A WW1 Game?

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Ryanrulez5

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Nov 24, 2010
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Honestly cant think of any game that the first world war had some significance I know ubisoft are making a game about world war one but I cant think of any its all WW2 and Nazis surely WW1 would make a great setting for a game that shows the horror of the war and the life in the trenches maybe a FPS or a strategy game.
 

Zhukov

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A turn based or real time strategy game set in WWI would work just fine.

A WWI FPS would probably end up exactly like a WWII FPS, just without compact automatic weapons and with funny looking tanks.
 

gorfias

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I did play an FPS about an alternate timeline with Germany winning WW1. Long time ago.

Zhukov said:
A WWI FPS would probably end up exactly like a WWII FPS, just without compact automatic weapons and with funny looking tanks.
I think it would be more like failed civil war shooters. The weapons would really stink. And trench warfare is likely boring as hell.

Maybe lousy weapons could be part of the suspense. Operate a funny looking tank, try not to get gassed to death, have a dog fight in a bi-plane.
 

endnuen

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WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
 

Jolly Co-operator

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Mar 10, 2012
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Does it have to be a realistic WW1 game? If not, then I'd recommend NecrovisioN. It's WW1 with zombies . . . and vampires . . . and a dragon. Yeah, as you can probably guess, the plot is pretty stupid, but it's a fun kind of stupid. Running into a horde of zombies with a pistol in one hand a bayonet in the other is hard find dull.
 

SteveTR

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I would appreciate a game in the style of Hearts of Iron III, a WW2 strategy game. I think it could work. The HoI series does go in depth, but it's not as hardcore as, say, War in the East. It's pretty accessible to the public (although it takes a while to learn all the game mechanisms), but isn't too watered down. However, there was never really an interest in the Great War.
 

Mocmocman

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Off the top of my head;
Warfare 1917: Awesome little flash game.
Rise of Flight: Flight simulator, rather hard.
Verdun: Squad based FPS, is historicaly accurate.
1916 :: Der Unbekannte Krieg: Indie game in WWI, has dinosours.
Necrovision: Vampires!
 

Dogstile

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endnuen said:
WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
You should probably find out more about WW1.
 

demoman_chaos

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WWI on the western front involved a lot of trench warfare, which could be fun. Spend some time plinking away at the enemy across No Man's Land, but then be given orders to chrage across, darting between the bomb craters to try and get close. Getting into face to face fights in the trenches, fighting for every corner.

The Eastern front was much much more mobile, making for modern FPS style action.
 

Tom_green_day

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Dogstile said:
endnuen said:
WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
You should probably find out more about WW1.
Actually that's pretty accurate.
I studied WW1 for English Literature and it was such a depressing time for most involved that a game about killing people would do horrid injustice to the actual war. Even the americans haven't tried to glorify it, it was that bad.
But if you want something a bit crazier play Black Ops 2's Zombie DLC map Origins. Not very WW1-ish but it's crazy fun, maybe the best map of the game.
 

Branovices

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There is a game in early release on Steam called Verdun, it's a fairly realistic squad-based first-person shooter. It's been getting lots of updates pretty quickly and seems pretty good. Certainly worth checking out.
 

Jamash

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Jun 25, 2008
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The problem with WW1 games, especially ones in the trenches, is that it's very grim and depressing and doesn't make for a very entertaining experience.

Toy Soldiers is an excellent RTS/Tower Defence game set in WW1, but despite all of the pieces being toys and exploding into little plastic bit and cogs when destroyed, it's still terrible depressing and grim and is a stark reminder of the senseless waste of life that was the trench warfare and idiotic infantry tactics of WW1.

Perhaps that makes it a more powerful game, because where in normal Tower Defence games, channelling the enemy into a a narrow field of fire provides a sense of jubilation and victory, doing the same thing in Toy Soldiers, using barbed wire to channel the German infantry and cavalry into the overlapping fields of machine gun fire whilst gas and flame weapons mop up any survivors, the same type of decisive victory wasn't really entertaining at all.

Another old WW1 game I starkly remember was Wings by Cinemaware. At the heart of it, it was a dogfighting and aerial combat/shoot-em-up game, but a combination of the setting, music and detailed diary entries compiled by your character(s) meant that the horror of the situation and the horrible conditions on the front line were inescapable.

It's a difficult subject and setting for a piece of interactive entertainment to tackle. If you make your game realistic and treat it with the respect and reverence it deserves, then you run the risk of your game being too depressing and not entertaining.

On the other-hand, if you make your game too entertaining, or remove it from the setting enough to lose the emotional impact (either through narrative ignorance of the subject matter, or a fantastical alternate history), then you run the risk of making light of such a horrible period of history and also raises the question, why bother to set your game in WW1 if you're going to ignore everything that made it WW1?

It is entirely possible to make good games set during WW1 but not on the Western Front, perhaps from the perspective of a different branch of the armed forces or somewhere else in the world that was at war, and it is also possible to have a entertaining game that features trench warfare like WW1, but isn't (e.g. the opening trench levels of WH40K: Fire Warrior), but a game, especially a shooter, that is set in the trenches of WW1 and features the level of visceral realism and historical accuracy that we've come to expect from such a shooter, well that isn't really good setting for an entertaining game.
 

Neverhoodian

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Are you kidding? I spent a good deal of my childhood playing classic World War I flight sims like Red Baron and Knights of the Sky.

I can see where the OP is coming from, though. Really, the conflict could be adapted for any number of genres outside of sims if people got out of the inaccurate "it was all one big, static trench in France" mindset. You've got the aforementioned flight aspect, naval combat, the Eastern Front, the Dardanelles, Palestine, various colonies in Africa and Asia, etc. Even the Western Front could be given a great treatment as an FPS, perhaps as part of a combat engineer team trying to tunnel your way under enemy lines. Another idea is a survival game where you're caught alone in No Man's Land and have to make it back to your lines. Sort of like a more realistic version of Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

Tom_green_day said:
Dogstile said:
endnuen said:
WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
You should probably find out more about WW1.
Actually that's pretty accurate.
I studied WW1 for English Literature and it was such a depressing time for most involved that a game about killing people would do horrid injustice to the actual war. Even the americans haven't tried to glorify it, it was that bad.
Well, most Americans didn't want to get involved at all, at least not at first. The United States still favored an isolationist policy and hadn't emerged as a world power yet. The conflict was seen as a European affair, a bloody legacy of the Old World that seemed to vindicate America's isolationism. It wasn't until the Zimmermann telegram, where Germany offered Mexico territory it lost in the Mexican-American War if it joined the Central Powers, that public opinion definitively changed.
 

Dogstile

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Tom_green_day said:
Dogstile said:
endnuen said:
WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
You should probably find out more about WW1.
Actually that's pretty accurate.
I studied WW1 for English Literature and it was such a depressing time for most involved that a game about killing people would do horrid injustice to the actual war. Even the americans haven't tried to glorify it, it was that bad.
But if you want something a bit crazier play Black Ops 2's Zombie DLC map Origins. Not very WW1-ish but it's crazy fun, maybe the best map of the game.
A WW1 game would not have to be based on the trenches. Try a game set behind the front lines? Sabotage, etc?
 

The Enquirer

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Zhukov said:
A turn based or real time strategy game set in WWI would work just fine.

A WWI FPS would probably end up exactly like a WWII FPS, just without compact automatic weapons and with funny looking tanks.
Actually if they added in a good hand to hand combat system it could work. Western games worked and there was more advanced technology in WW1 than there was in the mid 1800's.

Capcha: Dust bunny. Maybe this is a rather old and bad idea after all.
 

The_Lost_King

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Oct 7, 2011
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Neverhoodian said:
Are you kidding? I spent a good deal of my childhood playing classic World War I flight sims like Red Baron and Knights of the Sky.

I can see where the OP is coming from, though. Really, the conflict could be adapted for any number of genres outside of sims if people got out of the inaccurate "it was all one big, static trench in France" mindset. You've got the aforementioned flight aspect, naval combat, the Eastern Front, the Dardanelles, Palestine, various colonies in Africa and Asia, etc. Even the Western Front could be given a great treatment as an FPS, perhaps as part of a combat engineer team trying to tunnel your way under enemy lines. Another idea is a survival game where you're caught alone in No Man's Land and have to make it back to your lines. Sort of like a more realistic version of Sir, You Are Being Hunted.

Tom_green_day said:
Dogstile said:
endnuen said:
WW1 consisted of digging trenches, and then rushing forward into the enemy trenches. Would be an awful FPS.
En RTS / TBS could maybe work
You should probably find out more about WW1.
Actually that's pretty accurate.
I studied WW1 for English Literature and it was such a depressing time for most involved that a game about killing people would do horrid injustice to the actual war. Even the americans haven't tried to glorify it, it was that bad.
Well, most Americans didn't want to get involved at all, at least not at first. The United States still favored an isolationist policy and hadn't emerged as a world power yet. The conflict was seen as a European affair, a bloody legacy of the Old World that seemed to vindicate America's isolationism. It wasn't until the Zimmermann telegram, where Germany offered Mexico territory it lost in the Mexican-American War if it joined the Central Powers, that public opinion definitively changed.
We didn't want to get into World War 2 either. Only Pearl Harbor changed that. Did it stop us from glorifying the hell out of WW2, nope.

I just don't think it would be all that great of a game and will leave it at that as to not repeat what literally everyone else said.
 

Arrogancy

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Jun 9, 2009
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Toy Soldiers for the XBLA, if you count replica WWI. It's a tower defense game about playing a game about WWI on a model battlefield. It was quite good, actually. Well worth the price.