Everything overpowered idea, and how to test it? Thread

One idea I had for a FPS involves a change to upgrades/loadouts. Whereas most FPS games they do stuff like +10% health, +5% to accuracy or other bearly noticeable upgrades, my idea was to have everything be stupidly overpowered, but limiting what you can take. (the game would be co-op or single player I should mention) So, you can have either x2 health, or x10 ammo capacity, but not both. Likewise, you could choose a personal teleporter, or a deployable auto turret, but not both at once. You get the idea.

The problem is, building an entire FPS single handedly just to test out an idea doesn't seem practical, but I'm not sure it would work as map for Sven Co-op or something. At present, making a little 2D game seems to be the way to go, but I'm not sure.

I have a similar idea for a single player strategy game, again, all the upgrades are crazy, but you have to pick one or the other, and often come with crushing weaknesses. I was wondering what you thought, and if such an idea could work.

it shall be fully valid to make a simple 2d top-down game to test the idea, it's just about the game mechianics, so it doesn't need to be pretty either.
I think Kangaroux has a good point about balance, it either means you start in a world where you're not able to kill anything, so once you upgrade, you'll be able to kill or you start as usually, but once you upgrade, you just smash everything there is. and if you'd somehow upgrade enemies just like the player (oh well, oblivion had that smart idea), then the 'upgrade' is not really an upgrade, imo.
I like the basic idea of big upgrades, just can't think of how that might cope with the rest of a game. do you have ideas to solve that issue @ SabreXT ?

So in other words, make Bulletstorm but with upgrades that mean more than ammo count tweaks? I'm interested.

It's kind of already been done. Check out Chaos or Mr. Pants Excessive Overkill. Both take weapons and make them super-powerful, Chaos gives you great powerups/specials too. there's also Weapons of Destruction & a bunch of others (TF for Q1 might qualify too, it's more unblanced then the Valve versions)

TheHappyFriar wrote: It's kind of already been done. Check out Chaos or Mr. Pants Excessive Overkill. Both take weapons and make them super-powerful, Chaos gives you great powerups/specials too. there's also Weapons of Destruction & a bunch of others (TF for Q1 might qualify too, it's more unblanced then the Valve versions)

There's also Painkiller. Doesn't mean there's a quota for over-powered gameplay. Just need something more to go along with that, something some games try to ignore.

Some good replies here.

On the point about DotA, is that I don't want the game to be DotA. One of the reasons I thought of this idea is because I'm disappointed with games, particularly RTS, that all think they will be the next big Korean e-sport and end up as bland, not good versions of Starcraft/DotA.

The competitive multiplayer aspect, as well as not being my thing, might be an issue for the reasons you mention. So I imagine that single player or co-op would be what's needed as the focus, as the game could get harder not through scalling enemies (though that is an option) but also more of them.

SabreXT wrote: Some good replies here.

On the point about DotA, is that I don't want the game to be DotA. One of the reasons I thought of this idea is because I'm disappointed with games, particularly RTS, that all think they will be the next big Korean e-sport and end up as bland, not good versions of Starcraft/DotA.

The competitive multiplayer aspect, as well as not being my thing, might be an issue for the reasons you mention. So I imagine that single player or co-op would be what's needed as the focus, as the game could get harder not through scalling enemies (though that is an option) but also more of them.

SabreXT, I think I know what you mean when you're talking about co-op. As crazy as this may sound, Syndicate may be good reference material. It starts you off fairly average but I'm at max rank (took about 10-15 hours) and I can now play most missions on Normal without any trouble. It's all about using super cybernetic abilities to hack opponents and using advanced upgrades on weaponry. I advise looking it up. There is a singleplayer... but lets pretend that just didn't happen.