Following on Beo’s thread regarding gaming frustrations, I thought it would interesting if we pool our collective experience, sit down as a dev team and design the worst game ever.
It has to at least be a cohesive idea (well….“cohesive”) , as in it could actually exist as a product, but genres can cross, it doesn’t matter what the scenario/mission type/mechanic/publisher shenanigans are it will be shoe horned in there somehow.
Current key features:
Large “open world”
In depth tutorial
“Mounts” and “exploration”
No microtransactions*
Intricate crafting
Realistic animal care
Intricate inventory system
Eclectic soundtrack
Vibrant ingame economy
So I’m thinking always online linear open world game - I mean linear open world “experience” – possibly a combination of sci fi and dark fantasy with some tower defense, base building, crafting and survival elements.
Thinking of starting with something enjoyable to immediately engage the player so an underwater escort mission with a timer seems the best.
There has to be a racing / driving element in there somewhere with terrible vehicle (or mount?) physics and controls. It will make traversing the unnecessarily large world all the more… unenjoyable.
It has to be called WOAT as in “Worst Of All Time”. And the very first release has to be called the “Game of the Year Early Access Ultimate Deluxe Edition” but contain absolutely nothing else other than the (very) base game.
It could be kind of funny if the player character or NPC’s makes fun of other games with bad mechanics and then find out that their game has the same mechanics.
Though on second thought, unfortunately then it wouldn’t be the worst game ever, because it would be better than Nuke Nukem Forever, who made fun of other games with bad mechanics while using the same mechanics unironically.
Max stamina system that lowers over time, and the only way to fix it is to either use micro transactions or to rest at specific places that you can’t fast travel to. and in the same line, no fast travel or “taxi” service, you have to go everywhere manually, and there is no button for auto-walk
The game fades from black, a person in a cart looks you in the eye and says: “So, you’re finally awake”. A slew of other dated gaming references stream from the Unity Store bought NPC, before he dabs and flies away.
The game starts, you have a first and third person view, you have a mini map and a compass at the top that’s littered with hundreds of icons for points of interest on the absolutely massive open world map. But the map only consists of fern trees, green grass.
You start walking, at the speed of an old man with arthritis and a broken leg, you have a sprint button, but it is unmappable and mapped to the F11 key. In fact, no keys are mappable. The first person view is only set to 65 FOV and cannot be changed. But at least the sprint is fast…maybe too fast. So fast that texture poppin appears constantly.
You are only allowed to walk on the paths on the map, there are invisible walls all around to ensure you keep on the path. You get to a procedurally generated building with multiple empty rooms of the same textures. Nothing can be picked up, but each door must be opened by holding the use button for 10 seconds. You have at least 6 doors to open before you get into the final room, where you get your first fetch quest.
All the quests are fetch quests. Each gives you only 10 XP and you need 500XP to level up. To make things faster, you can but packs of 50XP boosts for R29.99 per pack. It also includes a different colour clothing piece, and is the only place to buy new clothes.
I thought of this but maybe we could have a mechanic where you have to click on the item and right click to open a drop down menu where the words pick up occur right at the bottom.
I was going to go for a turret sequence but hey. Game developing is a team effort.
I mean mine is just a first draft, and many changes can be made! I was also thinking about adding a menu that makes no sense, where you have to go into Menu > Person > Items > Inventory before you can access your inventory. But you have to do this every time you start a fetch quest as your inventory is too small to have all your items.
Don’t forget the “Always Online” requirement and be sure to under provide servers to handle the logins. When the login fails give it some snazzy sounding error notice like: “Error 37”
Thats a great idea. We could also maybe flesh out the menu into more inventory options.
i.e. Menu>Character>Current Character>Inventory>Items>Usable Items>Consumables> etc (each will take roughly a second to load in as they splash across the screen)
Also armor pieces and weapons aren’t color graded and the new stats will not appear. You would need to go into another menu
Menu>Character>Current Character>Inventory>Equipable items>Usable Equipment>Weapons>New> and then read the new stats.
This the only thing I’d change - 50XP per pack is too easy and rounded. Sell XP Boost packs containing an odd amount of XP - like 47XP. And make the 500XP to level up some weird arse number too - 523XP or something.
Even better is to have our own premium in-game currency, but it is not linked to any real currency. And no matter what you buy you will have change left. And you cannot convert back to any real currency.
270 gamebucks cost you $8.99
DLC item costs 280 gamebucks
Every door you open has a loading screen and when you open up your inventory it minimizes the game and opens up a menu that looks looks like you are editing in windows registry, the only way to close it and get back to the game is to manually close every sub directory you just went into
