What about a World War One game?
- Thread starter Egobrain
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WWI wasn't nearly as glorified as WWII was. Let's face it. It was days of sitting in trenches in terrible piss poor conditions waiting for some one to say "Up and over" so you could run out into a field and die isn't nearly as glorious as D-Day
There was a monstrosity of a WW1 thread a while back
Here's how I think it could be done, a combination of scripted scenes, but mostly procedurally generated stuff.
The game would start with a pretty standard tutorial, learning how to use rifles, grenades etc. But emphasizing the rigid social structure at the time and the colonial jingoism at the start "tut, tut the war will be over by christmas and we won't have given the kraut a sufficient walloping". You'd probably be a reserve officer or something, fresh faced and straight out of school.
The first mission would be heavily scripted, you getting ready to go over the top for a charge. The atmosphere would be incredibly tense, from the music, the soldiers muttering and the sound of artillery fire. You'd feel scared of going over the top.
Then you'd leap over and run through no man's land while machine guns and artillery obliterate everyone around you horrifically, not a cinematic but rather if you bother to turn to the left you'll see a couple of men ripped to pieces by machine gun fire. Eventually a shell would land near you and you'd pass out.
You'd awake in hospital for a brief moment before it blacks out.
Now the bulk of the game would be about a single large area, your lines (+ no man's land and the germans) and perhaps the nearest village you billet at while on rest.
The game would a fps with rpg elements like STALKER, there'd be NPCs from officers who'd issue you orders, to supply clerks or medical officers who ask you favours (like bringing them so much of x) and just soldiers with great accents and funny senses of humour.
At your lines you'd be able to walk around reasonably safely, you'd have to be careful and crouch through sniper trouble spots, wade through the muck with rats and every now and then you'd hear the crump of artillery and have to seek cover or hit the bottom of the trench.
No man's land would be ever changing and initially very frightening, but eventually you'd begin to learn safe spots, good sniper vantages and the quickest routes as you went out on night patrols. It would change each sometimes not by much, at other times huge differences. Every now and then a flare would go up illuminating the whole area before fading leaving it darker then it was before until your eye readjust.
Missions would consist of repelling German attacks (sometimes fighting in the trenches), assisting artillery and mortars, sniping the German lines, scouting no man's land, ambushing patrols in no man's land, retrieving wounded and dead, and off course attacking the enemie's line.
You wouldn't go over the top often in an all out assault, but you'd dread every time, sometimes you'd be successful and hold a trench, until your relieved or ordered to pull out, but inevitably you'd lose it, and often you'd get wounded/die. When you got killed in game, you'd later wake up in hospital being told you'd been bravely rescued or dragged back. If this happened too many times the game would end with you being sent home crippled or actually dieing and you'd have reload a save or checkpoint.
After every "big show" npcs you'd gotten to know might be crippled/dead, this would be random and depend on what happened in the fight. You might hate certain officers and almost be happy when they bought the farm or change your opinion about them when they do something amazingly heroic. A NPC you like might make you think of doing something risky in the hope of saving them. A wounded NPC might right you letters from hospital or from home if they are crippled.
As the war progressed the nature of combat would adapt, you'd eventually have plane and tank support.
Weapon wise you'd be able to carry three type of weapon:
Primary:
Simple bolt action rifle (both English and German) and would have the advantage of a bayonet
Scoped bolt action rifle
Lewis Gun (later in the game)
Double barreled shotgun (perhaps as award for side questions)
Pump action shot gun (side quest)
Anti-tank rifle (agains later in game)
BAR rifle (later)
Prototype submachine guns (sidequest + later in game)
Secondary
Webley revolver
Mauser semi-automatic or a Luger(captured from Germans)
Colt 1911 (later in war)
Melee:
Bayonet
Bowie knife (captured from germans)
Cosh (steel rod rapped in leather favoured by English)
Improvised trench clubs
Officer's swords
Sharpened shovels
and more stuff
Your pistol and melee could be used together at times. You could also carry a couple of grenades.
A heavy element of combat would be the melee side, either a brutal scuffle in the confined space of a trench or silent killing in the dark of no man's land. You'd be able to perform melee attack like elbowing and kicking like in condemned also.
The gun play wouldn't necessarily be slow paced, I mean Call of Juarez make even older and slower weapons quite exciting. Players would have to get to trying to be accurate and maintain cover before closing in violently with bayonet or shovel.
I should also mention gas and disease. If pushed though gas would create in game, impassible spots in no man's land and another thing you have to worry about on your lines, you'd have to run get a crude gas mask or something.
Disease, could be mentioned quite often (by medical officers, NCOs etc), but would be harder to implement in the actual play. At most things like trench foot and respiratory infection could be implemented as restrictions to running speed, health etc. But anything worse might have to skip by your character, for the shake of maintaining the story.
I've also been thinking that environment having effects on your clothing could be implemented quite well. You start each day with a pristine (well at least cleaner) seat of clothes, each time you hit the dirt and land in mud, the clothing gets dirty, can get torn when going through wire and bloodstained in combat.
Also another cool idea is once you finish the game, you can play it all over again as Germans, playing all the same areas from a different direction.
The game would start with a pretty standard tutorial, learning how to use rifles, grenades etc. But emphasizing the rigid social structure at the time and the colonial jingoism at the start "tut, tut the war will be over by christmas and we won't have given the kraut a sufficient walloping". You'd probably be a reserve officer or something, fresh faced and straight out of school.
The first mission would be heavily scripted, you getting ready to go over the top for a charge. The atmosphere would be incredibly tense, from the music, the soldiers muttering and the sound of artillery fire. You'd feel scared of going over the top.
Then you'd leap over and run through no man's land while machine guns and artillery obliterate everyone around you horrifically, not a cinematic but rather if you bother to turn to the left you'll see a couple of men ripped to pieces by machine gun fire. Eventually a shell would land near you and you'd pass out.
You'd awake in hospital for a brief moment before it blacks out.
Now the bulk of the game would be about a single large area, your lines (+ no man's land and the germans) and perhaps the nearest village you billet at while on rest.
The game would a fps with rpg elements like STALKER, there'd be NPCs from officers who'd issue you orders, to supply clerks or medical officers who ask you favours (like bringing them so much of x) and just soldiers with great accents and funny senses of humour.
At your lines you'd be able to walk around reasonably safely, you'd have to be careful and crouch through sniper trouble spots, wade through the muck with rats and every now and then you'd hear the crump of artillery and have to seek cover or hit the bottom of the trench.
No man's land would be ever changing and initially very frightening, but eventually you'd begin to learn safe spots, good sniper vantages and the quickest routes as you went out on night patrols. It would change each sometimes not by much, at other times huge differences. Every now and then a flare would go up illuminating the whole area before fading leaving it darker then it was before until your eye readjust.
Missions would consist of repelling German attacks (sometimes fighting in the trenches), assisting artillery and mortars, sniping the German lines, scouting no man's land, ambushing patrols in no man's land, retrieving wounded and dead, and off course attacking the enemie's line.
You wouldn't go over the top often in an all out assault, but you'd dread every time, sometimes you'd be successful and hold a trench, until your relieved or ordered to pull out, but inevitably you'd lose it, and often you'd get wounded/die. When you got killed in game, you'd later wake up in hospital being told you'd been bravely rescued or dragged back. If this happened too many times the game would end with you being sent home crippled or actually dieing and you'd have reload a save or checkpoint.
After every "big show" npcs you'd gotten to know might be crippled/dead, this would be random and depend on what happened in the fight. You might hate certain officers and almost be happy when they bought the farm or change your opinion about them when they do something amazingly heroic. A NPC you like might make you think of doing something risky in the hope of saving them. A wounded NPC might right you letters from hospital or from home if they are crippled.
As the war progressed the nature of combat would adapt, you'd eventually have plane and tank support.
Weapon wise you'd be able to carry three type of weapon:
Primary:
Simple bolt action rifle (both English and German) and would have the advantage of a bayonet
Scoped bolt action rifle
Lewis Gun (later in the game)
Double barreled shotgun (perhaps as award for side questions)
Pump action shot gun (side quest)
Anti-tank rifle (agains later in game)
BAR rifle (later)
Prototype submachine guns (sidequest + later in game)
Secondary
Webley revolver
Mauser semi-automatic or a Luger(captured from Germans)
Colt 1911 (later in war)
Melee:
Bayonet
Bowie knife (captured from germans)
Cosh (steel rod rapped in leather favoured by English)
Improvised trench clubs
Officer's swords
Sharpened shovels
and more stuff
Your pistol and melee could be used together at times. You could also carry a couple of grenades.
A heavy element of combat would be the melee side, either a brutal scuffle in the confined space of a trench or silent killing in the dark of no man's land. You'd be able to perform melee attack like elbowing and kicking like in condemned also.
The gun play wouldn't necessarily be slow paced, I mean Call of Juarez make even older and slower weapons quite exciting. Players would have to get to trying to be accurate and maintain cover before closing in violently with bayonet or shovel.
I should also mention gas and disease. If pushed though gas would create in game, impassible spots in no man's land and another thing you have to worry about on your lines, you'd have to run get a crude gas mask or something.
Disease, could be mentioned quite often (by medical officers, NCOs etc), but would be harder to implement in the actual play. At most things like trench foot and respiratory infection could be implemented as restrictions to running speed, health etc. But anything worse might have to skip by your character, for the shake of maintaining the story.
I've also been thinking that environment having effects on your clothing could be implemented quite well. You start each day with a pristine (well at least cleaner) seat of clothes, each time you hit the dirt and land in mud, the clothing gets dirty, can get torn when going through wire and bloodstained in combat.
Also another cool idea is once you finish the game, you can play it all over again as Germans, playing all the same areas from a different direction.
SODAssault said:
ultrachicken said:
Call of Juarez and Red Dead Redemption have guns that are that old (or older), they're still fun.RandomWords said:
Big Bag Of Salt said:
You know trench foot isn't WW1 exclusive, people got it in WW2, Korea, The Falklands, Vietnam and recently the 2007 glastonbury festival. It comes from having wet feet and not changing socks. I don't see why we'd have to include that in a WW1 game, we don't have a level in COD where we miss a battle because the player character has contracted syphilis from a prostitute.Jezzascmezza said:
Yeah, I've tried to whole WW1 game thread. Didn't work out well. I dunno, no one wants political difficulties in a game. The Nazis were evil. The Japs were evil... but ooooh the Germans and Austrians weren't really evil, getting a bit too grey for some people!!!
I hate how people think all WW1 comprised of was trench warfare with bolt actions. Gawd, there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be a game... a NEW game, that is, with current gen graphics.
I hate how people think all WW1 comprised of was trench warfare with bolt actions. Gawd, there is absolutely no reason why it shouldn't be a game... a NEW game, that is, with current gen graphics.
Gah, as if we didn't have enough threads on the same shit... What's next, zombies again?
WW1 was mostly trench warfare and there's nothing fun about it. The whole thing with "war of attrition", it's about as fun as laying siege to a castle in real time. After you sit outside for a few weeks, maybe fling a few dead cows inside, you're going to get pretty bored whether you win or lose.
It could make a good strategy game, and I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't one already, but otherwise there are very few redeeming encounters during World war 1 that would make it a good FPS game.
Unless you kind of ignore the entire war and do something totally random.
Generally fixed positions, tons of mud and constant mustard gas attacks sounds like fun. Just not for an FPS game.
WW1 was mostly trench warfare and there's nothing fun about it. The whole thing with "war of attrition", it's about as fun as laying siege to a castle in real time. After you sit outside for a few weeks, maybe fling a few dead cows inside, you're going to get pretty bored whether you win or lose.
It could make a good strategy game, and I'd be pretty amazed if there wasn't one already, but otherwise there are very few redeeming encounters during World war 1 that would make it a good FPS game.
Unless you kind of ignore the entire war and do something totally random.
Generally fixed positions, tons of mud and constant mustard gas attacks sounds like fun. Just not for an FPS game.
That's kind of, uh, because most of World War 1 consisted of trench warfare with bolt actions? Sure, there were other moments, but ignoring the fact that like most of the war happened exactly in trenches would be like making a world war 2 game without nazis.Digi7 said:
You are a derp.ultrachicken said:
Various semi-auto pistols & rifles and a few machine guns were used in World War I. A few examples: the Maxim/ Lewis/ Vickers gun, the M1918, the Luger and more. Get your facts straight.
Note that when I played World At War. I'm one of those annoying twerps who hunts around with an unscoped mosin-nagant, cause it feels more like trying. Rather than the lead rain storm of running around with an MP40. There has never been more gameplay satifaction than firing 200 feet into the back of a sneaky little bastards head as he runs ALMOST around a corner, that turning said corner and then emptying 8 pounds worth of bullets into him, the wall, the house next door will never accomplish. I just LIKE bolt action. So the idea of a game set in an almost strictly bolt action era appeals to me.
Besides. its nice to hear the machine gun users froth at the mouth when my one bullet makes them eat shit.
Besides. its nice to hear the machine gun users froth at the mouth when my one bullet makes them eat shit.
because WWI isnt the war when EMERICA became heroes and nearly all of the war shooters come from the USA
Becuase I wouldn't want to play a game were I sit in a trench for 36 hours watching my foot rot then die after being gassed or running right into a machine gun and firing line, the reason a WWI game would suck is because the tactics used were retarded.
Lies! Machine guns existed then and even before WWI. There were repeater rifles as well, which are technically semiauto (at least to me).ultrachicken said:
But on the topic, flying shooters are where WWI excels, there have been some good ones and I think that if dedicated effort were made with todays tech, it could be something extremely cool.
There has been a game on WWI and the american civil war but both were so bad they just got swept under the rug.