How about something like Overwatch 2, but 6v6, and no battle pass. Maybe it doles out rewards like skins and sprays and stuff for playing? Just spitballin’ here.
Heck, add an annual subscription to pay the devs, but don’t go all in with the overpriced cosmetics…
Anyway, I loved that game. I haven’t touched OW2 yet and I am not planning to. Greed took over, they axed half the fun mechanics, and added a battle pass that plain sucks. Fuck that.
Dungeon keeper but with immortal redneck play as a complementary aspect; there are DK clones where you can possess monsters, but they lack what immortal redneck has to offer gameplay-wise.
Also a game similar to void bastards but with multiplayer, more monsters, less crafting and more guns, and better/more varied environments, and no time limits. Also immortal redneck with multiplayer. Also ziggurat with multiplayer. Also hands of fate with multiplayer.
Actually forget game, I wish there was a program that could force any game to be multiplayer; or a dev team you could hire that would do that.
A good community-focused Rocket League clone. Ever since RL was bought out by Epic and it went F2P, the game has felt more and more soulless, and the community interactions have been super tonedeaf. As a small company, Psyonix gave out cool stuff like white hats for those who found bugs and custom titles for people who found their significant other via the game. It sucks that the best content in the game came the summer before and the summer right after Epic bought it. Since the game went free to play, though, it seemed like RL was just another accessory for Fortnite to grow.
Tl;dr: RL was freaking amazing when the devs were allowed to care about the community. Now, it’s slowly losing the stuff that made it so special.
VR biplane combat sim, with heavy emphasis on your plane as a location and an object. A massive but oddly fragile thing you can walk around, on the grass, for a real sense of scale. The prop-shaft is eye-level and there’s another four feet of plane above that. It’s this massive ungainly thing you have to climb onto, and then into, before convincing it to leave the ground. All so you can push it to the edges of its capabilities versus other google-wearing maniacs doing much the same.
The interwar period is just about ideal for the physicality of air combat. Speeds are comprehensibly low, while still blasting past anyone stuck on the dirt. The machine has a manageable number of controls, all bracingly direct, and you can watch the wings flex from whatever you ask of them. If you need to see ahead while taking off, you lean over the side.
All of this is suitable for a sitting-and-standing VR experience. You probably don’t have access to enough room for a proper walkaround. But you should readily develop enough of a feel to do proper barnstorming.
I am imagining the horrible graphics of Red Baron 3d (1998) played at a ludicrously crisp frame rate through VR goggles. The game had fast forward and play buttons because it took so long to fly over to the trenches or to ascend to a decent altitude. Solid idea though, it would be hectic with numerous biplanes dog fighting over France.
Edit: there are youtube videos of players using VR headsets and flying biplanes on IL-2 Sturmovik: Flying Circus (2019).
It'd actually be hilarious to have this set in the era when the pilot's handheld weaponry or even just throwing a goddamn brick at the other plane were viable tactics
It’d absolutely be an option. If nothing else, if you glance aside when you pass someone going the opposite direction, you are going to see the whites of their eyes and maybe a rude gesture. There’s every reason to let you twist in your chair and pop off with an old-timey revolver.
But if you fire it through the props, you will be landing ahead of schedule.
A biplane vr sim would be fun, there’s plenty of interactions to dive into, like adjusting the engines and clearing gun jams.
I’ve long wanted a single person tank/artillery simulator and guess I’ll just have to build it. Something about choosing a target and ammo type, grabbing shells from stowage, opening the breech, slamming it home, driving a tank and standing in a cupula just have vr interaction fun written all over.
Tank sims seem constrained and tactile for VR. You can poke your head out by standing up… whether or not the hatch is open. You’d just go through. Fabric-based aircraft are open enough that most movin’ around is a valid option, in real life, and the controls are simple and loose enough that a virtual stick will just about do.
? you’ve got interactions with the radio, map, gun comp, throttle, steering, all the parts of running the main gun… I see tons of opportunity and that’s before you add fuzzy dice and fancy keyrings and custom painting the beast lol
You can poke your head out by standing up… whether or not the hatch is open.
I’ve created a solution for this already. Well, two:
one is, while standing up to look out the hatch is fun, it’s probably better a seated game. I put a collision box near the underside that triggers the hatch to open. it’s still janky (not interpolating smoothly) but that’s just details.
the better way, imho, instead of standing from a seated position while wearing vr shit, which even with a quest is still janky in my experience, is just having a button to elevate the chair so they’re seated at the cupula rim. a quick fade in and fade out coming and going might help.
but tell you what, if I can make this happen, you make your sopwith sim and we’ll jam’em together so I can light up your lovely canvas with the commander’s ma-deuce! :D would love to have that in both games, swooping bomb runs and minitanks lol
Constrained in the sense that physical mechanisms would stop you, but a handheld controller cannot. Operating a tank is extremely tactile. There’s a literal ton of moving parts in a very tight space. It is a gun you are inside of.
Steel Battalion’s infamously enormous Xbox controller was halfway to a child’s toy dashboard because the only way to convey all those fiddly dials and levers was to actually provide them. Complexity within the game is not the same experience. It has to be present in-person. Quitting is not a menu option; it’s an ejection key you grip with white knuckles until the last second.
The HOTAS experience for some Red Baron shit is a Wiimote duct-taped to a broomstick. Force feedback would be massively better, but the stick not corresponding to the plane is a realistic possibility when things go fully pear-shaped. This goal and available technology align especially well.
I’d argue the ideal home tank game is a smartphone app you slot in front of the itty-bitty window of a glorified Rubbermaid container before climbing inside. Map all the thumbsticks and triggers of a generic controller onto widgets and switches on the lid. Disguise the main cannon’s foam round having nowhere to go by curling it down and back into the magazine when you shove it forward. Convey recoil within that tube by projecting a ring of light that slides back and forth.
… now I’m wondering how cheaply you could do a low-friction bowl so the whole thing can rock unpredictably with your center-of-gravity. Maybe just make the bottom round, and extend little legs when the treads are still.
I’d argue the ideal home tank game is a smartphone app you slot in front of the itty-bitty window of a glorified Rubbermaid container before climbing inside. Map all the thumbsticks and triggers of a generic controller onto widgets and switches on the lid. Disguise the main cannon’s foam round having nowhere to go by curling it down and back into the magazine when you shove it forward. Convey recoil within that tube by projecting a ring of light that slides back and forth.
Aight I got one I think is oddly specific, and another that’s just odd.
I’d like Starport: GE but as a fantasy RPG theme, instead of ships and colonies it’s classes and villages, work the reputation system into a good/evil alignment and change some gameplay.
Not sure about this one but I would like a hub system, only thing that comes to mind for me is realm of the mad god, allowing you to go from one server to another with limited items.
On that note I should probably try to play starport again, has been a number of years.
Other than that, maybe a 1v1 auto battler? A mix of part of a dream into hazy dozing in and out put an idea for an auto battler where you have four incubators and six chicken eggs and each incubator changes what type of chick hatches, where they then fall into the arena to start combat. The choice of incubators and which ones your remaining two reinforcement eggs go in to I think would make an interesting head to head game.
Okay bear with me as I go on an unhinged rant about a game I’ve wanted for years but is very unlikely to happen. For this we need to go into the deep Elder Scrolls lore, which I am going to butcher mostly because my version is amusing to me and all ideas are canon.
Imagine a magic steampunk world completely alien from our own, none of this Skyrim nonsense but truly alien. A time traveling thousand foot tall Magical Murder Mech decides ‘yolo I’m destroy the planet’, and almost does too, until Some Demigod shows up in their own time traveling magical murder mech (this one isn’t nearly as impressive though). They go fisticuffs with each other, a bunch of the planet is destroyed. Some normal people with hopes and dreams or whatever are like ‘this blows’ so they build a magical space ship. Not like a magical space rocket; I mean like a Sailboat on Steroids. They decide to fuck off to the moon because where else would you go. Anyway Some Demigod gets mangled by the other, better Magical Murder Mech who then follows the normal people with hopes and dreams or whatever to the moon, because that’s the most obvious choice for them to escape to because where else would you go. They show up ready to fuck up the moon colony when Complete Rando walks up and back-sasses the time traveling Magical Murder Mech to death. He then wanders up to Guy In Charge and is like ‘hey I want to fuck your daughter’, but surprise! The daughter is actually an intersex pansexual enby, oh and also they’re a god. So Complete Rando takes one look at that Gorgeous Deity (who is also maybe a lot a bit fascist but that’s a different story) and is like hell yeah, with our libidos combined we can repopulate the planet together.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I want a game that takes place from the perspectives of multiple normal people with hopes and dreams or whatever. Different characters follow different sections of the story. So the first character you might be learning about the Magical Murder Mech that’s running loose on the planet. You’re trying to prepare, you catch glimpses of the thing while fleeing your home. Another character could be someone who is in the Sailboat on Steroids and trying to get by on limited supplies while looking for people you were separated from in the chaos. However many characters there ends up being though, it would be crucial that the last scene in this game is watching Complete Rando suck face with Gorgeous Deity because I also want a game that tilts phobes.
Complete with the intersex pansexual enby who is also a god who gets going with some rando who can talk robots to death? Because I can’t stress enough how crucial that detail is.
Something like Retro Game Challenge, but for Western games. The idea behind Retro Game Challenge is that you play clones of NES games with achievement challenges to “advance” the story, as clones of games in the style of later NES games would come out. It had clones of games like Ninja Gaiden, Galaga, Dragon Quest. It also had game magazines written much like those of the time. The whole thing is a nostalgia trip.
In this case, it probably would have to be PC games. It could even have a cute minigame where you unbox and drop in your first 3D card.
Closest thing I’ve seen to it has been Arcade Paradise, but the games (along with the rest of the gameplay) weren’t as good in that one. They also weren’t all retro-inspired, as there’s clones of match-3 games and Vampire Survivors.
An open world, survival, party based rpg. Survival elements are light and focused away from micromanaging every crop placement and every floorboard. Player parties build cities, forts, roads.
It’s like: Minecraft without the block gimmick or detailed building capabilities. Skyrim with more playable characters in a player built world without a set storyline. Valheim without the heavy focus on survival elements or linear progression. Party management and diversity like a tactics RPG.
I’d love it to have several for game loops to bury yourself into. City building, character builds, crafting, gathering…
And multiplayer capable, self hosting if desired.
This is a pipe dream. A game that huge is too difficult to make for a game that wouldn’t have larger appeal.
Various groups are running fan servers for Monster Hunter Frontier since it shut down in 2019. There is a translated client that mostly works. Search for “rain frontier server” for more info.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of this myself and I don’t know whether the client they distribute will give your computer encephalitis.
I want to build various types of orbital and planetary megastructures like Isaac Arthur describes. Ixion has been the closest fix for me, but I want much larger structures than just a Stanford Torus. No idea how Ixion ends yet. But I’d like to see a lot more interior space available, vastly more green spaces, and experimentation with other styles of governance than capitalism. I want to walk and fly around whatever I build, preferably in VR. And while I wouldn’t object to the option, I don’t really care about fighting in this setting. I just want to build out a Dyson Sphere.
“Dyson Sphere Program” exists, it’s more focused on factory and logistics management. But the games central progression is to go from small factory to a Dyson Sphere powering multiple solar system
To get more specific, I think it would be fun to build out a single O’Neill Cylinder within a Dyson Swarm. For multiplayer, just give everybody their own cylinder. But I definitely don’t just want an overhead view. I want to build a little world that can fully explore in first person. And no damn microtransactions! The only exception I’d accept would be paying for other people’s models.
I’d like a PS1 level graphics elden ring (soulslike but open world) so it could be playable in a web-browser. Hopefully, playable via keyboard only. I’d also wish it were slightly easier so it could be played casually.
Subspace Emissary sequel. The key aspects are the physics/knockback based combat, multiple characters with drastically different play styles but keep the core smash mechanics (walk, run, roll, jump, shield, parry, grab, directional attacks, special attacks) but have the world navigation be like a metroidvania.
A game where you play a reporter in a pre-internet open world, digging through meetings, documents, connections and surveillance to get information to create stories.
You could have relationships with people too, and test them. Go with a private story on someone that will get big views and make the rent but piss them off, or keep it private and maintain your relationship to access their connections to try for a bigger story.
An urbanism focussed city builder where you start with an existing city in the current car-centric style, possibly including a couple of dozen kilometers around the city so rural problems are included as well and have to transform it, with realistic building project times, into one that is more walkable, has safe bike paths, good public transport,…
In particular I would also like it to take verticality in to account both for transport (people and bikes and trains have a harder time going up and down than cars, boats need locks,…) and for buildings (stores at the bottom of a building, residential above,…) and that accounts for the huge amounts of space car-centric cities waste on parking as well as the ongoing infrastructure costs for maintenance and replacements of all that infrastructure in sprawling cities.
Sadly nothing so far. Most city builders for modern cities tend to use the sim city simplistic zoning model, ignore verticality and building is super-fast and stuff does not have maintenance costs once built. They also mostly focus on cars and mass transit, not so much walking and biking.