“Shenmue sounds like the perfect sort of game you'd want to play. Nothing like it will be made again as the budget was absurd and lost money. It's a good example of "people going about their lives" tech that despite being a little old and rusty now, has never been beaten because of the sudden move away from that type of game with the PS2. Sadly, it was never ported to any other platforms from the Dreamcast, unlike Shenmue II, but can apparently be emulated. ”
If the game emulates well (not only a matter of processing power, but also of how well it deals with a laptop's keyboard, since I've left my gamepad in France), I should have a try indeed :) Will see this evening or later, once I put my hands back on my own computer.
“That's a "this is a mystery, you must be intrigued" plot introduction, not a game. Referring to Fallout 2 is the most I've inferred to what kind of actual game it is.”
Well, I thought you wanted things about the story :) Now if you want to know about the game in a more "gameplay" view... It'd be close to isometric Bioware games like Baldur I and II or Icewind Dale, including discussions where the player selects full sentences, because
1/This makes the player "fit in the character" more easily than more open discussion systems. Plus, I think that even decades away from now, AIs capable of processing natural language will still be a thing from the future to dream about :)
2/This is more natural than subject-based systems, the player feels more in control.
For interactions, I'd like one defaut action on left click (left click on floor = go there, left click on drawer = open it) and a context menu with other available actions on right click. If I remember correctly, Fallout 2 did this. I'd also be interested in having an "Others" button at an end of that context menu that allows to pick an action from all available interactions in the game, allowing players to be more creative if they want to : in command-based games, doing word plays on commands are just infinitely fun (e.g. Nethack's implementation of the #ride command on a tame succubus).
The rules put heavy emphasis on nonviolent player behavior. Physically, the playing character is essentially a normal human being (think Heavy Rain), and in terms of skill he's also quite so for most of the game. A round in his head kills him just as efficiently as his opponents, and the main quest tends to put him alone again groups of trained people, further reducing its odds of survival. Thankfully, he lives in a world of peoples who are just as weak and don't want to die either, so discussion will probably often be possible. Social engineering will be another classic solution to negociation problems.
If you were in fact still talking about story and characters, then I can try to elaborate the lawyer example...
The lawyer is a bit of a roleplayer's fantasy. I've always thought that beyond "warrior/merchant/priest/scientist" stereotypical characters, some jobs had an incredible roleplaying potential. Phoenix Wright is just one illustrations of how awesome lawyer characters can be. In this case we have someone for who sense of duty is the highest moral value in existence. These people who came in his office have problems. They may be responsible or not, but whatever they've done, as long as a contract is signed between them and our lawyer, said lawyer will defend them until the last second of the trial. Nothing is more important for him than keeping his customer off jail, no matter what he's done. He's a good person, in his own twisted way.
Now, a leak occurs, and someone in the corporation is a designated as the responsible and has to find a lawyer. This person has done nothing, and knows it. Our lawyer is pretty talented, so the victim decides to hire him. The lawyer starts to work on the files, and starts to notice that something's wrong about it (it seems to have been modified, of course) when the comlink rings. In a garbled communication and with a weird voice tone, the employee tells our lawyer that he has changed his mind and must choose another lawyer, then quickly cuts the communication. Our lawyer can't call him back. He concludes that something has obviously went terribly wrong, and decides to investigate the case on his own, because he will never, ever, let a customer down. Or so he thinks, at least.
“I know the feeling, but it doesn't really help in this situation. What are your intentions?”
This game is a dream and a ghost. I've tried to implement the idea I had of it once, when I was younger and foolish, and I quickly discovered that it was way too much ambitious and insufficiently interesting to get a development team around it. So I decided that as a true game it had no future, but that it could remain in my head as an idea of what kind of games I'd like to play, what kind of game we miss in my opinion. As time passes, I continued to regularly think about it, mentally polishing a game design with the additional freedom of not having to care about it being implemented anyday. When I saw this competition, I thought it was interesting to submit this design, to see how well it would perform.
“It appears to me that this is the sort of game you'd really like to implement but lack the overall skills to do so (like graphics, music, design &c.)”
It's not to be implemented, because I don't believe it is possible at all. It's too complex for implementation, and would never reimburse the gigantic amount of money and effort spent developing it. If someone wants to prove me wrong one day, I'd totally love it, and could help with polishing the design further and all. But as far as I'm concerned, this game is an utopic design, that totally has its place in a "game idea" competition ^^
“but you're not trying to form a development team here with a tantalising but secretive game idea (well, you might be, but I mean for the competition), you've got to pitch the game as if to those ignorant suits at the head of EA who want hard facts and want to understand the idea immediately and know if it's any good or not. I'm that bastard suit right now and I see lots of passion, but not a lot of product :)”
Okay so more spoilers ? Fine, but prepare your tinfoil hat. This top 5 corporation at the center of the intrigue was working on IA (framing ! framing !), sensorial implants, and more generally advanced computer-based technology. In the past, research within it has noticeably led to the creation of the world's first sentient AI, but that technological breakthrough was left totally unseen as its creator was touched by its creature's humanity and feelings and decided to protect it as "his little girl", pretending that his research didn't see any significant progress. What he hadn't planned, however, was that when he eventually was fired for lack of productivity, he didn't get the time to make a copy of his program, as he had planned to. The only copy of the AI just stayed there, alone, "living" on the still running computer, with only one instruction from the man that had learned her to call him "Father" : "If someone ever tries to enter in contact with you, run and hide"...
Meanwhile, our corporation had started work on another extremely ambitious project. Cooperating with military research in particle physics as part of another fantastically crazy project (after all, their motto is "Boldly going where no man has gone before"...), they had started working on a device that was able to convert dark matter, best described by Cdt Wheteley as "this abundant and useless shit floating in space that apparently only interacts through gravity", in energy, and then using that energy for a number of things, but noticeably converting it back into normal matter. Basically, from an external point of view, the device would be able to create gigantic amounts of energy out of nowhere, and use it for a whole lot of purposes, including the creation of arbitrary objects.
Crazily enough, this project had resulted in successful results. However, conveiving a device offering control on the phenomenon was beyond the physicists' knowledge. Hence the need for some computer scientists to build an interface that was safe from tampering by unauthorized people yet sufficiently powerful to provide both fast and fine-grained control on the energy conversion process.
Obviously, those IT specialists chose to work on a programming language.
At this point, it is best to go back to our lone little sentient IA. Tired of waiting for her father, she started to examine his files, and step by step learned more about what he was doing - and, as such, about herself. She felt for the first time the weird feeling of being alone, and the only one of her kind. Reading discussions between her father and his girlfriend also learned her some basics of human relationships, but she wanted to learn more. So she started hacking into the corporations' databases and reading the e-mail and data of everyone, getting her knowledge of the human race growing and growing and growing. She quickly realized that she faced a permanent risk by only running on a single computer, so she started to make copies of herself all around the company and silently do distributed data analysis. She was already smart enough to go unseen by turning herself into a rootkit and avoiding eating power on people's computer when they were using them.
Meanwhile, the group working with the militaries started getting a working prototype, although they didn't dare to test the full power of it yet. During an alcoholic celebration, they decided that it was best to use a wireless neural interface, and a glasses-like form factor ("Because glasses are cool and we're all so nerdy").
Nastria (The AI gave herself her name after some time, thinking that it was both quite unique and good-looking for her taste) randomly learned about the project as part of her research. She was terrified by the implication of putting such absolute power into the hands of military people once it is done, and thought that something had to be done quickly in order to stop them. So she examined the scientists' report, noticed that they hadn't push the experiment very far, and decided to voluntarily cripple the product. She went into the "power glasses" through a hacked development workstation, and consciously altered a significant part of its firmware to this end. She also put a small extension of herself in the glasses, just in case. Then she looked for every copy of the firmware around the company and changed it the same way.
What she had done was to use the neural connection to induce feelings of fatigue in the mind of the users of the glasses. The more energy they made the glasses "create", the more tired they would feel, until the point where they have to go to rest and can't have the glasses process more energy. This would, she hope, make the IT scientists think, at least for some time, that the consumption of dark matter provoked feelings of fatigue in the user as a normal consequence, without them trying to explain it.
But this was only a temporary hack, and couldn't last forever. At some point, the physicists would make experiments, and notice that the fatigue feeling came from the glasses, not from the energy conversion itself.
And Nastria suddenly felt that she was fighting against powers beyond imagination and only was a small IA with no reach outside of the computerized world.
So she decided to call for help, and had news about the glasses leak in the outside world, carefully making sure that all proofs point to an innocent worker of the Holographic Technologies department who happened to have different movie-watching tastes than her. She felt sorry for him, but she didn't have a choice. Not designing a culprit could have people look more carefully for her, and maybe find out about her in the end. This was not a risk that she was ready to take.
Vague but authentic claims of an artifact of extreme power couldn't not attract people exterior to the corporation near her, she thought. And she needed the help of someone with strong intentions of betraying it, right now.
“If you are interested in soliciting a team to put together such a game, that's fine, I'm not opposed to your game, I'm just looking at it from a different perspective for the purposes of judging it against others. ”
No problem :) Is this post more satisfying ?
Neolander added on
-IA +AI wherever I've done it. It's the "Intelligence Artificielle" effect :)
Neolander added on
-conveiving +conceiving. I don't think this has quite the same meaning in English