My idea: the story starts off with a lot of well-known objects mysteriously shrunken or expanded or missing. The Eiffel Tower is only six feet tall, the Moscow Kremlin Faberge egg is bigger than the Kremlin, the Statue of Liberty is nowhere to be found, and there are tiny people and giant insects everywhere. You don't know who did this, or why, but you know how, for you too have this technology. You can shrink or expand yourself or other objects, and just for fun, you can control any animal you ride. Use your powers to sneak into government buildings by flying in on a mosquito and tucking inside a bureaucrat's pat cuffs. Go toe to toe with battle mecha on the back of a gargantuan spider. Your powers increase in strength and variety over time, eventually allowing you to control your density and even reduce objects to zero size (very easy to carry that way).
The real kicker is that there isn't a single adversary (lots of people are using the size-changing technology for their own ends, and lots more want to get their hands on it, and some are trying to fix it, like you), nor is there a linear narrative (no defined story, no cut-scenes, just the world full of problems that changes as you interact with it), nor is there a definite need to restore the status quo. Want to join forces with a mad scientist working to create a race of tiny people? Go for it! Want to go into farming? Expand some ants and have a commercial giant ant farm!
This would be hard to do, but loads of fun. I can see quests where you save a commercial airliner by sneaking on board and shrinking it when it's under attack (which plane is in trouble? How will you get on board? How do you avoid panicking the passengers?) or where you save the world from a deadly comet strike by expanding the entire world to such a degree that the comet is too small by comparison to do anything (How will you get enough power to expand the whole planet? Who will you need to make deals with? What if you shrunk the planet instead, or shrunk the comet?). I call it "Mass Effect". Just kidding.
maninahat said:
maninahat said:
A combat space simulator in which the space ships, rather than being the typical streamlined, one-seater jobs like out of a Sci-fi movie, are fat, unweldy craft that look more like steam trains (though the action will still be fairly fast pace). These vessels are highly customiseable, so you can gear towards a whole range of tactics. Plus, the damage would have to be top-drawer. There will be no sissy lasers (think huge, loud guns), and there will be bits flying off the ships whenever they get hit (not necessarily crippling them though). Ships take a lot of damage to take down, unless you hit them in the right places. Otherwise, you'll just riddle them with bullet holes.
Oh yea, and rather than it just being in space, it would be in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. That way, you can get a whole array of pretty colours, plus different gases produce different atmospheres (some radiactive, some corrosive, some disrupt electronic equipment etc.).
The inside of a gas giant would be
perfect. First of all, it's unimaginably huge without being infinitely vast, allowing you plenty of space to play without needing to worry about faster-than-light travel. Second, it's roomy in three directions, like space, but there's atmosphere, allowing your ships to pull maneuvers that just aren't possible in a vacuum, not to mention the fact that sound carries through atmosphere, allowing you to have loud guns and still satisfy picky sci-fi geeks like me. Third, a gas giant has room for plenty of variety: starry skies in the upper atmosphere, crushing pressures near the core, freezing winds and flying hail near the frozen poles, blistering incandescent heat near the equator, and giant wind storms larger than the planet Earth! Fourth, such a planet could harbor life, which in game terms means Space Whales [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceWhale], or at least Giant Flyers [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GiantFlyer]. Fifth, a gas giant has room for all kinds of useful things (vast supplies of dense hydrogen and helium-3 for your fusion reactors, precious ice and minerals in the rings surrounding it, rare chemicals swirling around in the gaseous depths, exotic forms of matter hidden deep within the core, weird life forms to harvest, you name it), giving you plenty of reasons to be there and plenty to fight over. Sixth, if you are so inclined, you can exit the atmosphere, fly through the rings, tour the moons, and swing by some nearby asteroids. You must carry this idea to fruition.
