What would make me follow a game across genres? A compelling story & gameworld I like playing in... But to be honest, instead of playing different types of games that revolve around a particular world or storyline, I would rather have all those different genres be included in a single massive game. This way you are not choosing which game to play, but how you want to play in THE game.

The concepts are basically the same, but just coming at it from opposite directions. Imagine a MMO universe that isn't based on a boardgame, but is instead an alternate gameworld that is used as a staging ground for many other types of gameplay in that world. Players could choose their style of play & could participate in missions or quests of that genre that relate to the overall storyline & gameplay of that gameworld. These would all blend seamlessly within the gameworld simultaneously instead of being fragmented into different games.

I like the idea.
How many times haven't I watched that little guy marching across the battlefield and thought, "I wonder what a game about him would be like?"
Besides it would be cool to have your liutenant in the first game as your boss in the merc followup.

1) A compelling universe that's believable and consistent. A universe with depth. The Starcraft/Warcraft universes are good examples. And of course I'd have to like both genres.

2) Tech would have to be the same. Important figures would be better if they we're from a vastly different perspective. The liutenant mentioned above could be a silent, strange man taking orders from somewhere unknown in the Merc game. In the first one he was just a "Yes Sir!" kinda guy.

3) Closely related storyline, but from different perspectives. Either a tight followup or under the same time period as the first one. As long as the player can't say "I've played the prequel, I know what's gonna happen."

4) Identical storyline. What would be the fun in that?

5) I liked the way SimCopter let you load in cities from SimCity2000 to fly around in. What if you could load in a saved game in the sequel and base the game around that? Now THAT would be awesome.

I was playing Empire Earth today, and after reading this thread, I think it would be great if I could set one specific unit to be the commander, switch to first person, and go! (Though I shouldn't forget to assign numbers to my army - guiding them would become tendious otherwise)

Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
What would make me follow a game across genres? A compelling story & gameworld I like playing in... But to be honest, instead of playing different types of games that revolve around a particular world or storyline, I would rather have all those different genres be included in a single massive game. This way you are not choosing which game to play, but how you want to play in THE game.

That really is not an option, making a single massive game would only create an extremely fragamented and non-sensical version of both. It not always possible or a good idea to mesh to much unrelated content into a single game. For instance the Corperate Strategy game and the mercany game while they both take place in the same world, focous on drastically diffrent elements and subject matter as well as having diffrent story lines. It would simply not be possible combine the two into a single game.

Actually, this is probably what you will see gaming become in the future, especially in MMO's that use licensed worlds such as StarWars, StarTrek, The Matrix, etc. I agree that this would not work in any single player game, but the whole idea of MMO's is to bring together different types of gameplay to please a broader player base. The different types of gameplay won't even have to directly affect each other, but merely be linked in a manner that is realistic to the original creators of that licensed world.

Eventually MMO's will grow beyond the boardgame mentality to be mere staging grounds for all the kinds of games we play right now. When that happens gaming will finally reach the next evolution.