I didn't realize

It's been three days since my last post. I dug an old game out of the ruins of a crashed harddrive and have been playing it nonstop for the past few days. Halflife. Brilliant game.

An idea occured to me while trying to jump to a particularly difficult-to-jump-to place (which I later found out was an altogether not-to-be-jumped-to place) which was to blend a FPS with a skill based system. And, while I'm at it, might as well blend it with a Zelda-style puzzle game as well. Halflife does this to an extent, with excellent puzzles. But I found that each puzzle led to a different area (which was oftentimes a different portion of the same area) and therefore the complex seemed immense. I thought to myself, what if, while you played the game, your skill with certain weapons/actions got better throughout. This is done in Morrowind, and I'm sure it has been expanded on in other games, but in Morrowind your skill only really determined how powerful your hits were. I'm thinking you might have a skill called "Shotgun", and the more you use your Shotgun, the better you're able to use it. You may even learn "Shotgun tricks." Slower levelling but still potent skills might be "Jump" or "Run." With level-ups like these the game becomes much more puzzle oriented than hack-n-slash. The player isn't expected to make it through an area in the first go. As a matter of fact, some places may be innaccessible to the player until they build up their skill in a certain feat. For instance there might be an area that the player needs to climb, but their "climbing" is too low so they have to go to other areas before they can tackle that obstacle. Okay, this is a pretty lame game idea, and I'm certain it has been done before, if not in a right out FPS, at least some sort of "sneak-around", "covert-ops" game. Rainbow Six, for instance, relied on the player's skills in weaponry and certain tactical things to achieve goals. Rainbow Six was much more tactical than adventurous, however, and wouldn't have skills in things like "Climbing", "Jumping" or "Running." I'm thinking more a Doom, Halflife, Quake, Unreal style game that incorporates skills to give the player more mobility and power (i.e., survival) rather than tactical advantage, while also incorporating a puzzle element. Rainbow Six, for instance, didn't use skills to solve puzzles so much as to make different parts of missions easier to accomplish. It's difficult to say how multiplayer for a game like this would be best handled. Part of the point behind multiplayer is that each player's skill is determined by how well they handle the controls. But I have a feeling that having a skill-based system will only make players want to play the game more to get the slight advantage over their adversaries. Well, that's enough on this crappy idea. Back to the forums.