GUYS LISTEN I just got the perfect idea of a stealth action game based on TMBD. You are in a space station, and you are not Murderbot, you're not one of its humans, you're not a secsystem or whatever - You are one of its drones. You are a small intel drone that is a semi-disposable extension of its attention.
It preserves first-person narration without physically embodying Murderbot (because physically embodying Murderbot is not going to work). Murderbot is in your ear the entire game. You are literally piloted by its consciousness. The player experiences MB exactly the way the books work: through commentary, irritation, tactical observation, and involuntary concern.
And oh my god the gameplay possibilities. Vent crawling / surveillance / tagging threats / hacking terminals / distracting guards / relaying environmental data / desperately trying not to get shot out of the air / throw yourself through an enemy's face etc. etc.
The game's mostly linear missions at first - you go online, get objectives, scout areas, tag enemies for MB, do stealth stuff, then the level ends and you move on. But after a few missions the game suddenly drops you into a scene with no warning. You boot back online expecting another task and there's just no objective. You're sitting on the ceiling watching MB talk to a human.
And the overlaying UI. Oh that'll be perfect. How you zoom in and the face got tagged with "angry 11% anxious 12% worried 77%". How you can notice when MB accesses your input and temporarily drops it (probably because it's using you to look at a human's face during a conversation), indicated by probably a small green dot or a frame line (at one point maybe ART joined watching you and the visual effects are impossible to ignore). How MB instructs you with lines and arrows in the missions. How the hostiles are tagged and named and weak points highlighted - those are not uncommon for a sci-fi action, but here you know there's SOMEONE doing the tagging for you and that's MB.
And there are some occasions in which MB was offline, but its drones were online and doing their last instructions, guarding monitoring or something. And I think that's the perfect chance to let the player do some sneaky little things and figure out things by themselves. HEHE.
ALSO in the books the drones are sometimes acting as relays, connecting separated humans to each other on comm when the feed is down. I thought of a perfect way of how things will go after you finished the relay task. You could normally only hear MB inside your head, while the others' voices were distant and mixed up with ambient noises. But suddenly you could hear the humans clearly in your head. It should be a small surprise and a novice experience. It was also vaguely like they intruded your private space because they were loud and close. You spent a few seconds to emotionally figure out they were not talking to you and started to find them annoying before MB lowered their voice to talk to you. Just imagine.
Behold, the linear narrative immersive-sim-lite stealth action game titled THE DRONE GAME.
(sorry can’t come up with a better name)
turnnoffyourmind
dededos
janainaart
ellievsbear
