Okay, heres the story. Me and a team of about 13 other people have been working on/planning the creation of a MMORPG/FPS type game, but I personally being the executive producer am having trouble with the games storyline and style. To fill you in, I''ll give you a basic storyline. The year was 2049, and the world was a prosperous place. Great advances had been made in technology over the past twenty years - advances that finally warranted the first manned mission to Mars. NASA had previously established a colony on the moon, a colony that was thriving - and NASA intended to do the same on Mars... terraform and colonize the red world. Years of preparations would culminate in the launch of the Endeavor IV, a shuttle so far advanced it would be hailed as a wonder if it were sent back to the turn of the century. It would spend four and a half months on its voyage to the sands of Mars. Those four and a half months went flawlessly, and the crew of nine sent to set up the base of operations. With the assistance of advanced robotics, it took only nine days to build the base, and soon the crew was settled in. Over the next few days, they began setting up the cloning cylinders that would assist in populating the colony properly when it was complete. Little did they know that one of the crew members was working for the Foxim-Pentrite Corporation, who secretly wanted to have sole mining rights to Mars. The NASA mission interfered with their plans, so they decided to stage a little accident. At 8:33 AM on August 12, 2049, disaster struck. The Fox-Pentrite operative rigged the mission''s fuel supplies with enough plastic explosive to blow a crater in Mars the size of a city block. However, the Foxim-Pentrite operative was not aware that that morning five of the astronauts had taken one of the ATVs out for a routine geological survey. They were unharmed, and were not too happy when they found their former comrade attempting to escape in one of their small escape ships... in fact, the ONLY escape ship, large enough to hold all of the astronauts, and yet much smaller than the ship they came in, it was designed to carry them home if something went wrong. During the firefight between the astronauts and the saboteur, the ship was destroyed, leaving the five astronauts and the now dead Foxim-Pentrite operative alone, on Mars, without any supplies or chance of survival. Retreating to one of the deepest canyons of Mars, where the air was thicker, the remaining astronauts set up what little supplies remained. They set up some air compressors to keep the atmosphere down in the canyon''s caves somewhat breathable, and along with them they carried the one item that would ensure their survival. The cloning machine. They cloned various animals to survive, and managed to salvage some of the plant life they had been growing in their hydroponics chamber. And so they lived out a meager subsistence in that canyon for some 4 years, until fate gave them a chance ... for revenge. NASA, believing there were no survivors, immediately shut down the Mars colonization project and was promptly declared that no more missions to Mars would be sent. There was no way they could have known that some of the members had survived... After almost 4 years of legal battles between NASA and the foxim-pentrite corporation an agreement was reached in which NASA sold the sole ownership of Mars to the company. Within the next two years, foxim-pentrite set up a massive mining operation on Mars, and began systematically stripping the world of any minerals that they could use. It was when they tried to advance towards the northern pole of Mars that they began encountering resistance - human resistance in the form of a group named the Endeavor Resistance Force. The foxim-pentrite corporation was stunned. They assumed that everyone was killed in the blast including their operative. Puzzled, foxim-pentrite retrieved pictures of the members of this resistance group and sent them to NASA. They reported back that the resistance members bore an extreme, but not exact, resemblance to five of the members of the crew. It was then that they realized that there were survivors from that mission. Those five former NASA members had been living on Mars for four years - and when the corporation came, the crew must have used the cloning cylinders to form a resistance force. With little hesitation, foxim-pentrite began shipping weapons to Mars so that they might fight back against the Endeavour Resistance Force. That was seven years and four months ago, and the war between the two factions is still going strong... *sigh* Glad thats over.... So thats the storyline so far...I don''t really like it to be honest....its missing something, but I''m not sure what. If you have any ideas on what should be added/removed drop me a line. Right now, the way we have the game set up we are in visioning a slightly dark and paranoid atmosphere. For example, scary and somewhat dark sandstorms, evil caves and other x-files style paranoia type things in-game. But we don''t want the darkness to dull down the game play (Considering the fact that combat is what drives this game). Another thing we are trying to do is keep this game reasonably down to earth. IE: 80% of the weapons are weapons we use on earth right now...the other 20% of guns we want to look more futuristic (because its in the near future). The problem is, I don''t what kind of ''futuristic'' guns would be very sweet, but down to earth at the same time. I could use some ideas relating to this. Also, if you have any gameplay ideas, that would be cool too.

I agree with the above.

Mars is a barren place, with nothing but a mining colony and a group of cloned humans living in caves or whatever, it doesnt give much scope for anything else but fighting and wandering around.

Although you could start it off that way and then introduce some kind of lost alien artifact/structures/technology or something. But thats probably not down-to-earth enough.

My two pennies.