juvenite, on 29 June 2024 - 12:56 PM, said:
What needs to be done is a game people want to play, because it expands upon the foundations of the classics, not surface-level political statements. Let people write their damn characters.
Exactly. The question is, Build or no Build?
Personally, I'm perfectly fine with Build, and I honestly believe that an infinite number of fun games can be produced with it without becoming repetitive. However, I do understand that others might want something newer. I won't mind a game on the
Quake 1-3 engine, I suppose. Will it work well? I guess that in the right developers' hands, it will!
I'm also fully committed to the idea that
The AMC Squad setting is just about perfect for a community-drivent Duke-legacy game (since it already is one). If you just go about without mentioning Duke at all (while leaving the implicit idea), it should be fine. However,
The AMC Squad, having been born as a TC, still uses a lot of character and monster designs that were originally from other games, even though
sebabdukeboss20 reimagined them as (exceptionally cool) higher-resolution versions.
Let me get carried away a bit. My tentative "proposition" (or, rather, a wild but not completely unrealistic fantasy/idea) is to scale down a bit and maybe pick a couple of characters from
The AMC Squad (selectable for solo and possibly AI co-op play along the lines of
Alien Armageddon) and give them a more linear campaign as the basic single-player mode. I only played
The AMC Squad for a little bit, but there are some really nice characters with original one-liners that would fill in the protagonist role quite well as it seems. The enemy roster would have to be redone with completely original characters if this hypothetical community game is to bee really free and independent of any proprietary franchise (and henceforth potential interference from "interested parties"), but again, I do not doubt the artistic and creative talent of the esteemed community members here.
The range of settings employed in
The AMC Squad already proves that you can have both sci-fi and fantasy elements without a stylistic clash, so the game could be just about anything. Personally, I liked that old Ancient Greek TC called
Secrets of the Acropolis, and I wouldn't mind at least one level set in Ancient Greece, which is generally an underused theme in FPS games as it seems. Be it time travel or world travel or whatever.
In fact, assuming that this is still a Build game roughly following the lines of
Duke3D, one could have completely different episodes with separate themes and enemy rosters, and I suppose possibly even weapons (?).
At any rate, at this point there seems to be enough community-created, original content to work with that could become the basis of a purely original new Build game, at least.