Poll: Would a "World War" Game be Possible?

[Ossian]

Doesn't WW2 online do this already?

Big 1/3 scale of europe, constant fighting FPS game. Never played it, but I always assumed this had already been done...

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

Doesn't WW2 online do this already?

Big 1/3 scale of europe, constant fighting FPS game. Never played it, but I always assumed this had already been done...

Yeah, heard about it, too.

Still, a bit more mainstream and less in-depth would be something more to my liking. I'm just not very good when it comes to tactics, teamwork and Operation Flashpoint-style gameplay.

 

[Ossian]

Doesn't WW2 online do this already?

Big 1/3 scale of europe, constant fighting FPS game. Never played it, but I always assumed this had already been done...

Yeah, heard about it, too.

Still, a bit more mainstream and less in-depth would be something more to my liking. I'm just not very good when it comes to tactics, teamwork and Operation Flashpoint-style gameplay.

Then... what is the point of having whole countries go to war ingame if no one is playing with tactics and realistic warfare? Then its just "lolzfagz"

No thanks.

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

Then... what is the point of having whole countries go to war ingame if no one is playing with tactics and realistic warfare? Then its just "lolzfagz"

No thanks.

Probably not much, but still.

I'm a big fan of the whole MMO aspect, so if the game would be basically an MMO ARMA, I would've been alright.

And I never outruled tactics. There should be a higher chain of command because that's fun.

Still, my main reasoning is that those sorts of games rarely have really global communities - not enough people.

 

[kebab4you]

The only think I could think off when I read your opening post was balancing issue, maybe divide into continents instead of countries?

 

[Diceman]

So... exactly like real war then? xD

Touché fella, lol. I also forgot to mention the millions of people whining about hacks would make the servers melt.[/quote]
*Sigh* but that's a given with any game unfortunately...

The logistics of such a game would be mind boggling. Possible? Not right now, but maybe someday, and there would be serious issues involving rank, leadership, and such. It's a nice concept, but ultimately would probably fall apart.

Imagine trying to keep the idiotic 12 year olds on XBL regimented and in order. That's what I thought.

Mmm I have considered the problems with ranking etc. Maybe it could start with certain mods and admins as the leaders, and players with decent ratios for their scores can work their way up?
... Maybe an age limit? Nah, that wouldn't work :/

Funny thing is, this is what I thought Battlefield: Vietnam would be when my friend was describing it to me. Then I bought it and was disappointed. Then I played it and was hooked, and now the Battlefield series is my favourite on the PC.

/digression

The game could work. But it would take a big studio to make it. This game would cost a lot of money if it was to be good. It would require a studio to take a huge financial risk, too, as they do with any MMO. And big studios don't necessarily like taking risks when they can play it safe and be guaranteed money, i.e. yearly CoD games (I'm guilty of buying some).

As you said, a world map would be entirely unrealistic. I think it would be a good idea to start in a region, and then release more regions in expansion packs... It would be interesting to see this game. People would have to take on roles, some defending cities. Perhaps eventually they would add some sort of city management, or even civilians.

There are two thoughts of mine on maps.
1. It's a battlefield. Simple as that. You have trenches, you have bunkers, the lot.
2. In a city.

But one of the main things I thought about was "what about the cities in GTA?" They have HUGE cities, loads of building (you can't actually GO into) and plenty of other stuff. But they are huge... Their own landmarks etc.
Expansions would work too.

This whole idea would need to be scaled back - look at Planetside for instance. I would be all for a shooter game with a real world setting that is being fought no matter where you are, no matter what you are doing in the real world. Give me a sizeable map - nothing the size of the actual world or World Of Warcraft of course, but give me something that makes my planes, boats, etc useful and then four/five/six factions.

Like in MAG, I would choose my faction and be tied to that singular one, etc.

Sounds much more do-able and realistic.

Factions would be harder and slightly pointless to implement. You are either at war with someone, or you're not. See above about the maps.

 

[Diceman]

maybe let people join which ever side they want but not alow factions to get so large compared to others.

Well, then we're facing the language barrier in case the factions in the game are nations. Not everyone knows English.

You wouldn't need to know English. If you're French, you go with the French. If you can speak other languages, go with them.

1. Well, yeah. Battlefield 2 respawn tickets.

The only problem is that there would always be jerks who'd just run around comitting suicide and intentionally depleting, so there needs to be some kind of a limit.

2. Well, then where do they get the additional tickets after their country counquered? Balance issues.

3. Well, of course. I never said small as Rust or Shipment or anything.

But there are more than seven billion people in the world, and even they don't inhabit every part.

It would be really wasteful for 1000+ people to be the only ones in a gigantic world.

1. I don't play Battlefield 2, so I don't know what respawn tickets are. Since I said there could be a limit for people dying (total), how about two limits? If *you* die too many times, you're dead dead, and your country continues anyway. That way it's fairer.
2. I don't know.
3. As I've said in the above comment, how about something akin to the (later) GTA maps? They're huge, sprawling and would happily house several thousand.

 

[JourneyThroughHell]

snip

No, I mean "language barrier" if the factions in the game are not nations.

Also, yeah, that's pretty much what I thought of, too.

 

[Diceman]

Doesn't WW2 online do this already?

Big 1/3 scale of europe, constant fighting FPS game. Never played it, but I always assumed this had already been done...

I did not know that existed... Sounds interesting, though I do not trust it just yet

Then... what is the point of having whole countries go to war ingame if no one is playing with tactics and realistic warfare? Then its just "lolzfagz"

No thanks.

Probably not much, but still.

I'm a big fan of the whole MMO aspect, so if the game would be basically an MMO ARMA, I would've been alright.

And I never outruled tactics. There should be a higher chain of command because that's fun.

Still, my main reasoning is that those sorts of games rarely have really global communities - not enough people.

I've been thinking about ranking, leadership and such. You could have mods etc. that give out specific commands to their 'army'. Much like the Medal of Honour multiplayer option where you much capture certain points to win the map. The higher-ups can have a nice 'overview' of the map etc. and give out orders that the men can in turn use to gain advantage.

People could potentially be reprimanded for never actually committing to the objectives and bonuses to those that do.

 

[kebab4you]

maybe let people join which ever side they want but not alow factions to get so large compared to others.

Well, then we're facing the language barrier in case the factions in the game are nations. Not everyone knows English.

You wouldn't need to know English. If you're French, you go with the French. If you can speak other languages, go with them.

1. Well, yeah. Battlefield 2 respawn tickets.

The only problem is that there would always be jerks who'd just run around comitting suicide and intentionally depleting, so there needs to be some kind of a limit.

2. Well, then where do they get the additional tickets after their country counquered? Balance issues.

3. Well, of course. I never said small as Rust or Shipment or anything.

But there are more than seven billion people in the world, and even they don't inhabit every part.

It would be really wasteful for 1000+ people to be the only ones in a gigantic world.

1. I don't play Battlefield 2, so I don't know what respawn tickets are. Since I said there could be a limit for people dying (total), how about two limits? If *you* die too many times, you're dead dead, and your country continues anyway. That way it's fairer.
2. I don't know.
3. As I've said in the above comment, how about something akin to the (later) GTA maps? They're huge, sprawling and would happily house several thousand.

Respawn tickets works in the way as; okey you start off with x amount off tickets, each time anyone on your team dies the number of tickets will go down with; x-1. When the tickets reach 0, you have lost.

 

[Diceman]

Respawn tickets works in the way as; okey you start off with x amount off tickets, each time anyone on your team dies the number of tickets will go down with; x-1. When the tickets reach 0, you have lost.

Thought as much. There might be some 'tards that attempt suicide, but as I said, if you limit the personal amount of deaths, no one can complain as much about having a totally shitty team.

 

[SilverUchiha]

So are you suggesting an FPSMMO with a World-War motif? Or just a war motif?

for nay-sayers, I believe I read something about an FPSMMO either in the works or being released or already out. As for it's quality, well... I can't even remember the name. What's that tell you?

But why a war motif? Why can't we just shoot each other because we have spare bullets and too many bodies for one knife to handle? War is depressing, grey, been-done before. Simple psychotic killing-spree for points sounds like a blast. At the very least, allow the game to have variation from simple-run&Gun, camp&snipe, or just camp. Maybe allow specialization in various tech. This could even incorporate some stealth-gunning. Maybe have "trackers" who specialize in just tracking the stealthy bastards. It could be done. But I'd say drop the war-deal for something more interesting and less been-there, done-that.

 

[Nouw]

maybe let people join which ever side they want but not alow factions to get so large compared to others.

Well, then we're facing the language barrier in case the factions in the game are nations. Not everyone knows English.

You wouldn't need to know English. If you're French, you go with the French. If you can speak other languages, go with them.

1. Well, yeah. Battlefield 2 respawn tickets.

The only problem is that there would always be jerks who'd just run around comitting suicide and intentionally depleting, so there needs to be some kind of a limit.

2. Well, then where do they get the additional tickets after their country counquered? Balance issues.

3. Well, of course. I never said small as Rust or Shipment or anything.

But there are more than seven billion people in the world, and even they don't inhabit every part.

It would be really wasteful for 1000+ people to be the only ones in a gigantic world.

1. I don't play Battlefield 2, so I don't know what respawn tickets are. Since I said there could be a limit for people dying (total), how about two limits? If *you* die too many times, you're dead dead, and your country continues anyway. That way it's fairer.
2. I don't know.
3. As I've said in the above comment, how about something akin to the (later) GTA maps? They're huge, sprawling and would happily house several thousand.

Respawn tickets works in the way as; okey you start off with x amount off tickets, each time anyone on your team dies the number of tickets will go down with; x-1. When the tickets reach 0, you have lost.

Aaaah like the other game modes in other Battlefield games. Like in Bad Company 1, Gold Rush 'Attackers' lose by running out of 'lives.' (Fancy name for ticket in this case)

 

[Kris015]

That would take decades to make, also it would require too much HD space.

 

[Xskills]

One logistical difficulty is classes if you're going to do stylized realizism like this. Each class would have subclasses, i.e. Infantryman has rifleman, medic, grenadier, marksman/sniper, support gunner, CQB/spec ops/pointman; engineer would have explosives expert, apc/tank operator, aircraft mechanic, uav pilot on ground.

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

A game would be possible, but it'd probably be a terrible game.

I actually doubt the mapping issue would be that bad. You could pretty easily come up with a clever way to turn satellite images or generic physical maps into at least passable maps for the game (buildings would be hard, but maybe possible if you used the shadows they cast to judge their dimensions). You don't need to create a world since it's already there and already digitized. Storing it would probably be dumb. Maps are already stored, so just procedurally generate the area when it's needed. Large-scale FPS gameplay is also pretty doable with modern internet connection speeds. Actually populating areas with NPCs would require some creativity, but would probably be possible (you could likely come up with a nice client-side way of doing it).

The issue is one of balance. The world isn't particularly well balanced. It's hard to imagine a way that Canada, for instance, could fight anything resembing a fair battle against the US. Moreover, there are strategic resources we don't use for a reason. If we want it to be realistic, people have nuclear capabilities. In real life, people don't just fire off nukes because it means killing potentially millions of people and potentially prompting a nuclear shoot-out that ends the world. In a video game, none of those concerns are really present. And there are no 13-year-olds with control over nuclear armaments in real life.

In fact, none of the conventions of war would need to be followed. What digital reason is there to avoid using biological weapons? Civilian casualties are essentially meaningless in a game, so that problem's gone too. Which brings up another issue of complexity. A lot of warfare is focused on cutting off supplies, so are you also going to simulate supply chains? Resource gathering? Weapon fabrication? It quickly becomes pretty infeasible and you're left with a basic, badly balanced, and ill-conceived game.

So yes, it's possible, it's just not a GOOD idea.

Edit: Also, given a map the size of the world, there's no reason the players would ever meet one another given even the most liberal estimates of playership.

 

[viranimus]

Ok hypothetically, yes its possible. At the moment its completely impractical.

First off is the size of the game. Consider worlds you know such as the referenced MMOs that literally take hours to traverse and realize their real life landmass would not even equate to a 100 mile radius.

Then consider the sheer size of the game. Even with repeating textures, your talking about a world that would take hundreds of exabytes or perhaps zettabytes in size.

Next consider the sheer desolation involved in a world that massive. Even if you only had one server, and well use wows figure of 11 million, it would still take days before you would happen across someone, and after that long of a period of time you would hope and pray they were adversarial simply cause youve been dying to shoot ANYTHING.

I mean its a nice idea and all, it really is, but your invariably going to have to comprimise somewhere, Either smaller world, wait for the technology to catch up, or even accept randomly dispersed bots in order to fill in the blanks.

 

[Wintermute_]

You might recall a little game entitled MAG for the ps3,which boasted the ability to have hundreds of players in a huuuge PvP environment. You might also recall the suckiness of said game.
The problem would be the teamwork aspect. In MAG, if you went off by yourself, you were screwed, because dozens of enemy players would rain a steely hellfire in to you. If you were in a group,the confusion of dozens to hundreds of players running about shooting cut your survival rate to nil. No coordination meant chaos and no players had it in them to organized.

Imagine that on your scale. Cool idea, execution would be awful...

 

[bz316]

It sounds neat, but the servers of most online multi-player maps in Call of Duty can barely stay active with less than 100 players at a time on a map probably representing areas less than a few square miles. Imagine the enormous task of maintaining a server of thousands of people in maps representing areas the size of London or Tokyo in the kind of detail described...

 

[badgersprite]

They would have to have a REALLY scaled down map, but it's an awesome concept. Like MAG done right, with territory control and strategy elements, alliances between "countries". Complex concept, but interesting to ponder.