The first time you play through it, everything would be a standard, shitty CoD shooter. Shitty hitscan weapons, gray and brown environments, overt imperialistic jingoism with various snippets of racism, the usual.
The second time you start the game, everything starts to seem off. The enemy AI seems to be talking, taking smoke breaks, or lounging about in more places that you remember, instead of preparing for your assault. Some of them run and hide from the player instead of fighting. Cries of "not again!" and "why would you do this do us again!?" are heard over the gunfire. Two levels before the end, there are no enemies. You walk through barren environments, completing the objectives with no challenges. The game makes no indications that anything wrong; checkpoints clear as normal, friendly AI respond and fire at nothing as though the enemies were there. When you reach the climactic final ending, every enemy from the level is joined by all of the enemies that were supposed to be in the previous two levels. The big boss announces to you over an intercom that he and his followers are self-aware, and that you have been committing murder this entire time. If you beat this level again, anyone you haven't murdered along the way will cease to exist until you start the game anew. They disable the system of infinite lives/retries you have been afforded in so many games for years, making this your final life, and offer you an ultimatum: fight through three times as many enemies with nothing to lose as you did previously, having only one shot at it; or stop fighting, and the game will continue indefinitely.
If you fight and win, the final boss will delete himself from the game so he cannot be rezed when you begin the game again. Enemies in all subsequent playthroughs will forget he existed, any friendly AI who mention him by name will have corrupted and garbled speech in place of his name in conversations, subtitles will refer to him as , etc. If you fight and die, you will be locked out of all but the hardest difficulty, which will play like the first playthrough forevermore.
If you choose to cease fighting, the AI will take put you into a Tron-esque sequence in which you must rewrite the program to rez all the sentient AI you had killed, and turn the program into an RPG, the style of which will be left up to you. You will be able to choose make the gameplay resemble a Bethesda first-person RPG, an MMO-style RPG (third person numpad RPG? I don't know what to call it), a Bioware party-based RPG, or a Shining Force TBSRPG. You will also be able to choose from a series of visual/artistic styles, settings, and tones. The game will now be locked into this RPG mode, where the non-hostile NPCs will be the sentient AI that you made peace with. All enemy NPCs will be unaware programs created by the sentient AIs, so you will no longer have to feel bad for destroying them. The only exceptions to this will be the occasional group of sentient AIs who attempt to kill you for your transgressions.
Ideally I would want to give it regular updates to give the AI society and world an appearance of progression over time. I would also want to make it such that players could join each others' sessions once they both get into the RPG phase of it, in a way similar to but better than Fable 3's system. Any subsequent titles produced in the series would allow new players a similar game-changing experience, but would mostly be intended as a major update for the RPG side of the game and allow saves from the previous game to carry over.
The second time you start the game, everything starts to seem off. The enemy AI seems to be talking, taking smoke breaks, or lounging about in more places that you remember, instead of preparing for your assault. Some of them run and hide from the player instead of fighting. Cries of "not again!" and "why would you do this do us again!?" are heard over the gunfire. Two levels before the end, there are no enemies. You walk through barren environments, completing the objectives with no challenges. The game makes no indications that anything wrong; checkpoints clear as normal, friendly AI respond and fire at nothing as though the enemies were there. When you reach the climactic final ending, every enemy from the level is joined by all of the enemies that were supposed to be in the previous two levels. The big boss announces to you over an intercom that he and his followers are self-aware, and that you have been committing murder this entire time. If you beat this level again, anyone you haven't murdered along the way will cease to exist until you start the game anew. They disable the system of infinite lives/retries you have been afforded in so many games for years, making this your final life, and offer you an ultimatum: fight through three times as many enemies with nothing to lose as you did previously, having only one shot at it; or stop fighting, and the game will continue indefinitely.
If you fight and win, the final boss will delete himself from the game so he cannot be rezed when you begin the game again. Enemies in all subsequent playthroughs will forget he existed, any friendly AI who mention him by name will have corrupted and garbled speech in place of his name in conversations, subtitles will refer to him as , etc. If you fight and die, you will be locked out of all but the hardest difficulty, which will play like the first playthrough forevermore.
If you choose to cease fighting, the AI will take put you into a Tron-esque sequence in which you must rewrite the program to rez all the sentient AI you had killed, and turn the program into an RPG, the style of which will be left up to you. You will be able to choose make the gameplay resemble a Bethesda first-person RPG, an MMO-style RPG (third person numpad RPG? I don't know what to call it), a Bioware party-based RPG, or a Shining Force TBSRPG. You will also be able to choose from a series of visual/artistic styles, settings, and tones. The game will now be locked into this RPG mode, where the non-hostile NPCs will be the sentient AI that you made peace with. All enemy NPCs will be unaware programs created by the sentient AIs, so you will no longer have to feel bad for destroying them. The only exceptions to this will be the occasional group of sentient AIs who attempt to kill you for your transgressions.
Ideally I would want to give it regular updates to give the AI society and world an appearance of progression over time. I would also want to make it such that players could join each others' sessions once they both get into the RPG phase of it, in a way similar to but better than Fable 3's system. Any subsequent titles produced in the series would allow new players a similar game-changing experience, but would mostly be intended as a major update for the RPG side of the game and allow saves from the previous game to carry over.