Video Game Idea: Death In Paradise

[Lord Loss]

To moderators: I'm unsure if this counts as a religious discussion, I would say no, as it is a videogame Idea, but if it is, please Pm me/delet post. I apologize if it is a religious discussion (I think not, as talking about Dante's inferno is fine...)

Dante's inferno took place in hell, and it was one he** of a failure. But it opened my mind. It did something fresh. It was a new concept and it failed, but it still proved it to be possible. But what if a game were to be set in heaven? What? I hear you screaming indignantly. How do you figure that?!? Now, hear me out. What if one was to make a survival horror genre game, set in heaven. You play as the angel Gabriel, returning from a mission on earth, to find your home devastated. Angels slaughtered, purity corrupted.. Now, how would one make a game in Heaven? Obviously we couldn't set it in a big expanse of clouds. I thought the beginning could be in a very peaceful looking pathway leading to a temple, with beautiful trees with pink flowers. As you move along you notice the trees are filled with corpses, and blood drips onto you from a tree. When you enter the palace you see...

Thoughts? Ways to ''Make it happen''? Does it suck? Is it a good idea?

[Domochevsky]

Hum, could be cool by concept. :smallsmile:
(Of course first you would have to define what type of game it should be. Shooter? Hack/Slash/Stab? RPG? Mixed?)

[warty goblin]

Honestly if you're doing a game about the Afterlife, do a game about the Afterlife. Don't take an existing game genre and shoehorn it into said realm, because that'll just feel tacky.

So basically do what the Void did, which is to say go for a nearly complete marriage of gameplay mechanics to setting. Obviously you'd need a very different set of mechanics for a game set in Heaven, as opposed to the Void, but I think that'd be the thing to go for.

For gameplay mechanics, I'd make combat less important than saving things. Obviously, this being a game, combat is going to need to happen, but mechanically I don't think an RPG is the way to go at all. After all in a level up system, fighting enemies is rewarded. Penalizing combat makes for poor gameplay, so instead I think combat should be completely neutral to the player's condition. You can recover from it, but you aren't rewarded for it, so you only do it to accomplish your larger mission: the reclamation of paradise.

Jazzing on the reclamation side of things, why not allow the player to attempt to save the things he fights? Offer this as a choice- destroying the enemy outright is easier, but makes it harder to remove the taint from the landscape and from other creatures. Saving the enemy is more difficult, but allows for a more complete victory.

So for saving paradise from corruption, I'd make the graphics really emphasize this, that is have areas you redeem really look redeemed, and have corrupted areas look corrupted. I suspect normal videogame evil (aka creeping red tendrils) isn't the way to go here, but instead a real sense of tainted, slightly hyperreal beauty. Things that look like they should be beautiful from a distance, but up close are warped. If heaven is corrupted, I think the ultimate emotion it should evoke is tragedy, something the usual evil art style is very bad at expressing.

[Starfols]

You're too late (http://www.heaventhegame.com/). :smalltongue:

Also, I hate to be rude or anything, but that idea reeks of the 'good people are wusses' baloney that saturates modern games.

[Tavar]

Also, I hate to be rude or anything, but that idea reeks of the 'good people are wusses' baloney that saturates modern games.

What do you mean by this?

[Jahkaivah]

"And so is the Golden City blackened
With each step you take in my Hall.
Marvel at perfection, for it is fleeting.
You have brought Sin to Heaven
And doom upon all the world."

-Canticle of Threnodies 8:13

[Jamin]

To moderators: I'm unsure if this counts as a religious discussion, I would say no, as it is a videogame Idea, but if it is, please Pm me/delet post. I apologize if it is a religious discussion (I think not, as talking about Dante's inferno is fine...)

Dante's inferno took place in hell, and it was one he** of a failure. But it opened my mind. It did something fresh. It was a new concept and it failed, but it still proved it to be possible. But what if a game were to be set in heaven? What? I hear you screaming indignantly. How do you figure that?!? Now, hear me out. What if one was to make a survival horror genre game, set in heaven. You play as the angel Gabriel, returning from a mission on earth, to find your home devastated. Angels slaughtered, purity corrupted.. Now, how would one make a game in Heaven? Obviously we couldn't set it in a big expanse of clouds. I thought the beginning could be in a very peaceful looking pathway leading to a temple, with beautiful trees with pink flowers. As you move along you notice the trees are filled with corpses, and blood drips onto you from a tree. When you enter the palace you see...

Thoughts? Ways to ''Make it happen''? Does it suck? Is it a good idea?
This just turns heaven into hell.

[Zevox]

You could just wait for the third Dante game. The guys that made Dante's Inferno intend to do Purgatory and Paradise too.

Zevox

[Vitruviansquid]

I was aware that few people actually read any part of the Divine Comedy other than the Inferno.

This is because all the other parts were boring or, at least, didn't have dudes being pitchforked.

[Starfols]

What do you mean by this?

I'm saying that many games tend to reward evil and belittle good behavior. Most games nowadays have anti-hero, if not outright villain protagonists. Demonic powers and excessive grizzledness have become a common motif. If one has a choice between good/evil, generally the evil choice will be the more powerful.

Many compassionate, or even just non-jerk characters, if they even appear at all, are belittled, or abused, or have their worldview shattered or invalidated in some way. Having Gabriel wander off for a bit, and coming back to find the entirety of heaven ravaged and destroyed implies that the invading evil force is either stronger, or the good guys don't know what they're doing.

[warty goblin]

I was aware that few people actually read any part of the Divine Comedy other than the Inferno.

This is because all the other parts were boring or, at least, didn't have dudes being pitchforked.

Having read the Inferno, I can say with certainty that given long enough, even dudes getting pitchforked gets seriously old.

[Demented]

I'm saying that many games tend to reward evil and belittle good behavior. Most games nowadays have anti-hero, if not outright villain protagonists. Demonic powers and excessive grizzledness have become a common motif. If one has a choice between good/evil, generally the evil choice will be the more powerful.

Many compassionate, or even just non-jerk characters, if they even appear at all, are belittled, or abused, or have their worldview shattered or invalidated in some way. Having Gabriel wander off for a bit, and coming back to find the entirety of heaven ravaged and destroyed implies that the invading evil force is either stronger, or the good guys don't know what they're doing.

And what's wrong with that?
...Considering that the alternative is to have an actual villain protagonist go running around heaven bashing angels' skulls in. :smallbiggrin: I presume that the 'bashing (something's) skulls in' mechanic is the primary goal here, with heaven as the setting.

[Zevox]

I was aware that few people actually read any part of the Divine Comedy other than the Inferno.

This is because all the other parts were boring or, at least, didn't have dudes being pitchforked.
If the games prove to be anything like Inferno, the only thing they'll have in common with the poems will be the setting anyway.

Zevox

[Starfols]

And what's wrong with that?
...Considering that the alternative is to have an actual villain protagonist go running around heaven bashing angels' skulls in. :smallbiggrin: I presume that the 'bashing (something's) skulls in' mechanic is the primary goal here, with heaven as the setting.

That's my point. It's more of the same.

I suppose heaven could be used as a location in an action game, but I think it would make a better base of operations than a battlefield. Maybe you could be 'heaven police' and fight fallen angels or something.

[Lord Loss]

I thought that insted of the good v.s evil desicions (you're an angel, after all) you could have the player decide between the ''greater good'' (restoring heaven as a whole) and saving individuals. For example, you're in said grove, and you notice that one of the angels is still alive. If you take the time to get him out before he dies, more parts of hell will be tainted (for instance, a palace near the grove might be infused with tragedy and corruption). Mixing this with the saving, not destroying game aspect would work well ,in my opinion.

As for the genre, I agree that shooter and RPG probably don't work. Maybe Steali- Borrowing ideas from Heavy Rain would help.

P.S: Any way (that you know of) to get the game made (gathering intelligent and resourceful playgrounders to help make it? E-mailng Bethseda?).

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

A survival horror set in heaven? Interesting concept.

Speaking in terms of game mechanics, a hybrid of Heavy Rain, Resident Evil, and perhaps Bayonetta (the latter solely because you'd need some sort of suitable combat mechanic, and I imagine Gabriel would fight in a very fluid fashion. It could also, through the use of quick-time finishing moves, give you the option to either kill --press A when the finish command comes up, follow the quicktime event-- or convert --press X when the finish command comes up, and follow the more complex quicktime event).

Heavy Rain should be obvious: fairly seemless RPG qualities melded into the game world, while the Resident Evil third person just-over-the-shoulder feel makes the game fairly claustrophobic and makes you more alert to everything, as your view is so restricted. This allows even fairly wide open areas to be frightening, since you can't see everything at once.

Anyway, just thoughts.