In the last few years, I absolutely fell in love with BECMI dungeons & dragons: these are criminally underutilized versions of D&D in the video game arena, and I would love to see it turned into an open-world, sandbox-style RPG. The vision I have for it goes as follows:
The game would make use of colorful and detailed tiles on a grid system, similar to the old Ultima franchise. It would be a 2d, top-down with grid movement, all objects would have the same facing and more or less function as icons to show what exists in a given space. Building and other obstacle tiles, like stone walls, wood walls, etc., would be destructible and show damage until reduced to rubble. The game characters would essentially be small paper dolls with fully customizable appearances that change based on what gear they are wearing, much like the character sprites in Might and Magic 6, 7, and 8. You would be able to zoom in and out for convenience, such as during combat when you want to look closer at your characters, or at the whole battlefield.
In many ways, the game would be similar to Minecraft in the sense that it is randomly generated, and the player would be able to eventually hire workers to clear out a space of land and build structures. They could also potentially build boats and other vehicles, and have ship-to-ship combat and sieges.
The game would take place on a randomized island on a map that is something like 100x100 squares, where the mass of the map would take up 80-90% of the map, allowing for some sea exploratino, above and below (with the right spells and enchanted items). Every tile on the map would have randomized terrain, and the map itself woudl be populated with tiles that possess randomized dungeons, ruins, communities, etc. Each tile on the world map would represent a region of geography, again something like 50x50 tiles, and would have randomized encounters, from NPCs and monsters to magical pools, illusions, wagon wreckage, or corpses possessing randomized items.
As stated above, the game would follow the rules for BECMI D&D, but without the copyright materials. This means the player would go from adventuring to running their own stronghold. They would be playing a sole character at first, and depending on how high their Charisma score is, they would be able to recruit retainers, which function as PCs, except that they cannot recruit their own retainers or henchmen. This would allow the player to have anywhere from 2 to 8 characters total in their party, and also up to 4 pets ranging from squirrels to wolves, and at higher levels, magical creatures like manticores and unicorns. Once they reach name level (9th), they would be able to draw followers and recruit soldiers, provided they have a stronghold with enough housing for them to live in.
I would like the game to be online with multi-play enabled, though this would turn the game into something like Rust, where the players can either join together or make each others' lives miserable. It would also have offline modes where they can generate worlds with varying difficulty levels. Difficulty would affect damage outputs as well as control the size of combat encounters. For example, core rules would have the encounter numbers listed in the BECMI rules, while easier settings would reduce this number, and harder increasing the number, etc.
Again, the game would rely heavily on randomization for everything from treasure to monsters, but also communities and enemy factions. For example, a player could start a randomized world that generates an island that is under the rule of a lich king with armies of undead wandering about. Like a lot of open-world games, like Elder Scrolls and Might and Magic, the game world would recycle explored elements every so often. Shops would restock their merchandise, cleared dungeons would repopulate with new treasures and encounters, the wizard tower the party overthrew would be rebuilt and a new inhabitant will inhabit it.
The player character would have a reputation score that would affect their reaction rolls when dealing with NPCs, so if they performed quests for a community, they would have a better reputation. If they have a very poor reputation with a community, the denizens of that community will run away from them or attack them. Communities could be anything from a simple camp inhabited by hobos to a whole city ruled by a noble.
As with BECMI D&D, there would be seven playable classes: fighter, cleric, mage, thief, halfling, dwarf, and elf. The door could also be open to expand on each class with variants, such as a fighter also being a paladin or ranger, or a dwarf also being a war priest. The system used to generate characters can be randomized or customizable, and when generating NPC characters that have class levels, the game would draw from this same system to randomize them. Everything from characters to the clothes and armor and weapons they have would have a customizable color pallet, giving greater variety to every character and their kit. Every weapon and armor set would have 5 tiers of quality, from poor (-1), normal, +1, +2, and +3. I would also love to see mounts, like horses, war dogs, and monsters, like manticores and dragons.
In regards to the art style, I would love for it to look realistic with more historically centered weapon and armor designs. I feel this would give the game a gritty, dynamic look, and would feel more immersive. This is not to say there wouldn't be flashy colors, especially when playing exotic-looking characters, like humans with green skin and purple hair, or when mages cast spells that exude bright flashes of light.
Lastly, if a game like this somehow gained enough traction, it would be neat to also expand it into a map tool for dungeon masters who host games online, giving them access to all the monster and character tokens and adjustments, allowing them to fully customize it to whatever game they want.
