Hmmmm... let's have a go here....
Never played KOTOR so I'm not sure how that goes, but I think the branching path idea is a goodun. I think the way I'd approach it is slightly different to what's been mentioned here.
I'd open the game by making the Tardis deposit the player in one area. A tutorial mission that seems trivial, defeating some third-tier villain, that sets up the beginning of the story while getting the player used to the controls.
From there, the player would open up more and more areas from information fed to them during the missions. e.g. The Doctor finds an ancient manuscript describing something that happened across the universe a million years ago, or frees a race of indiginous chicken-dogs by destroying a machine that's broacasting information to a space-station in the future.
I'm thinking this branching structure would work like a cross between the world-map in Super Mario World and the mission structure of GTA. Going back and delving a little deeper into the missions would discover secrets that would in turn open you up to other incidents/missions. The game would open up like a tree. The more you investigate, the further it opens up sideways as little crises break out all over spacetime that you could go solve.
There would be a main trunk of missions/areas that are where the real meat of the story is though. This is where you'd find the well-known villains, doing all the really nasty things that take more effort to unravel. That's where you'd play FRIENDS, ROMANS, CYBERMEN! or AUTON-O-MATIC FOR THE PEOPLE! But some would only be there to give you cool little gadgets or expand the story. Like getting stuck and needing to let Nikola Tesla supercharge your sonic-screwdriver.
The more you play, the more apparent it would be that there's some sort of plot going on, a Big Bad that's manipulating everyone else across spacetime. The Master, if you're going for the obvious, iconic brushstrokes........ That would be cool actually..... you could spend the final missions on a mad Tardis chase through all of spacetime that you've already visited, cleaning up all the havoc he's wreaking as you try to catch up. Something narratively similar to the ending of LOOM.
As for companions.......
You could recruit them, maybe? Picking them up on your travels. Helpers with different abilities that you could use to either man the Tardis or help you out in missions? Like cycling the time-wave jiggermawhatsit while you're switching the chrono-osscilatirathon. Or doing something in 12,000,000,000 BC so you can investigate the physical-anomaly it creates at the opposite end of time and space. |
