Battlefield 1942 holds a special place in my heart but it had it's hay-day in 2002. Battlefield 2 is still quite populair and should be picked up quite cheap. It had max 64 player servers in huge open environments with vehicles like tanks, planes, subs, ships etc. all scattered around.
Another interesting game in the franchise would be the upcoming battlefield heroes. Look up some trailers of that one on GT or youtube.
Here lies perhaps a whole different future of multiplayer: It's downloadable for free and can run on almost any computer.
My dream on a huge open battle scenario would be to stop using guns althogether. I want an online multiplayer game, either FPS or TPS in the roman and medieval era. I want Rome: Total War and Medieval 2 total war linked together. I want to be longbowmen #50 firing down with my unit from the castle walls on the besieging knights. I want to be a hoplite bracing myself for an incomming cavalry charge. But, this calls for maybe 500 people or more on one server to be pulled off effectively.
What I would want implemented though:
Commander option as in battlefield 2
RPG system. If you play with a class more often you can pull of different sword-techniques and you upgrade your weaponry. Kinda like CoD4.
Gradual shift in time. You start of in 300 BC, work your way through battles and when you log off it's 275BC or something. when you log back on it's 200BC for instance. When the timer hits the end of the 1600's or so, you warp back to 300BC.
I'll take at least 25 years, is my guess, before this will be made
**Edit: Awesome idea while taking a piss: Perhaps you only need 200 human soldiers...the rest can be filled with bots.
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