Yeah I know, there’s a movie coming out soon and all, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was sent into tv series oblivion, not to live to see the light of another season. But think about it. How cool would a Terminator based MMO be? It’s a really well defined sci-fi universe, ripe with back story galore, with a good and evil side to choose from, with fun fuzzy grey tones, and no clear black and white. Sounds like fun to me!

The Good Guys: The Resistance

This seems pretty straightforward when you think about it a minute. They’re an army and organized as such, so they have that basic structure and would have that pseudo kind of class/organization system.

Soldier: The basic fighter class that could specialize into something more hardcore.
Medic: Could go on to become a doctor, surgeon, or a field medic.
Command: Your officers, they lead the troops and give buffs or other bonuses.
Specialists: Spies, snipers, communications, computer tech, things of that caliber.

This probably should sound vaguely familiar to a MMO veteran, it’s sort of the trees from Tabula Rasa. I just wouldn’t recommend the logos system. That annoyed the piss out of me, sorry guys. Something that would make some sense to me is “the more you use it, the better it gets,” but that rewards people who grind and grind and grind and penalizes casual players. Perhaps some kind of training cap per day as you get physically tired.

You could organize players into “units” to simulate the familiar guild system. Perhaps even work in housing by way of a shared guild “barracks” where you put up mementos of kills or other things that could give your unit members small buffs.

And then the missions. How cool would it be if you could barrel around in jeeps or other cars shooting the hell out of Terminators to save another team who screwed the pooch? Or sneak around shelled out cities trying to complete a stealth mission to get information to try to somehow take down SkyNet? Or perhaps you’ve found a way to come back to the present when you go back in time, but you only have 20 minutes in the past to get it done, or this remote pull-back device zots you back whether you finish or not. Who wouldn’t want to do that?!

The Bad Guys: The Terminators

Of course, you also want the players to be able to play the bad guys. I know, you’re thinking, hold the phone here. Why!? Because as soon as you turn this game on, there is going to be someone like me going “Why can’t I play a Terminator!?” that’s why. And it’s got a cool feature you could do with it when you think about it this way. Every Terminator is a chip. Not a body, a chip. And as they level up or progress, they can move from body to body by simply moving the chip around. Yeah, you want to play one now don’t you? That’s what I thought.

As a fresh off the line Terminator you start as a piece of junk T-400 being a warden at a concentration camp, perhaps learning the ropes in training on how to be a Terminator this way. When you complete this, you get your chip moved up into a T-600, which we all know and love from the first Terminator movie and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As the player continues to do missions to wipe out the resistance, they continue to move up models by having their chip moved around, and there are plenty of models to choose from as side-grades or possible mission specific types of bodies to use. The fun part? The player can keep these in a type of dock or warehouse to use and swap out to when they want to or as needed.

PvP And More

Another fun aspect might be to have bounties placed on resistance player characters every so often where player Terminators try to take them down. You could also say that the Terminators have a certain degree of self awareness, and have names at this point of SkyNet being aware, and do the reverse as well. Of course, PvP is already written into the world by default, so let the good times roll.

Overall, there’s plenty of story to this world, and you really don’t even need to involve his holy savior-ness John Connor at all. Real people with their own struggles are enough to push the story on their own. The conflict writes itself. This is of course, presuming the forthcoming movie doesn’t do something completely insane and totally rewrite the universe as we all currently know it.

What do you think?  Totally nuts?  Totally awesome?  Talk about it on our forums!