A sandbox, but with realistic in-world physics and ability to do anything.
Wanna burner? Boom, take this tin can, make some holes, put in alcohol and burn. Wanna learn how telephone works? Construct it yourself! Game should simulate real-world physics and just store properties of various objects and materials, allowing you to completely unbound from game mechanics and developer’s intention. Maybe you’d literally be able to conduct scientific experiments in game, and this would be a great in silico model. Maybe you’d be able to understand how things around you work. Maybe you’d be able to reverse engineer other player’s creations. Possibilities are endless, you’re having an entire world in your pocket.
…but yeah, we’d barely have enough developers and computer resources for that.
When it comes to electronics/computing, you should see what some geniuses have done in minecraft with redstone.Redstone. People have made functioning rudimentary computers in it, really interesting if you want to understand the basics of how a computer functions.
I kinda want to go way beyond what gmod offers, adding properties to every material and rendering players able to do whatever they want with it. There shouldn’t be a scripted “balloon”. There should be a property of latex to expand without breaking up to a certain degree, and there should be gas pressure physics to calculate how much does this latex expand. And then if that’s, say, helium, calculate the upward momentum of it based on air pressure, and the weight of piece of latex, and also calculate if there are any leakages. That sort of thing.
I probably wouldn’t want this game to actually exist, but it’s been stuck in my head for years so here goes. I described this one a while ago. A friend of mine was on mushrooms once and described a first person WW1 game where you’re an Austro-Hungarian courier running across battlefields. There would be parkour, time management, stealth, stuff like that. Sneaking through trenches and whatever. At first the missions go ok, easy enough. But then you’re given more complex missions that waste your time, or are foolishly planned.
Your character begins mumbling under their breath about how the generals are doing everything wrong, the war is lost. Your character becomes more deranged as the missions become more fruitless. Eventually your guy will start screaming deranged conspiracies and wild racist shit. There would be a mechanic where you start to need amphetamines to function.
Then in the last mission you catch sight of your reflection in a puddle and you’ve been playing as Hitler this whole time.
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.
A game where you play a spider in a variety of environments (forest, city park, front porch, basement, etc) where you control each leg with a different keyboard key, maybe spacebar to jump, hold a back leg to access your web, etc. you have limited energy to move/create web, and you need to build webs and traps to catch bugs.
Yes! We need more non-human/humanoid based games. I think your idea has a lot of potential tbh, playing as a jumping spider could be fun. Personally I would really like to play an orca/dolphin simulator.
Asynchronous turn based game where each person plays a single character. Like Fire Emblem if all the characters were players.
You wouldn’t all need to be playing at the same time, and you could have lots of games going at once. I want that nice slow-burn play by mail feeling for a co-op RPG.
The Siren series has a mechanic where you see what the enemies are seeing. There’s also a section of Driver: San Francisco where you’re being chased and it’s from the perspective of the person chasing you. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen.
There’s a game on the haunted PS1 collection like that, you play a girl hiding from a monster and there’s portions where you see from the monster’s eyes
Building vehicles, ships, and bases block by block as your character is mechanic I enjoy that I haven’t seen elsewhere. I also like the resource gathering. But I would like better physics, better enemy interactions and AI, and water instead of just ice.
That one futurama episode where bender is floating in space and he gets hit with a meteor and tiny life evolves on him and then they annihilate themselves with nukes
I want to play that game
There’s lots of god box games but they never get it right, they’re either civ builders or map sims, the tech advancement and interactions etc are just shadows of the mechanics they could have, and the best ones never let them get nukes and have nuclear wars >;(
Farming/homesteading colony sim with procgen plant species that you have to learn to cultivate. Models soil conditions and how they relate to nutritional profiles of the crops. For something that’s such a integral part of survival i feel like a lot of games just handwave agriculture.
I’ve always yearned for something like this too. I wonder if, from the dev’s perspective, balancing the years and years such a thing would take in real time conflicts with other aspects of gameplay? Or maybe soil chemistry is too difficult a thing to gamify for a casual player (including myself in this- unfortunately I don’t grasp chemistry or physics easily).
A colony sim/resource management game in early access I played recently tries to touch on this actually- Farthest Frontier. As you might imagine from what I typed above, I’m heinously bad at grasping the system, but the building blocks are in there! None of the procgen ideas you’re interested in though.
It’s really not that fun, you don’t do that stuff unless you have in real life, or you’re obsessed. Plus there’s also too much random chance, it would beincredibly complex and likely crash your computer if it was at all accurate
something like this integrated with space exploration would be super cool as well. im thinking: you can travel to different planets and collect plants from them and they have different genetic traits that you can bring back to your farm and crossbreed them with your plants with a somewhat accurate replication of mendelian and non-mendelian genetics. or maybe this is just my own fantasy as a biologist lmao.
An RPG where all the characters are LLM-powered with their story baked in, so you can actually have a free conversation with them and they’ll be basically chatGPT pretending they’re an actual real character. Bonus points for it being a VR game.
Next iteration: a game that’s generated by an AI while you play it so every playthrough is absolutely completely different.
Argh tone on the internet- I’m not mad or anything, just wanted to state my opinion since ours are so wildly different, and it’s interesting that all of these ideas will have to coexist in gaming spheres.
Speaking strictly as a player, this is the opposite of what I would want in a game. The…intention, I guess, is what I want when I play anything story-driven. Chatting with ai on purpose feels upsetting to me and I think I would feel tricked if I encountered it as a par-the-course kind of thing (knowingly or especially unknowingly) in a game.
But- I haven’t encountered it yet, and perhaps it could really, really work!
I could imagine it working well if you give different characters models trained on different data based on what they know as characters, but keep their responses railed to sections of dialogue that are more ambiguous or not key to the plot. Could really add to the depth of the world without compromising to much on cutting human written dialogue. But then again knowing game developers I doubt they’d use a nuanced approach.
Yes, that’s exactly what I had in mind. The characters need to have their story and their intentions hard coded. But using that as a basis, how cool would it be to have an actual natural conversation with them where you can just ask them questions that come to your mind instead of having to choose from a set of pre defined questions. It would certainly require some re-imagination of RPGs but that wouldn’t actually hurt at all.
I have no idea if this could work anytime soon, but at some point I’m sure it’ll be possible.