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.
Planetside 2, but in Warhammer 40k. I want to be an ork running around krumpin gits with a hundred other boyz, smashin up some humie tinboyz or them big bug wotsits
Bonus points if you can be a psyker and blow up your whole squad
Ethics aside, making the Space Marines pay-to-play while Orks are free would be hilarious, especially if the Orks still have higher odds of winning. Being a walking tank isn’t pay-to-win. You have to coordinate and not get overrun by sentient mushrooms with extra-shooty red guns. Get a few veteran tabletop players to pony up, and they’ll slice through a hundred randos without slowing down… while the survivors think it’s the coolest thing they’ve ever seen.
Honestly? Just a modern, improved take on an old WiiWare game called Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King.
There is nothing all that special about MLaaK on the surface: It’s just a management sim with a Final Fantasy theme to it. Place buildings. Get soldiers (well, here ‘adventurers’), send them out on missions. Get resources, invest them. In fact taken as a management sim it’s very barebones and not that great?
The thing is, no video game ever has, in my eye, captured the feeling of being Fairytale Royalty. You have direct control over the king character (who is a 12 year old because. Final Fantasy) – You walk around town. You want to see an overview of incomes and expenses? Go talk to your assistant and she’ll give you a report. Want something built? Point to the plot and ring the chime to call a servant and say ‘Magic college here’. Sending adventurers on their quests involves directly talking to them, and you can read their mood on how they react to the assignment, with motivated adventurers doing better. And when they return wounded you can visit them in the hospital for a boost to their morale and your popularity.
Also the higher the happiness level in the kingdom, the more citizens choose to stop and salute you, and the later you can wander around your town without your servants going “you’re underaged and royal and it’s dangerous at night, back to the castle now”, because your subjects like you.
Idk, these small touches made the game feel very special for me back then, I’ve been chasing that high since. Shout out to Fable 3 for the variety of nice royalish clothes your character could try on, but no shout outs to it for anything else.
Reminds me of Majesty a little, but with a direct avatar. Majesty was fun, but is pretty dated. Didn’t really have the morale aspect, but that sounds interesting. I’ll have to see if I can find MLaaK to try out.
A metal gear type game where the AI is trained on how all players play worldwide and it adapts and evolves over time in how it stations and uses its soldiers against you and for patrols. Every time you go back to play, the layouts and movements and gear and reactions of enemy AI differ.
I have a horror game concept, based around the old days, back when used game stores actually were a good deal instead of just a price gouging den of collectors. Back when buying a copy of a game pre-owned meant that you got the save files of the old user with it.
So this is a harvest moon type, there is already a file here, the game yells at you if you try to delete it, you get characters telling you that you can’t hide from what you have done. And when you play the game everyone is pissed at you, the world is in ruins, and making any real progress is next to impossible due to the horrible state the world’s in and no one wanting to help you.
The object of the game would be to convince the people of the game world that you are not the original user, and that you want to set things right. And the new game plus would just be what the game is supposed to be like under normal conditions.
Admittedly I got the idea from hearing about a Harvest Moon friends of Mineral Town Creepypasta called The Goddess Has Not Forgiven You, which I can’t actually find. But it was described by a harvest moon iceberg video. When I couldn’t find the story that it was talking about, this was just kind of the idea I had for an indie game based off of it.
If you are an indie game designer who wants to do this, feel free to steal my idea, Just credit me for it and shoot me a copy of it if you can get a hold of me.
I have this concept for a VR team battle game where you have to learn to actually cast spells through complex real time action. Like a mix of moving your hands in patterns and adding elements via hot bar in sequence and saying words via headphone. 1 on 1 or team vs team strategy game where complexity makes stronger team spells and counters. You could have casters who specialize in defense, offense, healers, traps and counters and how you build your team makes for strengths and weaknesses.
Reminds me of Arx Fatalis. I think it’s the only game I’ve seen where casting spells requires you to trace a rune in the air instead of pressing the cast button.
That was my first thought, but I remember there was some rights snaggle that kept B&W from appearing on GOG. Looking it up, according to an interviewthe source code and IP are owned by Microsoft but EA still has the distribution rights.
I love capitalism “Hey instead of someone doing something with this lets all sit on it and give everyone the middle finger. If I can’t profit nobody can”
Drakan: Ancient Gates was my inspiration. Their magic casting blew my mind back in the day and I never understood why no one else has utilized that system. I will have to check out Arx Fatalis.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite had spells you cast by tracing a shape on screen, representing wand movements (and it was graded on how closely you matched that spell’s shape as well as on speed.)
Not a complex system, but some of them took some effort to get a good cast.
I’d argue twin stick shooters like this are VS grandpa. Random-ish waves of enemies, bullet hell, increasing difficulty… The main differences are the powerups instead of permanent level ups, usually the lack of autoaim (right?) and maybe lack of meta progression.
Crypt of the Necrodancer lets you add custom music. I don’t think it is able to handle music streaming though it is a bit of a manual process iirc. The gameplay is pretty different from Vampire Survivors. Basically enemies all move and attack in patterns that increment based on a beat, and you need to time your movement and attacks to the beat as well. Fun game
Assassin’s Creed Black Flag (aka AC: The Pirate Simulator) meets Sid Meiers Pirates! Live The Life.
Basically I want a giant open world with dozens of cities and even more small villages, modernish graphics, and be a pirate. And be able to lead a fleet. And swap ships.
I’m gonna be honest, due to my niche game preferences, if they could add in ability to upgrade and customize every ship with tons of options, including crazy ass “I zip tied a rocket motor to a group of hot wheels cars to see if I could skate” type things. “I replaced one mast with a trebuchet, and because I like to tempt death it also launches flaming oil soaked things” energy.
Maybe toss in a ship editor like starfield had, but with sloops and galleons and shit. Things like fake guns could add to intimidation factor, and while fake guns don’t shoot, they need only good from afar. By the end of the game, hopefully your branding will allow you to win some fights before taking a shot.
And because I like games like Sim city/ cities skylines, building and management games and the like, I’d love if that could somehow be incorporated into things. Both on the ships themselves, and as your “pirate fortress” home base. And I’d want to be able to set up multiple bases, all working together.
All of the addons being an option but not required to finish since having to micromanage the happiness of Pegleg Dave because he ate in the dark without a table again would get old quick.
The downside is, because all these elements don’t really mesh all that smoothly in a game setting, I don’t even think it’s possible to make a good game like that.
Basically I want to be a pirate king in a modern game, and actually feel like a king. In both ability to command what is essentially a rogue nation, and the mild headache that comes with managing it.
Victims of pirates, I’d guess. But you don’t see many of those anymore.
Every time I bring up pirate games everyone falls over themselves trying to ask if I’ve tried sea of thieves.
Yes. I have. No. It’s nothing like what I want. I can’t even have fun playing it by myself. 0/10 (friends). Would not recommend.
It’s fine with a group, but it’s not what I want. I want single player with a crew of npcs, and for gits and shiggles you could have multi-player available where the crew of your ship can be replaced by other players, or a ship in your fleet can be controlled by other players.
Like… The ocean is a perfect place to hide loading screens too, because it’s relatively flat most of the time, nobody bats an eye if there’s fog obscuring the distance, this game could have so many possibilities but it would be SO expensive to make.
Which is why it will never be made.
Nobody is interested in making a good game, they just want to make money.
I enjoy fishing, and I even enjoy occasionally fishing in a game, but if it’s mandatory all the fun goes out of it. Needed for fancy upgrades is a good compromise though. It’s not necessary but if you want to max out…
And if you want to sit back and chill for 47 hours of just fishing? You get a nice haul to sell when you get back to the market.
Mod Nation Racers on PS4, you could do custom track. It was a really fun game and I liked the fact that you could defend yourself a little bit from items if you had enough boost and a good timing. Really had fun with that game.
Not the same kind of racing game, but Aero GPX is shaping up to be an excellent F-Zero successor that is going to have a fully customisable track creator.
There’s a huge modding scene for Mario Kart Wii, and lots of custom tracks. There’s also several track compilations. One of the most well-known is Wiimms Mario Kart Fun which currently has 449 custom tracks. It runs on a real Wii as well as in emulators. My wife and I used to play it a lot.
The tracks are made by various community members, but the compilation itself is made by Wiimm, the same guy that made the Wiimmfi service that lets you race people online even after Nintendo shut down the official servers.
The physical Mario Kart Switch game with the WiFi controlled carts - except it’s 100 % AR instead, and you can switch between 3rd person overhead AR view from your own position or 1st person view (VR-like) from the kart. You create your own tracks in the room you’re in.
And while we at it, I want a Sonic Maker game, which kinda like Super Mario Maker but for Sonic stages. Would be even cooler if the players can create a 3D Boost Sonic-styled stages too, in addition to the 2D Classic Sonic-styled stages.
A co-op game set in a open/sandbox fantasy world that is truly alive, driven by AI. You can do as you wish, join a Kingdom as a soldier for example, set up a village somewhere maybe. Become a trader. Hunter. Whatever you want. The ultimate open survival game I guess.
But the key part is behind the scenes an AI will change the story of the world as time passes. Perhap on the other side of the continent a war wages between 2 factions that threatens to pull the whole region into termoil. Maybe you’ll hear about it from a passing traveller. Maybe you won’t hear about it at all and the next time you go travelling far and wide you realise a new Empire is rising.
Perhaps the AI decides to slowly bring about the collapse of society through climate change. Perhaps you become embroiled in a plot to assinate a King. The AI decides all the variables, you can only react to them, maybe you can try and change the story with your actions.
One day you are out hunting and you see in the distance an army marching to war. Maybe you decide to catch up and join the army. Or maybe you’ll hide and hope that wherever that army is going, it won’t come to your neck of the woods.
The AI continuously evolves the world around you to keep things interesting. Every game will be completely different.
It’ll probably never get made, it is massive in scope.
I think this will happen in a decade or so. We have stuff like AI dungeon now, so people definitely want this (even though most people use it for sex stuff currently)
I have the same desire. It would be awesome to play a co-op D&D campain with an AI dungeon master in a living world. It generates quests and scenarios on the fly, keeps track of your actions, always able to adapt to the changing landscape.
Yeah, you obviously can’t code for infinite possibility, so it just has to be robust enough. And the first step would be text-based. “I walk into the tavern” “There’s a fight happening / it’s now owned by someone else / bartender asks if you want the usual” kind of thing. Biggest hurdle is having a persistent and cohesive world.
Given the advancement of image/song/code generation, I think it’s not out of the realm of possibility for a game to be truly limitless. Just not remotely any time soon.
Rolling Line is the closest game I’ve seen to being a true model railroading simulator. You can build layouts with few restrictions and control trains in third person. The low-poly art style can make it seem like it’s not very detailed, but it’s possible to make some great layouts on Rolling Line. You do have to build some things manually though, not quite like Cities: Skylines or Transport Fever where you can simply draw out a track in five seconds.
Haven’t tried it on a Steam Deck, but it works just fine on PC. You certainly don’t have to get VR for it. The low poly art is a slight annoyance, but I think that the game makes up for it by giving you a lot of freedom in actually building the layout.