[ED]

I’m sitting back and thinking about the popularity of games and what two genres have dominated the action game market – Military and Gangster/Violence. Look at Vice City, GTA 1-3, Max Payne, Dead To Rights, etc. And I’m thinking, well why haven’t we had a MMORPG real life game that basically transplants Vice City to an online persisting environment? Here’s how I’d do it.

Rockstar could easily contract out with Sony Online (I know horrible thought), to produce the title since theyre in good already with Sony. The basics of the game would be this:

You start out in Vice City. You have the option to be a hood or a recruit at the Academy. In the beginning youll just be running errands for your local capo – there’d be several disctricts with several bosses, captains, etc. – or doing routine traffic stops or domestic disturbance calls for the police. As you gain experience of course you go up in rank, rising from a numbers runner to manager of a local strip club laundering money, to eventually becoming a made man. Or you rise in the ranks of the police department and become Lieutenant, or maybe even a Detective with a special unit. Along the way though you’ll meet up with several other folks in your disctrict, and ala PLANETSIDE will fued with other members of rival gangs and of course with the police. Police offers in different precincts would not fued with each other of course, but they would be vastly outnumbered with the number of gangs and “families” out there.

As a police officer youd have the choice to take on assignments (missions) and gain experience points, but youd have a fixed income with which to equip yourself with (we gotta give the item collectors something to shot for). As a gang member, the sky would be the limit, as your tasks run from drugg trafficking to assissinations – sometimes of other players (imagine taking a mission from your don to infiltrate the area of l337_destr0234 [a player currently on the server], and doing a drive by killing him and anyone in his unit. . .of course if l337 leaves the server or kills you, you fail).

Random events would be inserted into the world as Developers could take pages from the real world and update them into the game – mayors would come and go, scandals would occur, precincts could lower your pay, and dons can die, or be taken over.

I’d definitely pay money to be part of something like that, especially if it had the interactivity of a game like Half Life 2, and had the attention to storyline that ROCKSTAR injects into its games.