Not really a game, but playing Minecraft has made me wish for real-world modeling software with a similar first person interface. Select from standard off-the-shelf components, use real-world tools, and craft stuff. Then test it out. I’ve got ideas in my head for all kinds of stuff, but going from there to an actual model is tedious with standard CAD and modeling software. Why can’t I (virtually) take an 8’ Douglas Fir 2x4, cut it with a saw, drill some holes in it - you get the idea. I could make something like a shed, then stress test it in a windstorm, pile 4 feet of snow on it, or drench it with rain. Or build a go-kart and see how it would perform. Tweak the design until it does what you want. Make the app user moldable and let the community go wild adding capabilities and virtual materials. Maybe it could eventually generate real parts lists, fabrication data for 3D printers and CNC machines, and assembly drawings.
You’ve kinda answered your own question there. That’s what CAD is for. To create what you’re after, you’d be using the same backend capabilities which are already computationally expensive, mapped out within a game engine. The result would likely be an expensive bit of training/simulation software that’s redundant to both engineers and machinists, and out of the price range of any home builder.
Accessibility is what you’re after, and I can sympathise. I think ANSYS Discovery was made with that in mind, and it’s available in the academic version.
I generate models with code and use a pythonic API to automatically simulate them in testbed conditions. It wouldn’t be far off to create extra scenarios, but each time you make one it would take a bit of knowledge to put together.
It’s one of their modules that’s meant for preliminary CFD with a simplified approach. I’ve only tried it a little tbh as it doesn’t have the control we required, but I can see how it’d feel accessible. Workbench is intimidating AF.
The pythonic API was for controlling Fluent which is maybe what you used in school, also involved some Spaceclaim. Getting started on coding that was a puzzle and a half. Feels good now it’s solved though :’D
There was a rudimentary gui of sorts, and we were taught using that and maybe very minimal command line stuff (I did learn some “programming” for Matlab in a different class, but all of that knowledge is long gone), but I remember it being very unresponsive and buggy.
Or maybe I just sucked at it, though I’m generally very good with computers and intuitively figuring out how software is supposed to work. ANSYS was not intuitive lol. I just remember trying to make meshes and wanting to smash the PC.
A sort of real time game that starts in third person, as a single character, and expands over time to a whole village. Set in a post apocalyptic world, where you wake up after the apocalypse and have to survive, eventually meeting other survivors and either fight them off or band together to form societies. Each person modelled like an rpg character, with skills sets and capabilities (electrician, plumber, computer geek, radio amateur, farmer and all the other things that make a self-sufficient village). It would need to model the dynamics of politics and how society was governed and the run-ins with other villages and roving bands of survivors.
A sort of mini civilisation but themed around rebuilding capability rather than discovering it.
An insectoid themed MMORPG! I’m not even a fun of insects, it’s just such an endless creative potential given their variety. Can have different classes and factions, for instance a Rhino bug tank, mantis-assasin, druid ladybug, Butterfly magician; The Ant Insect’s Republic, Wasp Protectorate, Holy Bee Empire! Also underground cities, tons of them!
Unfortunately won’t ever be made since an average player needs to be able to play as a human warrior to be interested…
A game that captures the feeling of when Arthur Dent crash lands on that primitive planet in “The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” and makes a sandwich. I want The Sandwich Maker.
You crash into this procedurally generated world. All the plants and animals are new every playthrough, and you slowly learn about them through experimentation and from the native population who has never heard of a sandwich and really doesn’t do much except eat raw ingredients. When you cook the meat from an animal instead of eating it raw, they all lose their minds with wonder and you become the town’s chef.
You harvest wild crops and cultivate better ones. You find ways to use the animal fat and meat and “milk”, you find plants that work as food, maybe their seeds are great crushed up with a little water into a paste, maybe you need to dry them out, maybe you need to de-seed them and mix them with another plant to make it taste better… on and on.
You need to work with the people there to make tools, and together you iterate out exactly what you need.
Eventually you have to find something that matches your randomised flavour pallette for the perfect sandwich. You assemble all the ingredients you’ve collected, cultivated, or created, with the tools and techniques you and the townspeople have developed, and you take a bite. It’s perfect. You win.
Super Smash Brothers but with jetpacks (ssb already has jetpacks but the game isn’t really tuned for them offensively and with big levels and lots of platforms)
A fighting game where you play an average Greek soldier on his way to becoming a hero.
It starts where you have to kill 5 enemies in a battle and you get promoted. Then you have to kill 10 etc.
You can upgrade your hero and the soldiers fighting under you. So you can choose to become a powerful lone hero or a hero and his men. If you don’t kill enough of the enemy you don’t advance. But if you go on a rampage and the battle is lost you also lose. Your performance influences the battle. So it might be that holding a bridge is more important than total kills for example.
I haven’t played it, so I may be wrong, but isn’t banner lords a bit like this - not Greek, and I assume you start with more status than a foot soldier, but it may be worth a look.
I’m not reading through all the comments to see if somebody has already mentioned these…
A game where you start out Godlike, superbuffed, maxed stats, best equipment whatever… but to progress through the game you slowly start to give up your gear, quit using your best skills (until they atrophy and are lost/drastically weakened) to end the game as a regular person just doing regular things. The catch would be to wrap a good story around why you’d be giving up all your cool shit.
A FPS that is split between the cutscenes of the warriors talking shit and the generals talking shit and the actual gameplay of you being a random nobody who is just trying to survive. You can’t pick up weapons, because you dont know how to use them or it draws attention and you get attacked directly by the soldiers of both armies. Maybe there’d be NPC’s at the beginning of the levels that you’d sorta be expected to try to keep alive but inevitably they would start to get picked off by cross fire, artillery, tanks, booby traps set by the fighting soldiers, etc.
An RPG where the basic game loop is kinda flipped. Where you’d expect to have random encounters and fights, you’d be able to see the mobs and the interactions would be more of the “Talk” or “Trade” variety but doing things like opening a door or crossing a bridge or equipping a weapon starts a fight. Usually your character would have something wrong with them… so like, going to sleep would leave you with sleep in your eye or groggy and trying to search or open things would start the encounter. Another example, your character’s let gets hurt and now your random encounter is with the cobblestones that you’re trying to walk on to get to the house of healing.
An RPG in the style of like the NES/SNES Final Fantasy games or the Earthbound/Mother series where you’re characters are trying to start a band and the Random Encounters aren’t fights but gigs. You finish the fights by either playing really well a type of music the crowd wants/likes, playing poorly or playing something the crowd doesn’t want/like until they kick you off stage. The goals are things like, getting better equipment, playing notable venues, making a name for yourselves and making it to “The Big Show”.
I just want to play fun games that have a great and comprehendible story.
They would also need to be natively made for PC (along with any other platform that the devs/pubs might want). I understand why console ports exist but one can wish.
Some AAA game examples/concerns off the top of my head:
MGS V ? Fun gameplay, couldn’t make head or tail of the story without viewing content from others, and still I feel it’s way too confusing.
AC ? Things were in a good direction from a story standpoint at one point in time years ago but they lost it, didn’t enjoy the new RPG-like direction as much either. Gameplay was a power fantasy thing I guess. Whether I like it or not is dependent on my mood during the session.
Skyrim ? Fun game, never got around to actually “finishing” the game because there would always be a break and I would entirely forget where and what I was doing earlier.
Souls-likes ? I don’t have a problem admitting that my skills are pretty sucky. Effort required to the rewards are pretty bad for me, and there is no particular story that I have seen other than community theories.
I’m working on my years long backlog, in case anyone wants to make recommendations it’ll probably take a long time for me to get to it if it isn’t in the current list…
Depends on what you define as comprehendible. Stalker and Yakuza as my “not AAA but does what I expect AAA games to do, since I play indies” came to my mind but they might not be comprehendible at times.
Same with fun, do visual novels count? Ghost Trick is the best story I played in recent years, but it’s a puzzle game.
I mean, there’s a ton of games I played with good story and gameplay over the years, but I don’t play AAA much.
Some kind of stealth shooter where you and the bad guys have very realistic anatomy and no healthbar. You can’t be killed by being shot in the foot but you’re disabled. Shoot someone’s finger off and they might not be able to use a rifle, help in pain, leave a blood trail to follow. Chest shots generally kill you but it’s the lungs it’s not instant like the heart or central blood vessels. Bone shots are agonizing and totally debilitating.
Caliber and velocity are all calculated and what damage is done.
I know this is kinda grim, but lots of video games have done parts of this, especially Sniper Elite, but also RDR2, the Resident Evil REmakes, MGS:R, and more. I just want it even more detailed and collected in one game. I’ve been thinking about this since PS3-era and I think the tech is ready now.
Arma and Operation Flashpoint is much closer than the other games you mentioned. You might be interested in trying them. But it requires a lot of patience and map reading. Also it’s not finger-level accurate. But the rest is on par.
Yeah I’ve heard of them but those are mil-sim games. Not very fun imo. I’m think more like AAA experience of pickup and play, not remember 2000 key commands to zero your target, turn off the safety, chamber a round, breathe, force the thoughts of your husband and newborn back home, and no more to shoot. Oops, you missed! 😜
Seriously though. ARMA is cool but my game I’m thinking more like MGS4/5
I remember being tossed in the deep end when the mods were new to me. Having to diagnose and treat gunshot wounds, inject morphine, run fluids etc… even CPR, certain medics could do transfusions, match blood types etc.
Was kinda frightening for a PC game… And often all of this was under enemy fire.
The enemy would be injured, shot, concussed, knocked unconscious, lose blood etc. the potential existed for them to regain consciousness after a while and if you hadn’t removed their weapons they could fire in you. Surprised the shit out of people not used to these mods… Always had to check downed hostiles.
I’d like to play an RTS game where you don’t control the units directly, but instead just give them general orders that they try to carry out to the best of their ability. The player would focus on coordinating combat at high level directing where the units should go and what positions they hold. The units would have to have plausible behaviors, so they wouldn’t just run into gunfire, but take cover, try to coordinate with each other, etc. The units would also have to have modifiers such as morale, so if a unit suffered heavy losses it might break and flee for example. I think you could get some really interesting emergent game play come out of it.