XCOM as an RPG?

My friends all play Role Playing Games. And that's fun. IKRPG, Deathwatch, Shadowrun, and even the Classic Dungeons and Dragons. We've dabbled in them all. But I had a thought.

The Lads, my older friends, all enjoy going down to Agros enormous plot and spending the day for a yuppie shoot, firing rifles at cardboard cut outs of Zombies, stapled with packets of simulated gore. What if... Aliens turned up?

The GM would suddenly be hit by a giant gob of green plasma and instantly killed. The rest of the Lads would freak out, take cover, and encounter the little grey men.

Afterwards, the remaining lads would be picked up by a proper military mob and flown back to the Headquarters for interrogation. Of which, they will be recruited as a rapid response team for Xcom.

From there play it like new Xcom, where everyone has a class and earns abilities with each Rank and few digits and stats compared to classic, and cross it with Apocalypse with a Brisbane City Layout. They'll have a main base set somewhere near Central Brisbane, and they'll get UFO Contacts and Exalt Attacks as normal, but locations based around Brisbane.

Have a UFO crash into the City Hall in King George Square; Save your Operative from Exalt in UQ; Have a Chryssalid Hive wash up in Pinkenba before calling in an Airstrike. The possibilities are endless.

Every week would have a new encounter of some sort, and rather than having behind the scenes crap for Research and Spending, it would be a general consensus each week. And everyone would be conveniently healed at the end of the week, and an operative would be sent off at the end of the second or third week. Or better yet, someone who's missing for a couple of weeks is automatically an Operative, and first night he's back he has to be picked up "because exalt have found him as he's transmitting information back to base."

I wonder who would volunteer for MEC Trooper Augmentation...

Offline Raid Group

I love Warcraft. I truly do. It's a game that I've admired for years since I had a demo of Warcraft II back when I was a sprog. Orcs have always been my favourite faction. I don't know why, possibly because I don't mind playing the bad guy on occasion, or because I simply liked the aesthetics of them all.

Could also be because I have a distinct hate for Elves. We may never know.

But I've enjoyed the franchise for as long as I can remember. But I haven't been able to play a Warcraft game in a number of years. Why? Because of World of Warcraft.

It's a good game in its own right. It's polished and shiny and hits all the good spots of its long time fans, while changing the style of the game from its traditional Real Time Strategy (slash Strategy RPG by WCIII) to an Action RPG.

Who wouldn't want to play an Orc Grunt? I know I did. So I did. Not straight away though. When the game first released, I didn't have money in high school, let alone a computer that could run it.

Eventually though, I made it into the game and started a Dwarf Paladin to play with my Alliance friends, who wanted to play Elves and Humans. Nancies, the lot of them.

But I still had fun. I ran around with a Giant fuggin hammer and smacked ever living shit out of every poor computer run monster there was. I just couldn't die.

The years went by, and the novelty wore off. I played a couple of the expansions and everything, but now you never even see me consider loading up the game. Not for fear of having to download 20gb of updates for it, though now that I think about it... But because The game has become tedious. I could play it once a week as part of a raid guild, taking on some of the more severe instances of the world amongst a large number of comrades, but I would still get bored. I've gotten into the habit of paying for a month of play and just farting around levelling up whatever character I wanted to play. And also getting used to the new abilities, because they're usually different by that time too.

There's the thing though. It's been almost ten years, and I am tired of WoW. So what about some love for the offline players?

I've been thinking about it for years, an RPG of Warcraft, telling a story between several characters from the Horde and the Alliance, each from different Races and Classes, going through the main events of the World of Warcraft series, and maybe even the entire franchise. Heck, their next expansion sends players entirely back in time, so why not?

One of my favourite RPGs is Final Fantasy IX simply because the game follows the entire cast, not just one and whatever companions he comes across at the time. It splits between them all, even just for a short while. That's how I envision an RPG Story told about Warcraft, flicking between different events a character could have been at, maybe with a couple bits of character substitution.

It's a wonder what the play style would be. Would it be just a rehash of the World of Warcraft System? Or would it be something like a JRPG, or a Tactical RPG? Visually, I couldn't care less if they just got the art style of Warcraft II or III and made a system from those, but it would still have to have features from the original game, like skill trees, and the rage and threat systems.

There's no chance of this happening, I'm aware. They're focused still on WOW and their other games, like Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm. But one day, it would be cool.