Hi Phil, Interesting. Well, as an absolute purest myself and as the developer I'd rather either go straight 100% fantasy wrestling, I.E. 100% made up wrestlers, or 100% true to the wrestlers I know and like. From what I gather from your message since 90% of the potential players probably don't give a rats butt about purity I should probably aim for something like a fantasy wrestling game without any connection to the WWE, WCW, ECW, and so on.
In one way that would be nice as I wouldn't have to worry about WWE or anyone else coming after me for any potential copyrights etc. I could create some fantasy wrestling federation and fill the roster with 40 or 50 custom wrestlers, and have fun creating original back stories and characters while doing it. After all, that's what the WWE does all the time. They take an ordinary name like Steve Auston and make it sound meaner by calling him Stone Cold Steve Auston. Now, just by adding those two words he sounds like the kick butt wrestler he is. Another reason why a totally fantasy wrestling game sounds apealing to me is ever since I started the idea of rewriting Piledriver I've got comments like let's add Steve Auston, let's add the Rock, let's include Edge, and this or that person. Besides the fact I don't like the idea of mixing old and new wrestlers together personally it would be pure murder to program all that. Let's face the facts of the matter realistically. Over the past week I've compiled a list of 80 wrestlers who were in the WWF between 1982 and 1990. That's 80 different wrestlers I'll have to program by hand, create an independant A.I. for, and it would probably take me at least a year or two to get that working on my current schedule. Now, if we were to open the game to everyone who was in the 1990's until present you are looking at at least 200 or more wrestlers. That might not be difficult for EA Games to program, but pretty much impossible for me. So technically speaking I just can't include each and every single wrestler who ever existed. At least not the way I want to create this game. So to be honest I was considering cutting the list down for the initial release anyway just to make it more easy to manage from a logistics point of view, and then build on it as I have time and energy to do so. Now, if we eject the idea of using real life wrestlers this makes it much easier because I can start out with a roster of say 20 male and 20 female fantasy wrestlers with their own back story, history, and unique moves and wrestling style. Heck even some of the nicknames of current wrestlers might be able to be borrowed since they are sort of generic. For instance, let's create a wrestler called the Viper. He might be some kind of new cross between Randy Orton and Jake "the Snake" Roberts. WWE fans might think of this guy as Randy Orton, but he'll have a different back story and probably some different moves. Maybe a sleeper hold like the Cobra Clutch since this guy would have a snake theme. As I said coming up with new and interesting characters shouldn't be that hard to do. For instance, cowboys, outlaws, etc is a popular theme for wrestlers. I might as easily come up with my own bad dude call him, Outlaw Jimmy Haynes, and base him on somebody like Terry Funk or Cowboy Bob Orton or something like that. Who knows maybe come up with a tag team of outlaw themed wrestlers and call them the Outlaws. It is all pretty easy to do. Actually, the more I think about it the more I kind of think it is a good idea. I'd be interested to know what everyone else thinks about the idea of just ejecting the WWE game altogether and starting over fresh using a completely fantasy based wrestling game. That way a person could create his or her own wrestler and wrestle the games official roster. Any thoughts? Cheers! On 4/13/11, Phil Vlasak <p...@pcsgames.net> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > We had a similar debate when I worked on Harry Hollingworth's World Series > Baseball. > There was a core group of fans that played only teams from the same year and > even did a 165 game season to determine who was in the world series. > But most of the game players didn't care to be realistic and enjoyed playing > any two teams against each other. > Some even requested that they be able to add themselves into the game as a > player and give themselves stats to rival the greatest. > I did get a special thrill when the game said that Phil Vlasak hit a home > run to win the game. > We found that at least ninety percent of the game owners played it as > fantasy baseball rather than the purists who played it as a real game. > Phil --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gamers@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
