The obvious MVP hiding in the described idea is a very short FPS, maybe with a simple roleplaying layer of travel around various planets, missions, letters from NPCs etc. to put the FPS levels in context. The technology for a simple FPS with simple assets is relatively mature and approachable; inexpensive engines like Unity and Unreal should be more than good enough. A short, low-budget FPS/adventure could sell well due to a touching story and to interesting level design and mechanics (you mention accurate physics, which could enable something novel).

After succeeding with such a technical and commercial starting point, sales can (hopefully) finance more instalments and the production values of the individual FPS levels, cutscenes etc. can gradually improve.

Multiplayer doesn't fit an adventure game with a predetermined plot: a group of players starting the game together and playing it together is unlikely to form in the first place and either unlikely to find time to gather to play (if the whole team is required) or unlikely to remain together (if the game can progress with a subset of players), A multiplayer RPG should be designed for a single short sitting or for replacing players while the game is in progress.

If you are afraid people could steal your idea. Don't be. No one will steal your idea here.

The obvious MVP hiding in the described idea is a very short FPS, maybe with a simple roleplaying layer of travel around various planets, missions, letters from NPCs etc. to put the FPS levels in context. The technology for a simple FPS with simple assets is relatively mature and approachable; inexpensive engines like Unity and Unreal should be more than good enough. A short, low-budget FPS/adventure could sell well due to a touching story and to interesting level design and mechanics (you mention accurate physics, which could enable something novel).

After succeeding with such a technical and commercial starting point, sales can (hopefully) finance more instalments and the production values of the individual FPS levels, cutscenes etc. can gradually improve.

Multiplayer doesn't fit an adventure game with a predetermined plot: a group of players starting the game together and playing it together is unlikely to form in the first place and either unlikely to find time to gather to play (if the whole team is required) or unlikely to remain together (if the game can progress with a subset of players), A multiplayer RPG should be designed for a single short sitting or for replacing players while the game is in progress.

Dude, honest question, where in the opening post do you read the word short? There are many superlatives in the opening post that inflate the complexity to insane values, but nowhere do I read short.

Same with the word simple. Seems in conflict with all the opening poster writes in the first post. AAA Quality, vast content, realistic graphics and extreme polish does NOT sound like a "simple game".

I agree with our post in general, but I think this goes against what the opening poster seems to have in Mind... Of course, if he is ready to listen, this sounds like a much, MUCH more sensible approach for creating a game on a tight budget (which I honestly believe the OP to have) than what is described in the opening post.

If you are afraid people could steal your idea. Don't be. No one will steal your idea here.

Yeah, they won't. I have been posting ideas for years here (and I have a proven track of finished commercial games mind you, plus these are not half baked ideas but contain details, possible problems and possible solutions how to solve these problems and variants and other goodies) and no one has stolen a single idea o mine. I find it frustrating and insulting!

Sorry man, never found the time to do it. But now that you put it that way, I feel bad about it. Some of your ideas really sounded good, and it seems them not having been stolen did send the wrong signal.

Next time you post an idea, I promise to steal it. Just give me a heads up of about a month so I can plan for the time needed to steal and implement it. If you also could give me a rough estimate on the amount of time needed to implement at that time, that would be fantastic.

;)

Sorry man, never found the time to do it. But now that you put it that way, I feel bad about it. Some of your ideas really sounded good, and it seems them not having been stolen did send the wrong signal.

Next time you post an idea, I promise to steal it. Just give me a heads up of about a month so I can plan for the time needed to steal and implement it. If you also could give me a rough estimate on the amount of time needed to implement at that time, that would be fantastic.

But I would suggest to steal that one http://www.forum.silverlemur.com/index.php?topic=2430.msg27417#msg27417 over some random one I would post next. It's super simple, well docummented and easy to implement, plus it's a complete game. A few years ago one person even promised to steal this idea but in the end changed his mind :D

Sorry man, never found the time to do it. But now that you put it that way, I feel bad about it. Some of your ideas really sounded good, and it seems them not having been stolen did send the wrong signal.

Next time you post an idea, I promise to steal it. Just give me a heads up of about a month so I can plan for the time needed to steal and implement it. If you also could give me a rough estimate on the amount of time needed to implement at that time, that would be fantastic.

Thank you, you are a beacon of light in my designer's life

But I would suggest to steal that one http://www.forum.silverlemur.com/index.php?topic=2430.msg27417#msg27417 over some random one I would post next. It's super simple, well docummented and easy to implement, plus it's a complete game. A few years ago one person even promised to steal this idea but in the end changed his mind

Man, stealing past ideas is no fun... how could I totally ruin your life with that? Unless you haven't used it yet in your games, but plan to make it a breaktrough success of epic scale in the future ;)

Bet the person didn't mean it that way... he most probably got distracted while implementing it. Must have been something really important. I mean, we all know all games are implemented in minutes, why wouldn't he complete the heist if it wasn't something serious? Maybe his PC broke. Or his pet dragon died. Or he found a better idea to steal while procrastinating on stealing your idea (not saying your idea wasn't steal-worthy enough... maybe the other idea had ninjas in it?)...

Okay, I stop now before the moderators bring swift justice to me for going offtopic

Dude, honest question, where in the opening post do you read the word short? There are many superlatives in the opening post that inflate the complexity to insane values, but nowhere do I read short.

Same with the word simple. Seems in conflict with all the opening poster writes in the first post. AAA Quality, vast content, realistic graphics and extreme polish does NOT sound like a "simple game"

Ignoring unreasonable aspects is completely intentional. Making a short and simple FPS with some valid selling point and hoping to earn enough to carry on with episode after episode until it grows into a large game is simply my idea of how to convert, approximately but with some resemblance, the overly ambitious and optimistic vision of the OP into a difficult but realistic plan that a talented team could succeed at.

What 1800hotlinebling dreams of (an excellent AAA game, but in all likelihood, if attempted, a technical and/or commercial disaster with serious monetary losses) and what 1800hotlinebling should do if rational and motivated (starting small and testing/developing marketing and technical skills without unreasonable risks) are unfortunately two very different things.

On a more serious note, the concept is flawed, I would discard it. It has a lot of "let's drop a lot of money on ___". Compare this with Minecraft for example; non existant graphics (ultra cheap), simple mechanics (rather cheap and easy to explain to the player), doable by a single person (again ultra cheap), enormous success. THAT'S an idea worth implementing :) Not much effort/resources and overwhelming success.

The problem with your idea is that I can come up with various reasons why it would fail, and from the vague intro, I can't find a single reason why I would want to play it.

A 'good' idea should be the other way around: it should make me curious about the mechanics so much that I'm hardly looking at the risks, and more importantly, it should focus on a scope that is realistic.

Think of it this way, what are you truly attempting to accomplish to make this experience worth playing? Can you paint a particular moment in gameplay that would be 'awesome' to experience? List 2-3 of them, and tell me why this is awesome.

Then, look back at the idea up there, and start to think at what you can do without.

One obvious culprit jumping at me here would be the AAA highly polished graphics. It's clear from the above you don't have the experience and financial means to achieve that kind of production value, but that doesn't mean you can't make a good game.

So, can you make a good game with 'decent' graphics? And by decent, I don't mean ASCII graphics mind you. There's a wide layer of quality levels between top-notch AAA and crap and you need to figure out what's good enough to support your game.

One interesting part of your project is the episodic element. It requires some work upfront so that you can push additional content, but if done well, it allows you to segment your production costs and post-pone them to after your release your first few episodes which means you won't need to put up the full budget upfront and can always gauge whether you want to invest in a new episode based off sales you've made, etc.

Another element jumping at me which is currently vague and would require a lot of attention: what is a low-cost but highly engaging way for you to convey your story? It seems to me that the focus of your game is narrative content delivery. The above post does not explain very thoroughly how that would happen, and I would suggest to avoid cutscenes as they are likely to end up costing you the bulk of your budget. At the other end of the spectrum, wall of texts would be boring.

If you can find an original and efficient way to pass along your content to the player, then it could make your game.

Take a quick look at 'Bastion' and that narrator voice-over. There's no denying the game is famous for it, and yet, it was almost an afterthought from the developer, but it was original enough because it reacted to the player's actions and granted them control over the narrative of the game (smash a few crates in-game and you will see what I mean). If you can come up with your own 'twist' to storytelling, you could have something more interesting, less deja-vu, and cheaper to implement.

Also, realistic physics: that's crap. Everyone has an idea of what they'd like that to be, but if you actually input that correctly within an engine, you'll see that this is very boring to play with and responds poorly to most control schemes. It's best to make fun physics which 'feel right' (as opposed to over-the-top) than to try to make them as realistic as possible in most situations. I've seen very few (if any) games that felt better with realistic physics, and mind you, I'm including actual serious simulation games in the lot.

This is directly tied to one of the 3 sacred Cs of game development, so it's an art of it's own and requires a lot of polish and there's no easy way to make it happen. What "feels right" will always thrump what "is right" in video games.

AAA Multiplayer. Is this a requirement to make this happen? Couldn't this be added later? What kind of experience do your colleagues have? And does that experience alleviate the costs of the time involved to develop a backend infrastructure, code and actually host production servers and most likely maintenance ops to scale up/down based on player flow, etc.? I could dedicate an entire article to this one alone: multiplayer is not "just another feature"; if your game does not revolved around this, don't include it. It will cost a lot more than you might imagine (and even more than 10 times what you might think after reading this!)

From a logistical standpoint, what you have to remember is that in order to build this kind of game, you would need a large cross-functional team, which unlike an indie 'basement-based' team requires a lot more logistics to function.

You will need offices (which I assume you already considered), computers, a server for source control, at least one stack-machine server if you intend to test multiplayer features during development, an external test server to plan for content delivery (which would most likely have a CDN, loadbalancer, several app servers and one db to start with), a team of at least 40, but most likely 80 if you intend on releasing this within a reasonable timeline, a dedicated producer, 1 or more assistant producer(s), in-house audio development (or someone to handle outsourcing for you, which could fall onto your 2nd assistant producer), a minimum of 5 programmers (1 of which focusing exclusively on the engine assuming you are using a pre-existing engine, 1 on systems, 1 on UI, 1 on gameplay, and one as a generalist which is likely going to hit audio, etc.), a bunch of artists (3d modelers, a rigger, skinner, texturer, animators, fx, UI, level artists), a game designer, a bunch of level designers (assuming many areas), and given the nature of the game one or more writers (depending how text-heady the story will end up being).

If you plan on having voice overs, things can get a bit more messy, and I'd recommend outsourcing to an audio professional with a lot of experience so he can do the casting, and sit-in on the recording sessions.

And QA...

There's a lot more to this, but I don't see any point to go more in-depth at such an early stage.

Also, realistic physics: that's crap. Everyone has an idea of what they'd like that to be, but if you actually input that correctly within an engine, you'll see that this is very boring to play with and responds poorly to most control schemes. It's best to make fun physics which 'feel right' (as opposed to over-the-top) than to try to make them as realistic as possible in most situations. I've seen very few (if any) games that felt better with realistic physics, and mind you, I'm including actual serious simulation games in the lot.

This is directly tied to one of the 3 sacred Cs of game development, so it's an art of it's own and requires a lot of polish and there's no easy way to make it happen. What "feels right" will always thrump what "is right" in video games.

+1

Many games that tried the "realistic physics" of lately have scrapped it and returned to a pseudo-realistic fantasy physics.

What happens when a tank with unrealistic movement values (too much grip, to much acceleration, and so on) gets thrown into a realistic physics engine? It will end up on its roof quickly.

How fun is it for the player to get "one hitted" simply by maneuvering a too steep slope, or not braking before a hard turn (because a tank on his roof, in RL is pretty much out of "the game")? Not very much, apart from the short fun of "lets screw the team over in the most spectacular fashion by ending up on the roof with the most ridicolous stunt"... but apart from getting lots of rage from fellow players, the fun of that fades away quickly.

Now, you could of course go in and make sure EVERY DAMN ASPECT of the game follows RL values, so everything plays nice with your realistic physics. Now you have sluggish tanks that get stuck on every not so well placed piece of debris on the map, and will not be able to reach a good portion of your map because the level designer might have made some slopes a little bit to steep. So you need to go in and make sure your maps are actually usable with your fancy realistic physics, and there are no stuck points because of the physics....

Now, that are just some things that come to mind in relation to tank games... same could be said about flight games (watching your speed to not stall comes to mind), racing games (again, rolling over in curves is not so much fun), even first person games (lets see the FPS skillers rage when their character actually has to move his body around to face the opposite direction.... not gonna be split second with full gear).

Of course, there are many solutions to these problems with realistic physics... they have one thing in common though: they need to be thought about from the start, they need time and money to implement, for making a physics aspect usable that might, actually, not be that fun at all (even if there is a way to "turn your tank back on its tracks" (like a respawn mechanism).... the fact you end up on your roof as soon as you don't watch your movement and the ground slope might still annoy players to no ends).

The better solution always is to have a clear goal how your ingame physics should work (for example, "no vehicle should roll over"), and then use different physics tweaks to ensure that this goal is met without the physics looking overly artificial (counterforces, sideways slip and other tweaks can prevent the roll over in curves... for slopes, there is no way around making sure the vehicle start to slip at some slope threshold, else it will just look fake).

As of today, physics engines are pretty crap themselves... the amount of tweaking they need even for a rough result is unreal, and if you want something that looks realistic, you will spend a lot of time on it.

Let alone if you want actual "realistic physics"... lets not forget that todays physics engine are not much more than "glorified random numbers generators", they model physics in a very brute force way, which works well enough for the most common cases, but is quite "rough around the edges".

Just see what the physics engine does for you out of the box, see what you can live with and what really needs tweaking. Tweak that, but make it fun before making it realistic. Players don't play your game to simulate reality, but to have fun.

Destiny (and mmorpgs in general) updates content at regular if long intervals. No Man's Sky uses procedural generation to create an entire universe of planets with multiple galaxies, all of which you can visit. I'd vote for procedural generation if you want tons and tons of content, but hand-crafted content could be made very gradually. If your story is good, people will want to experience new installments of it; that will give you plenty of resources to create the next part of the story.