Idea Info Name: Timeline Index: Primary Category: Action Submitted: 1/30/2003 10:01:18 AM Written By: chak

It is the year 2100. Headed by Dr. Aspen, a small group of scientists have come up with what they believe is a time machine. You are sent back into time at key moments, to change certain events that affect the technological innovations of the current day.

What started out as an ambitious experiment turned into a new quest to fast-forward the technology of the current day. On the second trial run of the time machine, you come across the father of Dr. Aspen. Dr. Aspen had learnt most of his theories off his late father's work.

In an unexpected move, you save him from his fatal car accident, causing him to be alive in present day, to improve the time machine. Dr. Aspen and his father brainchild a way of moving back in history, more precisely than ever before, and changing events to improve the technology of current day.

The game’s core engine plays similar to Hitman 2. Because of the infancy of the time machine, you cannot be precisely placed where the objective is. As such, most of your missions will consist of stealthily reaching your target. Much like Hitman, you may employ several methods of infiltration, or communication. Each person you interact with, or worse, kill, has the potential to change the future in disastrous ways. As such, stealth is ever present in the game design.

 Certain missions will have you getting into a government protected facility, while others will have you assassinating someone who would in future have some sort of bad influence on the technology of the future. Others will simply have you talking to a kid about his goals in life, and where they will lead him. Some missions might involve bringing a complex formula from the future, and asking a past genius to solve it, to bring back the answer.

 The current design of the time machine weakens your character when you send him in the past. As you progress, your character will improve, because of improvements made on the time-travelling mechanism, that allows you to lose less of your strength, agility and abilities when you time travel, as the initial machine severely weakens you when you start.

As the missions progress, new technology might also allow scientists to design new weapons for you, as well as new gadgets to play around with time. You may also collect certain ancient weapons that you might want to use. I can imagine a gadget that slows time down, allowing you to pull off some nice stunts (ala Max Payne), as well as bio-engineering to make you able to jump higher or run faster.

This adds to the immersion factor of the game, because all the standard gameplay elements are explained. Levelling up, slowing time, getting new weapons (I hate those games that have no explanation to why you can't get ALL the weapons in the beginning), and a bad guy that probably wasn't there before.

I foresee a game that starts off something like Thief or Splinter Cell, and ending up like Max Payne or Devil May Cry. Somewhere in the middle, you realise that one of your actions has actually changed the future where another rival group has begun experiments into time travel, thus providing the bad guy element. You find out when on one of your missions, you noticed another mysterious “Player” trying to reach the same scientist.

So Mr. Spector, am I hired?