What is your dream game?

When I was a child I played Age of Empires and Zelda: A Link to the Past a lot, so I always wanted a Zelda RTS game with ALTTP assets, I would even accept a tactical rpg if real time battles is asking too much.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No "magic parking", no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn't tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy. It's frustratingly possible and a concept that's right there but games that aren't car centric are all either historical or not city sims. It's not enough for me to build the pretty solarpunk city, I need to see people inhabiting it and solving their problems.

I have a simple request. Basically a new racing game that goes back to older racing game mechanics. No open world driving and collecting bullshit, just more focus on solid arcade racing with awesome tunes. Basically something like Need for Speed Underground and Burnout Revenge, but new. Unbound was close! But still had an annoying amount of open world driving and driving to the safe house at the end of each day or night. It was also annoying to switch cars for the drift events and then get stuck with a drift car when chased by 10 cops. Burnout Paradise was also close, but annoying map mechanics where you basically had to memorize the map.

A fully-immersive, RDR2 style Dragonriders of Pern game.

For those unfamilliar with the series:

• Humans colonize a planet

• They are Space Amish, so want to use the minimum technology possible. They live in a non-FTL world, so it's a one way trip.

• When they get there, deadly spores from the system's Oort cloud start falling in a cycle they realise will last 50 years, with 250 year orbital gaps.

• They have to figure out a way to burn these spores ('Thread') before it devours all of their organic material, and their flyers, jury-rigged with flamethrowers, are running out of battery capacity.

• A genius genetic engineer who studied gene editing with a sentient alien race turns the planet's native fire lizards (small, green) into rideable dragons (big, bronze), who can self-generate flame and reproduce.

• Each pass of the Thread cloud makes the colonists of Pern lose more and more knowledge as they retreat into machine-cut caves. Their tools wear out, their electronics break, their records are slowly destroyed, and over thousands of years, they essentially have a (non-violent) feudal society.

• The game would focus on immersive roleplay, as Pern MUSH and MUD games were a really fun scene when I was a teenager.

• The big event would be Threadfall, including excellent dragon flight dynamics (including teleportation - they can do that!) and working with your wing and your weyr to keep habitable settlements and crops safe from the all-devouring parasite that destroys organic life.

• The dragons are telepathic, so I'd want fully voiced bonding systems, as well as mating flights, depending on the color dragon you select at the start of the game. That'd be the basis of the companion/romance system.

• The main thing: it has to capture the feeling of yearning for a telepathic, teleporting, ultimate-freedom-granting dragon, and experiencing the cosiness of the world Anne McCaffrey wrote.

• Setting wise, I think it'd be most interesting to do it during a regular Threadfall pass, where the balance between dragonriders, Holds (settlements) and Crafthalls (professional guilds) was normal. This would allow for an interesting and character-driven storyline, and most of the best Pern RPGs were set in this time period, as opposed to the setting of most of the novels, where nobody believed Thread would come back and the dragons were dying out (it did, and they didn't).

I wanna ride a dragon. I want it to be fun and exhilherating. I want to breathe fire on a non-sentient parasite falling from the sky to protect my comunity. I want to build relationships with complex, interesting characters from across the three social worlds of Pern.

But I don't think any game has properly captured the feel of what riding a dragon might be like. That core mechanic I think is similar to the breakthrough Rockstar had with the feel of bonding with and riding a horse, and depending on it through the whole storyline.

That's the magic for me. Get the dragon riding right, and everything else follows.

Linear 3rd person space opera.

With how popular the mass effect series were, you'd think there'd be more, but nope.

I have always dreamed of what I would describe as a “vertically integrated 4X” game.

At the top level is something like stellaris. Empire management, fleet management, top level colony management.

But in stellaris, you just command your fleet to engage with the other fleets and watch the fireworks. In my dream game, you can play entirely at this stellaris level if you want. But if you want, you can zoom in to the battle and participate, with combat sort of like elite dangerous. This elite level would be an entire complete game, and you could play forever at this elite level if you want.

Stellaris also has land wars. And these would be another level to the game. I am thinking a FPS game sort of like battlefield or SW battlefront 2. Again, you could play exclusively at this level if you wanted.

The scope of this concept is mammoth, and so it probably will never see the light of day. Likely it would need multiple different developer studios working on the different levels of the game and how they interact. And balancing would be an absolute nightmare. But imagine a game where it was player driven at every level. You could be in a drop squad for an invasion, lead by a player commander, lead by a player fleet commander, lead by a player commander in chief, lead by a player emperor.

Joke answer: Overwatch if it wasn't being handled by Blizzard.

Real answer: I'm a sucker for actual open-world games with satisfying ways to move around. That could be GTA-style traversal with cars, motorbikes, planes, etc. something like Marvel's Spider-Man 2 with really fun movement, or ideally even a mix of both.

Story-wise, I'd want something meaningful and well-written, but still easy to follow. I don't want Dark Souls levels of ambiguity, where you have to find some random item in the most remote corner of the map and read its description just to understand an important part of the story. But I also don't want something as simplistic as GTA missions that can sometimes basically boil down to "go here and shoot people".

Basically, I want a story that's entertaining and engaging all the way through, while still being simple enough for most people to understand without needing hours of cutscenes, dialogue, or outside lore explanations.

After thinking about all of that, Scrap Mechanic actually came to mind as one of the closest games to what I'd consider my dream game. It's already one of my favorite games, and I love the amount of freedom it gives you, but its world has always felt a bit too empty and the gameplay can get really repetitive.

The Chapter 2 update has definitely helped with some of that, though. There are more enemies, more structures to find, and the whole underground area adds a lot more to explore, so the world feels more populated and varied than before. But even with those improvements, I still feel like it has that underlying problem of eventually becoming repetitive and not always giving you enough interesting things to do with such a huge amount of freedom.

I'm not even completely sure how I'd fix that, but it's kind of cool that a game already exists that gets surprisingly close to the sort of "perfect game" I had in my head.

Basically what they promised Star Citizen would be, but offline single player.

I want a game that lets me really focus on more realistic railway operations, particularly around railyards and building trains.

I love OpenTTD, Factorio, and Satisfactory all for what they give you with setting up rail networks. Satisfactory in particular feels almost like the most realistic: stations are huge and you can't just set up arbitrarily large stations like you can in OpenTTD. This constrains you to fewer and smaller stations.

With this constraint, I'd love to be able to have a railyard somewhere where I could split and build trains. Perhaps I have a station serving coal on four cars. I want to take that train and break the cars out and merge them into four different trains and then distribute them across the game world.

The closest thing I've found (aside from actual model railroading) is the game Railroader. I think though I want something that is a bit more at a birds-eye view. The dream game would be the interface and general gameplay of OpenTTD, but with heavy constraints around requiring realistic operations that would force building yards and switching cars.

When I was a kid I always dreamed of a large open-world game where you were an animal. Somewhere between arcade and simulation, so that the gameplay would reflect an animal's real activities, but you wouldn't spend actual hours eating grass (for example).

There are games that have tried and at least partially succeeded IMO, but there are honestly so many different ways to approach this concept, that I'm still itching for more.

Examples:

• Spore - If you know, you know. I was so excited for this game as a kid, and its release was like a slap in the face. The game had large ambitions of letting the player progress from a single-celled organism to an animal, to a tribe, to a civilization, and then to space. And (somewhat predictably) delivered just OK results. Also they had a terrible DRM system that prevented me from playing for the first few days and continued to be a significant annoyance past that. So I honestly didn't even play much in 2008. I only really experienced the game about 10 years later. The single-celled and animal phases were decent, but they just didn't feel full-fledged. The gameplay was sandboxy, but there weren't that many systems to interact with, so it felt shallow. Also the focus on the evolution of your creature is interesting in a way, but it also takes away from the feeling of living as that creature.

• Jaws Unleashed - a licensed game where you play as a great white shark living off the East Coast of USA. Released in 2006, which was around the golden age of AA games IMO, this game had no right to be as good as it was. Although the story missions were kind of clunky, and there were a number of technical glitches, this game comes close to my dream. You feel like a badass shark living in the real world. No, attacking and ripping people apart for fun is not particularly realistic (and it gives a bad name to real sharks, but I digress), but your fundamental actions and abilities as a shark mostly are. The ocean ecosystem is not thoroughly modeled, but everything looks pretty reasonable and there is decent variety. Importantly, the game was fun. Just cruising around eating stuff and causing mayhem was satisfying.

Anyway, this comment is growing out of hand, and I need to end it for now. Maybe I'll revisit this :)

Lately, I've been imagining a first-person shooter version of Noita. It would be a little like an open world, procedurally generated Hexen with destructible terrain. Maybe also some Nethack dynamics, like you actually don't know what which potions are which or exactly what that wand does when you fire it until you see it in action.

Particularly, I'm fond of the way that Noita signals to the player the way that Mina knows what's around her, even if she doesn't have a direct line of sight, as though she were inferring position and identity via sound, echolocation, or a sixth sense or something. I've been trying to imagine that maybe the player sees outlines or silhouettes behind opaque walls.

The third dimension would make the mines and Hiisi Base dark, claustrophobic, nightmarish maze, while at the same time the open arena spaces would feel airy and exposed. Gloomy areas would be especially scary.

I wouldn't want the graphics to be too good. Better that they stay more "Doom" and less "Half-life". It could run on a lot of hardware and would be extremely difficult. I might not even enjoy playing it, but I'd like to see it to find out.

Arcanum, remade in the divinity engine (or a similarly physics-oriented engine) and designed/written by the OG Troika team.

I'd also want to recreate the original (abandonware) Albion game as a first person skyrim-like.

I have two:

The first would just be a new game like Lucasarts' Gladius, which if you're not familiar is basically just a turn-based strategy RPG in the setting of the Roman gladiator games but at each city you can recruit new members with various classes and abilities, which allows for a surprising amount of replayability if you want to try different strategies and synergies. The original game is really too easy to bother with a lot of the strategy, unless you adore it like I do. I think I've played it all the way through at least a dozen times over the years.

The second would just be Dark Souls 4. Elden Ring was just okay and Bloodborne is too easy, give me more Dark Souls. Please Miyazaki.

As a child, I longed for a first person Pokemon. I didn't know how game designed worked, so I'm not sure how that would be translated today. Crawling thru grass and random chance encounters just seems to get cheesy the more realistic it gets.

I've always wanted an RPG style game set in the modern day. Something like what I imagine Earthbound was like back when it was released. You and your party are kids from a suburban neighborhood and your weapons and stuff are all things you'd find in normal day. No magic in the traditional sense, maybe some basic science or chemistry to craft things that explode, burn, etc. The villains can be regular humans but maybe there's something that's driving them crazy, like a toxic spill. South Park:Stick of Truth sorta scratches the itch but I want a game that takes it a bit more seriously and can't rely on years of established story

I'm not the biggest gamer so hoping for some suggestions toward existing games :)

After watching the anime Spice and Wolf I've really wanted a game along those lines. The premise: you're a traveling merchant trying to make enough money to settle down and open up your own shop with a medieval economy sim deep enough to allow for the kind of shenanigans that they get up to in the anime including things like currency manipulation and market crashes due to unexpected large-scale events. Or more broadly a "small fish in a big pond" kind of strategy game that doesn't scale up to have you the player directly running an entire guild or the like, but needing to do it through connections with NPCs that have their own ambitions and might refuse some requests or change their mind as the circumstances do.

Games like Mount and Blade, Freelancer, and Sid Meier's Pirates! have some kind of trading aspect to them but that's not the primary game mechanic and usually pretty simple. Even a more recent indie game that I've tried, Merchant of the Skies, is closer in scope for being entirely focused on trading but still fairly shallow in execution with "buy low, sell high" being most of it without much getting in your way. Maybe I need to dive into the trading and economy tags on Steam and see if there's anything else that draws my eye.

All that said I don't know if it would even make for a game that's fun to play, but it's something I've wanted to give a shot for more than a decade... and after getting back into a MUD and enjoying playing a trader leading caravans between towns, I think that desire's subconsciously been around for closer to 30 years.

Morrowind.

I mean, you could fix the stuff that's obviously wrong with Morrowind (the appallingly-unfriendly dice-roll combat mechanics, the ugly character models, the handful of quests with totally bogus directions…), but that would be to make it someone else's dream game. I'm perfectly happy with Morrowind as it is, weeping corprus pustules and all.

(I should start another playthrough.)

Morrowind does have a handful of features I would really like to see other games adopt more, though:

• No time pressure on the main quest. (In fact, there are several points where the main quest questgiver tells you to go do something else for a bit.) The Big Bad is immortal, patient, and not in a big rush; his plans have been slowly metastasizing (see what I did there) for literally millennia, and so the main character taking a few months sidequesting is completely immaterial. Now, I'm fine with games having time pressure on the main quest, but if you have time pressure on the main quest, you have to have time pressure on the main quest. Cyberpunk 2077's "you are rapidly dying and macguffin lady is literally hanging out 24/7 in this restaurant waiting to ship you to the endgame oh you're spending in-game weeks on sidequests" thing… does not work. And if you have an open-world game littered with sidequests, actual main-quest time pressure will backfire in a different way, because players will get very cranky if their sidequesting is interrupted. Morrowind's solution of just not pressuring you to get on with the main quest works so well, I wish it were more widespread.
• It does the Stranger in a Strange Land setting genre really well. Obviously as a first-time player you are Not From Around Here in in-game terms; Morrowind plays into that, with a Weird Fantasy setting and xenophobic NPCs who for the most part don't like you and treat you like dirt. Pairing the unfamiliar experience of entering a new game world with that world actually treating you as an outsider is quite immersive.
• The game is completely indifferent to how powerful your character is. Curbstomped by a rat on the outskirts of the first town? Should have majored in a weapon skill, that's just how it goes. Stack enchantments until you can punch God to death with your bare fists? I guess God needed to git gud. The world being objective like that is much more immersive than either Oblivion's "epic-level bandits decked out in Daedric armor" or Witcher 3's "trash-tier bandits wearing rags and wielding sticks, but they're super high level so the literally superhuman Geralt still struggles with them". It also enables a very satisfying gameplay experience where you can run into something too challenging; leave and level up; and come back and pass it with ease. I'll fully grant that a statically-leveled world with a leveling player character introduces some balance challenges (and boy howdy does Morrowind have balance issues), but trying to dynamically-level that out is definitely a case of baby-with-the-bathwater.
• The game's lore is presented in realistic histories. By which I mean: nobody knows what happened, everyone has ulterior motives for supporting their own pet theories, and they drag each other in in-game books (seriously). And I don't mean "in-game, nobody knows what happened"; I mean nobody knows what happened. Read the UESP's page on the Battle of Red Mountain, and it lists out a half-dozen different accounts, with none of them (not even the ones by characters who were actually present there, some of which hilariously contradict each other) being canonical. This is, of course, how history works in the real world, and it makes contemplating and discussing the lore way more interesting than if it is the game designer's background document paraphrased in an in-game style.

A combination of:

• Open world story-telling, quests, and RPG character building like Skyrim/Oblivion - similar setting to Tamriel / LOTR / GoT.
• Combat mechanics like Elden Ring
• Co-op campaign PVE like Divinity Original Sin 2 - built for a D&D-like party questing playthroughs.
• Character customization on the level with TTRPGs. Thousands of classes and subclasses to chose from / build your party with specializations for different scenarios.
• Use AI to have ultra-immersive NPCs in cities (I'm talking towns with 10,000+ unique NPCs to interact with), every building has a fully built out interactive interior.
• Ultra wide screen / VR support for first and third person mode (no, I have no idea how you'd handle Elden Ring / Souls combat mechanics in first-person-view-mode)

Basically the most immersive open-world fantasy RPG imaginable.

I've played Skyrim more than probably any other game. Most of my mods focus on making the combat mechanics more exciting and less clunky, and adding NPCs with new lines of dialogue. I have thought about trying the Skyrim together mod, but it seems a bit complex to set up and the people I'd want in my party aren't as tech-savvy when it comes to modding.

Two of my fondest memories are when I first started playing WoW during the WotLK era (with no prior knowledge) and the early years of Minecraft (first played allll the way back pre-alpha). What I loved was the feeling of this massive, unknown world. There was so much to explore, discover, and learn.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of my favorite all-time TV shows are also about exploration and discovery (Star Trek TNG and DS9, Stargate SG1).

So my dream game is whatever could possibly re-capture that feeling. I've played No Man's Sky, which does come close but feels a bit too barren and formulaic. Maybe I'm just too old now for a game to give me that sort of feeling, but that's the dream.

This game will never exist because there is absolutely no market for it, but a small part of me still dreams. As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with the anime series, Zoids. Giant mecha and they're cool animals? What's not to love. Also really wanted to go on my own adventure where I piloted one of them. So I've long wished for an open world game where you can explore the Planet Zi, get your own zoids, customize them, and pilot them in battles. Ideally an arcade game with a custom cabinet to invoke a zoid cockpit, but at the very least it would be awesome if it could be a control scheme using the Steel Battalion controller. Again, there's no market for this, so it will never be made. But maybe one day if I ever get good at programming, and I can make this game for myself with a custom game cabinet.

There are multiple possible ones but here I'll go with a postapocalyptic base management, scavenging game that is focused on rebuilding. Possibly larger in scope, possibly smaller.

Something similar to Dead State in some ways but larger, less buggy, less grindy and focused on said rebuilding.

Generally I would also like to see llms integrated into npc behaviours. That is one use case where nondeterminism and inaccuracy does not really matter that much.

They are absolutely not on a level to drive the game but constrained small talk or combat and noncombat routine behaviour should be possible.

I have three:

1. A NEW Zelda game that is linear, not like BOTW and TOTK.
2. A new Rollercoaster Tycoon, but made in the original style and graphics, just made by Chris Sawyer, and no online modes or anything
3. a cozy game for my phone with no ads or in-app purchases or apple arcade/internet connectivity where I can just complete side quests and puzzles with character development dependent on how nice you are to the people around you.

Serious in tone (not design) reimaging of Phantasy Star 2, the OG Dune/Star Wars/Dirty Pair sci-fi dystopia RPG.

An offline version of Final Fantasy XI that utilizes an action RPG combat system while still somehow retaining the slower-paced strategy aspect of the MMO. Potentially utilizing some kind of gambit system a la FFXII. Updated graphics and a new story, or a rehash of the existing stories (which are great! But told in a clunky way)

Really I just want Binding of Isaac 2.

To clarify a bit more, I want a roguelike, as that's my favorite genre, but if I get to be picky:

-- Real Time/Action based. I love a turn based roguelike too, but what I really enjoy about action-based is that physical player skill can play a real role, and that any game is technically winnable even if the RNG poops on you. A terrible run in Isaac can still be won with grit and determination; a terrible roll of the dice in Slay the Spire can end you before you have a chance.

-- Discrete math: I'd wager no one here can tell me how much damage any enemy in Hades does. But I can tell you how much damage an enemy in BoI does: half a heart, except champions which do a heart. I appreciate the readability, and I think the enforced structure forces game design balancing that isn't just changing some #'s a few percent up or down.

-- Meta-progress based on variety, not on stat grinding: a meta gameplay loop I see fairly often that I don't really enjoy is the "gather Smurfberry shards to pay at the store to unlock permanent 0.5% health Regen!". It's imo a lazy way to enforce a roguelike difficulty curve, since you are literally weaker to start until you've ground out the upgrades, and in the worst cases the game can feel outright unfair until you've put an arbitrary amount of time into earning HadesBux. I love unlocks, a key part of roguelike satisfaction IMO, but they should be focused on variety (new items/enemies/environments/challenges/etc), not on making your next runs forever a tiny bit less challenging, because that's what your natural skill improvement is for.

-- An achievable endgame: this is the least important of the bits, but this is about dream game so I get this too. I love unlocks, and checking the bits off the lists: Isaac with the post it notes, Hades with the achievements and story, Slay the Spire and it's Ascensions. But not all games work that way, either because of structure or too much stuff. As an example, Monster Train 2 (which I love) technically has a story, but it's finished relatively early and also isn't really a draw IMO, it's more background. But while it does have Ascensions and a logbook to fill out, due to how the game works there something crazy like 500 different clan combinations, which you'd have to all beat max ascension, which is at absolute bare minimum 500 runs assuming you don't lose a single game (and trust me, you will). So while pushing myself to finish that last post it or get that last romance dialogue (cmon Icarus...) feels worth while, I'm never going to complete MT2. Doesn't make it a bad game at all, but wish I could tie a little bow on it the same way I can some other games.

This is a great question and I've never really thought about it. I want a Harvest Moon-style farming sim, but I want it to be real big - like, No Man's Sky level big. I want to go to different planets (or even star systems!) and harvest unique ingredients. I would like combat to be optional to promote a fully cozy experience (or Persona style, so I can befriend potential monsters/enemies and get the loot through cooperation). I want to collect minerals as well as plant or animal materials. And I want the depth of a Rune Factory style RPG, where I can make a variety of different things that have progression to them - basic food or crops, sure, but also weapons and equipment, pharmacy or healing items, or upgrades for my character. If things get really wild, we could throw in a Recettear or Moonlighter element where you can sell things in a store or some kind of interactive way (although if necessary, I could deal with a trading hub system kiosk like in No Man's Sky).

I'd like to see some potential variety in things to make, too - can I get different fibres to make different kinds of fabrics? What about bringing back different kinds of fauna to harvest different kinds of ingredients? It would be nice to have more crop variety than just radishes etc and fruit trees - what about reeds or or flax or cotton? What about different kinds of dyes? Let's just get really friggin crafty.

And, if I could do all this without the arbitrary "you better be in bed by midnight or else", like No Man's Sky, I would be the happiest little clam.

I'd love an MMO open world Pilotwings.

I commented in another thread that I'd like a great modern 3D-citysim, similar to Cities Skylines, but with more depth in the simulation part, no bullshit DLCs and better performance. That would be cool.

Another game I'd love to play would be a complex single player space sim, quite similar to X4, but with better UX, better mission design, better story elements, just better everything. I tried several times to get into X4, and while I love the idea of it and want to love the game itself, it is so unwieldy, buggy and has so many different problems that I simply don't enjoy playing it. Maybe one day another company improves on the idea. That would be a dream game for me.

Id like an openish world, rpg type game with, I suppose, either a more compelling ending or less obvious black/white choices.

I really enjoy games like TES, Fallout, and Baldurs Gate: exploring the world, going through the story, meeting characters... right up until the 3rd act choices. Stormcloaks or imperials? Brotherhood, minutemen, institute, or railroad? Emperor or Orpheus? I've never finished any of these games! I can never decide, and the stories/characters are never compelling enough for me to want to see how things end. Instead I find myself completing side quests until I quietly step away from the game.

Zombie or postapocalyptic game set in one of the cities I’ve lived in and know well. With ultra realistic layout (ie the real buildings as they are, with real interiors). There were plans of a MMO like that set in Montreal (and they had real scans of the city) but it became vaporware. I can’t remember the name of it. Was around 2014 I think.