End thrown in for good measure.

edited 13th Jul '11 9:27:51 AM by RLabs

Neat idea!

I have an idea myself: Transformers Racing (or something along the lines of that)! Basically, this would be a combat-racing game with a transforming element (in car mode, speed and other racing-related traits are higher than combat-related traits, and the other way around when the player converts to robot mode).

A serial killer Sim. You're the killer and you stalk your victims, play out the little rituals, mess with the investigators and avoid capture. Detailed down to whether you leave the bodies arranged in specific poses, take bits to eat, trophies... etc etc.

Ok so maybe others wont think this is a good idea...

Serial killers will! And I think it is, though I don't know what that says about me...

A dating game sim game like Ar Tonelico 3...except the Reyvatiels are men and they have to strip to become more powerful.

Of course, there's like a 0% chance of that happening.

Sonic Uneleashed... Without the Werehog. The game is otherwise exactly the same.

Sonic Unleashed... Without the Werehog. The game is otherwise exactly the same.

Super Sentai-themed Dynasty Warriors. It would be incredibly silly and probably childish, but I can't imagine it not working.

A DDR RPG.

It would work perfectly.

I'm not sure. Does anyone else think that this would be a good idea, even if the system reqs would probably be stupid?

The Harry Potter idea sounds interesting, but a bit Grimdark and near-impossible to reconcile with canon if its during Harry's school time.

Anyway, continuing with Harry Potter:

I'd be very surprised if this hasn't come up yet in this thread, and God knows I'm not the first person to think of this, but I'd love a Harry Potter MMORPG. Especially if it has a really epic scope. Make it take place in the entire World, not just Britain. Give players the chance to be anything: a professional Quiditch player, a wandmaker, an Auror, a Death Eater, whatever they wish. Every single canon spell and potion would be included.

edited 19th Jul '11 7:53:50 PM by Pulsar

^^I like a good deal of the ideas there. Like you said, only problem is resources required to run that.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! (I actually went into more detail on my ideas on my blog. Please ignore the ranting I did about fanlets at the same time. )

edited 20th Jul '11 1:28:13 AM by FarseerLolotea

A Wii version of Elite Beat Agents. Instead of tapping with a stylus, you point a cursor and use A to hit notes. It'd be like a cross between a light gun game and a rhythm game.

Sonic Dream Match Game.

You can play as Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Cream, Shadow, Blaze, Espio, Charmy, Vector, Mighty, Rouge, Big, Omega, Eggman, and Silver to start. You can unlock Tikal, Chaos, E-102 Gamma, Tiara Boobowski, Heavy, Bomb, and even Maria(she was playable in Shadow The Hedgehog).

edited 25th Jul '11 8:40:41 PM by miru

I'm not sure how many people will read this considering how big the topic is getting, but here goes:

You are Eugene Dexter, a brilliant but socially awkward nerd that has just been recruited to a top secret research facility experimenting on teleportation technology. Disaster strikes as the teleporter is turned on, however, and the resulting portal tears open the fabric of space and time. The facility, and soon the rest of the world, is invaded by aliens from other worlds, robot overlords from the far future, zombies from the underworld, ninjas from ancient Japan, and pirates from throughout history of both the seafaring and spacefaring varieties. In his efforts to escape the attack alive, Eugene is exposed to a mysterious chemical called Testosterium, which transforms him into a hulking, handsome badass named Blake Hawk. Arming himself with a wide arsenal of weapons and an endless supply of badass quips, Hawk is determined to show these Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot Aliens who's boss.

Yes, this game's story isn't taking itself seriously, as you can see. Gameplay wise, this is a First-Person Shooter in the style of Painkiller and Serious Sam. The player has a Hyperspace Arsenal of guns with Bottomless Magazines, and Blake Hawk has a Bond One-Liner ready for every way you can kill an enemy. Levels are divided into encounters with checkpoints between each, and the player's health is refilled at each checkpoint, except at the highest difficulty level. Health and armor packs are scarce, but the player restores 1 health for every kill he gets because killing things makes Blake Hawk feel good.

As the story suggests, every encounter has you battling dozens, if not hundreds, of ninjas, pirates, zombies, robots, and/or aliens at a time. The levels themselves would make up episodes, at the end of each Hawk has to battle one of the bosses: an alien queen, an undead abomination, a pirate captain, a sentient AI, and a lone ninja adhering to the Conservation of Ninjutsu. Defeating all of them opens up the final boss: the undead cybernetic space pirate assassin responsible for all of this.

That sounds an awful lot like Out of This World, an FPS version of which would indeed be pretty awesome.

I don't know if anyone here would think it's a good idea, but I'm sure there's someone out there that does: I'd really like to see a Bionicle action adventure game. It seems so perfect for a video game, so it's disappointing that it ended without getting a decent video game, although the fact that it's ended makes it unlikely that Lego would ever make a game for it now...but anyways, I'd love to see a game where you choose your element and become a generic Toa to explore Mata Nui.

There could be a synthesis system involving Kanoka Disks, and you could find Kanohi Masks across the world with different powers, along with unique weapons and launchers to use in battle. I also think it would be interesting if there was an Okami-like system for elemental attacks if it was for the 3DS where you freeze time and draw a certain shape to use a special, mostly because I can't think of a better way to have lots of variety and options in the powers.

Since it's Lego, there would have to be some kind of character creation/customization system, of course. It would probably have to have a self-contained, and most likely non-canon, story though, and I thought that Bionicle had a really interesting story and world (not the best, but pretty impressive for a toy line).

edited 22nd Jul '11 12:17:51 PM by Beorc

Here's the list of guns that would be in my game, along with their key bindings (2 to a number key a la Serious Sam) and a one-liner from Blake Hawk:

• 1A. Katana - "Hakuna Katana...what a wonderful phrase!"
• 1B. Chainsaw - "I'm a lumberjack and I'm not okay with you still breathing!"
• 2A. Pistol - "It's not the size of your gun that matters!"
• 2B. Revolver - "I AM feeling lucky, punk!"
• 3A. Shotgun - "Does anybody have any gum? I'm all out."
• 3B. Super Shotgun - "I've got two barrels, that should be enough for all of you!"
• 4A. Machine Gun - "Now I can solve up to 800 problems a minute!"
• 4B. Minigun - "Remember when I said size doesn't matter? I Lied."
• 5A. Rocket Launcher - "No one can rock it harder than Blake!"
• 5B. Grenade Launcher - "Come and get your free t-shirts!"
• 6A. Flamethrower - "Goodness gracious your balls are on fire!"
• 6B. Freezethrower - "Chill for a sec!"
• 7A. Laser Cannon - "I'm dynamite with a laser beam!"
• 7B. Lightning Gun - "You're in for surprise, you're in for a shock!"
• 8A. Sniper Rifle - "This is my rifle, this is my gun; killing you is so much fun!"
• 8B. Minelayer - "These mines are mine...but I'm giving them to you!"
• 9A. Shrink Ray - "Careful, the water's cold!"
• 9B. Homing Launcher - "These missiles never miss...ile!"
• 0A. Multibomb Launcher - "My balls are always bouncing!"
• 0B. Smart Bomb - "Watch me explode, 'cause I'm TNT!"

edited 23rd Jul '11 10:33:45 PM by Cysma

I've been entertaining this idea of a sort of reverse RPG for a while now. Here, instead of playing as the adventurers, you play as the guy who "manages" the dungeons these adventurers have to go through. Yeah.

To elaborate, you're an employee of an otherworldly corporation whose job is to, quite simply, lure adventurers into your dungeon, kick their ass and acquire their souls (of course, since these adventurers simply reload from their last save point they'll be a-ok afterwards). As you might have guessed from the parenthesized comment, the story will be mostly tongue-in-cheek.

I would imagine that the gameplay goes like this: you have money, and you have MP. You use the money to dig out and furnish your dungeon, and you use MP to summon monsters. Money is only earned at the end of each "day", depending on your performance. MP regenerates over time, but you can also get some by beating enemies, using specific kinds of traps, etc. You will divide your dungeon into a number of sections, wherein you can put stuff like flora, furniture, decorations, traps and treasure chests.

Of course, it won't be that straightforward. You have to build the sections of your dungeon in such a way that the monster you want to live there can live there. For example, a pig monster would need a place with a bunch of plants to eat. Otherwise, it would be weaker than normal, or even just die off.

The monsters will also interact with each other a la RL ecosystems. If you have pig monsters in area, you can convince a meat-eating dragon to go live there. Put a cat monster and dog monster in the same place and they'll kill each other off. Get some goblin riders near some wolves and they'll form teams. Stuff like that.

The monsters will have the usual str, dex, int stats but they'll also possess attributes like high encounter rates, or how good their average AI is, or even what they tend to do in battles (like inflicting status effects or plain wailing on the enemy). However, if you don't feel like leaving things up to the computer you can directly supervise battles, provided you're willing to pay the necessary costs, in which case it'll play out like your typical turn-based RPG.

Of course, you can also "hire" sub-bosses and bosses if you fulfill their demands.

But you'll also have to place some treasure chests, great equipment/tools/key items and probably a macguffin in order to get adventurers to travel into your dungeon in the first place.

I probably put too much thought into that, hahaha.

There's about a bazillion games very much like this, most notably Dungeon Keeper and its ilk. I admit, however, none of them I can recall are themed around oldschool turn-based RPGs with Fight Woosh and so on.

I actually got the idea from several Flash games which had a similar concept... but I haven't played one that worked like how I imagined it. Like you said, most of them aren't themed around turn-based RPGs; they're usually RTS-style games. Plus while Dungeon Keeper did well in the monster-rearing department it kinda sucked when you got to the actual fighting.

You know what, you're right. I basically want a Dungeon Keeper that doesn't require you to be dark and slimy AND more interesting creatures and combinatorial explosions. Like the child of Net Hack and Dungeon Keeper, I guess. Maybe considerable helpings of Viva Pinata too, if the Pinatas were fantasy creatures.

edited 24th Jul '11 5:46:46 AM by fillerdude

I haven't gotten around to untangling Dwarf Fortress, but that seems like it almost fits the roguelike example. Your earlier description, to be honest, sounded less like a roguelike and more like an NES/SMS-era JRPG.

I have not really fleshed this idea out much but I'll say it anyway.

A seventies style buddy cop game involving one by-the-books cop and one wild and dangerous cop. It would be open world in a city like Miami and would involve a day to day system where you get crime reports each day (more than one in some cases) and would have to catch the perp before the trail goes cold. It could have some segments where you have to sift through evidence to figure out who the perp is and (more frequently) other more action oriented chases and drug bust shoot-outs. At the end of each case, you get graded on how many people you managed to take alive and whatnot, too many and you get your gun and badge confiscated for a few weeks, which could have an effect on how civilians treat you. If you kill too many people you are forced to retire.

The only real problem I can see with the idea in its current incarnation is the problem of narrative structure and a sense of increasing difficulty without feeling unnatural.

Your characters could be unraveling a conspiracy, coming into contact with more and more dangerous criminals as they go deeper. You know, advancing from normal footpads to the mafia to paramilitary troopers from Central America?