GTA4 has hooked the bulk of the gaming community and rightly so. It's fun as hell. But what, if anything, can be learned from GTA4 and applied to wrestling games? I don't think anyone wants to see wrestlers hijacking cars and running over hookers between shows, but is there any other element you can put your finger on that just might add something new and desirable to a wrestling game?
I suppose you could make the menu sort of a lobby system. And if you want to design a belt you run over to the belt-designer's office. If you want an exhibition match you pop over to the promoter's office and he sets it up.
Don't think too many people would be into that, though.
Though that would be kind of cool to have a backstage area with different rooms and places. You could take created wrestlers and place them around. Set up like the nWo's locker room or something.
The single most greatest thing about the game is it's genre - sandbox mode. I don't see how PWX can implement the sandbox style in a wrestling game... GTA wins with freedom of movement and just doing anything you want in a virtual reality. I don't know - maybe let your wrestler do the thing that the last two GTA games do like take a showe, training mini games, use money to buy houses, luxuries, etc. A lot can be learned from the game.
Are you kidding? GTA could totally make an awesome wrestling game environment! Instead of rival gangs, you could have different indy wrestling companies in the far corners of the city competing for fans and TV market share. You could have a whole RPG game built around wrestling, where instead of gun battles or car jackings, you have wrestling matches (either standard in-company matches, or rival company grudge matches) and belt/snake/robe jackings.
You could start as a wanna-be wrestling trainee who has to go around papering the city with flyers, setting up the ring, running concessions, ultimately getting trained and working opening matches as a jobber, only to finally gain a following and start moving up the card. You could win the belt and hold up your boss by jumping to another company. You go go out drinking at night and get mugged outside the bar or hit by a car driven by a cross-town rival promotion. Am I the only one who was watching the weekly XPW TV show back when they didn't have any new wrestling had ran the XPW Soap Opera every week for months? Rob Black was a genius! Hour after hour of hilarious TV on a wrestling show with storylines but no actual wrestling! Negro Claus! (Helloooo, Kevin!) Sulu! Roscoe's Chicken & Waffles!
DaClyde just threw you the best storyline for a wrestling game I have ever heard rly. Kudos to you! This is a nice storyline, but how are you gonna implement it in PWX?
What are you guys talking about. The thing that can be taken out of GTA 4 and applied to every other game on the planet is the Euphoria physics engine. It's golden.
Hi all! So how about if something happens and somehow your game is completely unplayable and freezes within 2 minutes of starting every time you make a patch. You also let your customers know you're working on it and you also inform your Customer Service reps about the issue and tell them that there IS a problem with YOUR game and not your customers system. Also might be a good idea to not call it a issue that effects a small amount of people when polling from one site ( http://loot-ninja.com/2008/05/02/results-37-of-gamers-are-having-problems-with-gta-iv/ ) says 37% of 2000 people are having problems and theres a forum post with over 3000 posts on the closest thing to your official Message Board. ( http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=gta&thread.id=370613 )
This is from some WoW or CoH fourms all you got to do is add a big Ever Quest world. Then add big updates like every 6 months:
"Why isn’t there one? Seriously. Is somebody working on one? I couldn’t find one.
This seems like a natural to me. Smackdown City, or whatever you would choose to name a wrestling MMO would seem to spring naturally from work that has already been done on some non-space, non-high fantasy MMOs.
A wrestling MMO would not be equipment based, so having great character creation/customization tools is a requirement. And what company has a game with the best such tool?
Cryptic Studios, makers of City of Heroes/City of Villains.
When I played the City of Heroes trial, I spent most of my time in the character editor because it is about as feature filled as you would ever desire. And, since wrestling costumes and personas are about as many and varied as super hero costumes and personas, Cryptic looks pretty close to having that base covered.
So what do you do in a wrestling MMO?
You certainly have to have the “becoming a wrestler” story-line. Maybe you start off at the county fair or other small town venue as somebody who was on the wrestling team in high school and knows some basic moves and wants to break into the big time. You get into matches, which would presumable also be the tutorial, until you win the notice of some wrestling organization, school, agent, or whatever.
Of course, there is the bad guy version of this, where you’re in a gang or just live in a bad part of town and you want to get into wrestling. You have your own route.
This leads into missions, some in the ring, some outside. Your stature grows, you gain new moves, you have more fans, each of which can drive quest-like story lines. Those who choose the “good” path get more fancy moves, while those on the “evil” path learn how to do things like distract the ref and then whack their opponent with a metal folding chair.
Of course, the PvP system is a natural. You can have different classes, different types of matches, even competing associations.
The day to day life of a wrestler has to be ironed out. You cannot be in the ring all the time. What else do you do, how do you interact with other players, how big is the world? There would have to be other quest paths to follow, perhaps things that open up new skills, venues, or fan bases.
You can take this and go completely camp with it and build up rivalries and all sorts of out of the ring drama. You can have “good” faction wrestlers switch to the “evil” faction. You can have rivalries which make for matches that earn more for the players.
This is something where the oft-mentioned 13 year old player would actually add to the game with his trash talking and fierce competitive attitude. And wouldn’t it feel good taking him down? Of course, when it looks like you’re going to win he’ll probably smack you with that metal folding chair.
I could not see a wrestling MMO ever being huge (then again, I could never see professional wrestling being huge), but I bet it could pull in a fan base at least in the City of Heroes range."
I think the one thing thnat pwx can take from GTA 4 is the way object properties are applied. Glass shatters in different ways, tables and door splinter as well as break in different parts. Things like that would help set pwx apart from different games in one aspect.
it'd be interesting to see if the GTA world could be somehow worked into the old "territories" of wrestling organizations. Where some people choose to be wretlers, some choose to be territory entrepreneurs, etc.
I think that one of the main things that makes GTA as enjoyable and popular as it is, is the fact that almost anything you can think of you can do. Applied to a wrestling game, being able to replicate spots in some of your favortie matches, fighting in the crowd, wrestling in any an every corner of the arena/gym would help contribute to a sense of freedom that makes GTA such an enjoyable and personal experience. Any and all wrestling games are pretty much moving in this direction anyway, with the inclusion of location-specific damage, and create-a-move features, etc. Making the arena feel alive and giving the player the freedom to interact with it in ANY way is in this gamer's opinion the future of wrestling games (that and realistic physics and AI engines).
I'm still waiting for a perfected one-on-one wrestling game, so before we worry about having a huge environment for our grapplers to run around we may as well get the actual wrestling bit sorted. I'm sure MDickie will try and implement this kind of thing into his wrestling game and it will suck.
GTA is a sandbox... so how does one apply that to professional wrestling?
Allow an individual to make his own way through his career.
This would, of course, be a massive undertaking, perhaps prohibitively so. Imagine a career mode in which you begin as at the low end of a local-indy card. Wrestling curtain jerkers in front of 30-40 drunken idiots who don't think you're shit until you take a chair to the dome 50 times. You're scheduled for appearances, and an entire show is booked... what you do in that time is up to you.
Your basic interface is the 'arena'... in this case, most likely, the back alley behind a VFW in some shit town in the middle of no-where. Your rivals are sitting in the rain with you. It's professional wrestling "as it's portrayed"... NOT sports-entertainment. The world as if wrestling were real. And you've gotta make your way in it.
Each show, you're booked, but otherwise you've got free reign to wander... backstage, mingle with fans in the audience, sign autographs, run in on a match, make your case to the boss to move up the card, all that. Basically, the life you figure a WWE Character leads (not wrestler, not worker, character... this only works if it's IN CHARACTER).
Go out there and just run willy-nilly into every match, you're going to be shunned by your fellows, never move up the card, the fan'll hate you for not letting them see a match, so on and so forth. Run in on a match for someone you're feuding with, you draw good heat. So it'll be a balancing act, knowing when to act and how.