From the BF2 meets GTA thread
QUOTE
Well, for me, one aspect that I appreciated about Covert Action besides for what you guys have already mentioned is also the 80s clothing and references (i.e. some of the terrorist organizations were bigger in the 80s than now, the uzi is the quintessential 80s SMG), which of course at the time was totally organic because those things were still fashionable. Definitely all in all Covert Action is one of the best games in a neat elegant package I've ever seen. I suppose there'd be room for modern revision, too, as in retrospect it seems like storming the bad guys' offices is too easy and too powerful. Sid Meier I suspect gave it far and away the best potential rewards and tried to balance it with severe penalties in terms of time loss if you were captured or if you were hit, but the problem was that as a player I could generally pull it off without getting hit and it was possible to get all the clues you needed to solve the whole case from a single visit to the appropriate organization.
If I were to design a modern revision, I'd make assaulting offices a bit more complex and have a few more realistic issues to balance out how powerful it is.
Nowadays it would be possible to make assaulting more realistic since we've got all these military sim games which have made basic room clearing procedures familiar to your typical gamer, and likewise the AI could be made more dangerous and difficult to deal with. Raids could be more difficult to pull off because of a time limit on the grounds that when you bust into someone's apartment and begin mowing down dozens of people with an uzi the local police will respond, so that the player doesn't have time to check each and every file cabinet. Finally, there could be a Diplomatic Capital talley where the player can only perform so many raids before foreign governments get furious with the US government and create an international incident. Maybe the amount of Diplomatic Capital lost would be less if the player makes a clean getaway, but it would be huge if the player doesn't make it out within the time limit and ends up getting arrested by the local police. Maybe there'd be a Diplomatic Capital penalty for each foreign national killed on such a raid. Finally, maybe if the player creates too many international incidents student protestors picket the CIA office in Washington going on about the School of the Americas or some such and Max Remington is fired for being a liability.
If I were to design a modern revision, I'd make assaulting offices a bit more complex and have a few more realistic issues to balance out how powerful it is.
Nowadays it would be possible to make assaulting more realistic since we've got all these military sim games which have made basic room clearing procedures familiar to your typical gamer, and likewise the AI could be made more dangerous and difficult to deal with. Raids could be more difficult to pull off because of a time limit on the grounds that when you bust into someone's apartment and begin mowing down dozens of people with an uzi the local police will respond, so that the player doesn't have time to check each and every file cabinet. Finally, there could be a Diplomatic Capital talley where the player can only perform so many raids before foreign governments get furious with the US government and create an international incident. Maybe the amount of Diplomatic Capital lost would be less if the player makes a clean getaway, but it would be huge if the player doesn't make it out within the time limit and ends up getting arrested by the local police. Maybe there'd be a Diplomatic Capital penalty for each foreign national killed on such a raid. Finally, maybe if the player creates too many international incidents student protestors picket the CIA office in Washington going on about the School of the Americas or some such and Max Remington is fired for being a liability.
I. Character Generation
In the original Covert Action you got to assign technical strengths and weaknesses to your character which worked in game by raising or lowering the difficulty of each mini game. I'd instead propose a combination of a questionnaire-based character generation system with the character generation system from Twilight 2000.
The way I see it, the player could first choose the birthdate of his character, with possible values ranging from 1926 to 1970. Based on that birthdate, the game would ask the player whether his character participated in certain historical events. Behind the scenes this would build the character attributes and skills. There could be both "serious" questions and also ones referencing 80s popular culture.
For example, let's say the player chose 1926 as a birthdate. The game would ask whether the character chose to enlist to fight in World War II, or whether he stayed home to study some technical skill in college. If the character chose World War II combat skills (steady aim, fast reloads, etc) would increase whereas if he studied the technical skill (i.e. electronics perhaps) then his combat skills would stay weak but he'd get better at wiretapping. The basic idea is that the game would go forward in time and keep asking questions that would determine the character's skills. A character choosing an early birthdate would have high levels of many skills, but would be older, and thus have less hitpoints and longer injury recovery times. A character with a later birthdate would have less chance to gain skills but might move a bit faster, have lots of hitpoints, and recover from injury fastest.
Here are a few examples of 80s pop culture questions that could be worked into such a questionnaire.
For a character who participated in World War II: Does your character go home and do (insert whatever activity), or does he stay in Japan for 20 years studying ninjitsu with Sho Kosugi, and, after many assassinations, leave it all behind and flee to the US to find his only daughter by riding around in a custom van with a burned out Vietnam vet? This would be referencing "The Master". http://www.amazon.com/Master-Lee-Van-Cleef...2022&sr=1-3
If the character chose to imitate John Peter McAllister he'd miss the chance to develop a lot skills over the decade open to the character who returned to the US, but maybe he'd be better at hiding in shadows (a la Theif), he'd be skinned wearing a ninja suit for raids, he'd carry more totally silent resources on raids such as shuriken or garrote wire, and maybe he'd have a little more time to complete a raid on the grounds that as a ninja it's easier for him to elude police.
Here's a pop culture question for a character born later: After serving in Vietnam, does your character use the GI bill to go study electical engineering at MIT, or does he become a cop, get his face blown off, and get drawn into a shadow vigilante organization that sets him up with a black Trans Am with lots of electronic computer features and spend the next X years driving across the American west righting wrongs?
If the character chooses to imitate Knight Rider he gets a small boost to his electronics skills, but his driving skill for the driving minigame shoots through the roof.
II. More complex raid dynamics
Besides for the ideas in the first quote above, I had a few thoughts about how raids could be more realistic.
As long as the character is totally silent (choses stealth entry as opposed to dynamic entry, doesn't attack anyone, and is unseen) he has unlimited time to get all the info.
As soon as a gunshot or explosion is heard, a timer appears representing how long the character has to get out before he won't be able to elude police, who would have gotten too close.
Each subsequent gunshot reduces the time on the timer down to a certain minimum representing the absolute minimum amount of time that it would take the police to respond in that part of the world. I guess that developing countries would have a higher absolute minimum.
So, for example, let's say the player chooses to use some detcord to enter by a hole in the sheetrock (explosion right at the start sets off the timer), and then immediately hoses the room down with 50 rounds from a M60 he's firing from the hip. Immediately the timer would go down to the absolute minimum, but no matter how many more times he fires the M60 the timer would no longer be affected as the count is already representing the absolute minimum police response time.
The raids could be more tactical with the player choosing from several possible entry points, including doorways and windows for stealth entry through lockpicking, but also dynamic entry by using explosives and detcord to enter through walls, or using breaching charges on doors.
Likewise, there'd be a greatly expanded selection of 80s weapons which would be differentiated in-game in terms of firepower versus noise or lethality.
Lethality and nonlethality could be a component of the game as well. More kills could create more diplomatic fallout as explained in the above quote. Nonlethal weapons, like shotguns with beanbags, or pepper spray (they had these in the 80s, right? what about tasers?) would keep diplomatic fallout lower.
The big suspects (mastermind, paymaster, whatever) *could* just outright be assassinated by the player to prevent the crime, but it would be better if the player could capture the big suspects by beating them into submission with nonlethal weapons, and then using a Vietnam-era prisoner handling kit to restrain them. The player would then have to escape while dragging the suspect, perhaps allowing only one-handed weapons to be used. This would allow the player to get more info about the rest of the suspects through interrogation; maybe one of the character generation choices would be a stint with the PHEONIX program in Vietnam which would improve interrogation results.
Also, there would be armor, but it would suck, a la 80s armor as represented in SR3.
