The game I want to play isn’t created yet. But if someone were to give me the Magic Wand Of Game Creation(TM) with the understanding I couldn’t warp technology (in other words, I’d be stuck with pretty much what we have now), this is what I’d be waving that wand for:

Serenity Online

1. The setting would be the Firefly/Serenity universe. It’s a quite brilliant and robust verse (albeit completely scientifically unrealistic, I know, I know). The existing storyline would do quite nicely, and it could be quite a large setting with lots of flexibility. Instead of having different “servers” the game would exist in one lone universe. Not everyone would start out in the same area, or course. Depending on your character creation, you’d wind up one of any number of planets or moons. You could – in theory – travel to anywhere in the verse. But travel is expensive and difficult – you don’t just jump through a warp gate. Not to mention dangerous – sure, you can get to Miranda. If you don’t mind a few thousand Reavers in your way…

2. Character creation would be stolen from Star Wars and City of Heroes. Still the most customizable MOG characters out there. And yes, as opposed to every single MOG out there (apart from SWG), you can be fat. Yaaay! For your “background,” you’d have a number of options – anything from a rancher to miner to Purple-Belly (Alliance soldier). Each would present you with the potential for any number of skills and abilities. Your stats would be yours to control, however: going old-school, we’d allow the min-maxing that was a core part of the Asheron’s Call universe. Because having a 10 strength is everyone’s right!

3. Graphics would be a mix: take everything from Anarchy Online for everything outside of the ship, and (obviously) EVE Online for the ships/space.

4. On planets, combat would appropriately enough be lifted straight from Planetside: it’s FPS, fast and furious. Ship to ship will be run off of the Jumpgate engine – piloting will be more than point-and-click! The "near-Newtonian physics model" that makes JG such a great game will very much be used. (Except for docking. I wouldn’t mind that being automated.)

5. Crafting would follow the lead of the quite brilliant Puzzle Pirates: anything you do will be done with mini-games. If you’re going to spend a few hours standing around brewing up an ale, it will at least be mildly amusing. And the better you do at the mini-game, obviously, the better your item will turn out.

6. Homesteading would be an original creation, but would borrow from a number of sources. Dark Age of Camelot was one of the first games to provide decent "home-owning" abilities, and would serve as an example here. However, growing beyond a simple "place to stash your stuff," you’d have the option to "hire" NPC workers. Using something along the lines of the awesome quest engine in Ryzom Ring, you could set up your workers to behave in certain ways and account for various situations. And having a homestead would provide you with heirs – provided you earned enough to afford to feed their hungry mouths.

7. PvP would be there. Of COURSE it would be there! The "starting" areas would all be relatively safe places, however. Strong Alliance presence prevents any sort of serious PvP combat in most of the larger cities, as well. Once you move to the outer planets and moons, all bets are off. And if you’re fool enough to go against Reavers…

8. Permadeath. Yup. If your character is killed in an area without nearby medical facilities (deep space, distant outposts) or you’re gorram fool enough to fall prey to Reavers, you can look forward to your character permanently journeying to the black.

9. Inheritance is the process of passing on most of your belongings to your heir (see Homesteading above). When your character suffers Permadeath, whatever assets they have banked can be passed on to an heir. Obviously, if your ship comes against Reavers, there’s not going to be much left to send them. But if you fall on a dangerous outpost that’s still within Unification territory, there might be a slim chance one of your more valuable possessions makes it back to your kinfolk intact.

10. Missions (Quests) would borrow from a number of sources. At the most basic level, you’d have simple fetch and kill missions available from any number of NPCs. Working your way up the verse, you’d have access to mission terminals, a la AO, that would allow you to chose some more difficult (and more rewarding) missions. Also, as you begin making a reputation for yourself, you’ll be able to accept much more complex (again, and more rewarding) missions involving interplanetary travel from NPCs.

11. Ratings would be earned by completing missions for (or against) various factions: Alliance, Ranchers, Companions, Miners, Agriworkers, Mudders, Smugglers, Tong – you name it, there’s a faction for it. Your rating affects your standing and interactions with various factions. Some get you lower prices at vendors, some open doors to better equipment, some… ask politely but very firmly for you to complete a mission for them.

That’s the overview. Now let’s go a tiny bit more in detail:

The ‘Verse and Getting About

The known universe of Serenity, if Malcolm is to be believed, is over 70 earth-like planets and moons. The opening of Serenity tells us there are "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons." Needless to say, this would provide any number of settings. Even going by the planets actually used in the shows and movie, there are plenty of settings to chose from. Different planets would have different laws, as you start inner-system and move outwards. In the core planets, the starter areas, laws are strictly enforced and there is no PvP. Players with negative Alliance ratings find it almost impossible to enter the system – the skies teem with Alliance patrols and you won’t be able to book a passage on any ship sailing into the inner-systems.

Inner systems don’t allow ships manual landings; all trafficking is done through approved landing ports with automated guidance. If you happen to run into trouble on the planet, you might find your launch access revoked until you clear things up, as well. For the very influential, you might earn access to private ports where customs aren’t quite so strict.

As you move away from the inner systems, you begin having to handle the landings yourself. Landing might not be a big deal to a seasoned veteran, but it will require practice for new pilots. Especially if the primary buffer panel falls off your ship…

When you start in the game, you’ll likely not have a lot of money. Scraping and saving and working with some friends, and you’ll be able to buy yourself a Firefly-class transport (maybe even an ’03, with the extenders). There are a variety of other ships available, however; as you gain more money and ratings, you’ll find more available to you. Eventually, you might even find it feasible to begin hiring other crews for your fleet and running an entire corporation (just don’t get so big Blue Sun notices you, or you might find yourself facing stiff competition – and by that, I mean death).

The smaller ships will only require a lone pilot and a mechanic. As ships get bigger, you’ll start needing the services of a navigator, possibly a crew of mechanics, and even some gunnery officers. Some of the outer territories are downright unfriendly, so a big fat freighter might make a tasty target for thems that profit by unseemly mannerisms! Better have a large crew standing by your side when things get hairy.

Service for the Alliance might find you as a simple shuttle pilot; but demonstrate aptitude, and you’re liable to progress up the ranks to a fighter pilot and possibly even crew a corvette. At the top end of the ship scale, massive transports will be available for moving terra-forming factories and entire city’s worth of settlers; you can bet these will require enormous crews, and a heavy fighter escort.

Traveling around a planet isn’t that expensive. You can usually run a few simple missions to earn the money to travel to another city. Each planet is going to have a variety of areas to it, providing access to a number of missions. Your character creation will dictate which system you’re born into, and that system will have an established "specialty" focusing on a set of skills and talents that you can further in the system.

Character Creation

In this next section, I use "planets" because I didn’t feel like typing "planet or moon" every time. So nyah.

Avatars will have a huge amount of flexibility to them. You can design your look, body type, facial features and your outfit. These can be changed, too – you’ll be able to create your own outfits or purchase new ones later on in the game, and a good plastic surgeon can take care of that big nose (or re-attach your ear) for you.

You pick your stats – your background will give you bonuses to them, but you can set your basic ones from a pool of creation points.

STRength: How well you can lift things. Gives bonuses (or penalties) to your hand-to-hand combat.
AGIlity: How well you aim a pistol or maneuver a fine tool.
CONstitution: Are you strong like ox? This is your hit points equivalent, as well as how you do resisting narcotic lipstick.
INTelligence: How many skills can you master? Do you remember the marriage customs of Triumph?
ALeRTness: How quick you react, and how quickly you detect a Reaver ship entering atmo.

You’ll chose a background – what sort of planet were you born on?

Agricultural planets will give you a good background as a mechanic – gorram robotic manure spreaders ALWAYS breaking down, and ain’t no way your family’s affording to have some know-nothing serviceman come to the homestead to fix it! Take it apart and see if you can figure out the problem…

Mining planets give you a good background as a crafter – after chipping soft silver from a narrow band while being suspended with a hand cable upside down, creating a finely balanced throwing knife is a piece of cake. You have an innate ability to work with your hands on fine details, and know several hundred-ingredient recipes from memory with no problem.

Ranching planets give you good background as a bruiser. There’s not much to caring for cattle that don’t involve sweat, dirt and pain. And when civilization left Earth That Was behind, they managed to bring rustlers with them, so you’ve had plenty of scraps to hone your pistol skills. Spending your free-time at the local saloon seems to improved your right hook as well.

Core planets give you a good background as a medic. With all that money at your fingertips, medical school just seemed like the place to go. As time went on and school came as easy to you as everything else in your world did, you grew restless and decided to set out to explore a bit of the world before resigning yourself to working at your father’s practice.

There are a number of other skills that can be learned at different planets, of course. The nearer to the Core you start, the more resources (money and training) you start with; but the fewer bonuses you get to your stats and backgrounds. After all, being born rich means everything’s spoon-fed to you – you never had to work a day in your life!

Graphics

Anarchy Online may not have the most cutting-edge graphics around, but the universe isn’t always the prettiest place. AO features a number of the settings, outfits and weapons you’re likely to see in game. If anything, you’d probably have to dial the "tech level" of AO back a bit. In space, nothing beats EVE. Gorgeous. But point and click flying is boring. If you want to fly like a leaf on the wind, you need a joystick in your hand and to jig your throttle as you try and keep out of range of that electro-magnetic grappler.

Combat

Planetside proved that FPS works for MOGs. Planetside runs pretty good even on (now) older machines; Serenity Online isn’t a massive-scale combat game, so it should work fine for the shoot-outs you find yourself in. Combat should be a little more dangerous – healing damage shouldn’t be as simple as zapping someone with a healing wand. You can slap a quick shot of adrenaline on someone, and they can limp their way to replacing a catalyst, but any serious injuries require some downtime as you treat them. You don’t have to sit in cantinas for hours at a time healing (we don’t want to be THAT boring), but you’ll have to sit still, and your medic will have to attend to you. Trauma Center: Under the Knife, anyone?

Ship to ship combat is a whole ‘nother level. Most ships don’t have armaments, for starters. Your average freighter survives by running, not standing and fighting. A good pilot will see bad guys on the radar and be running away from them before they even register a single ping. But when you get to bigger ships, maneuvering isn’t going to cut it. The bigger the ship, the less like a leaf on the wind and more like a fat guy on roller skates. But this is why you’ll have gunners on board; they’ll knock those pesky raiders off your trail. And even the horniest (and hungriest) Reaver will think twice about approaching a dreadnaught-class freighter with a full fighter wing escort.

Well, okay, they won’t – but you’ll have fun blowing them out of the sky!

Crafting

Standing in a corner mushing a button over and over is BORING AS HELL. That’s not crafting, that’s mashing potatoes. Crafting will have a number of mini-games. Every skill in the verse will have a mini-game in place for you to use that skill. Puzzle Pirates made crafting a fun and entertaining process – you’re not chatting while you mash a button, you’re playing a game (and chatting, of course). And the better you do at that game, the higher quality item you turn out.

You can "hire" your own vendors and eventually even set up your own store (or chain!), so you’ll always have an outlet for your wares, too. When you create important equipment (heaters and generators, for example), you’ll be able to sell them at a premium to the outer worlds. Of course, transporting your goods there will require you to hire a dependable crew…

And putting things up for auction is always an option – provided you cut the Alliance in on their share, of course.

Homesteading

Eventually you’ll have saved up enough that you’ll want to start a family. You’ll buy a farm or mine or storefront (or mansion!) of your own and populate it with NPCs. Taking cues from the Ryzom Ring technology, you can set up any number of behaviors for your staff. From simple things like farming or mining, to their behavior when a hostile is detected: do they immediately attack them? Do they run and ring the bell, summoning all the hired hands to drive off the enemy? Or do they sound an alarm and retreat into the homestead and take up defensive positions? Maybe they’ll even send off a desperate plea for help – are you close enough to them to get there in time to make a difference? Do you need to hire a nearby crew to go in there and drive the claim-jumpers off?

Besides a source of income, a homestead represents another important resource: heirs. While you’re out conquering the wild frontier, your heirs will be home learning the family skills. If (Buddha forbid!) harm should befall you and you don’t come home, your heir can step up and take your place.

PvP

Most areas in the inner planets simply are off-limits to PvP. You can engage in duels, of course (honor must be maintained!) and there’s always a chance for a barfight to break out (but draw a weapon and you’re going to find out how many of the bar "regulars" are undercover Alliance peacekeepers).

Moving outwards towards the rim, and the rules become more relaxed. You might get away with jumping another crew if Alliance is nowhere to be seen. Of course, they might just sidle up as you’re off-loading your victim’s goods, and then you’ll have a whole lot of explaining to do. Even worse, some of the systems still have monitoring drones, so even if you get away with your uncivilized behavior, you could be bound by law the next time you come within spitting distance of an Alliance vessel or settlement. And you think gossip travels fast? Just wait till you try and offload your ill-gotten gains and the wave’s already reached all your hidey holes to be on the lookout for a ship matching yours trying to pass Alliance-stamped goods.

Piss off the Alliance enough? They won’t wait for the Reavers to get you. They’ll dispatch someone that’ll sidle right up next to you, and… Well, you have an heir, right?

Permadeath

The absolute worst has befallen you. You got yourself caught in a big ol’ electromagnetic net and the rutting scoundrels opened your airlocks and sent you drifting into the Black. If you die in an area removed from any Alliance outposts or patrols (there’s always a chance of an Alliance patrol finding you – it’s just that the further out you go, the slighter the chance), you die the permadeath. There’s a small chance that the most valuable item in your possession gets returned to your heir (and, failing that, the least valuable – but it’s an heirloom! ROLEPLAY, DAMMIT!).

Your character becomes a portrait on the wall in your homestead, and you take on the avatar of your eldest heir. If you died the permadeath without an heir? Sucks to be you, noob! Have fun rerolling (yup, go ahead and start flaming the forums now!).

Inheritance

Inheritance allows you to bank money. Any money stored in the bank will transfer to your heir upon your permadeath. Why not leave ALL your money in the bank? Well, you can’t always access bank accounts in the outer planets. They don’t take traveler’s checks out there, either. Good hard currency (or gems) is the only currency they accept, so if you’re looking to do business in the outer worlds, you better bring a fat stack. And some friends to keep it safe.

One nice thing about having heirs is that you can also take a very active role in their background. By hiring specific tutors, you can set up your heirs to have much better starting resources and skills than you had. It’s expensive, but aren’t your children worth it?

Missions

Missions are simple in the beginning. An NPC will have a nice glowing symbol around them, indicating they need help. Begin a dialogue with them, and they’ll tell you what they need you to do – drive off an ornery varmint, fix a broken piece of equipment, or track down a missing child, as an example. You might also get "random encounter" missions – you could be walking down the street, minding your own business when some rascal comes running out of the bank with people shouting after him! Do you tackle him in the street? You might find yourself a town hero with a nice reward from the bank owner!

Of course, you also might find out that most bank robbers carry guns, and they don’t take kindly to being tackled.

As you progress and begin earning ratings from various factions you’ll be given access to specific NPCs that will give you trickier missions – missions that might require you to travel a bit or risk life and limb. Maybe even help crew a ship for some inter-planetary travel. But the reward is better, and you’re able to afford some good training. You can finally get those pilot lessons you’ve been after! Some of these missions might require the help of friends. As you work together, you might find them an amiable bunch and pool your money towards getting a ship of your own. Of course you might find yourself sharing a bunk with the smelly one, too, but there you go.

Get your own ship (or become part of a crew with one) and you’ll find access to mission terminals. These can be NPC missions of various difficulty (and legality), but they can also be missions from other players – lots of homesteads need supplies, and don’t have time to get it themselves. Or maybe a nearby homestead is under attack and needs some defending? Maybe you’ll even take on some passengers for a friendly three-hour tour…

Ratings

Each NPC mission (and some PC missions) carries a faction rating. From the guilds to the Alliance, they all need missions run, and they all take kindly to folks that help them out. Even another player with a high faction rating earns you some faction points when you help them. Of course the Mine Owners Guild won’t want to hire someone that’s thought of well by the Miners Guild, so you’ll have to do some thinking about who you want to work for. And if you take enough of the "shadier" missions, the Alliance will start to take notice of you. Not in a good way, either.

Ratings work in other ways, too. Every settlement you go to has a number of factions there (although some, like mining towns, might only have a couple). The townsfolk are all members of various factions, and how they react to you will very much depend on how well rated you are in their respective factions. Prices will rise and fall with your rating, so you’ll be wise to pay attention to who you’re working for and what parts of town they control.

Minutiae

Character progression consists mostly of skill advancement. Your stats change very little. You might see an extra point of AGI or STR as you train various skills, but your progression will be marked by advancement in skills and reputation. And money, of course. As you earn more, you’ll be able to afford better things – you can finally get that silk trigger active return bolt laser you’ve been eyeing up.

Granted, you might want to spend some of that hard-earned cash on training so you don’t fry off your leg the first time you try and holster it, of course.

The commodities market would be modeled after EVE’s excellent functionality; trading stocks could be a very prosperous career for someone with the resources. Of course, if you’ve got the money, why not make a little extra by hiring a crew to knock out that shipment of your competitor’s supplies?

Voice chat would be embedded in the game. You can chat with crew, person-to-person face-to-face, or send a wave to someone in game – provided you’re both near communication facilities.

Game staff would be flying around as Alliance patrols. And they’d harass players. After all, that’s what governments are there for, get in a man’s way.

Professions like farming and mining exist, of course. They are mini-games that produce raw materials that can be sold to NPCs or other players. They can also be stolen, so make sure you get some good guards!

Final Thoughts

Absolutely nothing I’ve written here is original. 4,000 words, and not an original though amongst them. How depressing is THAT?

Still, no game has all these components in one setting – especially not a Serenity setting. I’m sure there’s all sorts of hurdles involved (starting with the license!), and I’m not even going to attempt to pass this off as any sort of serious proposal or anything. Like I said, it’s the game _I_ want to play. You don’t? Fine, I didn’t want stupid you in my game, anyway!

Seriously, though, feel free to comment, criticize and mock as much as you’d like. I’m not a game designer of any sort. I just wanted to try and logically structure existing ideas into a game that I would spend hours upon hours in – and if the mini-games are good enough, I’d even have Kwipette crafting for me!

If you made it this far, well… Go get an aspirin or two. Then feel free to comment!

As always, thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Button-Mashing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.