66
votes
What’s a genre or style you wish was explored more in games?
It’s often argued that open-world, zombie survival, and the likes have been overdeveloped and variety needs to be introduced to help stimulate an otherwise stale market. What do you wish upcoming games had that the others do not? Were there any titles that just fell shy of your expectations?
God I miss the golden era of RTS games. Homeworld, Age of Empires, Star Craft and more were developed in a short span of time. For me this was a golden era of PC gaming. There are fun remakes here and there for me to feed my nostalgia with, but nothing like the late 90's/early 00's.
Can't wait for Homeworld 3.
I’ve always experienced RTS as a spectator because I never could keep up with my opponents APM. I’ve been meaning to pick up Age of Empires 4 because I wasn’t into PC gaming for the 3rd’s release. GTA San Andreas consumed my childhood, though that’s not really early 00’s. Any of the James Bond titles for the PS2 as well.
Nightfire is an incredible James Bond game. I do love Goldeneye and I still think it's perfectly playable (although I do still play on retro consoles) but Nightfire is the best 007 game in my opinion.
I'm keeping expectations in check for the new 007 game being developed by IO Interactive but the idea of playing James Bond in Hitman style sandbox levels gets me very hyped.
Oh Nightfire was amazing, and the multiplayer levels were so good! I lost so many hours as a kid to that game with my friends. Agent Under Fire wasn't quite as good, but still good fun. I adored GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, as it felt like a really fresh shooter at the time. The ability to grab enemies and use them as human shields was quite the rush. And finally Everything Or Nothing was just brilliant, and probably the thing that I would like to see replicated the most. I had no idea there was a new Bond game in the works, so colour me hyped as well! I think I might need to spin up a PS2 emulator now I've remembered all of these games exist...
Everything or Nothing was another fantastic game, I still hum the theme song now and again. Loved the level rappelling down the side of the mountain (I think it was a mountain anyway) and you're shooting enemies and there's explosions all over the place, super cinematic for the time.
Nightfire or Agent Under Fire are probably my favourites. I often played Nightfire by myself with bots, using only Oddjob’s hat or the remote controlled missiles lmao.. Agent Under Fire was played a lot by my family and I in those little co-op minigames. There was one specifically where you had to eliminate the others’ VIP they were protecting in a train station. Definitely one of the most memorable gaming experiences when I was younger.
Age of Empires IV is not only great, but for a more casual single player gamer I think it might be the best in the series.
Total Annihilation and Dark Reign. Those were my favorites.
Oh man, I love RTS games. I played them a lot as a kid. I'm super excited for Stormgate to come out. It's made by a studio that consist of a bunch of folks from Blizzard that were responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft. I think they are supposed to have some sort of beta in the next couple of months.
Its on my radar, but I'm cautiously optimistic about it. I have a hunch the lightning was let out of the bottle for all these OG blizzard devs.
I miss history based Total War games. After their massive success with Warhammer Total War it seems like every one of their new games, even the historical ones, has a "mythic mode" or something similar where there are fantastical elements. I guess its hard to complain — if I don't like it I can just not play those modes, but I do miss when it felt like the history was the focus! Although they are coming out with Pharaoh Total War which I'm excited for.
Me too. I still play a lot of Rome 2 and Atilla. Started a campaign Monday with the Medieval 1212 mod.
Age of Empires 4 didn't get very popular but I think it's a great game - I have almost a thousand hours in it
I support this one. There have been attempts, but they're more like cheap knock-offs so there's something off about them that prevents them from matching the original games (Homeworld, AOE, Star Craft, Warcraft 3). I can't put my finger on it... maybe the quality of the story and game play?
Can't wait for HW3 as well! I haven't pre-order a game in a really long time, but did this time. I just hope I'm not disappointed.
Sins of a Solar Empire was a good one that comes close to Homeworld, but the controls were clunkier, the story didn't feel quite as good and I couldn't get past a level so I stopped playing it. I should probably try it again or it's sequel at some point as it actually wasn't that bad.
Super happy to see the success of AOE2:DE and its community. Hopefully there will be some follow ups that do better than AOE 4.
I bought AOE2 definitive edition a while back and I love it. Its just enough of a visual refresh to look and feel good but still be authentic and there's still a decent online scene.
Have you played 8-bit Armies & 8-bit Hordes by Petroglyph Games? This is a studio launched by former Westwood Games employees, and hits similar vibes to Dune II and early C&C games.
I will have to look into those, thanks!
I want more high-quality walking simulator in the games I play. I want to move around beautiful natural landscapes (especially forests) in first person, with realistic physics, life-like visuals, and immersive audio. I want to see my character's feet and arms as I move and interact with the world, not play a camera manipulation simulator.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is the best example I've seen of this. It's my favourite game of all time. Sometimes I'd just stop pursuing active quests, and wander the game world, immersing myself in the sights and sounds.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a really great game and one of my faves too! You can tell there was a lot of love going into it.
There was a months-long period in my life when my go-to destress activity was to get just a little bit high, turn off the lights, plug in my best headphones, and go hunting ingame. It was a bitter winter that year where I lived and it was the next best thing to going for a walk in the local old-growth forest.
Yeah. KCD is such a good game. I got really invested in the story.. I did have a hard time with the combat tho.
It gets a bit easier with higher stats and better equipment. If you're not good at blocking and ripostes, you'll want to have heavy armour.
I loved Kingdom Come: Deliverance! I played so much of it in the beginning and kept restarting my progress for one reason or another that I eventually burnt out and I never finished the game, but I loved it nonetheless.
The graphics were great, the environment was great, I even liked the combat system. Oh man, I should perhaps play it again!
I encourage you to give it a try again! Feel free to ask me questions by DM or in this thread.
In in the midst of moving houses and whatnot but after? I’ll definitely have to do it. Perhaps once steam summer sale comes on so I can buy the DLCs.
I really like this about arma actually. Arma 3 is pretty janky and I've spent like 10 years in it so it doesn't really immerse me as well anymore, but the new Arma Reforger has much better lighting and visuals generally but it very much feels like you're controlling a guy with meaty noodle arms and legs. Immersion is something that is really hard to explain in words, but when you get really truly immersed in a virtual world it's something else.
Very powerful emotion heavy design with dark and adult themes. Like Nier Automata, omg. Loss, failure, a not happy ending, defeat, suicide, loneliness, sex, etc. Come for the thighs, leave with the cries type game design.
Undertale was good in that it had powerful emotions as well. Games that make you feel something when you play them, rather than just "nice graphics".
You and @jaxoff should consider looking into Visual Novels! Echo is a pretty good one for what you are looking for and it is free. There are many other examples to look for though.
Otherwise look up an old Dreamcast game called D2. It’s a long time favorite of mine. Lots of pretty deep themes and interesting storytelling. Though I guess technically it had state-of-the-art graphics when it came out.
I've got a game that might be of interest, it's called "The Way". It's a very niche title made for RPG Maker 2000 back in the early 00's by mostly one person (with help from others for testing and some custom art and music) but it's great fun.
It's set on a strange world where the people of The Way (called Wanderers) believe that the entire world is enclosed by the Rolling Mists. The very front of the world is gradually revealed by the Mists while the rear of the world is swallowed by the Mists. What lies in between is the titular Way and every human being spends their life walking the Way, either alone or accompanied by other Wanderers. Settling down is considered blasphemous and the religious order of The Guided ensure that people keep moving forward.
The story follows Rhue, a young wanderer on a quest to regain a lost piece of his past. He's been searching the Way for many years already, desperate for a simple clue that might help guide him to that which he lost so many years ago.
He encounters many weird, wonderful and dark characters and factions along his journey and takes part in duels, gang wars, and even a grand stage production.
Thematically the game deals with loss, grief, trauma, how the obsessive pursuit of an unobtainable ideal can cause more pain than good, the power and corrupting influence of religion.
The gameplay itself is varied, there's a standard RPG combat system along with a duelling system called The Plunge and a lot of fun mini games. It takes place over six episodes (episode 1 can be a bit of a slow burner, episodes 3-5 are definitely the peak in my opinion and episode 6 can be a lot of fun and has a number of endings available depending on how you've done throughout the game as it has a save game transfer system).
Highly suggest giving it a go as its one of the best JRPGs I've played.
I just played Nier Automata for the first time and I agree. Do you have any suggestions for games like it?
Undertale gave me similar feelings (in terms of loneliness/missing others), tho other than that, no.
Maybe Nier Replicant? I have not played it though, but it may be good.
If you enjoyed Nier Automata, I'd definitely recommend Nier Replicant. It deep dives into mature themes like Automata, including humanity, self-loaathing, the nature of evil, and more. It also has connecting lore to Automata (especially in new ending) as they are set in the same world at different time periods.
For similar games like it, Omori is a turn-based RPG with dark themes and tons of hand-drawn art that was easily one of my favorites last year. It's a slow burn, but similar feel to Undertale with much darker themes. Oxenfree is point-and-click adventure that is a slow burn sci-fi horror with great narrative around the characters and main sci-fi mystery.
And while I haven't played them yet, ANNO: Mutationem, Night in the Woods, Scarlet Hollow, and Beacon Pines are in my Steam library and seem to have similar storytelling vibes.
I want RPGs with chatgpt integration for endless, rich, relevant, lore friendly NPC interactions.
I’ve thought a little bit about this and there are some hard problems embedded in this. Not only do you have to prevent it from hallucinating references to things not in the game and sending you on non-existent quests, you also need it to produce engaging and non-conflicting lore friendly content, in-character. That seems like it’s going to require a lot of written backstory and characterizations ahead of time.
I could see it replacing lore-dump style characters like those found in Pillars of Eternity but I think giving up too much control for characters directly in the gameloop might not meet expectations in the short term at least.
I think ChatGPT might be the first force multiplier when it comes to writing in a long time, but it's not going to replace it.
Everyone wants branching unique stories for every choice in the game, and you could be doing that in the 1980's and today, and the main difference would be that at some point you'd finally start running out of feasible workable manhours, rather than memory, and it wasn't that far after 1980.
It's hard to write a good story and much much harder to write it with so many branching points. Games like Fallout New Vegas do a really good job of handling it by having lots of little stories that mostly pile up, but even that is often way more effort than anyone wants to put into it.
I'm hoping that GPT and its ilk can be used as a writing prompt/dead end tool. "Hero decides to join the dragon, what happens" and it blurts out some nonsense, but hopefully get the gears spinning and gives enough written text that's usable it actually saved time. It's also easier to bug in mass and doesn't care if it's at 3:30 in the morning.
Still, I'm not sure how much that will help vs homogenize (wow all these side with the dragon stories feel roughly the same), and I don't think it's anywhere close to doing what people are hoping.
ChatGPT seems better suited for less important lore areas. Humans write the main storylines and computers can fill out the rest of the world.
Imagine a Diablo style game where every one of the 10 million weapons has a unique lore snippet. Throwaway voice lines could reference the player's past actions.
NPCs could slightly alter their dialog based on how you have interacted with them so far. Maybe the shopkeeper has to sell you that item for the quest to work, but he's going to be angry about it if you just looted the place.
It would have to be something other than chatGPT then -- while it is good at generating humanlike text in various styles, it is not good at anything rich or lore-friendly (even in the real world it doesn't get the lore right!) I think there's potential for generative AI in games, but you would definitely need a different approach than something like ChatGPT and would absolutely need a lot of work with good human authors and NLP/ML folks (tbh it would probably be way more work than just writing more non-generated text for such a game).
I'm excited for the prospect of this, but a little hesitant as well. I fear that it'll just feel like a 2.0 of Fallout 4's radiant quests. Maybe there's a way for developers to fluff out handcrafted story beats with generative AI so it's a happy medium?
We're a way off from this... But it's conceivable.
I think story architecture and game flow are non viable given the current generation of tools, however characterization of voice and believable responses (in English, at least) are working fairly well.
I think within a few generations, the models will be able to handle 'story arcs,' and once that is normalized, it won't be long before a product has woven several generative arcs together to create a meaningful experience.
inworld.ai is a company currently trying to solve this problem space.
Imagine dwarf fortress with chatgpt integration!
Honestly, I really wanna try a cartography (or at least real "exploration") game. I remember trying out an Etrian Odyssey demo because having the option to draw your own map and markers was the closest I could find. I still wanna feel immersed in a world and earn the pride of making a high quality map.
I might just be weird, though. I sketched and left notes on a map for Zelda 1 even though I was emulating it and the Internet was full of both exact world maps and full guides, and I enjoy being the designated note-taker or rules-checker in TTRPGs and board games.
If you haven't, check out Lenna's Inception. Every run is a seeded random world with 8 temples. It opens like a Zelda parody but rapidly becomes its own thing, even if it stays a bit cheeky. Its developer actually started the project from an open source randomized Zelda engine he developed, butbI think the randomly generated worlds deliver an interesting replayability.
I'm also a big fan of note-taking games generally. It's just neat. Makes me feel engaged and immersed. IRL I actually have a very bad sense of direction, so not sure why I like it in games, haha.
While it's not exactly the same, some games give you a map but not a cursor and I appreciate that if the game is designed around it, with good landmarks. I especially like an "abstract" map that doesn't quite map 1:1 to the world, but rather points out the major landmarks and leaves the details to you to find.
One game I can think of that made navigation the core challenge is the indie horror submarine game Iron Lung. You get a map, but you navigate by coordinates because you can't see where you are. There are parts of the map that are unclear. It gives it a very spooky, tense vibe.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance had exactly this. Change to hardcore mode, and the videogame-y "GPS" ("you are here" marker) is gone. You have a map, but it is not a computer-generated, down-to-the-pixel scaled down version of the game world. It is literally a hand-drawn map (drawn by the game designers, not an NPC or something), and you have to look at your map, look at the landmarks and physical features (forest, river, town), back at the map, etc. Major things are mapped, but many things are not. The map on screen does not rotate as you turn around. You have to orient yourself with your own wits and know-how (time of day, position of sun, known landmarks).
The lack of "GPS" really raised the immersion of the game. You absolutely want to get back to familiar surroundings before the sun goes down. Getting lost in the woods at night is a very real risk.
There's even an affliction you can add to your character where you sometimes sleepwalk, and that causes you to wake up in a completely random location. The challenge was real.
Have you tried Shadow of Doubt? It throws you into a randomised city where murders dynamically occur and it puts you in the shoes of a detective trying to solve the murders. It just throws a bunch of tools for gathering evidence at you and asks you to piece it together. Because all the murders are generated, although some themes might repeat, you’ll not get the same one twice.
Sharing this Polygon video in case you haven't seen it - sounds like you two have a lot in common in that regard: I love note-taking games and I DON'T CARE if that sounds boring
It's been a long time since I played this, so my memory is fuzzy, but "Miasmata" is very exploration heavy. Iirc, you develop your map by finding and triangulating points of interest. It's not hand-holdy either - you run around, see a point of interest, and then you run around more until you can get a decent triangulation. I don't remember the game ever forcing me to use any particular point of interest..
https://store.steampowered.com/app/223510/Miasmata/
There are a lot of music/rhythm games, but nothing similar to Rhythm Heaven. Rather than having one game applied to a song list like DDR or Guitar Hero, there are variety of mini games. Each explores very specific aspect of rhythm like syncopation and polyrhythms teaching a kind of abstract grammar around rhythm without ever explicitly mentioning it.
Have you looked into Melatonin? It's essentially Rhythm Heaven with synthwave aesthetic and music. It sounds like it'd be up your alley.
Yes!
Rhythm Heaven Fever is one of my favorite games of all time. The game’s charm is off the charts.
Coincidentally, I actually just started playing a VR exercise game inspired by the series: Groove Fit Kingdom. It’s not as beautifully polished as Rhythm Heaven, but it’s still enough to make me grin from ear to ear.
It's the warioware of rhythm games.
Both series have even partially shared development teams over their life span, if you click through them on Wikipedia you'll see many recurring names both of specific people in leadership roles and of certain development team names. The GBA rhythm heaven title looks so much like the original GBA WarioWare title in its menu designs and stuff that it's very readily apparent just playing them as well. Great games on both sides.
My DS is still working, and I go back to Rhythm Heaven from time to time. It really is truly a rhythm game compared to other music games. It feels like practice made fun.
It's not unexplored by any means, but a genre that I've found in desperate need of a solid fresh take is the rail shooter, especially non-first-person offerings. In my opinion, this subgenre absolutely peaked with Star Fox 64. Even the majority of the the official Star Fox rail shooters since 64 have been letdowns in one way or another (I've still played them all lol, but they leave me wanting a tighter experience a la SF64). My biggest gripe with a lot of the post-SF64 entries are that they lack the tight core gameplay loop and the sheer replayability of SF64.
I have several games that fit this bill either in my backlog, or on my wish list (some unreleased / in early access, others I'm nervous about pulling the trigger because they don't look to be as strong of an entry given their price point). A few of the entries that have caught my eye but I haven't tried yet:
Has anyone else tried these entries out, and if so, what are your thoughts on them? What about you, @jpar? Any genre or style you're hoping to see in the near future?
Rez infinite is not a sequel, if you have already played Rez. It’s just an updated version of the original with some extra content.
I honestly haven’t played any rail shooters in a long time. The last one was the Panzer Dragoon remake, which was just OK. If you haven’t played the series yet, I still prefer Orta and Zwei. Orta in particular is great and I think it still works on the latest Xboxes.
The only others I can think about right now is Afterburner Climax and the two Sin and Punishment games, and those are all very old, too.
I haven't played Rez but that's good to know. Panzer Dragoon Orta - now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. That is a standout for sure; I just totally forgot about it because I haven't played it in ages! Don't believe I ever tried Zwei, and I don't know that I've heard of either of the other two. Appreciate the callout and will have to keep my eyes open for all of them!
Just be aware that Zwei is probably the oldest game I listed. It's also very short, but it's so arcadey that you'll want to play through it multiple times. Both Zwei and Orta are moderately hard but you'll get good at it fairly quickly.
I recall that aspect of Orta for sure, and that's good to consider regarding Zwei. The replaying aspect is one of the things I love about games in the genre that are more similar to SF64, so no worries there. Appreciate the heads up!
There are some notable titles such as Risk of Rain or Spelunky that do this, but I’m looking for more co-op roguelikes. Well executed roguelikes can keep repetitive content fresh. Adding in a co-op element also allows the game to have more content options for specifically team-based initiatives while it should still keep long-term progression separate once two players part ways.
As for rail shooters, I think that’s a genre I haven’t given enough attention. Looking through your list, the Whisker Squadron series really caught my eye so I’m going to make a point to download the demo later today. Thank you for showing me these!
Great points, I really enjoy Risk of Rain 2 as well. I would go a step further and say that I wish there were more co-op games in general that weren't just focused on PvP. Those games are fine, but I much prefer PvE co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic and the Vermintide series. Per your point, I think it's important that there's still a sense of progression when it's not the same group working together, so the roguelike aspect of it makes a big difference.
Rez is good for what it is (and it was amazing when it first came out), but it definitely won’t scratch the rail shooter itch. It’s much more about the audio-visual experience.
That was definitely the vibe I was getting. Feels like a square/rectangle sort of thing. It's a shooter on rails, but it's not a rail shooter. At least, that's how I'm defining it in my mind. Still looking forward to trying it out, especially with the updated treatment in Infinite. Appreciate the info!
Thanks for posting Whisker Squadron, it's a new one to me and I'm always on the lookout for games to pour into the Star Fox-shaped hole in my life!
I've also found Astrodogs which I have picked up but haven't had a chance to play yet so I can't personally vouch for it. Looks like good stuff though and might be worth a go if you're experiencing the same Star Fox drought.
Oh, excellent - really appreciate the heads up on Astrodogs. I had not heard of it but it definitely looks like it'll scratch the itch. And for sure, glad to make you hip to Whisker Squadron and hopefully it's an awesome end product when all is said and done. Cheers!
What's your take on Sin and Punishment and its sequel ?
Great question - I somehow managed to miss them both when I was growing up! I'm going to do some digging and see if I can track down some copies to play, and will let you know what I think if I can manage it. Appreciate the heads up on them; they look like a blast.
Being the antagonist. Being evil, or just self interested without mustache twirling nonsense.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Knights of the Old Republic, etc…
Akin to this, any games with a dynamic reputation! For example, in the Infamous series they would either love you or be afraid of you. It gave your actions an impact and made the world feel alive around you.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is another great example.
I'd like to see more games with breakable/movable objects and in-depth physical worlds. Katamari Damacy is a great example of that, though it's a singular weird entity that I don't think can ever be replicated. Teardown is another example.
Another thing I'd like to see is more games that are full of secrets and codes to decipher. Something like Tunic, where even the text is a challenge.
I think the Katamari series is a shining example of what we need more of in video games. Which is to say, generally, fresh ideas. But I'd love to see more games that were clearly built around some oddball (ha) unique game mechanic and then let the game's theme evolve naturally out of that.
And on a similar note: games with tight arcade-y game mechanics. Obviously modern tech has more limitations when it comes to responsiveness/latency compared to the old days, so games tend to allow that wiggle room. I'm not a big fighting game guy and haven't played a modern fighter in the last 15 years or so, but from what I understand, most 2D fighters still rely on that same kind of old arcade-y gameplay. So what about other genres?
More hard sci-fi space games. The only ones I know of that are currently out are the KSP's (have thousands of hours in the first one, waiting for the second one to get good), and Children of a Dead Earth, which is... interesting, and unfortunately got abandoned by its developer in 2017. In the black should be coming out of ea soon, but I still want more hard sci-fi space games, whether they be strategy, flight sim, rpg, whatever.
I want there to be no speed limit, where maneuvering is dictated by acceleration and Dv. I want no preferred up or down. I want missile, projectile, and laser based combat. I want it to be based in a single star system, and not lean on FTL as a crutch for fast travel. And for first person segments, I dont want magic spacecraft gravity. If im not on an accelerating ship or a centrifuge, it should be zero g.
Elite: Dangerous? It's not 100% realistic, but it's kinda close as far as floating via inertia goes. It has missiles, projectiles, and lasers. "magic spacecraft gravity" is available as an option (computer-assisted flight), but you can turn that off.
Unfortunately, it has a (relatively slow) speed cap, and hyperdrives are used for anything long distance.
I've done some thinking on how to make a game like Sea of Thieves work with the technology of The Expanse (the technology from the first book, anyway). A lot of the ideas in the series I think lend themselves to good game design, but there are some critical flaws that I'm not sure how to deal with, so I've never put effort into building the thing.
The problem is I'm not sure how to deal with travel time. I think Sea of Thieves hits the sweet spot for what's tolerable; you rarely spend more than 5 minutes travelling from one island to another when running contracts; even a journey across the entire map takes less than a half hour (depending on your ship and the wind).
However in The Expanse, travel times are listed in weeks or months - doesn't make for very engaging gameplay. If you do the math, given the stated accelerations, the travel times should be listed in hours or days - that could work if there is enough to do at a given location, and you travel while offline but I don't think it'd work for gameplay. I figure you could get the travel times reasonable for exploration gameplay by shrinking the solar system a bit and/or exaggerating acceleration.
For combat in general I look to World of Warships (without aircraft or submarines) for ideas; I think it handles long-range ballistics very well. You manage your orientation to use armor effectively, with trade-offs in the directions of travel available to you. You can also manage steering and acceleration to dodge incoming fire, but rudder and throttle are slow to respond which allows attackers to predict your movement and lead their shot.
So if accelerations are exaggerated to keep travel times reasonable, how do you keep combat interesting? World of Warships specifically keeps speeds low to give attackers a way to predict movement and lead their shots. If acceleration is 10g, any defender could just cut throttle for a second to dodge any incoming projectile.
My thought here is to keep acceleration high, but make the throttle and steering controls slow to respond. If the defender's acceleration will be roughly constant until your projectile arrives, the attacker can still lead their shot - just account for "bullet drop" under the target vessel's artificial gravity by acceleration. There's probably some intuitive camera mode where the view rotates to match the target ship's gravity and the player can use bullet drop intuition from other games.
As far as game design, I think each weapon type should have some counterplay that depends on the defender's actions. For example the defender can manage throttle to dodge incoming ballistic fire. The defender can manage their orientation to angle PDCs toward incoming torpedoes. Those are the things I'd compare with World of Warships (without aircraft or submarines) long-range ballistics, and why I think it handles them so well.
With that in mind - I really don't know how to deal with laser weaponry. What's the counterplay for the defender when the "projectile" comes in at light-speed? My only idea is to require the attacker stops acceleration for a period before firing, leaving themselves open to ballistic attacks. Say the laser is "charging" or something... but I have a feeling it would be broken and very hard to defend against.
The other issue is that it's easy for the game server to simulate light delay; I think it would be neat to try to coordinate attack or defense or shipping or whatever other events with other players while taking light delay into account - but there's no way to prevent players from talking outside the game to communicate "faster than light" which is unfair to other players who buy in to the light delay simulation. Therefore it's probably not worth simulating...
So im not much of a multiplayer gamer, but I always assumed that travel between planets would either be done with time acceleration or it just being 'travel', where the journey is skipped.
That one is simple. Lasers dont work at more than knife fighting ranges. Even laser beams arent pefectly parallel, and suffer from diffraction. Even in the best case scenario, a lasers minimum spot size (how small of a spot it can focus on) depends on the size of its optics relative to the range of the target. Anything more than point defense requires optics tens of meters in size, meaning the laser would be exceedingly fragile. Finally, lasers are really power hungry, really inefficient, and often need to be kept fairly cool. none of those is a problem on its own when you have fusion reactors, but combined, it means they dump a lot of low temp waste heat, requiring massive heat rejection systems, adding to their fragility. I think it would be fair to speculate that lasers would fulfill similar roles to PDC cannons in the expanse, acting as point defense 99% of the time, while opportunistically being used as close range weapons within a few thousand or few hundred kilometers.
One of the reasons I think Sea of Thieves works is that you do have to travel the distance. There's no fast travel (unless your ship is destroyed). There are things to do along the way and you can be intercepted by other players. If you have fast travel then you can't really be intercepted, and you have an easy out of any tense situation. It's impossible to create high stakes for the player.
So maybe you could add fast travel, but with some restrictions to keep things interesting. You can't fast travel while in combat. You can't fast travel near the destination.
I'm not sure how to enforce "you can't fast travel if someone wants to incercept you".
At some level all of the different travel time adjustments are equivalent: shrinking distances, increasing accelerations, and adjusting time. You can think of those as a weaker, permanent, fast travel that is applied to all players uniformly.
Ooh, I like that. It makes sense from a physics perspective, and from a game design perspective it is a good way to balance out the speed of the "projectile".
Heat dissipation is an aspect of things I had not really considered. I wonder if there are any other interesting game mechanics around this? I think it would depend on the actual implementation of the UI and how intuitive the input controls are, whether an extra system like that is worth introducing or would be perceived as distracting/annoying/difficult.
Maybe I should just build some prototype so I have a place to test these kinds of things and get a sense for what might be good or not. I write code all day at work so I haven't really put the effort in to do this on my own time, but I'm feeling inspired now...
I guess I should have elaborated more about the 'fast travel' I wasnt specifically thinking 'a cutscene plays, and then you arrive at your destination'. I was thinking more along the lines of the entire route not being physically simulated, but game events (interceptions, etc) still having a way to trigger, if that makes any sense. (again, Im not much of a multiplayer gamer, the system I have in my mind wouldnt work in mp.)
The one thing I wish the expanse did better was that it didnt touch on heat management whatsoever. Ive been a hard sci fi nerd for a long time now, well before the expanse books came out, and while it scratches almost every itch, I really could have used some imagery of white hot radiators dissipating waste heat from the drive cones, or even exotic radiators like liquid droplets, looking like massive etherial glowing sheets in the void. Im not trying to go 'ugh, they sacrificed realism for story', I really thing radiators could have added to the imagery and the story.
Reactor powered spaceships are not likely to be limited in any way by power output, but by heat rejection capacity, and heat rejection capacity scales with the 4th power of your outlet temperature (outlet temp basically being how hot you are willling to let your equipment get, think of it like your cpu temp in a water cooling rig, the coolant will never be hotter than your cpu temp). This means that every degree of extra heat your equipment can add, the less fragile radiator area you need, leading to things like gun barrels glowing red or orange during combat, running at the razors edge of material properties.
I interpret that as something like the time warp in Kerbal Space Program; with some added mechanism that external events like interception can stop the time warp. For single player I think that makes total sense, but I had been thinking of multiplayer, where that is not so easy since it's unclear what should happen to all the other players when one player starts warping.
The basic game loop I'm imagining is roughly the same as in Sea of Thieves. Players can run contracts around the system to earn money and customize their ship. They could also earn money by intercepting other players to steal their cargo, and sell on black markets. There can be AI-driven pirates, merchants, civilians, etc. to populate the system beyond other players, and to trigger events that other players can't.
I have been making this core assumption without much thought: if I exaggerate accelerations and distances and timescales, I can make the travel times suitable for this game loop. I think your main point is it's unclear whether that's feasible. So, let's do some math:
The basic relation for travel time using ships as in the Expanse is:
d = 1/4 a t^2. There's an extra factor of1/2compared with the typical formula to account for the acceleration/flip/deceleration pattern of travel.So, say we want a trip from Earth to Jupiter to be about 30 minutes of game-time at "hard burn". How can I make that work?
That distance varies between 4 and 6.5 AU, so I'll average and assume 5 AU. That yields a simulation acceleration of... 94000 g. Seems a bit extreme.
Okay, so what if I do mess with time-scales? Say every minute of game-time is an hour of simulation time. That yields a simulation acceleration of 26 g. That's narratively acceptable for short evasive maneuvers, but not so for a long-running hard burn. I'm aiming for something like 4-5g in simulation.
So say our timescale is 60x, and our simulated accelerations are 5x the stated value. The relation for game-time is now:
d = 4500 a' t'^2wherea'andt'are what the player "experiences".Now lets run the logic backwards, to see how long it takes the player to make various trips at a moderate burn of 1g (simulated 5g).
That Venus-to-Saturn trip is doable but a bit excessive. If the player burns harder, say at 5g (simulated 25g) the time varies between 40 and 43 minutes (simulated 1 1/2 days). Still a lot, but I wouldn't want players to make that trip direct anyway.
Weapons gameplay should also be a bit more engaging with the 5x acceleration and 60x time values. We can give realistic railgun velocities like 3 km/s, but still arrive to target in reasonable game time.
30-second range with those modifiers:
So, some fudging for gameplay reasons will still be needed for certain weapons, but applying a static 60x multiplier to time, and a static 5x multiplier to accelerations I think leaves room for an interesting multiplayer game without "time warp" specifically for travel.
The important thing is to make sure there are things to do on those 10-20 minute interplanetary voyages. Repairing damage, preparing for upgrades, managing the reactor, piloting the ship, defending or evading attackers, and .... ?? I think most of the challenge in game design comes here, how to keep the player engaged when they're waiting 20-40 minutes.
E: Venus to Saturn isn't necessarily the longest trip a player might want to make. That is Jupiter to Saturn, when they are on opposite sides of the sun. With the multipliers above, at 1g, that trip varies between 1 and 2 hours. At 5g it varies between 28 and 58 mins. But in that circumstance the inner planets are on the way, so maybe the player could stop there to complete some intermediate contract...
I dont have a lot to add, but yah, this seems quite reasonable from a math perspective. Especially if you increase the number of things you can do on the ship during travel time. (Perhaps being able to view all markets and interact with them sysem wide, so when you are at your destination, you dont have to go into the store screen, just pick up the stuff you bought and drop off what you sold?)
I see one issue with this. Space is much larger than the Sea of Thieves not just by sheer span but also because it's three-dimensional. How are people going to find each other in the first place?
Now, all this is rough spitballing given that I don't have a prototype for the thing, and it might turn out that yeah, in practice it's a big problem. I don't think it would be, since most people would congregate around planets or other points of interest, and the lanes connecting them.
Therefore yes, there are technically three dimensions of movement, but I expect people would stay confined to the ecliptic plane, and even more specifically stay confined to the lines connecting points of interest within that plane.
The game itself could also give a bit more assistance finding others than you get in Sea of Thieves. In the Expanse series, there's a big deal about how the ships drives are so powerful they can be seen from great distance, and variations in the drives allow a sort of fingerprinting that lets one identify those ships from great distance.
So in game, I'd say that whenever your main engine is burning, you broadcast your location and velocity to all players in X radius. Maybe make that radius even larger in the direction of the burn; if you point the drive directly at someone they should be able to see it from very far away. That broadcast includes your player profile, and which alliances you currently have.
Another point: to intercept a target you need to decelerate to match velocity. To do that, you need to point your engine directly at them, which necessarily gives them your location.
E: I've gone into a bunch more detail on travel times in this comment. I still don't think the scale of things will be prohibitive, but it may be difficult to keep players engaged on those longer trips.
https://tildes.net/~games.game_design/15sy/whats_a_genre_or_style_you_wish_was_explored_more_in_games#comment-87o9
Years ago I read some essays on what future space combat might look like.
Our films/tv/books tend to apply current concepts to space. A common one being the idea of stealth.
The problem is simple blackbody radiation. Anything that isn't a dead hunk of rock will be above the CMB. You can try to move heat and shield heat but it doesn't matter, fundamentally you are warmer. Even today we are incredibly good at measuring tiny temperature differences in our solar system.
Even if you were trying to pump out heat from the back to hide it from the front, well that only helps if you are pointing exactly towards your enemy.
On that basis you can't sneak up closes like in the Expanse. At range we can't use lasers or anything else because of the fundamental limits on diffraction.
Everyone can see each other all the time, projectiles at distances will only require someone to sneeze on board the target for it to miss. Missiles could guide towards a target, but at range the target using a tiny deltaV represents a massive deltaV course correction.
Then comes the real issue for a hard sci-fi game. The speed of light is unbearably slow. The universe fucked up and made even interplanetary communication impossible. The older I get the more I resent the universe for how slow the speed of light is.
We can't have realtime internet between Earth and even Mars. We are essentially two separate civilisations sending letters. If in battle we detect each other over huge distances and our forces are spread out in the solar system. Sending an order could take hours, by which time their slight change in deltav prevents any attack.
The speed of light makes any hard sci-fi game set in just our small solar system pure tedium and boredom. It doesn't matter if some sci-fi drive brings you to 0.5c it will still take forever to get to where the enemy isn't.
I tried bringing this up with the universe's manager, but she explained to me a tiny change in c would prevent all matter from forming and she wouldn't be able to enact my request to speed it up no matter how many times I threatened to call head office.
I wrote all that to say, you can't have hard-scifi multiplayer games covering even our solar system. It would be boring and crap. KSP lets you fast forward through years and you still miss your target. A whole planet that didn't course correct.
The crux of the issue to me is: I don't like magical warp drives. It makes the universe feel too small. But, it seems you get to pick exactly two of:
KSP picks the first two, but sacrifices multiplayer support for its time-warp mechanic to keep gameplay acceptable. Multiplayer mods do exist, but they involve separate timelines and require players to be in the same timeline to interact. I can't imagine combat is very engaging if your opponent can warp into another timeline at any moment.
So the concept I mention in my comments is to pick acceptable gameplay and multiplayer combat, but compromise on realistic propulsion. It's predicated on a handwavium fusion drive, sure, but it does use reaction mass! Well, yeah, we need to fudge the acceleration values a little ... no, no, it's not warp drive, that's absurd. See, each minute is an hour and you only feel 1/5 the ...
Yeah, it's basically a warp drive.
This could actually be an interesting mechanic to use in transit. Even with the compromises on time-scale and acceleration, you've still got like 15-30 mins of gameplay between planets. Gotta fill that time with something interesting. Manage your concealment by selecting which radiators are active - but you must radiate as much waste heat as your reactor produces and each radiator only sheds so much heat. Sure, you can burn at high g and get there in 5 mins of game-time, but everyone will see you do it.
Or, invest in high-capacity radiators, segmented around the ship. You don't have as much room to mount weapons, but at low accelerations you can shed your heat exactly where you want and control who can see you. Of course, if someone is on the tail-end of the ship while the main drive is running, they'll see that. So adjust your travel profile: a long slow burn toward the target, and a hard deceleration burn. Everyone can see the deceleration burn, but you're already there.
Right, but at 60:1 time-scale each player's reaction-time would be slowed by the same factor, right? And if your main drive takes a bit of time to change its output, then that gives your attacker a bit of room to predict your movements. Gameplay would be slower than any first-person shooter, by far, but I'd look to something like World of Warships battleship gameplay for the upper end of what players can tolerate for their projectile's travel time. Especially if there are other things to do and strategy to plan in the meantime.
But that's a lot of speculation, and it's the main thing I worry about on if this concept is even viable. I have started working on a prototype, just some simple ship mechanics and multiplayer to get two people in ships flying between Earth and Moon, shooting at each other. Is it possible to tweak parameters of the ship and ballistics and simulation to keep that combat interesting?
I think so, but I really don't know.
I did some more math about that too... if you just use Newtonian equations and can accelerate the entire trip, it takes about 4 years but at the half-way point when you do the flip, you'll be going about 2.1 c
With all the compromises mentioned in the other comment, that trip takes about 11 days of game-time. That's short enough that the game actually needs some mechanism to stop it, relying on sheer scale isn't enough.
The easiest thing is to actually handle fuel and reaction mass to put a cap on how much you can accelerate on a long journey. So long as no (player-piloted) ship can get above 0.1c or 0.2c then we should be fine, and can hand-wave special relativity. That means requiring a refuel about every 5 hours of gameplay
It would be neat to allow relativistic speeds and consider time dilation, but then for multiplayer support we need to consider timelines and all, I don't think it can work.
Ah, the issue is that you called. They require written notice for that kind of request; just mail a letter to your local branch in the Sirius system. What's that? It's too far to send a letter? Look, it's corporate policy, there's nothing I can do about it.
Brilliant comment, a lot of thought went into it.
The issue with realistic propulsion is that space is big, you just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. :P
So even with multiples of c propulsion it still takes forever. Therefore you need to artificially constrain interactions.
You mentioned World of Warships. Historically you would have a huge fleet sailing in the open ocean, meeting the enemy in open water. But that is boring and at 20km you can't even see them. So that game has maps filled with Islands that you can play around. Yeah it isn't exactly the battle of jutland in open seas, but it is more fun and it pulls people into a smaller area.
Have you see this video before? Slowing The Speed of Light Down To 2 m/s—What Special Relativity Feels Like
It is quite interesting as an exploration as to what the world would look like around us as we started to approach fractions of c. When I watched that video I did think about how that could be explored in a game where you a fighting in that extreme limit.
I grew up playing Elite, Wing Commander, loved WC3. Freespace 1/2.Tachyon the Fringe, and my beloved freelancer. So I absolutely love those games, and wish better Newtonian physics space games existed. I want to fly in Battlestar Galactica physics, not star trek.
My very close mate wrote Sublevel Zero, a six degrees of freedom descent inspired game. But as much as I love Luke, it doesn't scratch the Freespace/freelancer itch. I've just started on the tutorial for Everspace 2, so we'll see with it :)
If you can find a clever way to do time dilation such that people can operate under relativistic physics and not have to wait several months, then that would be amazing. But jeese, that is a hard problem to solve in a satisfying way for a game.
I had not seen that video but I have seen that game. His additional explanations are helpful, that's neat!
You know that's an interesting question that I'm not sure the answer to. Say you did have this magical handwavium torchship that could burn for years on end at 1g. What's your perceived travel time?
https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Rocket/rocket.html
That's not as bad as I expected, but we're still measuring in years. I'm not sure how to make a game out of that without still using time-warp or timelines or similar, even for single-player games. That's not even considering that different players travelling at different speeds would already experience game-time at different rates.
Yeah his explanations are really helpful. I did a physics degree a long time ago. Relativity and quantum mechanics are best defined by how counter intuitive they are.
The deeper you go, the more you learn the more weird and more counter intuitive reality appears.
That video is a great example. How you'd think Lorentz contractions would appear in real life close to c is actually totally inverted. Really incredible, our minds can't handle it, but we try our very best anyway. Having that in a game might completely break players brains.
Oh also, if you are going to Andromeda, as you have picked up speed you may as well go beyond the virgo supercluster. At that point I'd guess it wouldn't add that many years. Unless you wanted to stop of course :P
X4 is similar to this
No, x4 is not. It takes place over multiple star systems, using a hyperdrive. The flight is 'plane like', with max speeds and 'inertial dampers'. The ships are laid out like airliners with 'magic gravity flooring'. Thats just what I saw in the trailer.
My 2nd top level comment but I LOVE "arcade" space flight in games and one of my favourite games growing up was FreeLancer... Would love more of that. One reason I liked Outer Wilds so much was that locomotion itself in the space ship was so fun for me.
No Man's Sky might fill this for me a bit, though I just haven't had time to get back to it with all its improvements. I think terrestrial navigation still looks a bit clunky?
If I could smush NMS and Elder Scrolls together somehow that might be my ideal game.
If you have an android, I highly recommend spacerpg3. It's free, but it doesn't have advertising or analytics. It's similar to freelancer. You'll get caught in a story right away, but don't mind it - you have more agency in the game than you would guess. If you like it, try 4; it has fleets.
Could Everspace 2 be something for you? I only played the demo, but it was fun.
Absolutely Freelancer. There's not a single space game that quite grips me as Freelancer did/does.
There's a great mix between arcadey and serious which doesn't exist. Space games tend to go for very large scale, serious, sim-like, or the complete opposite.
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw came close but suffered from having a small studio so it ended up feeling a bit janky at times.
Freelancer 2 would be the best thing since sliced bread.
I had memorised and internalised all the jump points in Freelancer. I didn't have to look for them, I knew where I was in a system and exactly where to reach a jump point at all times.
I didn't do this on purpose, it just sort of happened from playing the game so much. I felt like I was in that universe.
I used to play on oh so many servers, particularly the RP ones. My brother was also obsessed. That game is like an unreachable pinnacle that no other game has ever come close to.
I just started on the tutorial for Everspace 2, I loved the first but again it wasn't freelancer. I'll see how this goes!
When I booted up Everspace 2 I was too excited, so I stopped and immediately rewatched the intro (directors cut with all the alien stuff) for Freelancer. Man that intro is just unbelievably outstanding. The narrators voice holds such weight and gravitas as well. I can hear his voice in my head as he lists the Bretonia, the Rheinland, the Hispania, the Kusari, the Liberty.
The x series might interest you (X4 or X3) starsector too. Bethesda's soon to be released starfield is exactly nms+skyrim
I really do miss dedicated servers. I think Team Fortress 2 was the last game I played that had them. I grew up playing games like TFC and Counter-Strike. You'd find a favorite server with some cool people and a good map rotation. Or if you wanted a certain map or a game with less people, you could just pick a server running it.
Absolutely blew my mind when I started playing Modern Warfare and they just a had a play button. The devs would even advertise like "great news! That map people like is back and we're going to let you play it sometimes.
Star Wars Galaxies was my favorite MMO experience for actually feeling part of a community. Other MMOs I’ve played focus too much on the grind and I wish other MMOs the last 15 years would have taken the SWG model and ran with it rather than the WOW model.
I explain all the ways SWG was so unique and how much I wish other games were like it to my kids until they roll their eyes, lol.
Between the non combat classes, the skill tree point system and the best I've ever encountered crafting material system it was truly a legendary game.
People actually made livings as Interior Decorators* in the game--and that wasn't even a class! Things like Politician skill lines were added to the game because people were doing that in the player towns already.
(*Every loot item in the game had a 3d model you could place down in your house. I had a really nice Imperial Table with a "Juicy Ewok Spleen" displayed from a quest I purposefully never finished just for that item). Dancer and Musician classes were actually vital to the game due to the wound healing mechanic. This also lead to a vastly superior social interaction system compared to any other MMO.
Pretty much every other MMO I've played since SWG has seemed so cookie cutter in class training (except maybe ESO). There wasn't a single person I ever talked to in the game that had the same skill trains as another. Dammit, that was MY Master Combat Medic/Pistoleer/Dancer.
The crafting system. OMG the crafting system. There were basic material categories like "Avian Meat," ores, etc. However, each material category came with stats (Flavor, Conductivity, Unit Toughness, Energy Resistance, Malleability, etc) and those stats would randomly rotate out every week or two and some were planet by planet, IIRC. The final product quality was determined by stats relevant to that item. Food buffs lasted longer/were more effective based on Flavor, Overall Quality, etc. Energy Guns did more damage based on things like Conductivity, Heat Resistance, etc of the materials used. Due to the random nature of crafting, experimentation skills and the vast selection of resources, it was literally impossible for crafters to make identical items to each other. A crafter could make a batch run of identical items given the skills and resources but no 2 crafters could make an identical item. Items also wore out and repair kits lowered the quality to the point they could only be repaired a few times before breaking entirely. There was a rich crafting community as a result.
I was friends with a guy on our server who paid crazy money for the best resources in current rotation. I'd happily farm him hundreds of thousands of units of Talos Avian Meat if he wanted to pay 700 credits per unit. The best part is that I'd always keep 20% of what I harvested stored away for my own use or to sell later. It would be nothing for some items to go 5000+ credits a unit if the current in rotation stuff was bad (that was alot of money in the game).
I also use it as an example of how dev indecision/interference can kill a game. I know some of that came down from LucasArts (they were unhappy that people could solo krayt dragons, for example) but the simple things like the "Great Melon Nerf" or you need Camping I to pull out your speeder/now you don't/now you do constant flux created the powder keg that exploded even before the NCU and class reduction.
Thank you for this heartfelt reply. Reading this really captured the feel of SWG for me and made me really nostalgic. Wonder when something like this will ever come back.
This is hyper specific but I want a really deep and immersive lord of the rings game. My ideal would be single player and extremely realistic.
As outdated as it is, LOTRO is still probably the most immersive Lord of the Rings game on the market today. I really hope that one day they take it and give it a complete graphics/engine overhaul to bring it up to date with modern day graphics/mechanics as the story telling and world building they have done is top notch.
I played hours and hours of LOTRO with my college friends back in the day. It was such a detailed game even though it did start to feel grindy like I imagine all MMORPGs do eventually.
I played LOTRO for years and it was amazing and literally awe inspiring.
Then my account got hacked. I had a unique random password that I never shared and it was a PvE only game with bind on pickup items. Like why? I literally never understood it. To this day it is the only time that has ever happened to me.
I thought about picking it back up again and showing my kids around but am afraid that the UI and controls would be archaic.
Turn based strategy on a hex board.
In my youth I played a game on the Turbo Graphics 16. Military Madness. You had a map with a hex grid. You have finite resources (tanks, planes, artilary, troops) as does the AI. Your goal was simple, destroy everything or capture (with troops) specific locations. They eventually created a sequal Nectaris. There was strategy involved in your position, planning, etc but it was mostly about overcomming odds stacked against you.
Turn based strategy has morphed into 4x and Gacha with Into the Breach being the cloest at eliciting my feelings of nostalgia though it is a normal grid.
I’ve always thought a deck-building classical mmo would be really cool. Character progression is done via cards/spells and each encounter is different because you’ve drawn a different set of skills. Lots of what mmos are already doing (build resource, spend resource) maps pretty well onto a card games and there’s so much design space on both the mmo and card game side that’s been explored for you, but you would get to tackle it in a very novel way by combining the two.
This sounds a lot like what battle forge used to be.
Kind of yea, but traditional MMORPG instead of RTS and hopefully more of a subscription model instead of a freemium one.
I want to say Wizard101 did something like this. Card based but still very traditional mmo in feel. It's obviously a dated kids mmo so I'm sure someone could do the concept a little better.
I really want some newer games that have the 2010's flash game or 2000's newgrounds game feel to them. I loved those sorts of games as a kid, and they're a fun way to relax when I wasn't up for the more complex or active games I play now. I know there's a way to access them all, but I miss the diversity and the fact I was always finding something new every few months. I really want to be able to find new games to play by playing them instead of going through research of others' opinions of a game because it costs too much of my time and money to experience myself
And yes, I know there's more relaxing games out there, but most of the ones I find have either have a price tag are are a crappily made mobile game with no effort or heart. If I'm paying for a game, my philosophy is that I better be immersed in it so I don't feel like I wasted money.
Note: I am sick and sometimes the way I word or comprehend things can be wonky. If anything isn't making any sense, please let me know. I'll be more than happy to work through the things that sound confusing :)
I find itch.io's random games tool set to show jam entries can surface some small fun games that sort of feel like flash games but there is an element of digging that you need to do to find them.
I wish arena shooters like Quake or Xonotic were still popular. Specifically without characters and ultimates and all of the other modern bits and pieces you see in games these days.
Like I'm bad at them, but I really enjoy the heart pounding break neck pace of action that you just don't get in a lot of stuff.
Maybe I'm just an old man yelling at clouds though.
single player retro shooters are making a bit of a comeback, i would like to point out. Have you checked out DUSK?
Oh yeah! DUSK is great! I've played a lot of the new wave of shooters but I miss the style of multiplayer specifically
DUSK does have a multiplayer if that counts. Granted, I feel DUSK's appeal is more in its level design in the solo campaign than its gameplay which, while good, feels a bit off compared to other offerings IMO
We agree, in any case ; not enough arena FPS in the world.
I definitely prefer the arena shooters myself compared to the battle royal type ones that have taken the world by storm. Unfortunately that Halo Infinite was a let down.
Have you played Ultrakill yet? It's technically still in development, but the dev is fairly active and what is already there is an absolute blast.
I'm a bit late to this, but ULTRAKILL isn't an arena FPS ; it has some Quake DNA but it's forever going to be singleplayer-only and it plays nothing like any arena FPS out there.
I wouldn't even call it a boomer shooter because aside from the style, there's not much that's retro. Hell, there weren't even many shooters on PSX, Hakita just happened to know that style well. ULTRAKILL is just its own thing entirely.
In any case, though, it's a great game.
Would love more systemic games, in particular open world ones. There are loads of openworld games, but all too often what is going on in the world is pretty static and centres on waiting for the player to get there and attack them. I want to feel part of a living breathing world where I am just one part of it. Sadly in all the advances in gaming we have had over the decades, work put into NPC AI has been the most disappointing.
I've been really wishing for a really good pirate RPG. Black Sails is currently the best one on the market and still holds up well today. I know Ubisoft is coming out with Skull and Bones, but after playing some of their closed alpha/beta tests, I am not so sure about it. While entertaining, it lacks the immersion that Black Sails had at times. I think even having some kind of multiplayer game where you could work on building an entire pirate kingdom would be awesome.
That actually sounds pretty appealing. I would love to play another game like Sid Myer's Pirates! or Uncharted Waters again.
This! There are no good pirate games because they're all pvp. I had lots of fun when I tried Sea of Thieves but would rather it be a co-op pve game where you can actually do the story bits without losing all your progress to a bunch of fuckin screaming 9 year olds. It would also be neat pve because then they could add upgrades and different weapons an stuff since they don't have to balance around "everybody is the same pvp" nonsense. All other pirate games are either team fight games, or you don't control a pirate but are a boat instead (windward was fun for a diablo type game but I want to be first person).
I've had Salt 2 on my steam wishlist for a while, waiting for it to leave early access. I haven't watched anything on it so I have no idea if it is any good.
I tried the demo to Captain Bones a while back but I have never played a game with a worse UI so I didn't play for too long. It was very weird.
True stealth games, still looking for the high from Thief 3
I love stealth games. The most recent ones I've played are Aragami, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun.
There's something thrilling about hiding and avoiding detection. I would always try to "100%" the stealth score of these games. i.e. get through a level without being seen even once
Check out darkmod its a thief based free game with lots of community levels to play
I really miss those old Platforming Collectathon. Like Banjo Kazooie, Gecks, Donke Kong 64. I loved the Spyro Reignited Trilogy and really wish they'd do a remake for more old classic games.
(Banjo Kazooie/Tooie Reignited... RARE PLEASE!)
Yes, so much this. Please give me a Sly Cooper remaster!
Arcadey extreme sports games, especially ones that eschew realism in favor of style. The genre sort of peaked in the early 00's with titles like SSX3 and Tony Hawk's Underground, but then died as the games industry shifted towards more "gritty" style. I know Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is slated to release later this year; hopefully that scratches that itch for a while.
I've been dying for an arcade style snowboarding game, for YEARS. I've played just about everything that's come out and nothing ever quite scratches the same itch. There was a Shaun White snowboarding game on the Wii that I LOVED when I was younger and I recently tried to play it again much to my wife's enjoyment and it didn't age very well.
Sort of similar, but on the original PlayStation, there was an extreme sports racing game -- you could bike, skate or I think hoverboard? and there was punching and stuff. Definitely would play the shit out of a remake of that game.
Arcade sports games in general need to make a comeback.
I'd like to see more games focused around the strategy of ship combat with higher detail, and in longer time frames.
Games where ships immediately start by blasting weapons and resolve combat within minutes are a dime a dozen.
I'd like to see a game where ships can be seen on scanners for 10-15 minutes of maneuvering before we're even in weapons range. I want to examine the other ship's visible details, get an idea of their shields and weapons systems, then form a plan of attack all while negotiating with them over comms.
I want to manage power levels across ship systems, compensate for damage and perform risky stunts that play out in minutes instead of microseconds.
That's kinda the feel I'm talking about with the ideas I mention in this thread
https://tildes.net/~games.game_design/15sy/whats_a_genre_or_style_you_wish_was_explored_more_in_games#comment-80kb
Like, imagine you're on contract shipping ice from Saturn to Ganymede. You're at 1/2g burn since your cargo hold is full. You could maybe do 1g but you risk damaging the reactor, and besides, you're in no hurry. You're down in engineering, crafting parts to improve the drive performance. This contract will pay enough to have these parts installed and buy supplies for the next upgrade. Your buddy is up in ops, looking at open contracts to decide your next move.
I want that moment where you hear "drive signature spotted" come over ship intercom .... "weapons range in 5 minutes" ... oh shit. You go to navigation, and sure enough: new ship spotted on 2.5g deceleration burn to intercept. The drive signature is linked to a player profile: pretty high reputation in black markets on Enceladus and Ceres.
It's small and light and fast, but not a lot of weaponry or armor. It does have a pretty intimidating laser equipped, so don't get too close. There's no real hope of landing any ballistic shots if they're paying attention, and even landing guided torpedos will be difficult if they evade at hard burn.
What do you do?
If you're up for a departure from sci-fi, you might like games like Sea of Thieves or World of Warships. They both have those longer timescales and risky schemes.
Although Sea of Thieves doesn't take itself too seriously and is as much action-adventure as it is pvp.
And World of Warships' core gameplay is great, until you encounter submarines and aircraft carriers, which bypass many of the game's balancing mechanics. Ship tiers 5-6 are still fun. Higher tiers can be fun if there are no carriers or submarines.
Yes, you have exactly the right idea!
One of my favorite concepts for this type of game is getting a team of people to collaborate on goals together. Take each system of the ship and make it a minigame where significant portions of the work they do is dependent on the others.
"Hey Kurtz can you man the engines, power is getting uneven and I can't keep shields up if it gets any worse."
"Yeah sure but promise me you won't be opening all your capacitor channels at once? God himself couldn't keep power stable through a dump like that."
"Guys I'm gonna put us on autopilot for a bit and get down to weapons, if they keep firing lasers there's nothing to dodge and at least I can be useful loading tubes for a while."
"Okay but watch out, weapons bay lost oxygen."
What I miss a lot were the old early 2000s turn-based strategy video games like "Advance Wars" by Intelligent Systems. The CO powers and the rock-paper-scissor unit mechanics were super fun. As a kid, it was awesome to run down an army with a big tank and as an adult when replaying, it was awesome to see how in tactically in depth you had to be for fog of wars and resupplying troops.
Have you heard about AWBW (Advance Wars by Web)? It's a modern web port with custom maps and online battles.
I just really want more short well paced impactful and self contained narratives, I've found myself turning more and more to older or indie games over AAA games as they feel the need to make every game huge or endless. Which along with costantly trying to out graphic each other is a huge part of why games are taking longer and longer as well as costing so much to make.
Would also I'd love more hand drawn animation in games, I've been playing Two Strikes lately and wow if it's not just absolutely gorgeous when done well.
If you want a great short and self-contained narrative, you should play Ghost Trick! It has a lovely aesthetic too.
That’s on my list! I’m a huge fan of Ace Attorney so I’ve been meaning to check out Shu Takumi’s other work for years and with the re-release coming out I think I’ll finally get round to it.
roguelikes in the style of nethack, but with a different spin, ie, no orcs, dragons, or anything like that. As far as I know, the only one like that is cogmind, a roguelike where you are a robot exploring a postapocalyptic robot world, fitting parts to your body to become more powerful. Other variations could include being a microbe, being an alien of some sort, being a rat or a bird or a fish -- the possibilities are endless, but there is just a sea of orcs. Nonetheless, my favorite in this genre is dungeon crawl stone soup, just because of all the different flavors of gods and species.
games in the style of escape velocity. In escape velocity, you piloted a lowly shuttlecraft, and traded or did missions until you acquired enough wealth and status to pilot better ships, access better equipment, and engage with more powerful enemies. Especially enjoyable was the lore, the beautiful graphics, the engaging, arcade-style game play, and the freedom. There are only a handful of games like this, and I'm not sure I'm aware of any games in its ilk -- a nautical variation, or a nomadic trader/warrior variation could be really interesting and cool.
Another one I love are beautiful puzzle games. The first one I loved was Myst. I also really loved monument valley (highly recommended). A game where it's not just the puzzle solving - the experience of playing the game is emotional and cathartic and kind of awe-inspiring, and the game itself is visually stunning.
Have you tried Caves of Qud? There's an overworld, so it's much bigger, but every overworld tile has endless deeps underneath it to explore. You can be a "pure" human with access to cybernetics once you can scavenge them from cybernetic suites or butcher them from the corpses of other cyborgs, or a mutant with a wide variety of physical and mental mutations. It's 100% not a normal fantasy world, or even a normal post-apocalyptic world, being home to such species as the dromad, camel people who travel the deserts and depths buying and selling, the slynth, newly sentient lilypads looking for a new home, and the urshiib, spiny bears with long, many-jointed fingers that help them in their tinkering with the treasures of past civilizations.
It's a trip. I highly recommend it.
That sounds cool as heck. Thanks!
I've always wanted to see more turn-based tactics MMORPGs. There are two that I know of, Dofus and Wakfu, both developed by the same French developer. While they each have some really great ideas and a fun art style, there are aspects of both that irritate me just enough to prevent me from going all-in on them. Wakfu in particular is monetized very aggressively.
Not that I think the genre is underdeveloped but I would really like to have an 3rd/1st person action adventure game set in the Dune universe (and not as any of the main characters or necessarily during the the books timelines) Maybe like a Freman fighting against Harkonnen rule prior to them losing Dune to the Atreides.
Dune has been dominated by the Strategy genre and I'd really like to see a more boots on the ground story in that universe.
Bungie released a game in the 90's called Myth: The Fallen Lords, that they called a Real Time Tactics (RTT) game. This was meant to be a sub-genre of the RTS game, where instead of managing resources to create new units, you were given the units and were meant to maneuver them tactically in order to win battles. Outside of the sequels, I've never seen gameplay like this in any other game. The game also had multiplayer through LAN and online servers, and Bungie actually gave mapmaking and unit changing tools with the game itself (on the same CD) to encourage people to make their own mods for the game. The community for this game has been rather long lived. I believe it still exists today, kept fresh by a tiny community of modders/mapmakers, and small community tournaments. The problem is that the community is small. This means its not easy to find others to play a game online with. Also due to its age you have a lot of set up to begin to play the game. To be able to run on modern computers there are fan made updates that need to be installed. Then to play multiplayer if you arn't playing via LAN, you will need to set up the game to play through a fan host as bungie.net (now battlenet) stopped supporting the game over a decade ago.
I'd really love, a remaster at least, or even better a new game that plays in a similar way, so that my favorite game series won't be alone in its genre.
I haven't played Myth, but based on your description I think it would be fair to say that Bad North would fit into this genre fairly well, even if it's not exactly the same.
I had a look and I really appreciate the recommendation! I would certainly say it seems to fit within the same genre. At first glance it doesn't seem like you can change the formations of your squads or give the individual units any sort of name or unique directions but the minimal style of the game definitely would make it fun in a different way. Its even on sale on steam right now!
Yeah your control is at the squad level rather than the individual unit level. It's fun game, and there are some roguelike elements that I enjoy, although I know those aren't everyones cup of tea.
I would love more games of whatever genre you'd consider Outer Wilds to be. Exploration, learning, puzzle solving, figuring out a story and such.
Also, more VR games that don't hold your hands in terms of restricting movement and such. I know some people have motion sickness and such, but games like Vertigo 2 that are just like "okay, here we go" and will fling you around the map off jump pads and throw a somewhat sizeable number of enemies at you, put you in a moving helicopter and have you gun out the side, etc. It's built for people who don't get motion sick and want to experience everything VR has to offer. It's awesome. Compare that to some games that don't have a jump button, or the jump is just a teleport option instead of an in-game jump (looking at you, HL:Alyx).
This is stupidly specific but it's kind of my dream game. I want a game to attempt recreating the feel of the combat in Kingdom Hearts 2 and expanding on it. KH2 is really unique for a 3D beat 'em up because it has this lightweight feel to combos that go against a lot of principles in its genre, and works very well nonetheless. The way your moves change depending on the range and move you around, the ability to transition smoothly from ground to air combos and back, the sheer speed of Sora... It feels nothing like DMC, Bayo or anything else I've played. Obviously, KH2 has problems, like its honeslty still lacking difficulty, and I think it could feasibly demand more intentionality from its player ; that's why my dream game takes those concepts and puts them in a more demanding setting.
Frankly, though, more 3D beat 'em ups from different creators than just Platinum and occasionally Capcom would be needed. Bayo 3 was good but full of holes which does not help
As far as genres go, I'm really craving for more fully 3D arcade racing games in the style of a Ridge Racer (PSP). Drift, boost, drift, boost. I tried playing the new Cruis'n game, but it didn't feel quite right. And I liked Hotshot Racing, but the aesthetic flavor didn't really gel with me.
In terms of style, I will always ask for more games that let the player explore and learn about the world independently of overt guidance, that deal in mystery and riddles, and where it's useful to pick up a notebook to keep tracks of things. Games that evoke this kind of pure adventure for me are The Legend of Zelda (1) and La Mulana.
I remember Final Fantasy 12 had this prominent Gambit system, where you can do some rudimentary scripting to give your allies AI for how they will fight in battle.
Then later I found this other game Gladiabots which does a more advanced version of the same thing, where that's the entire mechanic and you have no input during the live battle.
I think it'd be cool to have more "field commander" style games where you give your units strategies and signals instead of directly commanding people, but still a smaller scale than Age of Empires where you're in charge of a huge army and any individual unit is somewhat irrelevant.