Da Bears

After getting all drunk and blabbering about game stuff for a while, Ex-bouncer threw down this game design thingie about "with all this monster fighting football team garbage, why not just have a massively multiplayer online football game, where every guy on the field is a player."

Usually I can pretty easily convert everything he says into something that improves a D&D-like game design, but that one has me stumped, 'cause I can't think of way to incorporate everything that would be awesome about a massively multiplayer online football game into a D&D-like thingie without either diluting it somehow or missing a few pieces entirely.

Not yet, anyway, but the gears in my brain are still going at it heh.

The problem is that a MMO football game is sorta like a shark, its really hard to improve on it in any way, so it doesn't need to evolve.

I mean, on one level, its sorta like chess, its sorta simple and complex at the same time, pretty much everybody knows the rules (especially guys like me and Ex-b who actually played football in high school heh) but at the same time there's a million variables involved (and there's a lot of different ways to do it that could be really interesting when you start thinking about "player advancement" and the potential for "player fame" and mebbe a side game where you were trying to win "endorsements" with your character, and how "guilds" could be "football franchises" and stuff like that).

And it has monstrous amounts of replayability, really, when you think about how much time we put into Nintendo Hockey and Madden and all the other ones over all the years, y'know?

Its even got a built-in season-by-season plot-thickening sorta historical evolutionary system to it, where players determine the "history" of the game world (not to mention the fantasy football bits to it where you might incorporate stats from actual football players in the real world, because maybe you want it to just be based on computer game player stats, or maybe you want a PvE type system where you play against NPCs sometimes, I dunno, there's a lot of variations to the same idea you could do).

Its also got that "gamer as an athelete" thingie to it, and the potential for folks to be famous but not in an annoying way where they hog up some of our fun or something 'cause we're all used to playing on the Bad News Bears, man, y'know, that doesn't really kill our fun heh.

Well, those of us that actually play games in real life are like that, I dunno if totally antisocial evil supergeniuses are all that great at losing ahaha.

And that endorsement thingie is kinda interesting when you think about the CoH thingie with in-game advertisements.

And even though most of us probably wouldn't want to watch somebody else play, there's a couple mechanical things I've already mentioned that might make it matter to you whether or not somebody else lost or won, and what kinda tactics they used to do it if you are gonna have to play against them, at least.

And football is really a high-level combat simulation, its a shield wall and flanking manuevers with high-speed cavalry and stuff, when you really think about it.

I think that's why this football game thingie is really bugging me, our low-level simulations suck (well, for the most part) and they ain't really low-level at all, like, Knights used to have endorsements (from Ladies and Kings) and all that shit too heh.

Hmmph.