Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
I have usually kept a short list of games that would be fun if they existed. Long ago one my bullets in the list was a procedurally generated planet-sized planet with a full diaspora to explore. No Man's Sky fulfilled that for me.
What are some games that you wish existed?
1,871 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 467 ms ] threadSupreme Commander gets close to this, but I want the full surface area of a planet as the campaign.
But the idea I was thinking on was closer to, when Command and Conquer has you advancing across Europe...I want the map to just keep scrolling at that scale. Let me finish a mission by building an MCV and having it just drive way off the map.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the...
I really really want to play that, two player, on my phone over network where my finger controls the liquid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinia_%28video_game%29
has been around since March 2000, and currently free to play
1) Total War series — it's not FPS per se but there is the idea of managing the macro situation (resources, where armies are, developing cities, etc.) and then when you actually attack another army or lay seige, you have more of a tactical view where you direct the action.
2) The original Rainbow Six (and maybe some of its immediate sequels). You would plan out exactly what you want every one of your special ops guys to do (e.g., when I give the signal throw a flashbang into this room) and then you get to play as one of them. Not sure if anyone has replicated this yet!
The map design is amazing, game runs and looks great. Highly reccomend
Honestly, NS and NS2 the commander was a fun position. You play to upgrade your units, grab resource nodes, and expand influence, while trying to direct non-compliant troops. (Really throws in a wrench to your RTS when you can't get your soldiers to do something you need). Another aspect is in the smaller team dynamic of NS, one or two good troopers can have an outsized effect on enabling the commanders gameplay.
Empire mod gets around this by having larger teams (15+ vs 15+) with vehicles, upgrades, weapon customization, tech trees, so it really plays like a war where you need to counter what the enemy brings to the field in terms of tech.
Empires mod, quite detailed FPS RTS. Even has vehicles, tanks, APC, resource nodes.
It's been awhile since I played, but there was still some development on it a few years ago.
Downside is its a bit older. (2008 release)
The way it's made requires a lot of dedication -> gathering everyone, organisation to communicate can be tricky particularly if you want realistic kind of comms: teamspeak is still required (I don't think there's a realistic mod for Arma 3 compatible with Discord).
Nevertheless, Arma 3 has everything you need:
Big maps (open world)
An actual map (I am talking about the paper/GPS thing) -> with actual elevation information on it, etc.
Complex strategies and tactics possibilities
Communications
Vehicles: helicopters, tanks, cars, trucks, planes, boats, etc. etc.
A very WIDE set of weapons of all kinds: turrets, firearms, launchers, mortars, etc. etc.
All this adds up to the need of coordination, planning, preparing strategies, primary objectives, secondary objectives, backup plans, backup plans for your backup plans, etc.
Also, it sounds cool, but I don't think it'd be fun, just a neat curiosity.
Everything are axis-aligned boxes in my idea, so the math is easy for rotating the view. (But to rotate in 5D, you fix on 3 axes, not 1.)
With one spacial dimension x, and one time dimension t, you can roughly describe motion like this:
where `delta` is the change in time. In a 60fps game, delta = 1/60. Some games play with the `delta` for a "bullet time" effect. SuperHot is a game that employs this to great effect.With 2D time, I imagine it as red-time and blue-time. It might look like this:
(This can be written more succinctly of course).A mechanic of this game involves switching between red-time and blue-time at will. Most elements would only move in red time or blue time. But some elements might move in a mixture of both.
You can have arbitrary time dimensions, but I think two are plenty for this game. You can get real interesting with this mechanic. Velocity is preserved within a time-dimension, so you can "save" your momentum for later. You can have gravity with different strengths and directions for each time dimension.
There's a lot of reasons this won't work for a realistic simulation. I had spent some time thinking of a fan-sequel to Outer Wilds which utilizes two time dimensions, but I don't think I can write a physics simulation where that would make sense. But for a lil platformer it can be fun
These days I'm more interested in story-heavy, all single-player, occasionally borderline pretentious games, whose story is sufficiently compelling to distract from what the outside world (US-based, for me) has become.
I've heard good things, but I've only played the voiced-over version of DE - I'm not sure if I'd be down to read everything, and the different voice actors really add another layer
Unfortunately the last update to DE introduced a very annoying audio stutter (they're supposedly trying to get it fixed)
Disco's world is depressing, but because the world is so dark, any light in the game stands out so much more. It's depressing world make good people in it and any small kindness matter.
Also disco is more of a slice of life while the plot of torment though still incredibly dark is more epic. Disco bleeds immersion. But to achieve it they stripped out pretty much all the fantasy elements out of the setting and story. Torment manages to achieve immersion while at the same time making the setting more epic and fantasmic then anything you've ever even seen. The writing and setting is better then basically almost every fantasy novel out there.
In fact Disco reads more like a contemporary novel then it does fantasy or sci-fi. Torment is grounded in fantasy but it's dark and gritty enough that it doesn't feel fake like the final fantasy games. I would say it lies somewhere in between a standard bioware RPG and Disco.
Edit: come to think of it, some of the Lucasarts remasters are well worth revisiting. I went through the cleaned-up Grim Fandango some time ago & it was a lovely break.
If you like Point & Click Adventures then there are also many "newer" entries that are worth looking at. Primordia [0] (2012 so not that new, but the Linux port is) and Strangeland [1] are my favorites from the ones I have recently played.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/227000/Primordia/ [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369520/Strangeland/
Describing it vaguely, it's an archaeology knowledge-puzzle played over a tiny solar system, in one of the most immersive first-person mechanics I've ever seen.
It's (for me) the most brilliant game ever made, both mechanically and the story. It will also scratch your space travel bug a bit.
A Roman-period detective-ish story with some fantasy elements (which I won't spoil here, but it's not as much a big deal to be spoiled as my previous recommendation of Outer Wilds), and some pretty good voice acting and character animations, especially if you consider the size of the team that made it!
They really went all-in with the Roman theme, from what I understand the depiction of society of the period is rather accurate given its overall plot, and it quite feels like you're there, and not in a Roman-themed theme park or something.
It would include the rocketry part, spacewalks, airlock operation, moon car, etc.
...and maybe a possibility to host your own server for it, to play only with your friends/people you choose.
There are two hard parts to this: (1) how do you make the game balanced even as the number of players fluctuates by orders of magnitude, (2) how do you make the game fun even as the amount of time each player spends differs by orders of magnitude. You will probably want key plot twists to be announced in advance so that as few people miss them as possible ("we predict the enemy hoard will arrive at our base on Friday around 8:15 PM").
And on top of that, in the one I'm following at the moment, the world is being eaten by a void and the rumor is that when everything is gone that's gonna be the end forever
Tons of user content Scripting engine Modern mechanics Modern systems
It would need to be a platform first.
I would settle for the omega man.
Here they are:
The first one is a game where you play as Mormons, and the goal of the game is to be nice to people no matter the cost. It would start out with fairly easy things, but then you come across increasingly hostile or dangerous circumstances where you have to choose between negotiation or fleeing. You can't "die" in the game because, if you are about to die, either God or the angel Moroni will intervene. At that point, you must restart a mission. Then again, I'm not that opposed to the player dying either. I know not that much about Mormonism other than that I've known Mormons throughout my life. :)
Another idea I have is for a game I call "Monkey Town". It's somewhere between Sim City and The Sims, and takes place in a world where monkeys and various apes take the place of humans. They are as intelligent as present-day humans, but they do thinks in their own monkey ways. You are the mayor of Monkey Town, and you must build it up and maintain it. There are problems you have to deal with like monkeys pooping everywhere, political corruption, ape speciesism, infrastructure failures, monkeys rioting, monkey insurrections, etc. The monkey culture would have some differences from human society like knoodling being allowed in public, networks of vines are used for monkeys to swing between neighborhoods, bananas as currency, and so on.
My third idea is a game called "Shut Me Up", which I think of as more of a short arcade style game where your job as the player is to harass and scream at people so those people start telling you to shut up. But you keep doing it so that they start physically attacking you to get you to shut up.
When I moved to a nicer neighborhood and went to church once or twice I was amazed how many Pediatricians and Pediatric Surgeons who work at the local childrens hospital are Mormon.
The only worse thing I can imagine would be combining persecution complex-inducing game with an FPS.
Maybe you're right and I'm suggesting something that isn't really appropriate. I would play games more if there were more slice-of-life type games from different perspectives, but with some humor in there too.
Thanks for the feedback. :)
source: am one myself. This is true for the other members around me as well (friends, family, etc)
Game is still very early development, but here's a tech demo video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI
What's the tech stack you're using for the game? I'm not really familiar with how games are typically made these days other than that it seems like a lot of people are using Unity.
I'm using C++, SFML (graphics framework), and SQLite (for data storage/saves). Game & engine is developed from the ground up.
A lot of people choose existing engines for their games. I definitely would if I were to go 3D.
With 2D grid based games, it's not too difficult to get an engine up and running. It took me around 6 weeks IIRC (no physics or networking code though) to have basic tile placement functionality and outputting the game world to the screen.
I think mixing in just the right amount of janky ragdoll physics and glitchy NPCs would actually augment the game, and I could see it being a game that streamers and their audiences would find funny too.
There would definitely be some ultra-strict/traditional Mormons who would be offended by a game like this but I'd say the vast majority of the membership would find it quite entertaining.
Edit: Could call it Mormon Missionary Simulator to both give the game a slightly tighter focus/story and also indicate that it's part of the wider genre of "XYZ simulator" games that are often pretty absurd and funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC7blFgcZWs
The game concept is something I would play. It would fit well in any setting historical or fictional. A half-dozen elves trying to bring sensibility among Orcish chiefdoms guided by an avatar of Illuvar. A unmodified human among the transhuman houses of the galactic empire trying to re-cultivate aspects of humanity guided by an enigmatic Foundation, etc.
Regarding "Monkey Town," you might like Keith Laumer's book "The Other Side of Time." It starts off slowly, is all over the place, but has an alternate universe with several sapient primate species working together.
Back in the day when the genre was new, people were fascinated by the potential of virtual worlds and virtual societies. Social scientists did online studies on player behavior and the interactions people had online, on spontaneous self-governance coming into existence, on how communities formed and developed, and many other similar topics. That potential was never fulfilled.
Today - some twenty years later - the MMORPG has become a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you. Apart from PvP and maybe some forced grouping, most games would play absolutely identical mechanically, if you were playing all alone on your own private server. You'd do the same quests, fight the same enemies, get the same loot. All the other players you get to meet online - they don't actually influence the game mechanics at all.
You play next to each other. Not actually with each other.
I'd like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts. Some glimpses of this sort of thing can be seen in games like EvE. Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day. This kind of stuff has evolved very, very little since then.
I would assume that with today's technology we should be able to get a lot closer to fulfilling that potential.
Tip of the hat to you, good sir!
Still, Minecraft is pretty limited mechanically. The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention. The games' mechanics - all the technological progression and stuff - work perfectly fine in single-player. Also the number of players per server isn't quite on MMO levels...
But yes, some elements of Minecraft would be great ingredients of the game I'm proposing.
With mods, it does.
To be fair, neither does real life. Real life shops, jails, etc, are just collections of atoms with certain emergent properties resulting from how players have set them up.
Tell me, what town did you mainly reside in? I was over in Chiapas with the crazy leftists, one of whom erected a wool statue of himself. We were largely untouched by the HCF invasion, except for when their skirmishes with the World Police got close to our borders.
I offer you this classic, and hope you recognize it: https://youtu.be/BAzsolKHJfc
Dirty Ancaps everywhere. </s>
I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between late 1.0 and early 2.0, but I ended up in Carson City for a bit when it was coming online. Where they made a hole in the ocean, and turned into a city. A fun place to hang out and talk shit.
Do you have any 2d world maps of that era?
A true FPSMMORPG. Closest thing we have to this with a good community is Destiny. I wish for fully open worlds, good storylines and everything you said. I believe that was the original idea with the project that became Overwatch but sad it didn’t pan out.
I understand that level building and all is much harder when the expectation of detail is higher in FPS but hopefully that gets easier with better tools. I would think that it’s still Bungie’s ultimate goal. Hopefully Destiny can evolve into that. Whatever game does it right, has the potential to be one of the biggest games ever.
Open world yes - that's totally an ingredient that goes in there.
Storylines rather not. The thing is that storylines are pre-written, canned content that's just identical for every player that consumes it. In order to fit my bill, the "plot" of the game would actually have to be defined by what players are doing (and the game simulation reacting to that) - it would have to emerge dynamically. Saga of Ryzom originally tried to go a little bit along those lines, but due to the technological constraints of the day, the game world would have to evolve through updates/patches mostly.
The commercial game is now run by a finance guy and a web developer, pretty much. Neither of which seem to be interested in pursuing the original more daring vision.
The tech is definitely capable of being expanded into a real dynamic world.
What you see in the game right now is effectively auto generated placeholder content that got rushed in to have a deliverable by release.
Imagine if the tribes and mobs actually moved their locations dynamically, instead of being in the same spots eternally. Players could help out tribes, supply routes for trading goods between tribes would need to be maintained, mob populations would be affected by player activity, etc.
Wonderful screwing around game. An extroverted friend of mine during the pandemic made it his primary social network. Made a lot of friends.
You'll get snippets of how awesome the game could be if you play in an active outfit and try and coordinate in platoons... but oh gosh does that game have its warts as well.
It's a bit too static though, to fit the bill of what I'm longing for. Needs less pre-made modules, more dynamic simulation - so that the game world actually evolves in response to what players are doing. ;)
One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?
SWG for example had all items being player-made in addition to slowly loosing durability and breaking eventually. That means, instead of finding loot you can then use indefinitely, you were dependent on economy supply chains. SWG also made you dependent on player services - like doctors, entertainers and such.
I think there could easily be many casual friendly playstyles, like farming, harvesting, herding, entertaining, being mayor in a player city, etc. - in addition to more combat oriented play. Players should be able to choose one style or the other, or mix and match to their liking. And every such playstyle should both need and provide "stuff" from/to other playstyles on a regular basis.
It is a very strange "game" though, so I understand why it's not for everyone.
Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.
Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.
If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.
Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.
An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.
Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.
Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.
And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.
Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.
Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back
addendum: also infinite dendrogram
a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .
It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.
Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).
Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.
There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.
I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.
Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.
At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.
Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.
Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.
But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".
You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.
Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.
But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.
Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.
They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.
BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.
[1] https://tera.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance#Exarch
Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.
The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.
Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.
I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D
I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.
>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.
I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.
I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.
In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.
Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;
You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.
That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).
Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.
Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.
There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.
For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.
You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.
It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)
In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.
So I wasnt convinced it would stick.
I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed
The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.
I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.
Doubt.
I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.
Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.
I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?
The key point is that all missions should be impactful on the world, and not merely reward oriented.
We have the tech for an MMORPG. We've been working on simplifying the onboarding curve for new contributors first. In a few months we can start exploring game mission mechanics. :)
New World hit on some of these points at one point, but they backed down pretty fast.
Ashes of Creation may or may not hit some of these points. But that game is... overly ambitious, to say the least. They're trying to go full tilt on everything and I'm skeptical as to whether it's gonna work out well in the end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert
My friend and I started building on the side of a pond far away from everyone. We would get home from school and tie our house phone to our heads with our dad's tube socks so we could stay in constant communication while we collected resources and build up our enterprise.
1. Raise prices enough to employ enough humans. I imagine there's quite a few people out there who'd be happy to spend a pint's price on a quality gaming experience.
2. Give the GM better tools. Higher level half-scripted events + better sentiment monitoring. I imagine a single competent GM can run in parallel a bunch of events keeping quite a few players engaged.
3. Recruit experienced players to do this job for you. I imagine there's quite a few people who'd do this job for in-game goods, as long as an hour of GM-ing gives a couple hours worth of grind of goods.
Feels like a FAANG job
But yes, sandbox MMO's were a different beast than the themepark MMO's we have today, I had high hopes for Everquest Next when it was announced (like ten years ago now) but it ended up vaporware I guess, and that was the last I've heard of anyone actually trying. I guess metaverse might count but I've mostly ignored anything that facebook tries to do.
From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:
I wouldn't want to do data entry in an FPS game, no, but people love "bakery simulator" type resource management games. It would be cool to link my grocery-line-time-waster score into my overworld bank account, enabling me to shop around for gear in stores set up (but not manually run) by other players, to use in the FPS portion of the game where I steal morsels from the full-sized humans (or am I getting my threads confused?).The fact that the spaceship game was intertwined with the team-based FPS was really cool. FPS players (on planets) could be in the same clan/guild/corp as the spaceship pilots, and could call in airstrikes. In the spaceship game, your corpmates could maneuver into position and rain down lasers. This interaction had an effect on the local economy, which was an incentive for the spaceships to show up for airstrikes.
Maybe you want a pvp focused MMO? Maybe something like PlanetSide with more of an economy? Either that or maybe you want some big story points influenced by players?
Honestly I think you'd probably be disappointed unless you are personally part of the group that made the influential change. That takes a lot of investment as the mechanic would either be pvp or feel like its on rails.
Maybe you just want an RP wow server and a guild that is into grinding for Glam/RP loot according to their own stories?
I don't see how it's a technical problem at all. It sounds like your major issues are with story telling. Can you explain what technology you think is missing?
That said, I think part of the problem is that we've all gotten older, and no one has time to spend 5+ hours a day in a game world anymore. The younger generation may be able to experience it, but for those of us who have memories of old MMOs, it's unlikely we'll ever truly relive those nostalgia-filled moments.
+ Rust
+ Ark
+ Conan Exiles
Seems a great game.
Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.
Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.
Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.
I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!
1. http://www.middle-earth.us/
Conan Exiles is another game that has RP servers of a different variety.
It can be a lot of fun with the right group of people. There's also a lot of flexibility for adjusting the game's parameters, so you can make it work with 2 people or 20 so that everyone needs to work together but the tasks don't seem insurmountable. It's one of the most novel and interesting multiplayer game concepts I've played in recent memory.
As obnoxious as I’m being, the thrust of basically any MMORPG is grinding hours of boring tasks to get minutes of awesome time with the fruits of your labor. That’s how they make you stick around - roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. You remove the grind (d3 auction house) and you remove your players.
My point is, most MMORPGs depend on giving you relatively simple tasks but finding ways to make them take three hours.
The larger and wealthier your country becomes, the more you become a threat to other powerful nations who will want to stamp you out. Or maybe there would be revolutions, alien invaders, etc. if you become too powerful.
Alternatively, if the players of the realm fail to defend their lands or make peace with their enemies, they might be conquered and forced to live under another empire, fighting their wars and paying high taxes, until one day they can scheme to win their independence again.
Of course, this does essentially mean your world can become irreparably messed up, but that’s life. Maybe people would give up on a server and move on to a new world with new ambitions about how they can do better next time.
Tibia too. It used to be an extremely social game. Everything was hard so people had to play together. It's been modernized and made much easier, nowadays it feels like the magic is gone. The changes began with restrictions on player killing and spiralled from there.
Complex simulation based mechanics are much harder to implement than more basic fighting mechanics.
Puzzles require more work and hand crafting than creating new monsters to kill.
The whole project is probably more work, harder to scale, and has an unproven audience.
This describe Soulforged perfectly: https://play.soulforged.net/
It's funny but if you drop by the Discord, we've been having lengthy conversations yesterday on why this might not be fun.
The short of it is that it hurts solo players and individualism. Communes are extremely powerful and necessary for progress. There are also certain professions that are popular (like mining) but gated because of the rarity of mining picks. So a lot of people give up on their mining dreams for the greater good. The mining problem was patched just this morning, but solo gameplay is still a problem - you need to be part of some group to get anywhere.
The other major problem with a sandbox is many have no idea where to continue. They chop wood poles and then chop higher level wood and making housing from that. And then don't really have much to aspire for other than hoarding wealth. So the dev is adding quest-like features: one classic MMO quest system and a player based system, where people can pay for say, ore, or a rare material found from certain beasts.
But the world is based a lot on the players, from settlements to the name of materials.
If you guys plan on joining, civilization is past the river. Head south outside the tutorial cave, then keep moving NE past the bridge. The roads are also player built but nobody got around to making roads for the newbies.
Half the player base decided to quarantine. There was a route west, which involved a dangerous swamp and a climb up a mountain that most newbies couldn't make if they didn't have the right buffs. New citizens would be escorted to the mountain, quarantined for 4 days, then buffed so they could cross it.
The other group was the "gains" group. They figured out that sparring increased stats rapidly and they could buff stats to the point where the disease was no longer a problem.
So then there was a PvE war with the orcs, which hit an uneasy peace, where the player base decided to just give tribute of weapons and armor to them. A third faction spawned, the orc sympathisers, who snuck more steel weapons to the copper age orcs. A smith player unlocked the orc race this way and black market emerged trading iron to the orcs.
The gains faction were uneasy with this and broke the peace treaty. The rest of the game, unhappy with breaking a treaty, moved west.
The gains faction conquered the orcs. The orc god was impressed and there was a party involving player-crafted beer, and a brawl with a god that increased someone's dodge skills to superhuman levels. The orcs were assimilated and they created a warrior-murderhobo faction in the north. They took on small territory, near a rich mine and some rare leathers used in armour. By the end of the game, everyone up north including chicken farmers had the highest tier swords.
The isolationist faction had a larger block of land and established trading relations with the dwarves. They got access to many of the remaining dungeons and artifact zones.
Sadly the game died shortly after, because of tech debt, server costs, and a burnt out player base. After a year, it was rebuilt into what became Soulforged today.
Also see this game, ECO: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/
listen to first 10 minutes of this podcast: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/brad-will-made-a-tech-pod/79-...
The caveat to a game like that, is it lives and dies by it's player count. You really want to be on the bandwagon when it kicks off.
They were for all intents social constructs with the game as the centre point. I'm looking to build a new version with different scenarios but it is the social aspect that makes them so compelling.
The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.
However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.
The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.
Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!
Ultimately as I got older they became too much of a time sink and I just can’t play them anymore, but back in my high school days they were an absolute blast.
What I'd like to play, is a Hitman/Dishonored like Terminator game. You play as T-1000, you should avoid suspicion, shapeshift to gain access to restricted areas. You can do combat, but it should be avoided because it will make achieving your goals harder.
It's not really what you're asking for, but IMO it's lots of fun and young ones can get very creative in the level editor.
+ fill in a personal database device (see: Pokedex, mobiglass) to collect knowledge of and record 'sightings' of real plants, real animals, elements, chemicals, reactions, etc.
+ NPCs/locations with trivia challenges/minigames (main character name in Moby Dick, years during which the first world war occurred, etc.), plus a library to look stuff up in
+ type in what you want to do (ala certain early adventure games) like "heal forearm cut", "fish for walleye", "search for raspberries" = typing practice, spelling {although since almost no games seem to do this anymore, maybe it's just obnoxious and poor design}
There's a balance between fun and education like you see in kids shows, for example the main characters might be working through how to free a frozen monkey with something hot, while they just flew from their hometown to antarctica in mere seconds. I have to figure out how to show "this is true" and "this is fun".
1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.
How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.
2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did something along those lines.
Outer Wilds too, although in quite a different way.
2) this is a mechanic in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, when you die you can turn the time back to the moment before death.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/219890/Antichamber/
To my Portal idea the closest I’ve found was Superliminal. There’s something wrong with the graphics though, it makes me nauseous to play.
But I will definitely check out your suggestions! Thanks again!
Available on steam or direct.
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Shameless self plug, but I am currently working on a time-traveling puzzle game called Loop Thesis (https://loop-thesis.com) which features a completely internally consistent simulation of time that's constantly running during the entire game.
All of the time travel mechanics are emergent from that simulation, nothing is faked -- and the game takes that to an absurd degree, even the way levels are stored in memory is consistent with the core mechanics that the game teaches the player about time travel.
The point of having that kind of obsessive consistency is that the game is trying to feel almost like a textbook; when you understand the core mechanics of how the simulation works, if you think of something that you should be able to do, it works even if I didn't pre-plan it as a designer, because you're not interacting with a set of hard-coded puzzles, you're interacting with a simulation, and the rules you're learning are actually the simulation's rules, not an abstraction of them. It's meant to capture this joy of finding a complicated system and just kind of systematically picking it apart and then putting it back together again.
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The game also supports multiplayer (although I'm not planning on including that at launch), and the multiplayer runs on the same simulation. That means that if player 1 goes back in time, player 2 stays when they are; you can have someone in the past making changes that affect the future, and it all just kind of... works. It's a really trippy experience, at least so far in playtests.
And that obsession about internal consistency also means that modding tools work pretty well. The game's core engine is really fun to play with because you can just kind of change variables and build little tools and just see what happens. A couple of puzzles have come out of me just kind of noticing something weird happening, and then realizing that there's a consequence in the simulation that I didn't originally plan and then building a puzzle out of it. So I'm hoping that beyond the game itself that modders and level designers will have some fun building new mechanics.
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It's a top-down pixel-graphics puzzle game (not 1st person, sorry), and still in very early development, even though most of the core timeline engine is finished and I'm mostly at this point just fleshing out content and doing a bunch of work around that engine. The website (https://loop-thesis.com) is also horribly out of date, but I'll be starting up full-time development on it again soon, so I'm hoping to have more updates at some unspecified point in the future.
2. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/
Real empathy is hard and the real world could stand to see more of it.
It can be deep, complex, simple, fun, easy to play hard to master, whichever kind of cooperation -> leading to more synergy, dare I say symbiosis between the players!
Ok, random idea that just popped in my brain: You could have a cooperative game where the goal is to handle nutrients, etc. in order to cooperatively build a baby inside's a female womb. Basically, it would be about achieving "life" by cooperating: repelling microbes, driving whatever fluids/vitamins/hormones are needed to the right places, etc. etc.
This is why pregnancy is so perilous. It's a war, presumably because human development requires a lot of resources, and the father can always find a new woman to impregnate, so it's genes best served by trying to steal said resources, as long as most women most of the time are capable defending themselves until the baby is born, preferably longer things chug along.
And oddly enough, Detroit: Become Human