What settings do you want to see in a time/space travel RPG?

[sgc_meltdown]

Regarding the planets.

If you're really not lazy Elzair, you can go all out on this and make up a pulp science sentient race ecology for each planet and have them all somehow visitable with an minimally unwieldy space suit. A very shiny one. You haven't mentioned the tone of your time travelling game.

So if you want it to be more srsbsns you can bury specific alien artifacts and really strange organic/tech/mindfuck dungeon type areas for each planet, visitable only by preparing very specifically for atmospheric conditions and gravity etc etc I suppose.

And then perhaps assign an alternate reality twist for each period on earth you're warping to. I.e. Years of Rice and Salt style for the medieval era visit where the black plague completely fucked up europe and the islamic and chinese empires flourished to an amazing degree.

 

[Elhoim]

I do not want this project to become an Age of Decadence style fiasco.

Good luck with that

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Good luck with that

Hey, it's just one developer. Look at what one guy did with dorf fortress.

 

[zenbitz]

I think what would work nicely would be a 'butterfly effect' type story.

You go back a short ways in time to "fix something". Come back to present, and it's worse. Go back again further this time. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Maybe to resolve the whole mess you just go back in time and prevent yourself (time travel?) from ever existing?

 

[deus101]

Europe during the reformation.
MiddleEast during one of the crusades and middleeast again during the sacking of bagdad.

One of the Punic wars.

Spanish civil war perhaps...

Also some of the more interesting periods of Palestine between 1917 and 1954.

And the opening of the silkroad between east and west.


If you feel real gutsy partake in Muhammeds smashing of Idol at Kabah

 

[Baron]

Regarding the planets.

If you're really not lazy Elzair, you can go all out on this and make up a pulp science sentient race ecology for each planet and have them all somehow visitable with an minimally unwieldy space suit. A very shiny one.

Exactly! A Theeeeme. I'd play this ^ or Middlemarch, or Buck Rogers again (mostly because I like jury rigging and storming ships.)

Alex, I would like this game to be a lot more serious than Ultima II because that game was nothing more than a giant in-joke. However, I still want to add some wacky, ahistorical stuff like the city of Atlantis and maybe even Camelot. I am definitely thinking one of the time periods should be ~25 AD because it would be rather wild to have a certain Palestinian carpenter as a party member.

Sounds cool, bro!

 

[zenbitz]

What about a game based on travelling though the Multiverse with a ship? No FTL, Solar System travel only. Travelling though Alternate Earths would be interesting. Both CRPG, Turn-Based Squad Strategy.

Sounds like Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast"

 

[shihonage]

I still can't get over the idea of playing Jesus. Talk about putting the "player is world savior" cliche on its head. It would be ballsy as all get out.

The real controversy will rise when someone gets to the part where Jesus gets his hands on leather armor and an SMG.

 

[Surf Solar]

This sounds like a neat idea/brainstorm (but unfortunately nothing much else)

Biggest flaws: except you like to be developing a game from now on till the end of your life, pulling this one off is just insane. There is a reason games usually stick to some certain numbers of different asset styles and the like. Not only you would have to do all the scenery stuff, models and what not, no you also want to fill all these areas with content to not make your worldbuilding affords usesless, you also want to still make the game still appearing to look as one refined piece and not world/time era XY, planet whatever or timeline ABC and stuff.

This sounds just really too over ambitious.

 

[deuxhero]

Wild West is always fun.

 

[PorkaMorka]

 

[Baron]

It's refreshing to see the Wild West and the Spanish Inquisition back to back. I'm regretting my former misgivings about this project.

 

[Jackalope]

A pirate port, a robot city, the Jurassic era and a strange temple in Nepal inhabited by monks who turn into yetis during the night. If nothing else, you'd get quite a party out of it...

 

[shihonage]

You play Steven Seagal, and eventually have to face your greatest enemy -

Obesity.

 

[jancobblepot]

i want to play that...How is your project going?

 

[J1M]

Many games today feature muslim terrorists as antagonists. Why settle for a game that just takes place in the dusty shit-hole of the middle east?

The muslim hordes have threatened Europe and been pushed back before. You could treat them like a reoccurring villain on a bad TV show... and save on art assets!

One of the time periods could feature the invention of the stirrup as being the pivotal change that allowed the euros to push the Moors out.

 

[Destroid]

You teleport to early 1920's Austria and befriend Hitler. You help him get into the Art School in Vienna so he never gets involved in politics. In the end of the game you teleport back to present day, and it turns out the entire Earth is a dystopia and the Jews have exterminated all the other races because no one disrupted the sinister plans they had been working on since ancient times. Problem, Codex?

If you take out WW2, I'd take the Soviets as a vastly more powerful world player.

 

[Percy]

Make John Cougar Mellencamp a recruitable NPC.