Awhile back I had designed a pen and paper system for fighting arena battles in the Tabletop wargame "Warhammer 40k." The basic idea was that the player would be able to create a unique charachter with a set amount of points using a set of rules I had developed. During this creation process the player would be able to choose from a variety of skills and weapons. Then afterward the player would have to create their charachters model (this is a tabletop minitures wargame.) The player would have to compete with other players in a variety of scenarios set in a arena or area of battle. Usually this arena was filled with all kinds of traps as well to make the game more interesting. One of the great things about this was that you could take your charachter and upgrade it with new skills and weapons depending on experience gained in the arena, assuming you didn't die. This created more of a bond between the player and his avatar (the miniture he created) because he had invested time in it. Inadvertently I also discovered that it created a death penalty. Since most RPGs have their roots in pen and paper games I think this idea would translate well into the digital realm. Thoughts?

Sieges: Not much to say about this other then it would be cool to have siege scenarios. I'm actually modeling a castle right now and have it in engine to do some concept development for a side project. The ability to have such massive environments would make for some awesome siege warfare.

Battlemap: Another take off of pen and paper games. The basic idea is that you could have a set of scenarios making up what is called a "Campaign." Each scenario represents a specific region of a battlemap. Each scenario/region gives the owning side certain benefits or the non-possessor negatives. Also certaim regions may have negative effects or bonuses to each team. Players can jump into the current scenario being played at any time and leave at anytime (with some sort of balancing in place to prevent one side being completly outnumbered.) Ultimately the goal is to capture the opposing teams castle (ala siege.) Or could depend upon the campaigns winning conditions (perhaps its simply for one team to fight the other back from their castle that starts out under siege or infiltrated from within by Chaos.)

Lol I didn't start out this thread meaning to be this long but I kept coming up with ideas.
I think there is a lot of possabilities that you could do with this sort of game, though I'm not sure what the developers initially have in mind really. But I think diablo in cryengine2 wouldn't be making very good use of the engine.




And another question: Are you hiring? I have lots of experience using Cryengine2, including asset implementaion, modeling/texturing, and level design. Your site made no mention of possible job openings so I have no where to ask.

Most of your thoughts are very similar to our design document 8). We have a character progress depending on successfully completed scenarios, death penalty, upgrades, amount of weight points to enter a battle etc. I agree with you about "RPG roots", and we gonna try to combine it with arcade style gaming.
About jobs listing - Currently we are looking for skillful programmers for the project to adopt the engine for us. The position of beta-testers is opened as well. We are planing to make the site update, so people will able to find any information about opened positions.