Nine Fresh Game Settings That Developers Need To Use

I recently blogged about the pretty widespread feeling that the WW2 setting has been far overdone. Along with gameplay enhancements and great storylines, a unique setting for a game can make the experience so much more interesting. Hot titles like Assassin's Creed (Crusades era) and Bioshock (ruined 1950's utopia at the bottom of the sea) show that creativity is not necessarily dead in this area, it's just a little rarer than it ought to be. If you think about many of the popular games out these days, similar types of settings are done over and over again. I feel like developers are great at making engines -- all they've got to do is yank off their "modern warfare" skins and slap some of these following suggestions on top instead. It'd make the gaming landscape way more interesting!

1) Medieval - Now, obviously there are games that are set in the Medieval Era -- but, not as a Multiplayer Team FPS. Think Medieval Battlefield. Infantry "classes" could range from polearms and swords to ranged fighters with crossbows. "Vehicles" could be horses, chariots, and ships, and siege weapons could be incorporated as fixed positions or even just slow and movable. A game like this would need some absolutely incredible gameplay innovation to pull off, but if done right, it would be so cool and different!

2) Wild West, Cowboys, Indians - This has been recently FPS-wise (a la Call of Juarez...horrible game), but how cool would this be as an RTS? You've got different "teams/races" with 1) coybows/outlaws, 2) Indians/Natives, and 3) Government/Federal Army. Mix them up to be totally different like Starcraft and throw it on top of a Company of Heroes killer engine -- that could work!

3) Spaceship Warfare - Now, obviously spaceship fighting has been done before (Wing Commander, Descent, etc), many times. But I'm talking mainstream Team MP FPS (and don't tell me Battlefront, because those games get an F). Start with a round-based system where you get "money" for kills and wins, like in Counterstrike. Use that system to allow the players to customize ships and weaponry based on whatever strategy they want to implement in the next round. Have huge differences in scale, like in EVE, and throw in different gameplay types and interesting space maps (fighting inside some huge space station, in an old minefield, or give one team a mothership to defend). You can even do a Battlefield treatment on something like this, and just make the spaceships the vehicles in an even larger game that includes normal space-infantry combat. Then, you could have multiple people in each ship, as gunners and bombers, etc. ... I want this game.

4) Mutants, Comic Book Heroes, DemiGods - The gist here would be that instead of guns for weapons, you'd have killer mutant powers. I think this idea may have even been done on several MMO's, but put it into a fast-paced, deathmatch FPS, and how sick would that be. Instead of classes, maybe the game has 50 different "mutants" you can choose from. It'd be a mess to balance, but I'm sure if someone put some thought into that it could work.

5) Insects, Animals, Aquatics - Who needs anything even resembling a human? RTS-wise, we've had games like SimAnt and the Zerg in Starcraft, which the gameplay would probably resemble. But how about an FPS? You could totally have air bugs, water bugs, ground bugs, bugs that spit acid and stuff. Or forget wild and unnatural bugs and have everyone be bees or something. As long as the gameplay was focussed on a competitive FPS, the "bug"ishness would just be the setting. It would be awesome fly around and sting the crap out of everyone on a 64 player server....... wouldn't it? OK, maybe this one sucks, but I'm leaving it in.

6) Pirates, Boats - There's been some pretty poor tries at the pirate thing, and I even think there's a pirate MMO. What I see is another RTS, but I'd want to see this thing focus on scale. Build gameplay around the fact that 16th/17th century ships were pretty big, with big crews. Let us control each individual crew member, lead them onto other ships for hand to hand combat. Give the ability to choose between having huge cannon battles, burning our enemy's vessel into the sea, or take it over by force of manpower. I want to build strategies around building the ships, customizing them, and manning them with specialized crews, and have game modes that involve protecting treasure convoys or being the first person to retrieve a buried treasure. I think this could work, especially with a raw, realistic art style.

7) Modern city / gang - I'm not talking some cheesy Ice-T gimmick. Not interested in the least. I'm talking a dark, Max Payne-ish, film noir treatment of city violence. Concentrate on storyline and style, incorporating the ability to make moral choices that affect the game's outcome. Make a statement about a relevant societal problem, maybe focusing on raw realism as much as possible with the gameplay. We need a game like this.

8) Horror - OK, this one is slightly out there and I'm going to use Team FPS again as the frame because that's the way I roll. One team is made up of some kind of themed horror-genre monsters. I'd love to even see a mix of stuff, like stealthy vampires, tankish zombies, fast and agile werewolves... maybe even ghosts/specters and stuff. The other team is made up of human "hunters" who would have different abilities and attack types. So, it's a class-based team shooter... with a horror frame. I'd play that!

9) Robots - Mechwarrior, you say? While we do need a modern Mechwarrior, but that's not what I mean. I see robots as a way to get a huge range of different gameplay mechanics into the same title. Think T-1000's and cyborgs... You can give the players all kinds of abilities with something like this, like shapeshifting and flight. You could even do something cool with scale, give players the ability to even play as "nano" robots.

Now, you see I keep coming back to core game types, and try to put things into the mold of FPS or RTS. I'm not sure why I lean that way, and yes, it's probably just because those are my favorites, but it's also because those games are the ones I think have the least creativity behind them. I mean, RPG's and MMO's seem to be pretty darn good at getting the storyline to be interesting most of the time because those games are generally based around that element. However, FPS's and RTS's are based around the gameplay... so the rest of the game can typically be a let down.

Is there anything you've just been burning to see as a game setting?