This idea sounds a bit like Second Life (although I don't know much about Second Life other than reading its Wikipedia page)

However, an "everything game" is usually not a brilliant idea, it just seems like it in theory.

Im sorry but such a vague idea is hardly brilliant. Brilliance is finding something unique and make it work. Often something simple but that stands out or work better than something else that already exists. Your "idea" comes off as just saying "put all game ideas into one super large game. So all players will like the game since all players like SOME kind of game".

Compare to:
Many players like call of duty
Many players like fifa18

Now make a game that includes the machanics of both in the same game. You will double your player base!
In theory that could work. In reality that is a VERY bad idea. Games needs to be polished and work well. Add to much different stuff and you'll just end up with lots of boring or half-completed pieces of the puzzle.

We dream in theory. We make games in reality  (sadly!) 

On 1/18/2019 at 10:38 AM, 1024 said:

This idea sounds a bit like Second Life

For many this idea is actual life. Quests like fishing and bowling etc... That's regular stuff that I can do in the most realistic sim of all... Reality. 

32 minutes ago, Brain said:

lots of grindy quests such as that repeatable one called 'career'...

Oh god yeah, that one is a real drag. Totally ruins the balance of the game IMO. Replayability rating of zero from me! ?

That's what Second Life is - a general purpose big virtual world. There's no plot. You can build things, buy and sell land, hang out, and play games. It's a huge shared world - not sharded. All users are in the same world. State is persistent. Very persistent. Some objects and running programs are 15 years old.

Because Second Life tries to do everything, it doesn't do anything as well as specialized games. You can build an FPS within Second Life, and people do, but it's not as good as a specialized FPS. There are dungeon crawls, but they're not great dungeon crawls. There are driving games in the big world, but The Crew and GTA do that better. There's great game art and asset design, and there's terrible art and assets. All this is created by users. Linden Labs acts like a municipality. They build terrain, roads, parks, and some public  buildings. They sell land, collect property taxes and a fee from premium members, and that pays for the system.

The effect on new users is unusual for gamers. The big new user question is "what do I do now?" The usual answer is "what do you want to do?" It's like moving to a new city, not logging into a game. Second Life tends to attract people who like building things and aren't scared of a really open world.

Second Life would be in about 7th place on Steam, about even with GTA V there. About 30,000 to 50,000 concurrent users, depending on time of day. It was about 50% bigger at peak, around 2011, and now it's holding steady at those user numbers.

Second Life's technology is about 15 years old, although it's been modernized along the way. The graphics system is somewhat dated. The back end servers are basically single thread for each region (256 x 256 meters), which is a drag on performance. More than about 20 players in one region, and it slows down visibly. More than 30, and it will choke. The network protocol is a bit flaky. The level of detail system is not very good."Technical debt" within the C++ code is a big problem. I've made some fixes to the client, which is open source. This is Not Fun. The server is closed source, although there's a clone of it, OpenSimulator, in C# for people who want to run their own worlds. The system needs a major tech refresh. But it would have to retain the users and the user-created content, or the successor would be a flop.

So far, there's no successor to Second Life. Sansar, Linden Lab's other product, is not a big-world system; it's more like a game level loader which allows users to create and upload their own maps. when you load an "experience", you wait a few minutes while a few gigabytes download. The same is true of High Fidelity and Sinespace. All of those have user counts in 2 digits. They all thought that VR with headgear was the Next Big Thing. Oops.

Improbable, with Spatial OS, is making big-world noises. So far the only big general purpose world to come out is Sominium Space, used by nobody.

It bothers some people that Second Life allows sex. That, too, was developed entirely by users. Linden Labs neither encourages nor discourages it. It's available to those who want it, and not too visible to those who don't. Just like real life.

Second Life was originally envisioned as the successor to the World Wide Web - at last, a 3D world, like the Metaverse in Snow Crash or the Oasis of Ready Player One. That's why it's overbuilt and so general purpose. It turned out that wasn't what the mainstream wanted. They wanted Facebook.

So that's the real "everything game". It can be done, it has been done, it could be done better, but it's a big job and a tough sell.

i'd totally play that, the only thing that it's kinda impossible to make (or you need to be a gaming giant like blizzard or w/e to make such an open world)

On 1/21/2019 at 1:10 PM, suliman said:

Many players like call of duty
Many players like fifa18

Now make a game that includes the machanics of both in the same game.

Sounds like an awesome game idea to me.