Reality Askew

On the way to work I’ve been listening to the Audible version of a book by Michael Crichton called Timeline.  It’s about a bunch of archaeology nerds who travel back in time (over simplified for this post) and see the place where they are researching but as it was back in the 1400’s.  Of course this got me to thinking, wouldn’t it be amazing to have a first person game like DayZ or Rust but with castle building, siege engines, flaming arrows and the whole works.  I would want it to be very detailed with accurate depictions of actual building materials and good flight dynamics for projectile type weapons.  My clearest example of this in my mind would be having an opposing group of players outside my castle with fire arrows and having them land in my castle setting wooden structures on fire.  Imagine building a mammoth trebuchet to hurl giant boulders toward an enemy fortress and watching rocks and debris fly off into the air.  Or getting a group of your bandit cohorts together to man a battering ram to drive down the enemy gate.

Maybe as the  game progressed you could even have a whole health component that would react to a diseased animal being thrown into your midst and causing a minor plague of sorts.  On that note I think it would be important and maybe educational for players to only have medicines and healing techniques that were actually available during the time period.  (leeches? nice!)

Of course for me the castle building itself would be the most fun especially if you could build secret passages/tunnels, take advantage of features in nature (think draw bridge across a ravine) and actually have to mine the stone from a local quarry.

Now you could of course make it so one person could carry large loads (ox and cart?) but the true fun might come from forming an alliance with a whole group of people to build a much larger fortification/castle. You would even likely want to setup a simple form of government to rule your new kingdom of friends and knaves. :)

All in all I think this game would be a huge success and I could imagine the game would have great longevity just due to the vast number of great features that could be added over the course of many years.

If you “borrow” this idea please be a sport and at least give me a beta slot. :)

Update:  Well as luck would have it a company is working on just such a game and it has great potential.  Give it a look at http://lifeisfeudal.com/

I would love to see someone create co-op games for smartphones.  Imagine sitting around and playing as one of the door gunners on a B17 type game together with friends.  Heck each of the positions on the bomber (gunner, bomber, pilot) could be either a human or computer and folks could join or leave at random.  How about a space simulator where each person performed a key role, like weapons, propulsion, engineering, etc?  That would be a very fun experience indeed.

This would probably only be possible on a lan given the latency issues with wan networks, especially cellular.