The Dream Game!

This is a relatively short write up I'm making for a contest about your dream game for the Archdruid Community! Hopefully you enjoy it a bit and if you want to participate you can find it here!

I love fantasy games especially the medieval fantasy genre but lately a weird quirk has been invading all the fantasy games/RPG games these past few years, there's nothing that I love more than a rags to riches story where you get to be the underdog and overcome difficult challenges, but lately most games are skipping most of the process entirely, games these days have you start like an average guy and suddenly a few hours into the game you end up being some sort of unbeatable god...

Not all hope is lost thought, earlier this year Kingdom Come Deliverance was released and what a fun time I had playing that game, this game is easily the best single player experience I've had in the past few years, it had an amazing gameplay, amazing story and the combat system was amazing but over all these things, it exemplifies what I truly want in a game, starting as a nobody and staying as a nobody for a good while at least.

Another example of making characters over powered is World of Warcraft, this game has a really especial place in my heart and I've been playing it on and off (more on than off lol) for over 10 years by now, the narrative was simple, you are a small timer looking to go into an adventure and you end up facing difficult enemies and harsh bosses in dungeons and raids and for some you even had to bring 40 people, which makes sense since the enemies are strong and you can't possibly handle them alone, but how do you go from fighting dragons in a relatively old fashion fantasy way to fighting basically gods on a platform in space? You start as a weak adventurer on a horse and you end up traveling on a space ship to fight a god in space, where did the relatively grounded fantasy go? well enough rambling, this is supposed to be about my dream game not what makes existing games not live up to that standard!

The main issue I believe implementing my dream game would have is how the gaming landscape has changed over the years... with the advent of mobile gaming and more and more games becoming round based, get in, play for 20 minutes and get out it becomes harder and harder for developers to require time investment in games, most people these days are seeking instant gratification rather than a realistic, long build up adventure, this is why over the years fast travel has become more and more prevalent in gaming, people don't even want to have to walk in a game anymore, they want no downtime, they want to go from action packed moment to action packed moment and get out ASAP, there's no room anymore for those amazing long mount runs you had to do with your friends in early World of Warcraft history, where you had to travel for over 30 to 40 minutes to a dungeon or a quest zone, for some it was tedious but for some of us that was part of the adventure... Its like gamers these days are running on borrowed time, they don't want to do the journey, they want the destination and they want it now, no time for build up or anything else...

^Source

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The Game

With everything I've mentioned above, I believe I've painted already painted some sort of picture in your mind of what my ideal game would be, It would be an MMORPG, with medieval fantasy, with highly specialized characters that take a long time to build up, thats also a common pit most games have fallen these days regarding character uniqueness, everything has to be streamlined or similar and you have games like Final Fantasy XIV where your characters can do all the professions and all the classes, no specialization at all, your characters is just a copy/paste of everyone else that decides to do everything.

My Dream game would change this, it would have super specialized character professions that take time and resources to advance with huge pay offs at the end, with super rare recipes that would make other players require your services because you are one of the 3 players that have managed to get the recipe drop in the whole server for example and you have taken the time to max your profession and your services would be required by players that have gathered the materials for your craft. A limit here would be 1 gathering profession and 1 material processing profession, like for example mining and blacksmith or herbalism and alchemy, with each profession having super rare and difficult to get recipes that would make you instantly required by people that have not been as lucky as you or worked as hard as you in your profession.

No fast travel at all, the only fast travel you will get is when you die and you get send to the graveyard. If you want to travel long distances you would either have to walk there, use your mount or if you are lazy, pay an NPC to take you there and endure the whole trip, this is basically to not only reward the skill and luck of the players but also the time investment they put into the game, maybe you are traveling to a far edge of the map that takes almost 1 hour to get to and there you can find super rare and expensive materials but since its so far away most people don't go there out of laziness and instead spend their currency buying it from you on the market.

This is more of a economics thing but wouldn't it be awesome if you could use your game currency in real life like they do in the movie Ready Player One? I believe a similar system would be amazing and would put real value behind the time you put into your games and would give your digital items value, I believe this is totally doable thanks to crypto currencies!

Maybe the mining of the crypto currency happens when a player kills a monster you get your money out of a rewards pool similar to how Steem works and you get a certain amount depending on the level of the mob and difficulty of the zone, then the currency can be traded in game for items and things from other players or with NPCs, trading with NPCs would probably be some sort of burn mechanism to maintain supply under control, the math for that is hard but I believe someone out there is capable of doing it!

I would love the story and game world to be as grounded as possible, mainly to prevent players turning into god-killers after leveling up a bit, this would also apply to the game play, even if you out level a creature or player, one shooting is pretty boring but a lot of games lately have manage to create level scaling system to allow players to play with lower level friends at the same speed and not leave them behind, this could be tweaked to apply it to the whole game world, of course as you level up and you get equipment certain foes become easier to defeat but the never to the point where you can one shot them and insta kill a whole area with 1 spell...

I would probably not want factions in my game, I don't want to divide the player base like that, I would prefer some sort of dynamic clan system, where you join some sort of guild i.e an assassins guild or a knights guild and you get access to exclusive things that allow you to specialize your characters even further but at the same time making you enemy of another guild/clan to have some sort of PvP cohesiveness and not just mindless death matches.

If we are on a medieval world, of course we would need some sort of reputation/karma system and depending on your actions against other players and NPCs you are categorized as good or bad and eventually if someone is bad enough players can start putting bounties on them or maybe you where gathering herbs peacefully and someone came and killed you from behind but he's stronger than you and you decide to put a bounty on them just for the pleasure of watching them die... but to have this death be meaningful, the death penalties should be high losing XP is boring but maybe losing gold or having the chance to drop items from your bag when you die would do the trick.

After reviewing this seems like the game would be pretty hardcore and hard to get into, but its supposed to be my dream game lol and thats what i miss from old games, the rewards and good feeling you get after putting hours upon hours of effort into getting things done and thats why these days I gravitate more towards grand strategy games because it takes a while to build up and then you execute your strategy instead of the get in - get out - instant gratification of most games these days... A little bit too much into the hardcore scale but that how i would envision a perfect game and if i didn't mention something, i would probably also lean to the hardcore choice on any other issue, too much quality of life things these days in games!