The GTA series has been based in America since its inception (with one London-based exception), but the locations have always seen a complete overhaul from one era to the next. Los Santos and the greater state of San Andreas, Vice City, and Liberty City have been the three main locales whenever a new GTA comes along.
There are others that appear, such as Alderney and Ludendorff, but you won’t find them filling out an entire game other than Anywhere City, but since GTA 1 featured all three major locales in one game it was expected they’d try something different. However, while many would want to see an HD revamp of Vice City (perhaps even extending it out to include more of south Florida), I feel the time is right to try something new. A completely new location offering completely new opportunities for exploration of not only a location, but story, world building, and the references to real world experiences. With the rumours and leaks, it seems both are happening, and I made a rendition of the Project Americas stuff previously. This time the detail is much greater as I launch into detailing how I would go about making a GTA-verse Michigan.
0 Comments
I said in the monthly update that I would be unveiling the completely new state of Michigan within the GTA-verse. Instead, I’ll save that for some other time, as I want to put focus somewhere else today. And that focus is on the leaks.
The ones that say GTA VI is nearer to release than we think and give us an idea of where we’ll be exploring. So, using the information gathered by Gfinity, I’ve cooked up a concept of what that map might look like. From the leak, we have Vice City returning, but there’s some new places that have never been seen within the GTA-verse before. A combination of Cuba and Panama will create the People’s Republic of Del Castro. Well, it’s more like this fictional island will be based on those two places, but there’s sure to be many influences from both present. Bolivia and Columbia combine to form the Republic of Castellano, with Rio de Neve – the GTA-verse Rio de Janeiro – also being present. In the first quarter of 2015, I outlined an idea relating to Wuhu Island – the sports haven of Miis featured in Wii Sports Resort (though it first appeared in Wii Fit).
Since Wii Sports Resort, it has featured in Pilotwings Resort, future Wii Fit games, and even got some representation in Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., but while Nintendo in recent years seems to have forgotten the island except for the occasional referencing, I’ve been planning an expansion. That idea I mentioned would put all the sports from Wii Sports Resort into a new game with a fully explorable Wuhu Island where you could naturally head to locations to access the sports, though you’d have the option to access them all through a menu in the hotel lobby if you so wished. New sports would also be added, with the ability to freely fly without restriction and drive a kart around the island. EA’s Star Wars Battlefront games have seen a lot of good, even if there’s glitches within the gameplay. Last time in Equipping Ideas I talked about mechanics, which leads the way into modes. Galactic Assault is a fun mode, though with command posts there’ll be a few changes. Heroes vs Villains is also going to see a change. Then there’s conquest and my new mode.
For Galactic Assault, each team has two permanent command posts that always move with the phases. A third would appear when needed. The two that are permanently on the field hold only ground forces. That third command post holds all vehicles including the transports during transport defence phases. No starfighters will be available in Galactic Assault. There’s conquest for that. The EA Star Wars Battlefront games have been fun, though there are problems with how they play. To me, it doesn’t feel like Battlefront. It feels like a Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare clone in a Star Wars skin. Funny, when you think Battlefront was a Battlefield reskin, but at least that actually worked.
The thing I most dislike about the Garden Warfare feel is how the secondary weapons and abilities are handled. Rather than just offer a simple fix for it, I’ll be giving it a bit of a full change from how the entire system is handled in Battlefront 2. In fact, I’ll be using Battlefront 2 as a base to build all these ideas from. Tower defence games have been around for a long time, bringing a lot of differences between them. It was only a matter of time before the concept was reversed so that the player would be on the offensive, and that came with a game called Anomaly: Warzone Earth.
While I don’t exactly know if the game was the first to reverse the concept, there doesn’t seem to have been as many notable games using it. Tower defence games have you defending against incoming waves of enemies by placing units of your own in or outside the path that the enemy travels. In tower offense, you are the units travelling on the path, with the enemy defences already in place. In the case of Anomaly, you can change the path your units travel to tackle the defences how you want. With EA owning the Star Wars licence, the results from that have been rather pitiful. Not because of the games released, but from a lack of them. Take into account this – since they claimed the licence in 2013 there have only been two console games released by them.
Both in the same series. There has been one mobile game released by them, and there are supposedly four games yet to be released by them (one of them being another mobile game). Now take the period of ten years prior. In 2003 to 2007 (not counting film-based games or LEGO-built ones), we had new entries in the Jedi Knight and Rogue Squadron series, two Knights of the Old Republic games, Galaxies and Empire at War, both Pandemic Battlefronts and Renegade Squadron, and Republic Commando. There were some other handheld and mobile games as well, such as Lethal Alliance. The original Battlefront of 2004 started Galactic Conquest off. However, the mode has definitely been improved a lot more since this game. The original didn’t even have any strategy involved. The map consists of all the planets featured in the game (bar the two era-specific planets that are not related to the era you chose), with each planet except the era-specific ones having a perk attached to it.
If you own that planet, you can choose the perk per match. There are things like increasing the accuracy of your troops or having an increase in reinforcements, but the only one that really matters is getting your team’s hero out into play. So capture that planet as soon as possible and unleash the invincible lightsaber-swiping hero onto the enemy. I’m a fan of open world racing games, and I’m a fan of RPGs. No, I’m not suggesting a fight to see which is better. I’m proposing a mix of the two. I’m saying that mixing two genres that haven't really been done before might prove interesting if done right.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting I know the perfect method of doing this that will achieve a full-blown ten across the board, but I like putting ideas out there, and this month has been pretty focused on racing games already. Why not add one more to the mix before Star Wars month [where there’s gonna be another racing game idea appearing, depending on what ideas I settle on]? Either way, a specific idea for an RPG open world racing game is ready to roll, so read on and see if you agree with me on something like this. There’s a lot of excitement and curiosity about this new racing game from SEGA. Unless a misdirection, we know it to be a kart racer – but that’s it. As you’ve no doubt seen, I like talking ideas, with post three having recently been added of the Future of Mario Kart series.
Much like ideas for a future Mario Kart game, I’m doing the same with this Sonic racer. Everything will be contained within this post, with levels, characters, and other ideas within. And no racing game is complete without the tracks to race on, so we’ll start there. For this idea, there are eight cups of four tracks, but each cup is effectively part of an island. Each island is a hub that the tracks are accessed from, but also becomes a track itself for the final challenge. |
Categories
All
|