A paradigm shift

I have been looking at my own motivations for making this game and what I hope to accomplish with it.  I think what I hope to accomplish is to at minimum plant the idea that there needs to be a paradigm shift as far as online gaming is concerned.  I have been playing games for a very long time and I have seen a great many different kinds.  I have seen the amount of detail that is put into game creation and now that I am learning the process I am very impressed with what some companies have been able to produce.  I know that I have said it before, but I think that they are just repacking the same game with newer and fancier graphics.  So I thought that I would sit down and look at where FPS games in particular are at now and what can be done to break out of the paradigm.

First thing that comes to mind is the map.  Players often complain about how a map gets old after playing it over and over again.  I think the problem is that basic strategy of a map will not change once people have figured out the fastest or most effective way to win on it.  Map creation is a time consuming process and relative to how long someone is playing on a map it may be a 1:1000 ratio, meaning that even if players are also making maps new maps can't be made fast enough before players get bored of playing on them.  I think the problem here is that the average time I have seen on a map is perhaps 15 to 30 minutes.  Once the objectives are reached a new map has to load up and the cycle begins again.  So that would mean that even in a situation where say 100 maps are ready to go at a game launch a player will have played most of them within 50 hours of game play assuming they play all of the different game styles, and within 100 to 200 hours of gameplay all basic strategy and tactics have been established and the game is no longer a challenge.  Humans help a little in this because playing with humans means that there will be an element of unpredictability and challenge simply by virtue of the fact that new players are constantly joining the game and they will all be a different levels of competence and knowledge of game play.  To counter this problem I propose to make simpler maps with an element of randomness thrown in so that things will never get to the point where the game is always the same.  Games like Minecraft and Ace of Spades have shown me that a game does not need to have an immaculate landscape in order to be enjoyable.  Also having a persistent world where there is not a timer saying go and everyone starting out from the beginning spawn points all at the same time will make it so there is no 30 minutes and start over again aspect.

Second thing that comes to mind is the objectives.  Often maps will have one objective which players know from the beginning, whether that is to kill more enemies than your enemies kill you, or to capture a flag, hold territory, destroy the enemy base first, etc.... Often these objectives are accomplished relatively quickly, which means that a new map needs to be set up and the process started over again.  Because people are familiar with these simple objectives they get used over and over again, sometimes with simple variations on the theme, but usually they all come back to the same strategy and tactics that are useful in short term confrontations that will only last for 30 minutes or less.  What I would like to see changed here especially is the length of time to accomplish the overall objective and some player creativity in making shorter term objectives in order to reach the overall objective.  I think that if it took at minimum a day to accomplish an objective then strategies and tactics would evolve more slowly and would have a greater amount of variance. If that overall objective became even longer to achieve then there would be an even greater amount of variance bordering on what happens in real warfare.  By simplifying the system the game won't be as complicated as real life warfare, but it should be much more interesting than a 30 minute skirmish.  The downside to this is that it won't be as action packed as your standard multiplayer FPS, but there are already hundreds of them for the player who needs the high speed action.  Luckily in videogames it is possible to take out some of the more boring aspects of real life warfare, like the days spent in travel, the hours and hours of waiting patiently on guard duty or doing menial tasks while waiting for orders, or the mind numbing aspects of  intelligence gathering and analysis.  These activities will still be there for those who desire to participate in them, but teleporting makes travel a non issue,  bases will still need to be guarded but alarms and base defense items can help with this, and intelligence gathering in games is aided by the simplicity of the system and will doubtfully require a large amount of mind numbingness.

I'm sure there are other aspects I would like to see change, but these are the main ones.  I realize that a paradigm shift takes a lot of effort and much persuasion by those who have the vision of the new paradigm.  I think that sitting down and writing this out will help me as I organize my arguments for why changes need to happen, and maybe, just maybe there is someone reading this who can make a larger difference than I am currently able to.