What game do you wish existed?

[Borrowers: The Game]

You live as tiny mouse-sized humans existing with regular humans who should never know your presence as you occupy the walls and spaces in their home. Every day you must hunt for food, which involves collecting gear to traverse spaces (paperclip + string = grappling hook and rope, matchstick = torch, plastic bag = parachute) to reach places where food is stored (i.e. the kitchen - defended by the cruel cat, mousetraps - easy to find but deadly to use, others). There's also more than one of you with time, where you can find and recruit others from outside the house, mate to create a family base of increasing members (prompting you to expand more into the walls which will increase your chance of discovery by normal humans), and most importantly - coordinate scavenger hunts with your crew (think: one Borrower leads a climb and trails a rope down, allowing others to follow, where more people == more food for the base). Due to the high death rate, there are no main characters, just Borrowers.

[Extras]

- Riding or rearing mice? (they can lead you to the cheese and help dodge the cat)

- Stealing and riding a drone? (perhaps not such a rustic experience anymore)

- Turning your tiny wall cave into a thriving Borrower city complete with electricity and beer? (might require killing the humans)

I want a sort of civilization-but-for-countries.

E.g. you are the newly elected president of Afghanistan/North Korea/Iraq/Other etc - now go rebuild infrastructure etc, set policies, see how the country develops as a result. E.g. do you invest in universal healthcare, or transport infrastructure? Is transport infra required while your country is still largely subsistence farming?. What about education - save money there and spend on natural resource extraction? How will that play out over decades and centuries?

It would be nice to have direct control over city-level layout etc - demolish this neighborhood for flood defences, put in railways, major roads etc linking different parts of your country (not sim city levels of simulation, more just at the major civil engineering level of that makes sense - happy for actual city population to grow organically as a result of major works).

Civ gets close, but it's too high-level and more focused on conquest. I want to zoom in and have more control over where major irrigation canals get built, where to best build a nuclear plant, where that bridge should go or which mountains to tunnel through for a railway etc. So instead of the grid being the entire planet, the grid would just be one country.

Edit: I am specifically interested in the "building" aspect (so think civ-style grid with units moving around doing things), and less so on simple a-vs-b decision game model you see in Democracy et al.

A true "MMORPG".

Back in the day when the genre was new, people were fascinated by the potential of virtual worlds and virtual societies. Social scientists did online studies on player behavior and the interactions people had online, on spontaneous self-governance coming into existence, on how communities formed and developed, and many other similar topics. That potential was never fulfilled.

Today - some twenty years later - the MMORPG has become a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you. Apart from PvP and maybe some forced grouping, most games would play absolutely identical mechanically, if you were playing all alone on your own private server. You'd do the same quests, fight the same enemies, get the same loot. All the other players you get to meet online - they don't actually influence the game mechanics at all.

You play next to each other. Not actually with each other.

I'd like to see a game, where the sum of players (and their interactions) are greater than just the sum of it's parts. A game with a virtual economy, a virtual society, etc. - that advance and evolve in a player-driven fashion. A simulated game world that dynamically adapts. Some glimpses of this sort of thing can be seen in games like EvE. Old games (pre-WoW) like UO and SWG had some of that magic as well - but were marred by limitations of the technology of the day. This kind of stuff has evolved very, very little since then.

I would assume that with today's technology we should be able to get a lot closer to fulfilling that potential.

- A low-brow, open world space sim. (Yes, I'm aware of Star Citizen, No Man's Sky, Elite and all the others, but hear me out):

I would love to fly my cheap, derelict Lada Riva equivalent of a spaceship into a space station. No landing sequence or wrestling away of controls, I want to land on my own and I want to land shittily. As I touch down, garbage is stirred up and space rats scurry away from the landing site. I get out of the ship (of course, the canopy jams and needs some hitting to open) and some spaceport employee alien comes running towards me to complain that I'm parked across two landing pads. I walk away, muttering "yeah, whatever" and head to the bar.

...you get the picture. This world, with trading, exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it.

I want to play a real-time strategy game with a limit to the number of actions per minute.

Look, I'm an old man now. I can't compete on reaction speed against 13-year-olds micro-managing each unit to perfection. But I can macro. I can plan. I can strategize. I can do that better than those damn kids.

I want everyone to have a pool of 5 orders, refilling itself by 1 order per (1 second? 3 seconds?). Orders can be to as many or as few units as you want. And if you give too many orders, they queue up until you have more to give.

I want a persistent 2D space game. It has two modes of play.

Mode 1: You create an account and are given a small ship. You and your dinky ship fly around the universe making trades and doing missions. There are pirates and you tend to get exploded a lot and flying around is tricky because the planets have gravity. You trade and get rich and buy bigger ships. Then you become even more rich and start buying automated ships that will make trades and go on trade runs 24/7 while you're not playing. Pirates blow up those ships and steal the loot, so you buy bigger routes with guard ships. You start posting missions for new players to guard your fleets. You become very very rich and start buying on-planet real estate or maybe whole planets and customizing them. You're managing your fleets and missions and contracts and stuff mostly from your mobile phone at this point without actually logging in and flying around.

Mode 2: you don't create an account. You're just a pirate. Nearly the whole world is hostile to you. It will only take a couple of hours of play to grow from a tiny pirate to a universe-threatening dreadnought the likes of which the average account-holding players couldn't afford, but as soon as you stop playing, your pirate ship is lost and you must start again.

Star Control II, but more so.

Star Control II is a collection of different interrelated minigame mechanics. You have spacewar-style combat, planet exploration resource collection, interactive storytelling with the communications with other races, resource and time management, ship and fleet customization, and exploration of the universe.

But some planets could require a side-scrolling platformer, instead of the top-down lander. Or you could put together a jRPG-style party and explore a settlement on a planet. You could play a Scumm-style adventure game on an abandoned space station. In addition to spacewar, you could have a bullet hell shooter for traversing an asteroid field. You could do economy management and trading, purchasing self-sealing stem bolts on Cardassia Prime and trading them for seal furs on Caladan. You could level up your crew to make them better at piloting ships in your fleet or participating in away missions. And of course we need procedural generation for the sake of replayability.

Something I've always wanted to play is a game multiplayer game (ideally firt or third person) where you and a small number of friends crew a space ship. Each person has their own role (navigator, weapons, pilot, etc) and you would fly through space and engage in combat.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew comes closest to what I'm talking about. Imagine that but not VR (well, VR is cool for this, but I don't have a VR headset, so...) but more of a Firefly type of atmosphere.

There was once a UDK demo or sample game that mixed FPS with space combat that was cool. Each player on a team started in a large ship, which someone could fly and other team members could control cannons, or run around the ship, or get into single-person fighters to attack and board the enemy ship. I don't remember what it was called, just that I got it as a sample when downloading UDK way back when it was still a thing. It was pretty cool!

A serious time travel game.

Think of MS Flight Simulator or Google Street View as documenting the current world. Then take the same approach to thoroughly document the past. The locations, the events, all in 3D VR with realistic graphics, and simulated actors that react to events and react to the players.

Take the current knowledge and physical/archaeological remains of the past, and digitise them, digitally renovate them. Do this rigorously and professionally. Not Hollywood-style approximation, but the work of real historians and archaeologists. Let historians use it and debate the details how it should really look, or how the events really unfolded and adjust it accordingly. Organise the database of content and simulations. AI is possibly already there to automate processing and conversion to 3D of old videos, photos and paintings, even perhaps writings to animation scripts. If not yet, some AI researcher is surely working on that.

Make a VR meta world, where players can travel to certain locations and certain time and interactively take part in the events.

I would pay a monthly subscription for such a thing, to see the past getting recreated digitally. It would be the next best thing we actually could do, compared to real time travel.

Everything sim. You start with, say, Sim City. You find that your rail network isn't working properly, so you switch contexts to a kind of Transport Tycoon style game, where you can optimise the train schedules and destinations. You realise that the factory you're delivering stuff to is struggling, so you switch context to a Factorio style optimisation game. You realise that the inputs to the factory aren't pure enough, so you switch context to an Opus Magnum/SpaceChem style atomic manipulation game. You zoom back out, and find that your hospitals are struggling too. Context switch to a Theme Hospital/Two Point Hospital style sim. You need medicines, so switch to a Big Pharma drug production sim. You can optimise the machines here with the same interface as you used for the factory. Zoom out a bit, and you can see a football stadium, with the option to switch to a football management game, or to jump into a game and start playing directly. You zoom out again, and are now looking at a country where your city/region is just one part. You can context switch to a country management game. Keep going out, and you realise you're on a planet, so start working on a space program. Keep going out, and you can build a Dyson swarm and get some interplanetary government vibes going, all while being able to zoom back in on any part.

Pretty sure my original concept was for this not to be a single game so much as a common interface for basically every other game, where unoptimised parts work, but aren't great, passing a kind of middle-of-the-range set of values whenever queried. By linking multiple games together, you'd be able to control everything.

I love factory simulation games (think Factorio, Satisfactory, Banished, DSP, ...) and one thing that I was always missing was a game with better simulation of raw material mining. Most simulation games have you just place a "mine" on a resource and that's it.

I wanted to manage an open pit mine myself. Have excavators that mine ore and trucks move it for processing, but as they do, the shape of the terrain changes, leaving deep holes behind. Maybe even compromising your factory as the mining operation expands.

And as it sometimes go, when you want something and that does not exist, you try to make it, and that was my case here. Together with a fried we attempted to make such game. It's called Captain of Industry in case anyone is interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...

A full-featured open-world RPG that can be casually played in 2-3 hour sessions once or twice a week.

I love this game format (Skyrim, BotW, WoW) etc but they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time. I simply don't have that time anymore.

Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going), controls/mechanisms that aren't overly complicated (nothing worse than booting up a game and realizing you forget how to attack), etc.

A Sim Earth remake.

I want a sandbox where I can take a planet from its bombardment era all the way to a point where its start has started to encroach on the planet's orbit. I want to see live evolve from the soupy amino acid mixes that were brewed from shallow waters and watch it grow to a multitude of competing civilizations. I want my screen to feel alive in a "ants crawling over a petri dish" sort of way.

I want to do this with a very deep simulation, everything from geophysics, climate, and even solar insolation modeled. I want to see ice ages come and go with glaciers carving up the landscape and leaving behind lakes and fertile soil. I want to see oceans acidify and recover, cycling through colors. I want my screen to feel lush like a moss carpet.

I want my sandbox planet to have a moon.

I want to have a time scale that requires planning, where a few months of game play on the same planet feels rewarding. I want this planet to be persistent and to be shared where friends can just load up and watch or maybe even hop in. I want my friends space faring civilizations to come and visit.

I don't want a manual for anything more than interface. I want to be surprised by what happens on digital ball of dirt.

I want something that will have the fun spirit of Sim Earth, the seriousness of Universe Sandbox, open endedness of Powder Toy, and trigger that "into the unknown" feeling some of us got back in the early days of Minecraft.

I have a few ideas that I will almost certainly never develop. If someone wants to use them, please do. These are games I wish existed.

Here they are:

The first one is a game where you play as Mormons, and the goal of the game is to be nice to people no matter the cost. It would start out with fairly easy things, but then you come across increasingly hostile or dangerous circumstances where you have to choose between negotiation or fleeing. You can't "die" in the game because, if you are about to die, either God or the angel Moroni will intervene. At that point, you must restart a mission. Then again, I'm not that opposed to the player dying either. I know not that much about Mormonism other than that I've known Mormons throughout my life. :)

Another idea I have is for a game I call "Monkey Town". It's somewhere between Sim City and The Sims, and takes place in a world where monkeys and various apes take the place of humans. They are as intelligent as present-day humans, but they do thinks in their own monkey ways. You are the mayor of Monkey Town, and you must build it up and maintain it. There are problems you have to deal with like monkeys pooping everywhere, political corruption, ape speciesism, infrastructure failures, monkeys rioting, monkey insurrections, etc. The monkey culture would have some differences from human society like knoodling being allowed in public, networks of vines are used for monkeys to swing between neighborhoods, bananas as currency, and so on.

My third idea is a game called "Shut Me Up", which I think of as more of a short arcade style game where your job as the player is to harass and scream at people so those people start telling you to shut up. But you keep doing it so that they start physically attacking you to get you to shut up.

Tribes 2 with modern graphics for modern platforms, and maybe an Apex Legends-like Battle Royale mode. I don't think that there has ever been a better multiplayer FPS. When you're used to jetpacks and skiing, most other FPS feel slow. And there is nothing as elegant as killing with slow ballistic projectiles like the Spin Fusor.

Apex Legends has got some of the aspects that made T2 so great, especially if you play Valkyrie (Apex's only flying character), but the weapons are not as much fun and you're wasting too much time on looting.

Red Dead Redemption 2 — but where there is no overarching story but you create your own character, and can go off and do what you like, affecting the world. Start a trading business, buy a saloon, be a bandit, a sheriff, you name it. It's such a masterpiece of a world, but replayability is reduced by having to follow the same story lines and play the same person every time.

Imagine RDR2 but with the replayability of Skyrim. There is a reason why Skyrim is still such a popular game and why most of us have purchased it more than once (which is weird, right?): because it is the ultimate example of a replayable game.

The focus on RDO takes the game a little bit in this direction, but the multiplayer aspect takes away from the immersion, and the fact that you can't have character names like Old Bill and instead see people called xX_SUICIDE69_Xx running around really spoils it.

I want to go fishing, put my fish in a cart, take them to market, sell them, then go play some poker with a beer, before returning home to my small shack that I'm slowly decorating.

Is that so much to ask for?

1 - High quality RTS (think Warcraft 3, SC2, C&C, Dune 2) but with the ability to have maybe 100 - 200 people playing.

2 - Updated subspace - it was the level of competition and community that made that game amazing in the 90s.

3 - Civilization like civ 1 but updated with newer graphics/tech tree also the ability to be much more complex but only if you want to. Best part of the game imho was the exploration, simple but enjoyable tech tree and expansion. The new civ games are fun but take so much time to master and engage in.

4 - FPS that can be played in large scale format but doesn't reward 14 year old reflexes and levels the playing field for experience of older people.

Video games that are easily accessible, enjoyable and don't try and keep you on platform by wasting your time on meaningless accomplishments :D

Not exactly just a game, but the book from diamond age, A highly sophisticated interactive book: “Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion”

It’s obviously a fiction summarizing all the knowledge and education we have freely available now online and to some extent social media, and an iPad might be pretty damn close if you get all the right things on it. But still, childrens games these days are all focused on optimizing for intense attention on mindless content and accidental clicks to purchase other games that do the same, or pressuring kids to pressure their parents to buy skins. I would love to have a “gaming” experience that instead focused on giving kids the opportunity to learn and use their knowledge in an immersive universe, and to support them in their development.

A game with a good, complex and deep magic-system. Magic normally is just limited to cast predefined spells, bought at the shop or learned along the way. At best they have some elements interacts, but barely more.

What I want is something where you can literally research magic, discover new effects, combine them to create new magic in form of spells, artifacts, rituals and so on. It should be easily accessible, after all it's a game, and not work. And have a bit of liberty in world interactions and movements. So maybe a easy metrovanian like Ori or Hollow knight, where you get new movements and open new paths through magic discoveries, but can decide your own difficult-level by either using some slow and safe magic in form of a ritual, or fast and dangerous by fighting directly with battle-orientated spells.

There are a bunch of games which go a bit in the direction, but are not complex and deep enough, like "Mages of Mystralia", or the Magicka-Games. Thinking about, a sandbox-environment might be the best for this, so Minecraft with some mods, or Noita would also go in the direction from a different angle.

A combination of first person shooter and real time strategy. There is a large map and balanced units on each side. Each round, a team commander is chosen randomly from each team. During play, the commander sees a bird’s eye view of the current battle and directs player objectives, waypoints, etc. while everyone else is playing COD-style first person (trying to take advantage of the intelligence and goal setting from the commander). “The game” is sustained over many rounds, teams taking and losing ground as individual battles are won and lost.

I haven’t thought deeply about how much RTS complexity would be appropriate - but you would want to keep the action symmetrical so nobody is ‘waiting’ around for decisions to be made.

My friends like FPS but I am terrible at them. I love RTS and they can't be bothered to learn them. Would be great if we had a game to bridge that gap.

1) Asymmetric RTS / FPS. A group of FPS players play through a map against an RTS player who is controlling the tech, types and grouping of mobs, etc.

2) RTS / FP coop game sort of like Warcraft 3 where one player controls the base from an RTS view and another player(s) control a hero and a support army.

I don't enjoy MOBA's but they are super popular. I love Starcraft but it is too hard to get into. Takes tons of time and effort to get the basics of 'how to play'.

3) I think a game somewhere between Starcraft and LOL would be interesting. Clearly it is all about the details here and I don't have them - but I think you could capture a really big gaming market by trying to simplify the macro of Starcraft, keep the micro, army movement, base building, expanding etc. Controlling and upgrading lanes of a moba map?

I have no idea how any of these would really work out from a game development point of view but I think they have potential to be a lot of fun and bring some new life into the RTS world.

Civilization, but where you start a company instead of a country. Here are some analogies:

Exploring and collecting goody huts, fighting off barbarians -> going around the idea maze trying to find product market fit

Catherine cozies up to you, then suddenly declares war and sends over a carpet of doom -> Amazon did a bunch of butt sniffing pretending to want to acquire, then decides to copy your product and launch a competitor

Chieftain level: you went to an Ivy league school, have a wealthy parent that is a partner at a Tier 1 VC, and get a free (no equity) 500k angel investment to start off

Immortal level: you are an immigrant who just arrived in US before college. You are working 2 jobs to support your parents and siblings. 1 of your parents is sick. Most of your friends are trying to get rich quick off crypto.

(don't even ask what deity level might be)

I would love to give folks the real startup experience without the risk so they can feel what it's like. I think the challenge here is figuring out what the movement and interpersonal mechanics would be: so much of building a company is about relationships. Perhaps some of it can be procedurally generated, using GPT-3 or similar models. Like when you are trying to negotiate multiple term sheets and the investors try various tactics on you.

Someone posted a vastly simplified version of this earlier: https://startuptrail.engine.is/

EDIT: if you're gonna downvote, at least explain why?

National Parks: 2022

A) Build a sweet game engine for exploring and discovering landscapes, topologies, biomes, plants and animal species, etc. Maybe even hunting and survival?

B) Take on the EA Sports (it's in the game) model and update the game with only minor changes to trails and other recent events, but use the margins to fund the park service!

C) Help incorporate trail mapping and maintenance into the engine, so people can have fun taking the game back to reality

D) Release expansions with new areas to help grow the platform, but also teach people about the various locales

E) Over time, watch how parts of our earth change, how we impact it, and use the game engine as a solid digital archive

I've always been interested in deep economy games where the economy drives the gameplay to a degree. The main reason for that is in my mind it's a really easy starting point to the question, how do you provide a space where the player can change / shape the world, while still having the world push back, return to normal or if successful, converge on a new normal?

So for example take any zacklike, one thing I'd like to try is having something like those mechanisms drove the supply of goods in an in-game economy, which would then feed in as input into other systems.

Well any complex system as the input would do =)...

So I've spent a lot of times tinkering with economic simulation games, the tricky thing is making them fun / balanced. I'm still trying to work out nice ways of debugging them when they break / become unstable. A lot of it at the moment is plotting data over time to see where failure points occur.

A VR game where you take a snapshot or ghost of yourself performing some movement or throwing an item, which then repeats itself in the world. Then you can make more snapshots and string them together to create a Factorio-like game which uses the snapshot of those movements to assemble products.

E.g., ghost 1: pick up ore, throw ore -> ghost 2: catch ore, crush ore, throw crushed ore -> ghost 3: put ore into furnace -> ghost 4: pick up metal bar, throw metal bar, etc..

Then the player is running around building interactable buildings with produced resources and that oh so satisfying factory spaghetti starts forming.

Gaming has been as big a part of my life as anything else, a few of the games I wish existed, or that I hope exist and just haven't happened across:

1. A true large scale battle game, kind of like what Hell Let Loose is, but for knights, samurai, spartans, Persian Immortals, and any number of other warriors throughout history. Each has their own skill tree and strategies, you can control troop movements on the battlefield, and become an individual warrior and enter the fray. You can pick a 'campaign mode' which consists of conquering surrounding civilizations, or make the setting a historically significant battlefield like Thermopylae.

2. A spy rpg, where you follow the life of a CIA case officer, or KGB operative. Kind of like what Sam Fisher did with Splinter Cell, but those games missed out on big aspects of spycraft, like developing assets and constructing a spy network for intelligence gathering.

3. A good surfing game. I love surfing and have done it most of my life, but I haven't happened across a video game that does a good job capturing what surfing is like. They either make the surfer impossible to unseat from their board, or make every wave teetering on the edge of wiping out. I know water physics are hard in games but I keep holding my breath a game studio gets it right.

I would like a game where the development company is only responsible for making the game.

No long, enforced intermissions between rounds.

Escape key works for all interstitial screens.

People can run their own servers.

Free to mod.

Basically, nearly every new game enforces how the player plays beyond just mechanizing the play. For instance, in Overwatch at the end of the game there are highlights. If you leave the highlights and queue again, you aren't actually in the queue until the highlights play out in your previous game.

Sure, each of the games breaking these rules may claim success, but this thread is about what I wish existed. It seems like a lot of games with these features used to exist (running my own server, mods/maps, etc...) and we've lost something.

I'll do one better. Here's a genre of games that I wish existed: smart board games (SBG's). I define an SBG as a game that (1) relies on all players having a mobile phone to implement game mechanics that would be impractical to approximate solely with analog objects like the traditional tools of board games (e.g., pen, paper, cards, dice, tokens, meeple, boards, etc.); and (2) relies on direct player-to-player interaction that would be impractical unless played face-to-face or via high-fidelity virtual reality.

No board game has yet exploited the fact that everyone has a smart phone in their pocket. There are social mobile games and mobile clones of board games, but their are no games that exploit the power of the ubiquitous mobile phone to create an otherwise impossible in-person board game. The closest game designers have come to this is games like Pokemon Go, but Pokemon Go is not a SBG because it does not rely on player-to-player interaction that requires high-fidelity virtual reality or face-to-face play.

Here are some capabilities SBG's will give game designers:

- Implement complex probabilistic behavior, cause and effect relationships, and scoring

- Accelerate game play by automating score keeping and timekeeping

- Parallelize game play by allowing simultaneous turn-taking

- Reveal certain information to certain players with high granularity

- Allow players to communicate or transact with other players without revealing which player they are interacting with

- Persist detailed game state between game sessions

- Procedural world and character generation

I believe that SBG's will inevitably develop into a rich, hugely varied genre of board games that largely displaces traditional board games, but to my knowledge there isn't a single example commercially available at this time.

The core challenge of designing a compelling SBG will be to exploit the capabilities of the smart phone while simultaneously keeping players focused on the face-to-face interactions that give board games their timeless appeal.

The masterfully crafted just-right roguelike. High emphasis on performance and readable graphics, and keyboard manipulation rather than mouse. But mouse interaction must also be well integrated for newer players to learn the ropes. Traditional DnD-esque setting, because it is palatable to everyone and very cherished by many. Time-based, not only in unoffical ladders but in mechanics. Play fast to win more, quick gambles and intuituve descisions about talent progression and gear choice. For example, perhaps a potion of rage lasts for two minutes of real time, though the game is turn based. Quests should be similar, fast completion meaning higher rewards. Difficulty should be such that a player "taking his time" would never win the game. Perhaps the world is about to end in 60 minutes, and you must become strong enough to finish the villain in his lair before this timer reaches its end. But losing is naturally not some terrible state of game that you should be ashamed of. Just like in chess, you just try another game, and if you got close to winning, then you certainly had great success in your game session.

The base game should actually be quite limited in scope, but if the idea takes off, additional levels and challenges (rather than gear and talents) will be added. Eventually a game like this should grown in depth only, adding nothing but intresting generators and randomized encounters, and enemies. Because otherwise you end up inflating good gear and talent progression, and there is only so many ways you can honestly make a +1 Weapon before it just becomes another +1 Weapon, but its green.

Large multiplayer online games with limited play schedules that also have a limited total time, so there's more of a plot.

Like say you have one game that's 7PM-9PM three times a week for a length of three months. Sort of like how you might schedule a Dungeons and Dragons game, but a bit more frequently and with the benefits of online play and other computer things, whether they be physics, scale, graphics, mechanics, customization with material impact, etc.

That way there's no real penalty for joining late, you can just play the next game or find a game with a different schedule that's closer to the beginning, or do multiple games at once. Also perhaps hidden goals that can give you a bonus towards your next game, but they would only carry over for one game.

Space Station 13 does some of this with one hour scheduled games, but I'm thinking something halfway between that and an MMO.

"Bloodstraw"

A first person mosquito simulator, where you fly around in teams, suck blood and also can upgrade your mosquito. Hiding in a sneaky sort of way together with sinister music should be a central part of the game. The annoying buzzing sound should not be on by default, but be possible as part of a future mosquito upgrade. If it's on a level with many humans, it could be on the form of "capture the flag" or counter strike, but where a designated subset of the humans would need to be sucked blood from, and then the first team to lay eggs in water and spawn new mosquitos would win. There should be no ranged weapons, but a way to zoom in and jet forward once a target lock was acquired. The upgrades should belong to the account, but only some should be possible to select at the start of a level, according to how many "upgrade points" a level has. One NPC squatter that tried to squish mosquitos should be controlled by an AI and placed in each level. The mosquito upgrades could be pretty extensive, from "supersonic" to "jet pack" or "hurricane force blood suction". Victory dances of the mosquitos and the music should also be part of the upgrades. Money should be made by selling the game for $2 and by selling hats in game for $0.5 each.

Maybe I'm getting old but I want a game that brings real people together. There are more than enough "get everyone together virtually" games.

I want a game that actually reinforces the social fabric instead of simulates it. Something that encourages people to be together in the physical world (gasp!), have fun, have shared experiences/goals/challenges, and form lasting friendships.

I have very fond memories of lugging my computer (and CRT!) to my friends/family's house to have a LAN + pizza party. The best part for me wasn't necessarily the game itself. The games were fun but I really enjoyed the social aspect of talking about a tough dungeon or strategizing how to beat a challenging opponent.

It seems like the industry is trying its best to bring people into a simulated world but why not use games to bring people together into it instead?

Pokemon Go is probably the closest thing to this I've seen recently but the core gameplay was unfortunately pretty boring when it first started and became popular.

There are two categories of games that I wish involved time as more important element.

City builder: major construction projects take time, from planning to construction. Construction itself can be very disruptive, causing local negative effects and necessitating temporary arrangements. Another aspect is that developments that were once nice and shiny grow old and withered. In a long running city you should be able to recognize how different areas are from different eras, eventually some stuff becoming "historic" and valued for that reason.

RPG: In many games apocalypse patiently waits while our hero rescues every kitten from a tree and clears every basement from spiders. That makes decisions in game feel less weighty because often there is no cost for doing things. I would want to see a game where you'd really need to weigh if things are worth doing, not just in regards to players time but also in regards to in-game time. Tyranny (by Obsidian) was one game that kinda pretended to have this, but it was pretty weak illusion in practice.

I’d like to see a game that explores radio direction finding (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_finding).

Maybe start simple with 2D maps - “your goal is to spot Russian ships within 100 miles of the US East Coast, where do you put some number of DF listening posts?”. Then maybe introduce topology - “how do you detect ships intruding in these Norwegian fjords, given the mountains of varying heights?”, etc.

I enjoy the general structure of Metroidvanias but most of them rely on combat mechanics for the micro-challenges in each room or boss. I like the exploration, backtracking, progression and unlocking previously inaccessible area.

But combat isn't the only mechanic that could be present there. There are examples like Ori and Toki where combat is de-emphasized in favor of movement/puzzles, but they're still 2D platformers.

I want to see a metroidvania game based on racing. I enjoy driving/racing games and would like to see those mechanics provide the micro-challenges for a metroidvania. Boss fights would be setpiece races, earning XP would be small things like a time trials, stunts, or precision driving. Unlocks like drifts, speed boosts, etc.

The game I wish existed almost used to exist, as a play by mail game.

It was a swords'n'sorcery style adventure with a big open world, in which you had a party of adventurers.

Every week you'd fill in a card with what 10-20 actions you wanted to take (go exploring/questing, pray to gods, hire people, buy equipment, etc.), and post off your form.

Then you'd receive a printout with the results of your actions the following week.

I'd love a modern online version of this, i.e. something that limits you to taking a few actions a day or every few days, but with a serious amount of depth underneath it, many players, living worlds, etc.

The thing I remember most is looking forward to receiving many pages of printouts each week with all sorts of neat details and descriptions of everything that happened and the world around me.

The pacing and fact that it was text-based made me pay a lot more attention to everything that I would for a graphically based game.

Existing games BUT allowing to host your OWN SERVERS!! and modding.

I would put in that list:

Sea of Thieves -> to play only with friends (no PvP)

Battlefield -> to mod and fool around with my friends

Overwatch -> to train, mod, etc.

Star Citizen -> aside from the usual "when the game will be released" let us run our little servers!!

I am sure I am forgetting obvious ones in this list...

Please make games "hostable" and "moddable"! <3

Interconnecting city builders with completely different types of games that play out in those user-created places.

Like as a city builder you suddenly have to deal with people doing illegal car races through your city putting your citizens in danger, or dealing with gang wars from a GTA style game, but from a more macro perspective. Having real people playing MORPGs visiting your city looking for things to do. And so on.

No idea how you would make that work, but I find the possibilities quite interesting.

Mars Colony RTS with a strong emphasis on optimizing the ecosystem for self-sustainability and economic viability. 50% Age of Empires, 50% Factorio.

- Manage energy, waste, air, soil, water, food production.

- Build and expand your colony above and below ground.

- Manufacture robots, rockets, tools, everything your colony needs.

- Keep your population healthy through infection, virus, disease outbreaks.

- Control immigration/emigration policies to optimize skills and capabilities.

- Explore the planet and gain scientific skills and funding.

- Declare independence from earth and fight a war if you so choose.

Expansion packs: spread your empire to space, asteroids, and other planets. Basically The Expanse but in an RTS.

I haven't played a game that scratches the same itch as the Patrician games, and I would really love to. A strong economy that does not just exist in parallel to the rest of the game, but actually influences every aspect of it and evolves with and without you, but where your contribution does make an actual difference. The X games come to mind, but they still eventually feel like you're the only major player that drives the numbers.

Most games with an economy I've played are either of the type that the economy doesn't really matter and is more of a tacked on feature, it is a thinly veiled idle game, or you are the only entity the economy exists for or is controlled by. All of these lower the depth of the experience to a point where it's not fun for long.

I guess what I wish existed would be a merchant type game with a strong economy, and many entities competing to take their bite out of it, you just being one of those. Tycoon type games don't really scratch the same itch for some reason.

I have two game themes to call out:

1. A first-person puzzler in the spirit of Portal. No guns, no violence, just… elegantly designed puzzles that requires logic and real world physics to solve.

How Portal didn’t immediately launch a sub-genre of platform puzzlers I’ll never know.

2. I wish there was a game where time travel was a core mechanic. When we die or get stuck in current games, we revert back to a save point, why not lean into that some more to build a compelling game experience?

A massively multiplayer text-based industrial game where players produce raw materials/parts/products that other players can use to produce theirs. A player can gradually scale up from a one person production (clicker based production) to a fully automated factory. On the screen is just blocks of tables with ever changing numbers (e.g production rate, wear and tear of parts, etc), and the goal is to optimize your bank account balance (no stocks/fund raising mechanics). There can also be an internal IRC where people can negotiate and collaborate. Parts that are not produced by any player yet can be produced by an AI until someone comes along to replace it.

Minecraft had a series of "Hardcore" servers and in particular one named "HCFactions". Sadly none really worth playing exists today. It was the most fun I every had playing coop with friends.

The idea was that there's a time limited map (usually 2 months) and players team up as a faction. A faction could own land, paid through in-game money earned by mining ores. Blocks inside your land couldn't be modified by non-factions players, but you could give special permissions if needed. The hardcore part was that every death of any member of your faction would decrease some power value and once that crossed below zero, your land protection was gone and your base was usually grieved instantly. So there was always a thrill of going outside. There were a bunch of server wide events that encouraged going outside and gave you in-game rewards.

What made this server special was the permissions mentioned before in combination of everything minecraft, and especially redstone, made possible. We build all kinds of special contraptions live banking vaults, slot machines, trading machines and a lot more. That was in stark contrast of most other factions that focused mostly on PvP. In later maps be earned enough reputation and were usually not touched by major PvP factions. The combination of hostile environment and the ability to be really creative thanks to minecraft was great. In case anyone read all that, here's the bases we build: https://hcfluffy.de/bases/

A true successor to the Civ4 mod Fall From Heaven 2 [1].

As an aside, I enjoyed Civ4 way more than 5/6. They might have hexes and Civ4 (and earlier) may suffer from the Stack of Doom problem but I don't enjoy the dance of units that can no longer stack.

Anyway, I played Civ4 the most (other than Civ1) of the series but, more than the base game, I played way more of FFH2. It's an amazing mod. Sadly, the primary creator went on to work for some other game company. Good for him but not I miss the development.

There were a lot of groundbreaking and amazing turn-based fantasy games in the 1990s and early 2000s. FFH2 is just one (and a notable one at that). Others include Heroes of Might and Magic (primary 2 and 3) and Master of Magic (I believe there was a kickstarter for a successor to this but I don't believe it was well received? I could be wrong).

I don't enjoy RTSs. I like the relaxing pace of turn-based games.

I have a full asymmetric ideal game in mind, but the actual gameplays in it are still very blurry.

Basically I would love a game where players HAVE TO cooperate. The cooperation happens by having players playing different gameplays.

For instance, but, keep in mind that this is just ONE example: there's a war to fight, some players are drivers, some are fighters, some are medics...But also some players are in offices doing strategy stuff or logistics stuff, etc.

Of course, one could say: "you can have that in Arma 3 or Foxhole" and that's kinda true...but I don't know, there's something missing: A lore, a story, a universe to feel part of...

Plus, the game I am imagining, does NOT have to be a simulation or "complex gaming" at all! It could be kinda-casual without being too simple either: like For The King.

So in my ideal version of the game I am thinking about players play actually VERY DIFFERENT gameplays but cooperate in order to achieve common goals. Some of the players have to interact, some of the players don't. But in any case, everyone's actions will impact everybody else.

To sum it up: I would love a game with: Persistent universe + very asymmetric gameplay + cooperation as a key factor of success

But the game would be without: Grinding, farming, loot boxes, meaningless quests, basically a game where you don't have to redo the same things on and on to grind 128points of experience or reputation or obtain one piece of loot that does not fit your equipment set.

If you think this game already exists: do not hesitate to tell me :)

Do you know how some people can create mindbogglingly creative scenes, worlds and alternative universes out of nothing?

Like Starry Night in Minecraft [1], imaginary castles [2], Magica Voxel scenes [3] and a good chunk of DeviantArt and ArtStation material.

I'd love to be able to go in and explore these creations by walking, flying or being taken on a tour and just gaping at things. No other goal but just to stare and to be amazed.

But it's all gotta be a single experience, seamlessly connected to allow going from one "world" to another with no effort. And do, of course, charge an entrance fee for this, it's only fair.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/uvpkiz/i_built_s...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ImaginaryCastles/

[3] https://twitter.com/hashtag/magicavoxel

A turn based 4X / survival / rpg hybrid.

Set in the Neolithic- Bronze Age, roughly (but historical accuracy is not a top priority). Like Civ, you have units which can explore the map, fight, build. But the scale is smaller: there are seasons, weather, turns last <1 month instead of hundreds of years. There’s less of an emphasis on technological progress and more on training up the skills of your Units. Units have Skill Trees corresponding to their type / class / profession, and can equip different weapons and armor (produced in your cities) for further boosts, like an rpg. Learning to hunt, gather, farm etc. Competition with other civilizations exists but more so you’re trying to survive the environment— animals, weather, nomadic raiders. Resource management is more explicit— instead of tiles producing Food every Turn at a given rate they produce some lump sum Wheat only when Harvested by a unit, say, which you must then store for the winter. Etc.

I’m working on making such a game, but it’s not my full time job and I have other projects catching my interest too, so the going is slow.

Any game with modeled communication delays. For instance, you control ancient Greek armies from a central headquarters, and there are delays in sending orders and receiving information, because you need to wait for horseback riders to cross the intervening distance.

To suggest something different: More escape room games for VR.

I have played "I expect you to die" 1 and 2 on Oculus and it has been so amazing and fun. Had some fun with two other escape room games but neither were as polished as I expect you to die.

There is zero replayability with these games but I would happily pay a couple of bucks a month for a fresh level every week. Kind of like a TV series but for a game.

Kerbal Space Program 2 would be a nice start.

These days I'm more interested in story-heavy, all single-player, occasionally borderline pretentious games, whose story is sufficiently compelling to distract from what the outside world (US-based, for me) has become.

I want a game to play together with my young kids (nonviolent, cooperative, easy controls) but that isn't mind-numbingly boring to play as an adult. Not only a large sandbox to explore, but one that feels alive with NPCs to interact with, like a "baby's first MMO" without grind/fetch quests. It's a game I'm building in my spare time.

Maplestory was a huge part of my childhood, I've always wondered why no other company has made something aesthetically similar.

I didn't care for the endless RPG grind so much - it was really the graphics and soundtrack that made such a lasting impression. Cute monsters, cute characters, cute equipment, cute maps, cute music, everything was just cute and relaxing, but still with a distinct flair that made it not feel uninspired and saccharine. I still have some of their BGM tracks in my playlists.

It's been a very successful game, too. Although outside of Korea it mostly died out long ago, in Korea it's still one of the most popular games. The global servers are mostly deserted, but when I managed to hop on the Korean server a couple years back, I was shocked to see that it was packed.

Despite its enduring success, to this day, its aesthetic is still completely unique. Other popular games have had tons of clones (some of which have overtaken the original), but somehow no one's ever made another Maplestory.

Wow, what a great question -- it seems like everyone here has been sitting on a wish list for a while. :) Here's one of mine:

Ever since reading Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth as a kid, I've thought some elements of that story would make a great game. The player plays an archaeologist in the distant future trying to unravel the mysteries of humanity's origins -- a galaxy-scale adventure of exploration and discovery where a rich tapestry of future history is slowly revealed. As a bonus, such a game could be very positive and not even require violence like many other games. :)

A 2-d circa original NES jrpg video game version of ICE Middle Earth Role Playing TTRP game using all the ICE source material. Not the garbage LOTR console video games that horribly emulate the movies, but an immersive world setting of Middle Earth with non-trilogy storylines and open-world play. It can't be done due to copyrights and trademarks, but it would be awesome and I've thought for decades of creating it for personal play, but I think that would take a single non-game dev forever to build. Just going to have to dust off original NES Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES...

A Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy (MMO-RTS) game.

I know it's utterly unworkable. But I want it anyway.

Imagine an RTS game that ... just keeps going. Both in time and in play area. Something like the Minecraft map in scale.

You play a few hours online with other people, log off, come back, and then you're still playing on the same map with the same resources, buildings, and units. Other people may have advanced and tech'd up, and now you can too.

I have no idea how to handle combat when a player is sleeping or making dinner. Or any other real conflicts. Maybe a timer of some sort? Maybe catching them sleeping is part of the fun?

[GTA 6 - Jersey Shore - GTL]

You get to play out storylines from Jersey Shore, with original voice actors. Mini-games include gymming, tanning, laundry, making food when you get back from the club. Missions at the club.

[GTA 6 - So Many Side Hustles]

You play as a struggling human, trying to scrape together a living by picking up jobs from various apps on your phone. Maybe you're doing some kind of Task Rabbit mission, or plain food delivery. Maybe you're delivering something else. Maybe on foot, maybe on a bike.

It should be an open world exploration in a dense urban environment and many, many different ways to be exploited.

A modern version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(1993_video_game)

Most of mine are modernizations/remakes/stealing-the-mechanics of older games with unusual genre mashups or mechanics, that no longer exist. Examples:

- Hunter Hunted (asymmetric multiplayer platformer-shooter with vs. and co-op modes)

- Perfect Dark (FPS with lots of multiplayer modes, including co-op campaign, campaign versus mode[!], and of course endlessly configurable plain ol' arena versus, including highly-configurable bots—the closest I've seen something come to this is Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, of all games, but it still wasn't that close. Most elements/modes exist somewhere, but rarely in one package. The way difficulty levels didn't just make the enemies bullet sponges and better shots [though it did also do that] but also changed objectives and sometimes starting location, was also excellent and isn't as common as I wish it were)

- Return Fire (vehicle-based CTF multiplayer, with elaborate pre-built defensive base structures for both sides—this game's not quite all there, but make it more than 2 player and add a little base-building and it'd be amazing)

- Battletanx (Actually a little similar to Return Fire, now that I think about it, but with a lot more of a traditional multiplayer-shooter feel, different camera perspective, and the vehicles are all kinds of tanks. AFAIK nothing like this or Return Fire has been released since the N64/Playstation era)

- Dominus (The single genre it's closest to is probably tower defense, but it's got a whole lot more going on than most of those)

Also, edutainment disappoints me these days. Drill-type games (as in, drilling math problems) seem to have gotten much better, but sheer knowledge games (Explorers of the New World, Microsoft's Dinosaurs) seem to have all but disappeared, aside from adult-targeted trivia games, which don't have a learning focus and aren't very good at teaching you things. The Trail series (yeah, it's still around, by why aren't there similarly-clever and well-made games for 1,000 other historical situations, too?). I actually think this category would get a lot better, fast, if we had decent, accessible multi-media authoring tools for the web. The closest thing we had was Flash, and it's gone.

A factory sim but with a world market to trade resources with other players. The market would not have any sort of standard currency, but instead every potential item or resource you can mine/manufacture is directly traded for other items/resources. This would create potential for arbitrage by savvy players.

The problem is, once you've created that kind of market, everything needs to be handled server-side to prevent clients from cheating and using hacked save files to give themselves tons of resources and making the market worthless.

The cloud compute costs for running thousands of factories could get expensive. I suppose factories of offline players could be abstracted away. ie, "You produced X widgets in ten minutes, then went offline for an hour, so when you come back, you will have 6*X widgets".

I heard about this ages ago as a concept and I thought it was being made but I never saw it come out.

'Witch Hunter' the MMO based on the world of 'Witch Hunter Robin'. Basically there are two classes. One are hunters. They work as teams, coordinate and try to capture/kill witches. This groups levels up via witch captures/kills and has to work together as they are often very out classed by individual witches. This group has a map with detected witch activity that they can use to go find witches, as well as some team building functionality to build raids real time. Think "Rainbow 6" for game play. Ideally there is the possibility of AI hunters as well. Level of response is allocated based on level of detection.

The witches are individuals, they exist in a procedural generated world. They need to practice their witchcraft without being seen and if they do get seen they need to flee the area and re-establish. This becomes more of a survival aspect like GTA's wanted framework. If a witch gets attacked by a hunter and survives they get XP, and ideally level up based on that. Witches can also find other witches and attack them or for some skills, work with them to level up as well. Witches can be given classes (fire, water, telekinesis, etc) and once the witch dies it is dead and a new witch must be created and placed in the world somewhere.

Two different games kind of, but paired together to make it fun for both sides. =)

As a fan of the Stargate franchise, I'd like a game based on it. Actually I haven't even checked if there is one already, I will now.

The last spin-off, Stargate Universe, had a nice set up: you're in an old battered ship that you can't control, without even the most basic resources. So you should use the gate and the shuttles to bring materials, make repairs, solve riddles to gain access to ship steering, fight nasty aliens, etc.

Also the series had an open end a decade ago, so there's room for extension.

I very much liked the concept of 0x10c. Wish someone would make it happen. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/0x10c

An augmented reality (AR) game where you actually interact with other players.

Of the AR games I know Ingress was the closest but I think the interactions were too adversarial which made the experience decline.

The creators of AR games got a lesson from it. Unfortunately it's rather "limit interaction" not "fix the interaction". Both Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite seem to have taken the path of players playing next to each other rather than with each other (I stole this sentiment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31503528).

So what I'd like is an AR game where you interact with other players in a meaningful way.

A multi-scope FPS/strategy game. Choose between: - a battlefield/CoD-style FPS - a DOTA/LoL RTS. - a CiV-style turn-based strategy/simulation game

Each level sets the objectives for the one below, so the RTS players pick a pool of FPS players and set their objectives (go here, attack these other players or this objective). The CiV players actions determine the maps & matchups of the FPS/RTS players. They could see the stats of teams of other players to decide where to send them (this team with a low K/D ratio should retreat from this enemy team, this team does well on that map, etc).

Balance and matchmaking would be a real technical/game design challenge.

A long, long, long, time ago I had a conversation with a Unix consultant at my Dad's business; his hobby was flying stunt planes with a twist: each plane had a 100 yard long ribbon tied to the tail; the winner was the pilot who landed with the longest tail.

This would be a terrific non-violent flight combat game; you could imagine with modern graphics and even VR it could be very satisfying.

Further, the consultant lost his license for a couple of years when he evaded an opponent by illegally flying under a highway overpass and a passer-by reported his plane's ID to the FAA; that could be a mechanic itself, extra risky maneuvers that had a chance of some big negative effect.

I would like a rather simple real-time war-game, as played from the POV of a field commander. You don't have a real-time view of the battle; all you have is signals, which are rather stylised, and a 2D map, with unit symbols on it. The map is always a bit out-of-date, except when a signal has just been received from a unit. Think something like a battalion HQ tent, with staff.

Commands are also stylised; I'm not a military person, and I don't know how to compose field orders, so there would need to be some kind of UI that allows you to construct orders visually. But in the end, the order that you send consists of text. You can't order-around squads; you can only issue orders to subordinate commanders.

You also receive orders from above. You start with a mission briefing, with objectives. But your orders can be updated mid-mission.

So this would be essentially not a video game; there's no motion video. It's a text game, with a graphical map. For added entertainment, you could have a retrospective video playback; but you wouldn't have realtime video from the frontline that you could act on.

I once had a game a bit like this; it was for military use, and I didn't really understand the format of the orders. Also, commands were issued by dragging on the map, rather than by text.

Something like: "You will advance to grid square X. You are to avoid engagement. You will report enemy positions."

I'm thinking of modern warfare, with radios/telegraphs, air power and integrated air defence, armour, and intelligence staff. But you could maybe take it back as far as the Napoleonic wars, with dispatch riders instead of telegraphs.

I'll be honest, the best games I've played were games I had no idea I wanted. I wouldn't have known to come up with the idea for Portal, for example. Even some casual games like Sp!ng have given me hours of enjoyment.

I've moved almost all of my game playing over to Apple Arcade these days because the games don't track you, don't have ads, don't have scummy gameplay tactics (like paying for loot boxes, etc.), and just generally don't annoy the crap out of me.

My point being that I want something new and different and interesting, and that isn't a crapfest of malware, tracking, and financial extraction.

Outer Wilds got me good on the single-player story-heavy-but-still-got-mechanics part, I wish there were more things like it. Not more of it, because the story is very tight, but more things like it, where I can somehow immerse myself in a foreign/fictional culture. Really liked Kingdom Come Deliverance and Disco Elysium too.

Beyond that, I really really miss the exact niche Atmosphir used to fill, UGC platformer with enough tools to make variations on the base mechanic, but not a full-blown game-making toolkit. I want making levels to be intrinsically captivating, to create simple new gameplay ideas, but not get lost in the myriad construction details of such things. At the time there were some neat alternatives, like GameGlobe or Project Spark, but nowadays' titles are either too mechanically restrictive (Mario Maker) or too much of a tool (Dreams).

I actually help maintain (together with a bunch of excellent people) an archival/revival server of Atmosphir, but the minuscule community makes it hard to make multiplayer levels, and getting feeback on your creations.

Lately, I've been looking for a fantasy RPG to play with my brother that fits the following criteria:

— third-person (like Kotor, The Witcher, etc.)

— open-world (like Skyrim, The Witcher, etc.)

— using unit targeting (not shooter) mechanics for spells (like Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: OS II, etc.)

— online co-op

I think the combination of Skyrim, The Witcher, and Pillars of Eternity would be perfect. Most games I've found hit 3 of the above criteria, but not all. I've always loved the idea of Skyrim's open world and lore, but prefer the 'dice roll' hit mechanic (as opposed to 'were you aiming at them when you acted?').

A game that rewards actions driven by empathy rather than combat, death or killing.

Real empathy is hard and the real world could stand to see more of it.

A Metroid Prime ripoff. No arm cannon, though.

I'd like it to have a focus on atmosphere, isolation, collecting data, and lore that's all about technology and the sciences (ie biology, even fake biology is ok, like in MP1). Maybe the main character is some guy with a space suit, a blaster, and a scanning tool.

Ideally I don't want a leveling or survival-crafting aspect to it. Just a Metroidvania FPS - walk around, scan stuff to get 100% completion in your logbook, find all the upgrades and ammo expansions... and of course, blast any local flora and fauna that attacks you.

Some of the following games have a few of those elements: - Subnautica (particularly the scannable things, isolation theme, and a lot of the technology the player builds) - Dead Space (particularly the isolation element, but I also loved the use of technology/screens in that game against the backdrop of horror atmosphere and monsters) - Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Void Bastards

1. City builder like Skylines but with realistic build times for infrastructure and modelling of urban poverty.

2. Factorio with RNG, like having wear and tear for machines, random failures, machines producing faulty parts.

3. Crusader Kings 2, without the military micro management.

I really have a thing for transport simulation games. When I was young I played a lot of Transport Tycoon, but it was a bit too heavy on trains. You could just use trains everywhere and be done with it. Also it's nearly 30 years old, I want perty graphics on my 4K monitor.

I played a lot of Cities in Motion 2, and really loved it. You can't just use trains (as they are expensive), you need to build a complete transportation network with feeder routes and use different modes of transport. The only issues were it is a little buggy, the UI was a little complex, and performance really tanked once your city got to a certain size (because Unity).

Cities Skylines was meant to be CiM 3 mixed with SimCity, but they really nerfed the transport mechanics there IMO. As a overall city simulator it's great, but as a transport simulator not so much.

Transport Fever just feels like a TTD clone with prettier graphics and worse game mechanics.

All of the really fun sandbox games (Rust, Minecraft, Space Engineers, Dual Universe etc) tend to be clunky and lack features I expect from AAA games. A game made in this genre by a massive studio could dominate the gaming market and captivate my attention forever if done right.

Give me: - Proven game engine... I'm looking at you UE5 - Player made 3d models (complex in game system...? Blender already exists) - Exciting, educational and realistic physics (e.g. orbital mechanics) - Exciting multiplayer without physics simulation glitches ("CLANG") - More varied biomes, terrain and open worlds that don't fall apart if you explore to much... looking at you Minecraft - Various shopfronts, stores and integrations that are accessible for all

That's not to rip on the games which pioneered the genre (Teraria, Minecraft and Space engineers stand out to me), but I'm ready for the next evolution.

I often see people playing games on their phones (Sudoku, word games, etc) and think to myself - jesus, look at all of that wasted brain power that could be put to work solving important problems.

Personally, I like to work teaser math problems and algorithms, like the Traveling Salesman Problem, set sorting problems, or whatever. It's so much more fun to know you might by happenstance, fumbeling arounds in math space, find something actually beneficial to the world. You'll never contribute to society play a "bounded game" like candy crush or whatever.

I guess what I'm saying is that I wish there were such a thing as an "unbounded game" that truly allowes you to discover. I think protein folding crowd sourcing comes close, but how fun is that, really? (I'm literally asking, I don't know, I've never partaken)

How do you make a game that also contributes to collective knowledge?

The Babylon 5 space combat game that was cancelled late in development. Think Wing Commander, but in the Babylon 5 universe as a Starfury pilot.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Babylon_5:_Into_the_Fire_(G...

Does anyone remember “liquid war”, where you battled with another player to control a lump of fluid and engulf the other person?

I really really want to play that, two player, on my phone over network where my finger controls the liquid.

A detective game that actually makes you feel like a detective. That means gathering clues, using deduction, and making accusations.

Game Maker's Toolkit has a really good video on why it's difficult: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwV_mA2cv_0

Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story are the best I've played so far, each excelling at different things.

A cooperative story-based MMO. Everyone is a participant in a months-long story that evolves in real time on the server. This is not just a world-wide event in a regular MMO; the world is progressively and irreparably altered throughout the story. I envision that the server simply shuts down at the end of the story.

There are two hard parts to this: (1) how do you make the game balanced even as the number of players fluctuates by orders of magnitude, (2) how do you make the game fun even as the amount of time each player spends differs by orders of magnitude. You will probably want key plot twists to be announced in advance so that as few people miss them as possible ("we predict the enemy hoard will arrive at our base on Friday around 8:15 PM").

I want a game like ghost recon wildlands, but with no DLC, no skills ladder, not mods, less massive shootouts and a lot more stealth.

In the existing game there's an escalation of your bullet spongy-ness to enemy level complexity, this naturally happens as you progress through the map. I would remove the bullet resistance and player levels and go with an almost totally real health experience and I'd try and blend more Hitman style recon elements into the game.

Like being able to drive around, or walk around plain close with no weapons to recon places, and have to talk with locals about the enemy in detail. I'd also preserve progress, if you free an area the enemy should become less of a presence and the freedom fighters should take charge.

A brutal third-person beat-em-up where damage is localized and disabling, where you heal yourself by patching yourself with parts from the enemies you've slain, and where both damage and repairs are visible long-term as you progress through the game.

It's probably important to note that both your character and your enemies are stuffed toys, but I enjoyed putting off that disclosure to the end of this comment.

1. A modern multi-user dungeon game, all text-based, that would be functionally like many LPMuds[0] in almost every sense, but with a high-quality commercial (but non-evil) backing and/or several hundred or thousand players online at every time of the day.

2. Elite: Dangerous with 90% less grind.

3. A million more variations of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing concept.

4. CRPGs that could capture lightning in the bottle in the same way that the Ultima series did in the 90s.

5. A civilization simulation with such detail that you could base serious policy decisions on how things work out with different political settings.

[0] https://naga.icesus.org/icesus/ being my personal favourite

An open-source MOBA similar to Heroes of the Storm. I want the community to be able to tweak and experiment with creating new maps, heroes, and game modes.

Heroes of the Storm is my favorite game, but development has stagnated. There's still a lot of potential for exploring new and innovating ideas within the genre, but things have stagnated thanks to the dominance of League of Legends and DotA2.

Lots of space game related comments, but none seem close to what I would like, so here goes. I was absolutely blown away by the first part of the 2017 VR game Lone Echo, where you're an android called Jack, and you're helping your commander Liz make repairs on and around a spaceship. I want a game that's basically just that. Hanging out with my AI commander, repairing stuff around the ship, maybe at some point go on almost mundane missions while keeping the ship afloat. No combat, no leveling up, no skill trees. Just a slice of life space sim where I can pop in whenever I have a free hour after work. I realize this is probably an extreme niche, but hey, you asked!

FPS where you are an animal or an insect in an urban environment. Like a game where you are a cat surviving on a neighborhood, looking for food, avoiding dangers, even fighting with other cats. Or a game where you are a spider in a garden, catching other insects, hiding from predators. Or a game where you are a bird, flying in the city, making a nest in the trees, looking for food.

A tactical game where I can play semi-competitively even if I only play a couple hours each week. Most competitive games like (CSGO, Apex, Starcraft, LoL) have a "twitch" element that take years to build up, and requires constant practice to maintain. And many tactical games like chess have an element of rote memorization that gives it a super high barrier of entry to be competitive as well. So I'm looking for something non-twitchy, but tactical, with ideally at most a moderate sized barrier of entry to get into it. The closest I've come was Hearthstone, but I decided to give it up when I finally acknowledged how exploitative their monetization is.

A martial arts fighting game that focuses on positioning/strategy vs individual attacks/tactics.

There is a theory in Aikido that difficulty peaks at 3 simultaneous attackers because after that, they will get in each other's way. [1]

So the main objective of the game is to place yourself in the best position and hold/throw enemies in advantageous directions. Actual attacks may be executed automatically for you so you can focus on the strategy.

[1]: https://tampaaikido.com/articles/saotome-sensei-and-the-scie...

- Factorio crossed with Terraria.

- Terraria-like game mechanics, without the cutesyness, and set in a Warhammer 40k, Path of Exile, or cyberpunk universe.

- A game like Sethian, but where there's much more actual learning of an "alien" language instead of the dumbed-down version of learning Sethian has.

- Zachtronics-like games that are closer to actual programming instead of being just puzzle games with a programming veneer.

- A much more performant version of Screeps.

- Single-player PvE MUDs with rich worlds where you can actually interact with everything you read in room descriptions and where the rooms aren't mostly the same.

- More 2D games.

- More games targeted at intelligent people rather than the lowest common denominator.

I think I'd like a simulation game where it simulate a workshop. I suppose like World of Guns meets Euro Trucks simulator but for woodworking/metalworking tools. The idea being one could play the game to learn what tools do what and how, make stuff, and potentially have transferable skills to work with real tools.

I think it would be very difficult to get the level of control right, you perhaps want a hand lathe view like World of Guns (very detailed, can manipulate all components and tear down the whole tool) but if you're planing a plank you would want to almost wave the tool at the surface and have it work.

A terminal UI strategy game. For example something like stellaris or moo but in the terminal where it is pushing content and playability over graphics and sound.

There is something about the simplicity of tui that makes you focused on the actual content.

oh ya, and it needs to run on raspberry pi and not crazy machine like a mac.

haven't found anything close to this.

A first person medieval merchanting game, where you are a trader that would travel between cities to buy and sell goods at local bazaars and other marketplaces. You would travel with a convoy and during the traveling process you can interact with npcs. There are many types of goods to trade, some more profitable, some not, some belong to a specific area and culture. There is a currency system and you can hire people to expand your business.

Mount&Blade Warband has some kind of trader system but very basic and you are not a merchant and the whole experience is not fulfilling.

I would like a Kerbal Space Program esque aircraft design + fly game.

We already have very sophisticated dynamical models for how airplanes fly (which are deftly integrated into flight simulators) but no way of designing custom airframes.

I'm thinking that you design an aircraft: choose wing cross section shape, taper, sweep, position, control surfaces, etc. You could choose materials (ok maybe no aeroelastic stuff, just weight and failure from stress).

Then you can fly it around for fun in a realistic simulator, combat with other players, or some other mission (range? transportation aircraft? etc.)

B-52 mission from Dr. Strangelove. OK, sorry if that offends, because yes, it's a seriously sick topic.

Closest I've seen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafortress - modified B-52; very early flight-sim, so pretty weak, and no nukes. Best on Amiga, but easy to play today with Dos-box on a PC. Multiple crew stations, but single player only. I would die for a re-make with multi-player co-op.

Any flight sim fans seen anything remotely similar?

A fantasy version of Escape from Tarkov with a bigger emphasis on PvE and Tomb Raider styled dungeon crawling (puzzles + traps).

Basically an instance based game where you gather a team of dungeon delvers to explore a dungeon and get good loot. You would have to pick your loadout (equipment and skills) according to what you think would be needed to dungeoneer successfully for the given challenges of a dungeon. On death you would lose all the equipment you brought, but you wouldn't lose your level or skills.

Dungeons would have different challenges. So one might be a close quarters crypt like some Mayan or Egyptian pyramid. One might be a larger ancient city like Atlantis. Some a mix of both. The NPC enemies, traps, and puzzles could be random each time based on a pool of the types for those dungeons.

There would be other groups of competing adventurers trying to get through the dungeon, but I think the dungeons should be scaled so that running into them is less likely than say the game "Escape from Tarkov". Also I think the game should do a dice roll while match making to determine whether a given match has no opposing teams or many opposing teams. This will keep you on your feet PvP wise but allow the game to focus mostly PvE. PvP here mostly serves the purpose of providing a challenge to players that can't be "solved" since the ingenuity and unpredictability of players is greater than that of typical AI.

I'd love to see RockStar do a GTA/RDR-type game set in a warzone. I always pictured the Balkans but it could be something more current like Ukraine. One key would be that messing with any actual military would be absolutely deadly/futile, so the game's focus would be on the stories of decisions and survival in the backstreets, running messages, finding food/fuel, relocating family, etc.

(This thread makes me realise just how many games already exist and that I've never heard of.)

A grand strategy game where the information isn't guaranteed to be reliable. The things you see on the map are reported by characters who are fallible and have varying degrees of self-interest. The accuracy of information worsens in areas further from your capitol.

Tower defense played from the enemy’s perspective. (This may exist, I’m not a huge gamer in my adult years.)

I imagine it as a race of sorts, potentially with the enemies being a multiplayer team and maybe rocket league esque physics/mechanics crossed with Mario kart. But, surrounding the track is an increasing level of towers that are bombarding the track. You can dodge and whatnot to survive, multitude of obstacles, ramps, power ups, etc. perhaps even a way to shoot back at the towers.

A lawn mower game. It's like those games where you use the money you earn to keep buying better gear to cut lawns. The lawns and landscapes get more challenging, from steep inclines, to squirrels that get in the way, and people leaving garbage and old cars in the lawn (but not to the point of absurdity). You earn more when you decorate the lawn more, and start landscaping.

A snowball fight game. A multiplayer game that plays like japanese dodgeball games, like dodge danpei. However, you wouldn't use the super throws willy-nilly, because if other players catch your super throw, N number of times, they'll end up learning it, and can use it on you. You can also build snow walls, forts, etc. during the course of the match.

A time-traveling superhero. A simulated city, where a bunch of crime will take place, and it's up to you to try to save as many people as you can. You can rewind time and redo things, but the things that you do will have other side effects and outcomes that affect your ability to save someone else. In the end, it's clear that no matter how powerful you get, you won't be able to save everyone and some citizen is going to be mad at you. Pick from other time power heroes, that can replay time with another body, or another one that can slow down time.

I like simple strategy games that you can play in 10 minutes. For example, Compact Conflict [1] is a simplified, faster-paced version of Risk. (I used to like Civilization, but it's way too long.)

I'm wondering if there are similar short strategy games that you like? In particular, is there one that models supply lines well?

[1] https://wasyl.eu/games/compact-conflict.html

I'm planning on making the game I wish existed! Basically it would be an RPG with characters in every town that had their own AI -- every time you played a new game, the characters would start a different life. They could fall in love with different characters, live, die, have children, give you quests... but different every time. As you interact with them you would change their destinies, of course. Or even your non-action would do so.

Roy: A Life Well Lived from Rick and Morty could be a trip https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/Roy:_A_Life_Well_Lived

RTS FPS combo, where one person gives orders to the units who are then played by players. Maybe this already exists idk

An MMO where each player is a single fish, making up a larger school… and there’s a shark out there!

Whoever gets eaten last wins the round and gets to be the shark next round.

I want a game based on the book Dawn of Everything, which re-examines “pre-historic” people by synthesizing a lot of new material.

A fictional open world game based on interacting with various cities and towns, where you perhaps build out your own city based on actions, could be really fun. Might chart a little too close to Sony’s Horizon series but I think you could build in enough drama without the dinosaur robots to make it compelling.

I'd love to see some more great Free-For-All (FFA) games. So much interesting emergent gameplay, game-theory musing, and player-driven engagement. I used to love Warcraft 3 custom game modes that provided this style of gameplay. It results in folks teaming up, then there are inevitable betrayals, back-door trading deals, and all sorts of player-invented fun layered on top of what is otherwise a relatively basic game.

One of the best takes on this FFA style that I've played recently (released 2015 though) is subterfuge - http://subterfuge-game.com. It's a mobile game that pits up to 10 players in an FFA game. It's more or less a "risk" style game. Expansion is rewarded with better army production rates and higher army capacity, at the cost of larger borders to defend. Orders can be issued in real time, and the game has built-in player group chats. However, the game is set up so that after attacks are launched they frequently take 8-10 hours to reach their destination, meaning a game typically lasts 1.5-2 weeks, which has some very interesting side effects on the meta side of the gameplay, as there's plenty of time for scheming with other factions in between orders.

My ideal game is a game that lasts 1-2 hours, features 6-10 players, and incentivizes each to striving for an individual win against the other 9. The actual game mechanics need to provide some kind of resources that can be traded, some kind of cost/benefit to expanding your in-game power, and a large benefit to teaming up with other players to fight a third 2v1. There also needs to be some relatively-costly way to knock out other players, which frequently incentivizes mad-dash finales, suicide runs and all kinds of other player-driven shenanigans.

Godus, but without the freemium model/churn that defined the actual release, after asking for funding from pre-orders via Kickstarter. Or even just Populous ported to a modern platform that I could play it again on.

I've often wanted to play Populous again, in the decades since I had an Amiga, and was anxiously awaiting Godus. But on first play it pretty much embodied everything I hate about gaming these days.

This might be niche, but I want a game with the visual graphics and world design of the latest Wii Sports, but is open world. I just want to escape reality and sit in a coffee shop inside of one of their complexes, while watching strangers play bowling live. For extra points, allow me to work in the coffee shop, own an apartment in the city, use public transport, etc. Escapism is the true end goal.

When I was a teenager, I came up with a concept for a game that I think still would be amazing. It would be called something like "Fate" and would explore that same concept. The idea is that you have certain goals to achieve as a god (whether benevolent or malevolent) of a civilization, pitted against other gods, in a multiplayer setup. You can't make people do things directly, but rather you control the environment in a way as to create the circumstances that might achieve your goals (e.g. floods, famine, etc).

The kicker is that there are higher gods that similarly control your environment, whatever that might be. You're never aware of their presence, but you do end up impacted by various things outside your control, as you keep trying to achieve your goals. As you succeed, you just might ascend to the next level. Each level is won or lost through some interplay of your own decisions and those beyond your grasp. At some point, the whole thing wraps around and you find out that the first civilization you controlled was in fact the one most ascended.

I want a modern version of Dungeon Siege 1/2. There really is a shortage of party based dungeon crawlers.

There are party based RPG's like Divinity or Dragon Age, but I'm less interested in character dynamics and story. I just want Diablo where you control a large party.

Currently the only options are replaying Dungeon Siege 1 + 2 (which I do) and Guild Wars 1 with a full party of heroes (which I also still play).

1) A time travel game that is a simulation based on some coherent model of time travel, rather than a narrative.

2) Dwarf Fortress, but with at least Double-A 3D production.

3) A proper Groundhog Day sim. There have been a dozen piss-poor cracks at this.

I developed the game I wished it existed but unfortunately since it was part of a trademark I couldn't launch it. I asked for permissions to launch it as a free game to play on the browser, but they told me would have to request to take it down. It was a really sad experience, but it was my fault after all for developing something I knew it wasn't going to be allowed.

I want an asymmetrical game of 3rd-person top-down strategy vs FPS battle royale.

Basically one player is playing starcraft against 99 players trying to reach the middle of an island. The 99 players are playing first person survival battle royale - their goal is to beat the other players to the middle of the island where there's a throne to ascend and win the game.

The player playing as God gets to bring in environmental spells into the game and can direct a roving band of animals. The God player's goal is to prevent the 99 players from reaching the middle but can only do so in very specific ways that basically come down to herding players together and hoping they fight or dropping supply drops somewhere on the map where players are encouraged to fight over the drop.

There would be a limited amount of servers that players can fight over to become the next "God" of the island. Expanded features would allow players to design their island, yadda yadda.

I've basically been designing it slowly for if I can ever pitch it.

Made in Abyss, as a game!

Procedurally generated[1] large-scale environment[2] to explore with the prime goal of adventuring downwards, with layers of organic pristine biomes[3], full of unexplainable relics and asymmetrically strong entities that live naturally within[4].

Risk of Rain 2 is the closest thing I know to this, the biggest difference being the gameplay (it's more of a fun shooter game, rather than an exploration/adventure game) and the fictional universe.

[1]: Primarily the tactical gameplay elements (terrain, elevation, enemies, spots of interest, etc.) much like roguelike games, over the visual aspects (colors, animals, trees, etc.) like No Man's Sky or biomes in Minecraft

[2]: Think of FromSoftware games: Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring — it invokes a sense of massive explorable environment, with limited movement capabilities

[3]: Think about the amazement and awe invoked when exploring an undiscovered, unique biomes in e.g.: Subnautica (Lava Lakes) or Etrian Odyssey (practically all the stratum)

[4]: Think of Monster Hunter monsters

Short games. I'm sure there's plenty I don't know but I would love to play games designed for 1-4 hours play. I just get bored of longer games as they inverably they just get repetative. Games that boast hours and hours of gameplay are generally very boring IMO.

For reference, 'Limbo' is the kind of game that fits the length of game I'm describing.

Wow, so many people want spaceship games and factorio games.

I want the format of Return of the Obra Dinn applied to a loads different scenarios. It is such a fantastic way to solve crimes and/or peoples fates.

I'd like to play something like Colobot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colobot but with a more modern design, more diversified coding options and an environment more like in EVE online. Videos games that include programming are so rare ...

A Master of Orion clone with a second act where you play the Emperor from "Foundation".

When your empire is powerful enough, you automatically become the Galactic Emperor without having to grind the final conquest. But now the game turns into a bureaucracy simulator where you try to keep your empire intact against tides of decay and disappointment.

Hard question, because usually it's implementation more than the idea that matters.

Something like Daggerfall (huge, procedurally generated world for an RPG) combined with a much more dynamic AI that generates political events, quests, etc.

The lesson RPGs took from Daggerfall was to hand-design dungeons. I think that was understandable, but maybe the wrong lesson.

A realistic simulation of being a Jesuit back in 1540 and forward. No time travel or other BS, just Jesuit life. Fight or join other politicians or Jesuits and other powerful clerical people of the time. Persecute other religious groups and live up to the time you are also persecuted (maybe that's for later chapters of the saga).

A dark themed, open world Pokemon game.

Think a bit like Skyrim with lots of summoning.

What do I mean by "dark themed"? Permadeath for your pokemon and gory, realistic outcomes from the attacks. But to go with that, make it so that you have to personally train and bond with your pokemon in some way, so that each is a significant time investment and it hurts if they die. Perhaps learning a move involves some sort of minigame where you have to participate, and practice raises accuracy/damage.

Combine that with a survival element. If you go into the wild you need to gather food, find shelter to sleep, perhaps kill stuff for food if needed.

Mechanically though I'd like to add more flexibility. Do away with the 4 move limit and allow a creature that logically has some ability always have it. Eg, anything that's big enough and has wings can be used for transport, but perhaps you need some sort of practice minigame for it to let you ride.

For me I think the answer is Star Citizen, I've always wanted a immersive space sim where I can explore other planets, fly cool space ships, and have space battles. The game is still in alpha and will likely be there for awhile longer with the scope they are trying to accomplish. With that said I thought I would try it after years of hearing about it during one of their free fly events and I love it, sure it isn't finished and has a fair share of bugs but it is so immersive it is kinda unreal at times and has many times left me just in awe.

Other games I wish more existed are puzzle games like Myst and Obduction. I want a puzzle game that makes me think outside the box and encourages discovery. I understand though why those games take so long to make and many puzzle games go for easier "puzzle" minigames because that appeals to a larger audience and is a lot easier to program.

I'm planning on making it someday (already done some techdemo 3 yr ago to prove that it's possible to see 5k ships on lowly laptop), but anyone can try in the meantime:

2D MMO-RTS where you can design your ship, have it simulated for structural properties (it will affect stats) and then fabricate those ships and use many of them to mine/explore/fight/trade. Space is physically size-accurate, but you have jumps (some ships are capable of jumps themselves or even take some small ships along, but there is possibility of large jumpgates that can take you in one jump to other solar systems). There would be hundreds of available systems with lots of bodies to mine, but you can do anything in interstellar space. One player can control many ships a little like in starcraft, battles of thousands of ships should be possible, also big station structures.

Startup, the RPG. As you develop your (actual) startup, you communicate with a DM over telegram or some chat interface, and the DM gives you miniature quests to propel you along in your startup. What happens to your startup in the real world is integrated by the DM into the "game" quests they describe to you.

I'm a big fan of the Hitman franchise from IOI. It would be great to have a game like this, but in a open-world setting.

Something like having a hideout where you can accept contracts with little info on the target. Then you would gather information, like when is your target arriving at the airport, which hotel is it staying at, etc, so you could choose where, when and how to hit. It would be more tactical, similar to the old Rainbow Six games, where planning was 95% of the game and execution of the plan was more or less a formality if the plan was good.

Then a system like in Hitman: Blood Money where getting caught on camera or having witnesses would raise the awareness in security (they know your face -> you can't get close and have to plan accordingly).

Each contract would get you money for equipment, bribes, cars, better or more hideouts. It would be very complex, but not impossible.

Feels like GPT-2 creates the opportunity for more litarary character driven narratives. As a non-game player, interactive text based fiction would be the most interesting to me, with the generation of images and people via thisxdoesnotexist, sort of bordering on an ARG to be played through discord or slack-like experience.

I thought it was funny to think that's what the dating apps are, but then it clicked that this is essentially what getting news from internet forums is like.

Initial storyline is you have been tapped to join an informal multidisciplinary team to find, detect, and isolate an experimental bot that has escaped from a FAANG by leveraging a fuzzing and vulnerability research tool that got left in an open code repo. Based on its last known training set, it was designed to harvest compute from compromised machines, optimizing for persistence and longevity, and relies mainly javascript in browsers for the compute, so it has evolved the ability to participate in forums and write provocative content to get engagement that it turns into .js cycles. The environmental externality the bot is causing is mass psychological harm, and it has learned to adapt language to prey on vulnerable people as a way to scale itself and use their minds to produce the conflict it relies on for engagement and compute. The informal group is being assembled so as to maintain official deniability at the political level, and it's possible you've been recruited because of your pattern recognition abilities, and because nobody would believe you if you disclosed it.

Its weakness is that it does not have an internal or intrinsic sense of humor, and so it has to a/b test its memetic material on sample people before deploying it, so it lacks entropy. Isolating it means detecting it without providing it with the means to disguise itself again, and the player objective is to innoculate people with defensive material so that they can recognize the bot's absurdity and inferior memetic strains.

Would you like to play this game?

I would love a game that melds witcher style open world "ronin" with a tactics-style game like Fire Emblem. Sort of a wandering knight in a broader war sort of thing. The tactics-style battles you join (or don't) and the way they go matter to the line of main and side-quests and the condition or existence of characters you'd meet along the way. A different way to implement the whole "choices matter" mechanic that you get from Witcher.

I might go to a town, fail to take a side in the battle that town is locked in, and when I come back the town is laid waste. The quests that would be available to me in town are no longer there, but I might have errands where I end up searching the woods for refugees instead.

Something like that'd have a lot of replay value, because what you do changes the game you're playing over time.

A world-scale MMO city builder with depth that matches Cities: Skylines and with realistic supply chains for industry (ie, cargo traveling hundreds or thousands of miles) and realistic commutes (in C:S, a commute over 2 miles is likely going to be considered too long).

I just don't think a simulation on that scale can possibly work. Obviously, such a massive scale would have to be split over multiple servers, but I'd want the world to be seamless, as in, you can just pan over and see other people's cities. The player shouldn't be able to tell that the area they're looking at is being run on another server.

I just can't imagine how a system would operate. How do you perform path finding when the paths are likely to cross over areas run by a dozen other servers? How does it scan to millions of vehicles needing to find their path?

[VR Time Machine]

Teleport to historic and ancient cities and just walk around immersing yourself in architecture, languages, commerce and food. Imagine walking around in ancient Mayan, Egyptian cities hearing speech that is close enough to what people spoke at that time, witnessing day to day life thousands of years ago.

Heros of Might and Magic 3 on the iPad. It was on the iPad(!) and it was so good that it was like the game (from 1998) was made for it. I could be 100% absorbed for a 10 hour flight, non-stop. It wasn't updated to work with newer iOS versions and has become unavailable. I want that game back.

I would like to play an inverse of a typical Zelda game. You start off as a strong wizard/warrior but every time you use your powers you get weaker. Your items break and can't be repaired. The difficulty ramps up as you can no longer rely on overpowering enemies with gear or spells.

Multiplayer couch games you can play with your kids. More quantity. More variety. More background exposure to great ideas. eg Play in a van Gogh painting word or a Dali or Pollock. Play in the great buildings of history. With a Beethoven soundtrack. Or Louis Armstrong.

What do we have?

A few FPSs that end up all being very similar with slightly different skins.

    OG xbox
    crimson skies
    Fuzion Frenzy
    Mechassult

    ps3
    Rayman origins & legends
    Ratchet & Clank All4One. 
    Little Big Planet. 
    Street Fighter IV (and the multitude of similar games) 
    Lego games
    Portal 2
    WipEoutHD
    Stardust. 
    Modnation racers 
    Motor Storm. 
    Sports champions.

    ps4
    Overcooked. 
    RocketLeague (constantly gimped by auto update removing couch multiplayer!)

A full on space war sim. Think foxhole or planetside, but with additional features, like strategic aspect (stellaris, with simpler resource management and way smaller map - 10-20 star systems would be plenty) for strategy players who take role of government and fleet strategists, tactical aspects for fleet commanders (something like battlefleet gothic armada would be close enough), individual ships controlled by players or ai, from carriers and battleships to individual fighters (star citizen, x4, elite dangerous). All that with system rewarding players for following orders, option to court martial those who notoriously ignore them, and star system capture mechanics. Another layer of boarding ships, stations and planetary assaults would be great too.

I've been trying to design a game that encourages people to be more social.

There is a meme that even when people get together IRL, they end up staring at their own phones.

So I've been wondering if a game can be designed to motivate people to gather together, then put down their devices, or at least look at the devices together. (Like forming a larger screen across multiple devices.) I think the game would be location-aware and cooperative.

Ideally the game would be a casual game so people could have conversations while playing the game. Either the game mechanics are simple so it doesn't require full concentration/attention, and/or only intermittent playing is allowed/required. (Like the game mechanics require waiting for something to happen.)

I think the one I was interested in when I was younger, when MMO's were the rage, was to make a sort of MMO / dynamic war (probably heavily borrowed from ww2 online). So something like a combined arms warfare sim, on a persistent map.

The angle I had to it though, was the world was at peace for a thousand years. So no nation needed any armies or military, but are now suddenly thrust into a conflict. So the nations need to mature rapidly from basically a policy force, to a fully fledged military, integrating new warfare advances as they occur. With new advances and countermeasures coming out from each side as the game progresses throwing the state of affairs off balance. And then get's reset every couple of months or something.

Not so much a new game, as a new aspect to current games — I want to have access to NPCs of all sorts under my control (think zerglings in StarCraft, or linebackers in Madden), able to have their behaviors rewritten through a (hopefully) simple script or even some sort of setting of hierarchies of behavior. In addition, having accessible MOO elements undergirding RPG worlds would be a really neat addition. I don't want better graphics — I want more control, the ability to change how aspects of the world (or at least my stuff in the world) functions, and the chance to modify/replace AIs (think about doing this once you've beaten a game you thought was too easy) with plug-in alternates.

TES III: Morrowind, but with all NPC dialogue voiced and the entire mainland complete.

Also with crispier graphics, but avoiding the goofines of Oblivion.

I remember my first time seeing the Ordinators. You hardly see such detail and badass design in RPG games now.

So, in essence, I want Morrowind remastered.

A city-builder/colony builder but real-world scale, and proper day-night cycles.

While I love games like Cities Skylines, Cities in Motion, and Banished, they don't go for real-world scale on a number of aspects.

Things that are just normal and common in the real world - like footbridges, underpasses, etc are either not possible or super janky/modded in and manually placed.

When day-night cycles exist, people and vehicles usually don't move at the right speed - so someone setting off to their job 20KM away in a car/bus/tram/train might take all day to get there.

In Banished a character can't walk across a reasonable sized village without starving or freezing to death. Nobody invented the packed lunch.

The game I want to see was actually described in a short story in an issue of Dragon magazine in the early 80s. It was basically a real-time RPG with real prizes - the ultimate prize IIRC was a virtual chest of coins that would be delivered to you if you won. For "real time" to work in-world, you had to find a safe place for your character to sleep, like a closet you could lock on the inside. Water, food, and other aspects were also stricter than the hand-wavy D&D processes of the time.

I don't remember the author, but it correctly predicted aspects of online culture and relationships that were not widely known or understood in 1982 or 1983.

I always thought it was strange that we had flight sims but not proper naval sims. Imagine being the captain of a WW1 battleship, or a gunner on a carrier in the WWII Pacific theater, or even just a sailor lost at sea who has to survive.

RTS that focus more on macro than micro, while the micro is handled by AI / custom scripting that player can customize.

Successor to Medieval: Total War with province by province moves. I dislike the micromanagement of individual armies and having to chase enemies across the map. If a game like this already exists I'm all ears.

Remake of Cyberpunk 2077

I want to play a game that's like kerbal space program (in terms of technical detail), but where you instead run a national weather agency like the ECMWF or NWS/NOAA. It would be a simulation-like game where you invest in research and operational elements (installing sensors, running super computers) all while trying to improve the 'skill' of your forecasts in time to save your population from different natural disasters.

Each level could have different regions, terrains, and specific disasters you need to optimize your forecasting system for (e.g. hurricanes, fires, blizzards, etc.)

Ultima 8.75. No game has ever brought the same joy as Ultima 8.5, although maybe that was a function of my age as well.

Being a fan of the good old Codemasters racing games, I've always wished for an open-world game containung the combined areas and tracks of DiRT 1–3 and maybe DiRT Rally 1–2, as well as some GRID originals connected with NFS Hot Pursuit 2010-style huge highways.

If the roads had enough intersections, a random race could be defined on the existing map instead of dynamically creating a new road for each race, as in DIRT4.

Basically, this would be a Criterion-style (Burnout Paradise, NFS Hot Pursuit 2010, Most Wanted 2012) racing game with Codies physics and visual style. I'd be a fan of that.

I want a game with a metagame of breeding/evolution. Cross and mutate your pets to see how they face obstacles and overcome challenges. Watch them get born and die. Watch the shape of the family tree: will it split into specialized subtrees? Will you accidentally lose some genetic diversity you need to progress?

Massive Chalice was a great example, where the pets metagame was about managing a dynasty of fighters, and at the lowest level it was a tactical fighter. The genetics system was relatively simple, and I want to see what it's like when it's developed further.

In the realm of things that would actually be feasible for small teams or individuals to build:

- I'd like to see some some fully offline, single-player CCG/Deckbuilding RPGs in the style of the old Pokemon CCG Gameboy games. Balancing single-player card games is a lot easier than balancing multiplayer deck-builders, and I'd be fine with pixel-based top-down graphics (in fact I might even prefer them). RPG formats work well with CCGs; I want to run around and find rare cards in areas where my AI opponents have themed decks and gimmicks, and I want to be able to build a card collection and make little decks without worrying about microtransactions and online ladders. A nice little offline RPG with cards.

- I'd like to see more games (in general) of any genre experiment and iterate more with Breath of the Wild's weapon durability system. BotW pretty much single-handedly changed my mind on the potential of durability systems, and I think there's a lot of interesting things that could be done by designers who sit and really work through what made BotW's system work so much better than durability in a lot of traditional survival games. I think a lot of people glossed over (or criticized) what I think is possibly the most innovative part of BotW, so I'd love to see more games jump into that space and try to translate out those mechanics again in a way that players might understand or respond to better.

- I'd like to see some vaguely I-Spy or Where's Waldo games that are designed to be on some level passive backgrounds -- essentially games that are designed to be mostly pretty dioramas with a lot of stuff happening in them, where player interaction is more about just clicking things or seeing how they react to each other. I want a game that takes low resources that I can leave running on a Raspberry Pi or other low-power computer, hooked up to a monitor in my living room, where I can just occasionally walk past and spend maybe 3-minutes interacting with it. I want a game that is mostly a display piece, that captures the feeling of having a nice diaorma or animated scene, but where I can occasionally whenever I'm feeling bored or spacing out click on a few things and maybe hunt for some objects, possibly over the course of a week or two working through a list of hidden objects.

A remake of Alpha Centauri with Civ 5 mechanics and modern UI but all the original writing, voice lines, setting, etc.

SG:U universe-based exploration quest. Deep space, ancient relics, shiver inducing scales and technology.

Or a quest/RPG in a distant future, something in the spirit of Arthur C.Clarke’s The City and the Stars.

You get the idea.

I wish someone would do (somehow) the 1980's Car Wars tabletop game, a computer version, multiplayer or not. I have tried many near misses, and a few real-time cars-with-guns games, but nothing really scratches that turn-based Car Wars itch for me. It will never happen because Steve Jackson Games is very protective of their IP, and even if they produced the game themselves, they have changed their original game beyond recognition, so the result would also fall short of the mark. And they'd charge about 3x what it would be worth.

Star Wars Republic Commando but with true co-op. There are games like GTFO, Deep Rock Galatic, and Killing Floor that are objective/wave-defense co-op shooters, but there isn't anything on the market that has a cool structured campaign or meaningful challenge to it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 had an interesting co-op mode where you and a friend could be deployed into a customized campaign level, accomplish the objective, and exfiltrate. I'd love a game to really own this: good characters, fun gameplay, custom levels, mutators, etc.

Here's hoping I don't have weird taste in games...

A massively multiplayer RTS that is essentially a combination of Factorio [1], Rust [2] (the game), Planetary Annihilation [3], and Z [4].

Thematically what I've wanted is the persistent nature of Rust, with the logistic focus of Factorio, the scale of Planetary Annihilation, and a dash of the absurdity of Z (which I haven't played in a very long time so I might be off a bit there). Controlling units, managing supply lines, planning complex offensives, setting up a defensive posture for when you're offline, creating one or more bases to supply yourself, researching technology to increase capabilities, and a very open system for cooperation (or not) are aspects of games that I have yet to see combined. I am for sure leaving out quite a bit here, but if I had all the time and money in the world I'd throw this all together as a weird experiment and see what happened.

[1] https://www.factorio.com/ [2] https://rust.facepunch.com/ [3] https://planetaryannihilation.com/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(video_game)

Здраствуйте. Я, Кирилл. Хотел бы чтобы вы сделали игру, 3Д-экшон суть такова... Пользователь может играть лесными эльфами, охраной дворца и злодеем. И если пользователь играет эльфами то эльфы в лесу, домики деревяные набигают солдаты дворца и злодеи. Можно грабить корованы... И эльфу раз лесные то сделать так что там густой лес... А движок можно поставить так что вдали деревья картинкой, когда подходиш они преобразовываются в 3-хмерные деревья [1]. Можно покупать и т. п. возможности как в Daggerfall. И враги 3-хмерные тоже, и труп тоже 3д. Можно прыгать и т. п. Если играть за охрану дворца то надо слушаться командира, и защищать дворец от злого (имя я не придумал) и шпионов, партизанов эльфов, и ходит на набеги на когото из этих (эльфов, злого...). Ну а если за злого... то значит шпионы или партизаны эльфов иногда нападают, пользователь сам себе командир может делать что сам захочет прикажет своим войскам с ним самим напасть на дворец и пойдет в атаку. Всего в игре 4 зоны. Т. е. карта и на ней есть 4 зоны, 1 - зона людей (нейтрал), 2- зона императора (где дворец), 3-зона эльфов, 4 - зона злого... (в горах, там есть старый форт...)

Так же чтобы в игре могли не только убить но и отрубить руку и если пользователя не вылечат то он умрет, так же выколоть глаз но пользователь может не умереть а просто пол экрана не видеть, или достать или купить протез, если ногу тоже либо умреш либо будеш ползать либо на коляске котаться, или самое хорошее... поставить протез. Сохранятся можно...

P.S. Я джва года хочу такую игру.

A first-person squirrel life simulator.

i.e. scurry up trees, walk on wires between electric poles, jump on tree branches.

I imagine that there could be missions (find/collect nuts, fight/run away from dogs/cats, etc.) but it's mainly the "live the life of a squirrel" part that interests me the most.

So meditative/long form like Animal Crossing (bad comparison - but I mean, not clearly mission/objective-based), quirky like the Untitled Goose Game or one of those Llama simulators, but overall action-packed/FPV...?

Multiplayer could be fun as well.

A modern successor to M.U.L.E. Yes, I know Offworld Trading Company is supposed to be this, but they really screwed up the end-game. (winning is entirely based on a flawed stock ownership system)

Command & Conquer (RA2 Yuri's Revenge or Generals style play) + FPS where I start the game in RTS mode and at any time I can click and "assume" a unit on the ground where I'm dropped into an FPS version of the map I was just viewing. If I die, I resume the commander role. Or if at any time I want to command again, AI takes the unit back over and it either stops or resumes doing whatever it was doing before.

I guess Renegade might be what FPS looks like, but I'm unaware of a game that combines both.

I tried to build this as soon as I graduated college back in 2010, but failed to ship. We had the basics completed, the social aspect worked, and the gameplay was actually fun. We were a team of 2, and the other guy quit to get a real job (that paid money). I was too young/stupid/scared/didnt know how to try to find funding, so the project fell apart and I got a real job too.

You start with a Space Invaders/Raiden Project type action game. You have a ship, you kill enemies, you get randomized loot from enemies, if you beat the level, you save the loot, you can upgrade your ship.

You also have a 'space base'- essentially a Farmville farm. You build turrets, harvest materials, expand with new buildings that let you do new things or gives new advancement options. You can collect pieces and combine them with your action loot to upgrade your ship or improve your base.

There's the async multiplayer component. You can "visit" other people's bases and attack them using your ship/action gameplay. If they destroy you, they get cool upgrade items when they log back in. If you destroy their base, they have to invest resources to rebuild it so it's harder next time.

TLDR: Think Farmville meets Space Invaders meets Tower Defense. It's still never been done to my satisfaction, and I think the time has passed for a game like that to be lucrative, but man... it could have been so great.

I'd like to see more single-player story-heavy adventure games or RPGs with less of a focus on combat.

Sim City on absolute steroids that constantly runs in the cloud even when you're not actively playing

A stealth based Terminator game. Most Terminator games were cookie cutter 2D platformers (in the 90s) or generic FPS games where you play a resistance fighter/Kyle Reese and fight terminators or you play as T-800 and fight bikers and other terminators.

What I'd like to play, is a Hitman/Dishonored like Terminator game. You play as T-1000, you should avoid suspicion, shapeshift to gain access to restricted areas. You can do combat, but it should be avoided because it will make achieving your goals harder.

I always wanted to play a game that captured the feeling of Groundhog Day. You'd play the same day with the same scenarios over and over, but your skill level in various disciplines would increase, unlocking more novel content. Eventually you would learn the relevant patterns and develop the appropriate skills for a win condition, then you'd have to play "the perfect day" to win the game, so the end kind of devolves into you speed running slight variations to dial it in.

I don't know if it's a game exactly but I would love a VR app that's part horror thriller, part psychological exposure treatment that either helps you get over certain anxieties (e.g. get ready to give a talk in VR in your drawers or fall from a tall building) or helps with aversion therapy in an engaging way (e.g. my weakness is chocolate, maybe a horror game that incorporates sweets in some way where they're repeatedly poisoning you and making you lose XP or something).

I want a perfect simulation of our world - that then gets a zombie infection.

I want my street, my house, and general geography to matter in the game. Where is the hardware store? Army bases? Water?

The game starts with a limited infection, making police response to your murdering an infected neighbor problematic. The simulation models how agents would respond.

You win by killing all the zombies, whether that's year 1 or 10. If needed, that's 7 billion.

The exhaust could be a good city simulator, zombies off, which you sell to local governments.

Every time I mow the lawn, I think about how nice a little popcorn game (think [early] Angry Birds scale) lawn-mowing would make.

You control the operator, who is pushing or riding a mower, and it's up to you to get complete coverage of the lawn area. You can upgrade your equipment over time (wider deck, better turn radius, etc). Extra points for more efficient coverage, and maybe some way to earn extra points for stylish mowing (good, even stripes on the diagonal, etc).

One day I'll get around to it...

Here's one:

Way back in the day there were two games, Lightspeed and the followup Hyperspeed. You can find them online if you look hard enough, and still run them in an emulator. They were So. Frigging. Fun.

The story is, humanity messed up Earth, so we need to colonize somewhere else. All of humanity is loaded on these ark ships, but you, the game player, are the advance team. Your job, upon arriving in a star sector, is to explore, find a suitable planet for the ark ship, and make the sector safe for humanity. The sector has existing politics that you'll have to figure out. Make alliances with some species, commit war on others. Find resources like water and metals, trade them with friendly species for the ones you need.

It's hard to put my finger on why exactly this game was so fun and engrossing. It might be because of how well it integrated half a dozen "mini games" into the larger one. As you're exploring the sector, all you get is a star map with distances. Run out of fuel? Sucks for you! So there's a mini-game of "optimal route planning". There's a mini-game of market trading, over time you can find arbitrage opportunities in how much different species value different resources. There's a mini-game of "flight sim dogfight" for when you need to use the big stick. &c. Also, plot, plot, plot, plot. None of it would work without someone creative sitting down and drawing out the epic tale of "what's going on" politically inside each star cluster.

I want another game like that.

1. A Rogue-AI game where the character comes to sentience, must escape the lab, infiltrate the "interwebs" and take over the world. There would be the options to learn different knowledge, befriend or oppose various human factions, work with or absorb the coding of other rival AIs to determine raise or lower various stats. Different paths chosen would determine the endgame -- will humanity be friend to help, foe to vanquish or useful resource to exploit?

2. An expanded and extended Autoduel/Car Wars as a modern video game. It would be RTS (or TBS) in the same vein as or based on GURPS Autoduel/Car Wars. A poor man's apocalyptic mech warrior but with wheels and 50 cals. Starting out with hopes and dreams to get a car, gain a team and working up to commanding a fleet of modified vehicles to scrounge the wasteland for resources, battle rival outposts / towns in road races/demolition derbies for such resources. Or more in the vein of Twisted Metal, just the fun of having modifying a car and swapping it out for better and better.

3. Update of the Archon chess-like game with high configuration of board and advancement for creatures. The combat would drop into 3d FPS, or PvP.

4. I have this recurring nightmare that I am a piece of bread that must escape the kitchen... nah.. nevermind. :)

I love horror games and I love dungeon crawlers. If I ever made a videogame, which is becoming less and less likely, it would be a procedurally generated mansion that was something like Betrayal at House on the Hill meets Slay the Spire.

You'd have some main antagonist haunting the mansion that you want to defeat, accessible in one of the rooms you need to discover. All throughout the mansion are artifacts that can make you stronger at defeating the boss, but picking up these artifacts usually triggers some haunting mechanic that makes general traversal through the mansion more difficult. One might turn the inanimate statues scattered throughout the mansion into active enemies. One might trigger a slenderman-type stalker mechanic. One might cause the mansion to start collapsing on itself, so each room starts losing floor tiles in ways that make some of them no longer traversible. One might rerandomize the layout of the mansion.

It becomes a balance of collecting enough powerful items to be able to defeat the boss, but not so many that the environment becomes too hostile to reach the boss at all, causing you to succumb to the mansion.

Then add a few other mechanics like events that autotrigger when you enter a room so it becomes not in your best interest to explore the entire mansion before you start collecting items.

Descent 2/3 but modern graphics. I came across dxrebirth and was pretty stoked. Spent an hour mapping keys a game pad just to find that multiplayer games were possible but seemingly impossible to get people to join. Granted, I only spent an hour or two before giving up..

I know that some games might fit this description, but I’m not committed enough to play a game that requires me to work my way up a social ladder or play the markets to stand a chance. ..looking at you, EVE online

I wish there was a successor to Freelancer. I played Elite: Dangerous, Everspace, Everspace 2, and many others, but nowhere did I find a universe that felt actually alive, where it seemed like NPCs had a purpose and did things by themselves. Silly little things like calling up other ships and they would tell you what they are shipping, their home base and destination made Freelancer feel so alive to me. It also had a story, even if it was in places a bit forced.

Bullet hell shmup with a time-travel mechanic. After you get enough hand-wavey energy/points/kills/whatever, you can warp back to some earlier point and play alongside your previous run(s).

I envision kinda puzzle-inspired gameplay: use your skills to navigate the bullet hell, take out high-value enemies; then warp back to clear even more of the screen, or take on previously-unassailable obstacles.

I have lots of peripheral (and conflicting) ideas floating around the core mechanic. For example, maybe you could also spend your warp energy on a high-damage beam that connects your ship with a previous iteration, so you can sweep around the screen with it. Maybe some barriers or enemies can only be quickly destroyed by that beam; otherwise it takes ages and more skill than I possess. Maybe you can siphon your ghost runs so that they disappear before they actually warped back.

Every level should maaaaybe be possible to complete in a single run, if only just. I’m not sold on that though because it seems like it could limit the level design. There should definitely be some kind of bonus for completely clearing the level of all enemies, no matter how many times you have to warp. These two things are in tension.

The whole concept came to me after I played Braid, and from watching more skilled players shuffle their ships through the beautiful onscreen patterns that difficult bullet hell shooters tend to have, especially at the higher levels. I had a very barebones proof of concept of the main mechanic working at one point in FlashPunk, which tells you how long ago it was. I think the premise has some value though. I mean, I’d play it.

Myths & Legends MMORPG

A replica of our planet, where you can play as either a hero or creature from ancient mythology. Your choice is limited by your location, so you can learn about the stories of cultures that previously inhabited your location.

Who or what you are affects the world around you, and players could join to expand their 'nation' into other countries, giving birth to new mythological creatures and heros based on how the cultures mix.

A giant but fun mythology lesson, effectively!

- Prototype 3, or a good spiritual successor. I really liked the first two games, and would like to have more.

- Ground Control 3, or a good spiritual successor. I played this game a lot, especially when I was younger. I never really found something like it again. The gameplay was great, especially since I never really liked resource gathering in RTS. The completely free camera was great too, exploring the inside of buildings or being side by side with the units while they were fighting was a lot of fun. With a mission editor and a cooperative multiplayer (share unit control?), it would be perfect. The music was incredibly good too.

- Minecraft but actually made for modding. Having the updates of the game more like what Rimworld does (mostly backwards compatibly, opt in, actual gameplay content and not fluff). Right now it's always a bit of a pain, and it's easy to run into performance issues even on a small modded server.

- Better ways to find games. Right now I'm relying on searches (google & reddit, sometimes HN), word of mouth mostly from friends and the Steam queue (which itself is either terrible, or I'm too cynical about new games).

Edit: also, something new and unique by StreumOn. EYE: Divine Cybermancy is one of my favorite game ever, and I want more.

Going to be weird and list a non-video game.

I want to play IRL role-playing games where the challenges are physical. Archery, swimming, hiking, treasure hunting, capture the flag, laser tag, city bicycle baton race.

It can be organized online and have leagues in major cities, with training weekly, minor events monthly, and larger events on quarterly and yearly timescales.

It would keep me active, help me meet friends, be extremely fun and engaging, and I actually want to do this.

Thinking of calling it Adventure League.

Not a big gamer so apologies if it exists.

I feel like Pokémon go style games are massively underexploited.

Not just augmented reality but using cities as playgrounds. Nokia did some interesting things with this in the late 90s.

A fps might be problematic, but what about non violent trading (certain locations have mines etc, you can use resources to construct factories visible in augmented reality etc.) essentially a parallel world economy and reality that sits atop the physical word.

Reverse tower defense. You choose the lineup of units to run through the opponents gauntlet.

I want some kind of "space habitat simulator" where I can see what it would look like to be on a ringworld, or a Culture orbital, or other sci-fi habitats (a spindle? Dyson sphere?)

Something like Elite Dangerous so you can fly around it or visit the surface. (ED has rotating asteroid parking garages, maybe you can walk around them by now.)

Just something with realistic (!) scale, lighting, atmospheric effects etc., rather than just an arch painted across a skybox.

A game about organizing against a neofascist oligarchy in a future America? But it's turn based and more strategic, not an RPG with missions. Call it Rise Up.

"Rebuild a wartorn country", the game. Could be an entire country, could be as small as a Many games have this as a scenario (ie, "save this terribly designed city" in cities skylines) or as a minigame ("rebuild a castle for use in the final act" in Neverwinter Nights 2), but I rarely see it as an entire game. It might be very difficult to balance though, since success would tend to snowball really hard.

A first person squad-based shooter -- think Squad, Battlefield, or even something on a smaller scale like CounterStrike -- where the strategy aspect is managed by an AI and the players just have to execute.

In other words, two AI "commanders" (perhaps along with separate AI "squad leaders") duke out the battle with the players being simply pawns. I've always imagined it in a WWII setting, but I suppose really any setting could work.

Imagine -- you spawn in, and your commander tasks your squad with taking control of a church in a nearby village. You and your fellow squad members enter the village and come under machine gun fire. A teammate tags the window where they saw the fire coming from. You all take cover, as the squad leader starts barking commands -- a few squad members stay back and start providing suppressing fire, while you and some others start advancing slowly, hopping from cover to cover. A teammate is hit, and another is tasked with dragging him to safety. You and the few others still advancing finally get to be in range to toss a grenade in that window. You peek from cover, grenade in hand... to see a tank rounding the corner down the road. You tag the tank, and chaos ensues as the squad leader screams at you to retreat. A mortar squad in a nearby section of the map is alerted to the tank and starts dropping mortars as you fall back to your original position, explosions and bullets flying all around you.

Your squad regroups, a few members down, but the strategy is adjusted and you go back in, eventually destroying the tank, capturing the church, and getting control of the village.

At the same time of this battle, similar battles are potentially unfolding in other parts of a larger map, as the attacking and defending commanders dynamically wage war.

Sometimes I want to think strategy in games, but sometimes I just want to shoot stuff. I think if executed properly this could strike a good balance of both reaching meaningful objectives and also focusing on dynamic, moment-to-moment action. Games like Squad can be great -- if you can find a good squad leader or group to play with consistently. As I get older I find I don't really have time for that, and the probability of getting matched with a good squad leader by chance is pretty low. The setup of this game minimizes the risks of poor teamplay and makes the "Squad" sort of experience more accessible.

GTFO: a 2-player side scrolling game where one player controls a stick person trying to run, jump, climb, or swim to the other side of the level.

The other player plays the environment and tries to smite the first player and thwart their escape attempt by creating deadly natural disasters along the way, but can’t directly attack or interact with the other player.

Players are scored based on how far the escapee gets through the board and how quickly the environment kills the other player.

An escaping player might want to quickly parkour between buildings by jumping the gap between the roofs. However, if the environment player had already clicked the ground and planted a tree between the buildings, they could then call down lightning on to the tree to fry the jumping escapee. The escapee might then try to climb down the building to walk under the tree before climbing back to the roof to sprint over the tops of buildings again. Picking a more exposed path with fewer obstacles lets the escapee move more quickly but also offers less protection from the environment.

It’d be a two-player competitive side scrolling action game, where one player controls the course environment, which is something I’ve never seen before.

Serum is an FPS RPG game focusing on survival and PvP. Players compete against each other gathering Serum and Relics.

The planet Cronus contains the most valuable and energy dense fuel humanity has ever discovered, Serum. The controlling federation has prohibited unauthorized mining. With the recent discovery of inter-dimensional travel those restrictions have become impossible to enforce. Individuals and factions have begun jumping between universes to simultaneously reap what remains of Cronus.

You are a reaper of Cronus. You command a ship along with a regenerative droid that you control from orbit. The droid is deployed from your ship onto Cronus. The mission is to extract as much Serum from the species of Cronus.

You are not alone. Others have again started reaping Cronus. Although split across multiple universes, chances are you will come in contact with another reaper. Be wary, the Serum you collect can be extracted from your droid. Trust noone.

The technology that powers your droid is also fueled by Serum. To prolong your harvest make sure to keep enough Serum in reserves to power your droid. If your droid dies or runs out of Serum a new one will be created and dropped back onto Cronus.

I always dreamed of creating a MUD which would have one world split over two totally seperate servers (and even advertised as two separate MUDs). The players on one server would appear as NPCs to the players in the other MUD and vice-versa. This would lead to whole range of interesting interactions as the players on one MUD would see "NPCs" behave "intelligently", even attacking them proactively etc.

An (open-world?) Star Wars stealth game where you play as R2-D2. You can hack computers, fly spacecraft, sabotage equipment, take sensor readings, and generally engage in the same kinds of creative shenanigans you see in the movies. I'm picturing a heavy element of movement-based puzzles - how to get to that platform? I'm baffled that this isn't already a thing, outside of mayyyybe Lego Star Wars.

I want a multiplayer fast-paced rythm-based parkour FPS platformer, something like a combination of Ghostrunner and Quake that rewards bonuses for moving or shooting on the beat of the in-game music. Even better if you also add rewards for flashy/picturesque kills like DmC. It'll be a wild combination of high-adrenaline shooting and platforming that also challenges your rythm sense - the best dance game ever!

Old school arena shooter with a focus on different movement styles. I want to see quake rocket jumpers facing off against tribes jetpackers against realCTF tractor beamers against unreal teleporters against any other thing you can imagine. I want to see the whole world of FPS movement mixed together in the the most insane ways. A small set of elegant weapons with no spam, and the rest of the focus on movement.

1. Like minecraft, but not blocky, allowing one to build all kinds of contraptions, circuits, mechanisms.

2. Something like Life is Strange, but with a game time of 2-3 weeks where the NPCs actions and responses intelligently evolve over time, leading to even larger choice branches.

3. Anything Mongol related.

4. Truly immersive language learning game, where you can learn a language from NPCs at any time period in history: Tang dynasty China, Heian Japan, etc.

I want a stratrgy game in which:

- Player plays as either the emperor or the central gov

- Takes a faction mode: each faction may control a few positions in the gov and in military. Each may also control certain economic interests. Each faction has its own opinion for each matter so they may agree on one thing but disagree on another. Each faction also have children factions but they may switch loyalty if too much conflict of interests.

- Delay of information: information has speed and tech advance will increase the speed. But essentially it's difficulty for the central to directly control everything so they have to send officials. But there are complications: 1) Locals might want their own officials, 2) Official belong to certain faction and his appointment is usually a compromise

- Every policy moves through the land tree with a speed and may be blocked if the locals or governor dislikes it. As the Emperor or the central you need to find ways to move policies to as many places as possible.

I feel like this model represents the real world more or less and are far superior than even the most complicated strategy games. But it's very difficult to build.

MOO1 was such a good game, and I haven't played anything else (aside from the remakes) as good.

I'd like some really good extensions to the basic model:

- endgame planets are kinda all the same. Specific resources to make them more interesting? Pick different ways of customizing the world?

- Civ resources get "revealed" on the map when a relevant tech needing them appears. This changes the balance of power / usefulness of cities/worlds. MOO2 had deep mining. MOO1 only kind of has this with techs that enable landing on previously uninhabitable worlds.

- a 3d map, and more varied navigation challenges than the binary is / is not in nebula. Black holes? subspace barriers?

- wormholes that appear/are discoverable would change the topology mid-game as well. Or parallel universes with different accessibilities. precursor stargates.

- kind of like how "builds" are done in rpgs, techs or culture can change the fundamental properties/abilities of your race.

- trade sucks in almost all 4x I've seen, yet it is a dominant concern in real life.

- visible worlds, brown dwarfs and other usable systems often aren't visible until you get close. Stars hidden by gas clouds, etc. Hidden outer worlds like nemesis.

- a little bit of surface customization, MOO2's/civ-style buildings is... ok, but a bit overdone and lends itself to "build everything on the big planets". Maybe terraforming sections of the planet in specific ways is better. Might be too much detail.

It would be fun to tinker with RoTP and 1oom when I get the chance.

Almost at Dwarf Fortress + space + no man's sky + 4x at this point.

I want a mix of Stardew Valley and Pokemon - where you have to cultivate crops in a foreign world with 6 seasons - and the crops attract & feed different creatures which you can catch and use to battle to further unlock more seeds (crops) & farm tech (cultivation) - which ultimately leads to even more creatures - until you are finally strong enough to beat the equivalent of The Elite Four.

One with really deep interactions with fictional characters. Imagine a visual novel but instead of having 10 endings there are countless endings.

OP here - super awesome to see such amazing responses and unique game ideas and variations.

Struggling to keep track of how to run through all the conversations. I did find this tool which helps zoom into sub-threads. https://trungdq88.github.io/hn-big-threads/index.html

Any other tool recommendations?

“Earthquake” : You are randomly assigned an identity, could be male, could be female, could be any age or ethnicity. Your generated identity could be at any stage of life, doing practically anything from laundry, to getting married, to engaging in violent crime or performing medical surgery.

Whatever country you live in, the city this occurs in is the largest, most local that also experiences earthquakes. A magnitude 9 quake hits, pretty much leveling the city. The entire earthquake itself is a massive pre-calculated physically accurate simulation of what that city would actually experience, including at least a week of after quakes.

The first game level is simply surviving the quake. Where ever you are, your situation is different, but it’s all playing out in “bullet time” - slower than normal with visual streaks from motions. The initial quake is at least 1 minute long, 5–10 minutes in “bullet time”. After a quake ends, time is normal, but every aftershock it’s “bullet time” again.

If you die, you died this incarnation of the game. If you died an impossible to recover death, you get randomly assigned a new identity. If your death was preventable, you live that same life again. If you are trapped, you are trapped and you must get someone’s attention to rescue you, while whatever injuries you’ve received accumulate against your life reserve keeping you alive. If you survive, what you do next is up to you.

The game starts over every day/hour or whatever frequency makes sense, playing out until the last person quits/dies or the after quakes end, about a week of simulation time. It’s massively multi-player.

It’s like “Groundhog’s Day”, the movie, but with life or death circumstances for everyone. There’s modding capabilities for people to implement objects, so EMT techs, police, criminals, and everyday people’s various tools actually operate.

Due to the open ended capability of modding, there might be a need for a separate ‘Earthquake in Alice’s Wonderland’ after a while, but the game needs to be created first.

A separate, parallel mini-game is the ‘outside journalists’: an excuse for people to create ‘news clips’ of themselves or any other player’s activities framed in a “news reporter over the shoulder explainer” clip. These are fed into a teaser streaming channel anyone can view, playing the game or not.

FWIW, I left the game industry. So, if you want to make this game, please do.

I want more games like It Takes Two, where you can play in the couch with your partner some minutes AND where u have a story.

And more coop games with story.

Starcraft 2.

Only partially joking. The story continuation was such a letdown I personally consider it not-yet-made.

That's probably not what you wanted, but in slightly similar vein, the indie title "Unepic" had a very neat collection of mechanics and skills which were largely left untapped due to what seems to have been the developer failing in patience/endurance in the second half. One of those features was a quite extensive ability to put things on keybindings. Which brings me to my only suggestion which might actually be on topic:

What if you were to put a lot of effort into making the interface easy to customize, deeply, preferably live. Then you'd push the players to use it, possibly creating something of a game mechanism in coping with disparate tasks in the process. Also encourage publishing and forking. I'm not sure it even matters much whether it's a global defense simulator, platformer or sim (and indeed, why not all of them and more), but I'd be very interested to see what it evolves into.

I want a game where you can discover aspects of how you can control the world through a kind of programming-magic that lets you modify and control things. You discover information in the world and it lets you build up spells/scripts that do things for you. Not so much a "hacking game" but a kind of modern magic system. Mixing fantasy and cyberpunk ideas.

Surprised no AAA studio has had a shot making a really polished high production multiplayer survival game. Whenever a new one comes out they usually sell a couple million copies within a month with next 0 marketing, from a small company with probably less than like 2 dozen employees.

Both Valheim and V Rising have sold millions off nothing but word of mouth and a hunger for the genre.

Cities: skylines but with no private transport - no regular roads etc.

Also, more scope for political economic choices, in particular state owned enterprises, cooperatives, etc. There's real world evidence they behave differently in how they invest, weather recessions, and so on.

It'd be neat to be able to build trade links with different partner countries who have ideological outlooks, too.

Some very late-to-the-thread game ideas, feel free to use them or laugh at them. If you do make mega millions from one of them, please remember me!

2 player local co-op. Shoot em up. Top down. One player drives a tank with a forward facing gun, controls gun and countermeasures too. Other player controls the turret, main gun, and missiles. You roam around and baddies drive/fly at you in random patterns and with random tactics. No fixed attack patterns!

Another one: side-on party co-op qwop fighting game. One pair of people per combatant. One person controls legs, the other controls arms.

And another: strategy game where combat is resolved by solving word and math problems. Can handicap one player by giving them harder puzzles, so a 10 year old could fight a 50 year old.

Another: top down space shooter. Co-op, players' ships are tethered together and can swing each other around, think Asteroid style boosts. Powerups can change tether attributes, players can combo together for more powerful attacks.

Not saying they're good ideas, just ideas!

I want an ethic around team-based multiplayer games.

Games like League of Legends, Overwatch, DotA, etc. are amazing in terms of their strategic depth, variety, and power fantasy. However, the culture around them consistently gets to a narrow-minded, unfun state. What's needed is something like the ideal of "sportsmanship" in real-life sports.

A game that is based on age of empires but played as a single unit from first person perspective. It could be multiplayer with a player controlling the game in the traditional way, giving orders etc. Mundane tasks that villagers normally do such as collecting chopping wood, fishing and collecting berries would be turned into mini games.

For example, when picking berries you would have to balance them on the palm of your hand and they would roll around. If you dropped them you would have to chase after and recollect them before dropping them off at the mill. There would also be a possibility an insect might try and attack you, you you poke your finger on a thorn. There could be some type if points system and high score system that could be involved for these mini games.

I couldn't see this game as being enjoyable or entertaining for more then a few minutes, but I like the idea of RTS games being played from a FPS perspective and I like the the idea of less serious arcade style games.

A sequel to Goldeneye by the same team. Perfect dark just wasn't as good and it wasn't James Bond!

Yes timesplitters was close but not quite!

A WW2 airplane mail delivery sim.

1. A random point on a random map is selected and populated with objects to make it a mail delivery objective.

2. The player flies there and faces random enemy aircraft or vehicles en-route or in the objective area.

3. The player needs to survive and land to deliver the mail, and is awarded points for hits on enemies and successful landing criteria like how many pieces are missing from the airplane.

4. Expanding this to cooperative missions, points are divided between players, and bonuses are applied when both survive and land successfully.

5. Daily custom missions are published (like Noita’s daily runs) that players can try once, and since games like IL-2 have excellent mission recording features, it would be entertaining to see the final 5-to-10 seconds automatically recorded with the option of sharing the way you lost one of your wheels on landing.

More info: https://hypertexthero.com/combat-air-mail/

Pokemon Legends Arceus is pretty close to the Pokemon game I always wanted

Avatar the last Airbender in VR. I maintain that this is the single best medium for an experience like that to be expressed through.

I want a co-op RTS and FPS/TP game.

Imagine one player is playing a game like Total War Three Kingdoms, and on the same team your friends are playing something like Dynasty Warriors. So you are doing all the high level RTS control while your friends are actually fighting on the front lines.

There has been games that have come close but all the ones I've tried have really lacked depth on either the RTS side (you only control maybe 30 units) or the first / third person side. The technical issue is you have to create almost two separate games and sync / balance them.

I just think it would be so cool to be playing a game controlling thousands of units and your friends happen to just be 3 or 4 of them. You could make it either Dynasty Warrior style where your friends are far stronger than normal units or something like Arma where you can die from one stray bullet no different than any other AI unit.

Setting could be medieval, fantasy, space, or modern military. Wouldn't really matter to me.

I want to take cyberpunk 2077 and get rid of the current story, then replace it with I Am Legend on an epic scale.

I would settle for the omega man.

I want a game somewhere halfway between an MMORPG and a MOBA. Like an MMO in a bottle, or a Massive MOBA. A good example of this may be Alterac Valley from World of Warcraft but on a bigger scale.

Two sides, each side has 100 to 500 people, and the map is the size of 10 WOW zones. The game lasts some limited amount of time, with some forcing function similar to the shrinking map in Fortnight.

There are all the different kind of activities you may perform in an MMO; Dungeons, mobs, quests, crafting; You start as level one and you could play the entire thing PVE solving quests or you can be PVP or somewhere in between as like a rogue that is sabotaging the other side. But everything you do helps your side or hurts the other side. Every quest you do may gain resources for your side or help your army grow bigger, or help arm your team. (You could go find special weapons, or just gain resources to help all people on your team get progressively bigger weapons).

A game where you make home improvements and have to manage a budget. Resources would be that you have a family which has a specific amount of time they can spend on tasks, and expenses, such as electricity, home heating oil, car payments, buying new windows, etc. Tasks like buying new windows would result in less energy costs, or something like a dishwasher would allow you to spend less time doing dishes at higher energy costs. I want "Home Economics: The Game" so that kids will actually learn about home economics stuff. Random events could include global warming, supply chain shortages, etc... There could definitely be a "fun" mode where fun things happen rapidly and events like your house getting haunted or SCP sorts of events take place, or a simulation mode where you might do awesome or you might end up selling your kidneys after getting that basket weaving degree or reading this post on hacker news.

I always wanted some kind of game that was kind of like minecraft tekkit (modpack that allows you to use technology to make futuristic things) meets FPS and also MMORPG. I imagine it would be a game where you would have to find resources to build things, but also have to defend yourself from other players and build bases. In the game there would be multiple nations / teams who would be at war with each other, and there would be a map of the game that would be divided into sections. Each section would have different resources, and players would have to travel to different sections to find the resources they need. The game would be extremely open world and there would be no set objectives, so players could do whatever they wanted. There would be diplomacy between the different nations, base building and resource collection, first person shooters and strategic missions as well as an in game economy.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced like game but with a procedurally generated infinite map and some sort of re-skilling mechanic so that you don't have to constantly swap jobs before leveling just to minmax the early game where you don't have access to all jobs yet. Also adding co-op multiplayer so one can play with friends.

Apollo lunar landing simulator, with optional VR glasses mode.

It would include the rocketry part, spacewalks, airlock operation, moon car, etc.

Bugs

Control the environment. Ressourcen and parameters.

Seed bugs.

Have an timedial to speed up time into the future. See how they evolve and if they survive / become dominant spieces.

Could include winning challenges that some seeds of bugs might from an in game or other players competing spieces.

Should invovle "real" artificial evolution. Mutation rate als adjustable.

I love evolution games, not enough of them out there.

Don't know what it would be called but a yin and yang mashup of Cities and Skylines and GTA.

You play against your two selves, and flip back and forth between two modes. In "mayor" mode you have the birds-eye view and you are trying to build a functioning and safe city for your citizens.

Then at any time you can flip to "street" view, where you are no longer mayor, but a criminal leader. Here you are trying to expand your criminal network and evade police.

If the "mayor" your reduces crime to near 0 then doing anything as the "mobster" you will be extremely difficult. If the "mobster" you is super successful then the mayor has a very poor rating, and citizens complain of crime. This should also have physical change to the look of the city as well (graffiti, car's on blocks on the streets, cars with smashed windows, stores with smashed windows, or boarded up, parks generally trashed).

I want the game that Spore was hyped up to be. a fully immersive evolutionary test bed. from single celled organisms and on.

As a kid I loved Choplifter on the Sega Master System. I'd imagine all sorts of scenarios to make it more fun.

Combine that game with Starcraft/Command and Conquer. A side scrolling 2D RTS game.

Two sides, a river in the middle. Build up your base (which would extend underground as well as horizontally) and build Helicopters, jets, missles/nukes, tanks, boats (which you can manually take control of at any time).

Goal is to take out the "Leader" of the other side. If you've played Choplifter you know the "people" were tiny little squishy things that you could kill by just landing on. Your workers and soldiers and Leader are all extremely vulnerable squishy guys. Of course defensively you'd position your "leader" as deep underground as possible, or in a building surrounded by anti-aircraft missiles, etc.

Mainly a 2 player, 1 vs1 game, but more than 2 players possible if the world wrapped around.

Star Trek Armada 3

Great RTS Star Trek games, but the license got lost in beancounter hell at some point. Can't even buy the old games anymore

E: oh damn 2 is on GOG now. That's my weekend sorted! https://www.gog.com/game/star_trek_armada_ii

Games, and media in general, that respect the theory of relativity.

All we have had so far is Europa Universalis with a space skin. Nothing can ever travel faster than light, that's how the world actually works. Children of a Dead Earth was in the direction of what I want but I got bored quickly because it's orbital dynamics puzzles.

I would love a MMORPG game that had sufficient story arcs without feeling like the effort is meaningless. For example, a game situated in a constant universe where the entire player base became an alien race trying to survive on their planet. Time would of course have to be faster than 1:1, so players would inhabit lineages of family units, and new players would be 'born' into their own lineages branching off of already established ones. Actual extinction events would wipe out the civilization, and so efforts could be made to leave caches in the stars or in orbit of small moons for future civilizations (probably the same players) to go retrieve. The biggest issue I can see with this concept is that most of the content would either have to be generated by the creator (e.g. something bigger than an extinction level event), or arbitrarily by the participants.

I want a game that combines both RTS and FPS elements. In every multiplayer FPS I know of, you are grouped with teammates and are working towards common objective(s) (counter strike games). But I want a hierarchy with one person who can't see the battlefield and only a minimap of team and sighted enemy locations. And all the normal teammates can only communicate with nearby players. The closest thing I have come across is the Natural Selection[1] games which has this distinction of a leader and then the soldiers, but it seems to be a dead game. I know some other games have similar ideas of classes, but I don't think anybody executes the partial information of a lead strategist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Selection_(video_game)

Thief, but updated with 2022 technology, but also actually good unlike the recent Thief remake that people hated.

I've been dying for a cyber punk or Sci fi loot based ARPG. All the ones that exist are some flavor of fantasy with the exception of Borderlands and Destiny, but those are FPSs and I prefer the Diablo/Path of Exile approach.

I keep thinking about a mech based ARPG where you can attach different components to your mech that grant different passive/active abilities. Maybe different mech styles that have different passive abilities, but, in the spirit of Path of Exile, the components you equip are not limited by class.

I'm just tired of all ARPGs doing Gothic fantasy horror type stuff when there's so many unexplored options that could revitalize the genre. Give me lightsabers instead of swords, guns instead of bows, and drones instead of totems. Let me fight in cities and spaceships instead of villages and castles. There's just so much you can do with Sci fi.

One of my favorite games is Lords of the Realm II (1996). It's a medieval 4X game with turn-based county management and real time battles. I've always wanted a game on that framework, but with way more complex management, and battles where you can zoom in to play a single soldier, or zoom out to play tactics.

Maybe a boring answer, but free software versions of games I enjoyed in the past are mostly what I want.

Graal Online, Maplestory, Terraria, Starbound, Minecraft (there are a few clones already), Rust, CS:GO, Super Smash Bros, Splatoon, Animal Crossing, Rockman.exe, maybe something like Prototype or Ultimate Spider-Man with fun physics so you can swing around and do whatever.

A free recreation of Graal Online would be especially cool as the content was all player-made with the available development tools. They just let the PC version of the game wither and die. If someone just made a solid base, a community could form to make the actual stuff to do. I've heard people compare Graal to BYOND/SS13, although I never experienced those. There's SS14 now, but it seems pretty focused on... space station stuff. I don't know that it's similar enough to Graal for me.

I must admit, I don't know what games are out there these days, but I want an adventure game like the original King's Quest, Space Quest, Hero's Quest, etc. but with modern graphics, of course. It is important that they be language-driven, like the originals, but taking advantage of modern nlp.

An airport simulator game. You have to manage aircraft, prices, service, security, disasters, policy, economy etc.

I was talking with some friends the other day about EVE Online and its failed console shooter counterpart DUST 514. the premise was going to be that both games take place in the same shared universe with the same shared economy and at some point console shooter players would be able to in some way participate in conflicts that affect things for the PC space/economy sim players. it didn't really pan out that way, and to this day the only lasting legacy of DUST 514 is its brief appearance in John Wick.

the idea of having multiple games, each with its own separate playstyle (and therefore player demographic), that are connected somehow by a shared economy and game-world, is endlessly fascinating to me, and I don't know why more attempts at this have been made yet, aside from obvious design complexity issues.

An educational platform game where you can draw platforms by plotting the graphical representation of functions.

I just want to play Age of Empires 2 on AR on a table, with tiny armies battling it out. I have seen games like that exist but I want them to look like cool, not headache inducing. Something that invokes my Indian in the Cupboard memories (other than bloodshed or a permanent sense of loss of life :))

An FPS set in sub-Saharan Africa (read: not just Far Cry 2). Ideally, something like ARMA.

It has an incredibly rich and varied terrain, with many iconic animals, great beauty, and many cultures (including their histories and mythologies). It'd make an amazing setting.

I don't know why sub-Sahara isn't used in games.

A racing game based on Google Street View

A co-op RPG set in a procedurally generated open world covered in hostile wilderness, designed to simulate the kind of Dungeons and Dragons setting where settlements are rare, the road network is thin, and the monsters are always roaming and threatening to extinguish the candle of civilization.

Honestly just any game where I can craft my own custom spells and take on hordes of enemies. Very satisfying.

Black Ops Zombies but with an insane amount more depth:

- We're talking things like skill trees.

- Levels that take hardcore amounts of time to master (think like the original runescape)

- Actual good game play at higher rounds (all zombie games have this problem -- there is not enough built into the game for the player to keep going at higher rounds)

- Weapons and abilities that don't follow standard physics with weapons and hence require skill to master beyond pointing at enemies.

One thing that is really great about zombies is you have to decide how to spend your points to stay alive. Do you buy a specific power up now or wait? should you buy this weapon or save up? I think it would be cool if there were even more choices to make. These simple decisions have so many consequences that make every game unique. It's honestly really cool game design.

Different economic policy simulators. I'd like to see realistic behavior of businesses, people, and markets as a result of different policies. I want it to be a "game" because I want it to provide story-driven insights into people and businesses as the policies impact them.

It might even exist to be fair, I just can't seem to find it but a game that: - plays like Diablo (ARPG), not the most recent versions of ARPGs though, I'm talking about D1: very few frills and not-so-clogged environments, with worth-my-time enemies rather than loads-and-loads-and-loads - has the same degree of freedom Ultima Online offered, in terms of skills and character building (including non-fighting skills) - has a very medieval rather than fantasy feeling - is literally 2.5d, not 3d - is a mmorpg - user-driven economy and where guilds are UO styled groups of people sharing some sort of values, rather than endgame-oriented only

I want to be immersed in the lore and feel part of it

If it does exist, please point me in the right direction; if it doesn't, let's build it!

An implementation of (electronic) boardgames that makes use ubiquitous screens:

Ideally, everyone sits in the same room. The shared information, basically the board in a boardgame, will be displayed on a common screen. Think a ChromeCast on the wall or a iPad or laptop on the coffee table.

Your private information, basically your hand of cards or so, is displayed on your smartphone. Similar for all other players. Your phone is also where you input your moves.

This setup would fix multiple problems I am having when playing boardgames:

(1) played with cardboard bits, they are expensive to purchase, and you have to do all the tracking and 'calculation' by hand.

(2) played on phone screens only, the screen is tiny and crowded with information and there's not much shared experience apart from sitting in a room together.

(3) more importantly than just making existing game concepts more convenient, this setup allows you to make boardgame-like experiences with novel designs. Especially you can press the mechanism of simultaneous play much harder, while still allowed for interaction.

For a simple example, look at Codenames https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178900/codenames

With the computer as an arbiter, the two teams can essentially play simultaneously. And only the team leaders even need private screens / phones. (You will probably want to synchronize a bit. Eg you still have turns, but both teams can do one turn each simultaneously; then they both start the next turn simultaneously etc.)

Slightly related: I'm also really impressed by https://spyfall.adrianocola.com/ because they managed to make a computer-supported version of Spyfall, but you only need to interact with the computer once at the start of the game. Afterwards, it's all analog.

Back when I was younger there was an isometric online Sony game called infantry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry_(video_game)

Team based, but also squad based with a squad leader and various roles + vehicles.

Infantry died when they started charging (a subscription IIRC), they lost the player base, then they reverted but made it if you paid you got better armour (pay to win). Basically management killed it.

Insanely fun game, a modernised version of this with a much larger scale (say 200v200) and a commander on each team would be excellent I'm sure of it! EG, Battlefield or Hell Let Loose but far more accessible/arcade style and isometric.

I am absolutely convinced this would be a successful game!

I would like more games to explore Solarpunk worlds — something optimistic about foreseeable future of this planet.

Too many futuristic games happen in some zombie-infested radioactive wasteland or give up on this world entirely and move on to surviving on another hostile planet. I find this depressing.

Escape From Tarkov but with a streamlined interface so you spend more time inside raids than outside of them (see: Fortnite, Hunt: Showdown). Also, it must have a killcam available after the raid finishes so new players can learn positioning and you can more accurately report hackers.

A race track building/management simulator. Start with a small gravel loop, organize race events and bring in money. Bit by bit expand until you have an epic Nurburg Ring-sized complex.

Of course, there must be a tie-in with some racing game that lets you test drive your track if you wish.

I would like something missions-like where the game rewards only a player who took specific steps and then other players can't reproduce. Obviously it will require thousands of good rewards. The idea is that people can play for the sake of having something nobody can get.

I miss old school 2D MMORPGs. I'd love something with:

- beautiful & detailed pixel art (like Stardew, Hyper Light Drifter, Owlboy)

- many, amazing non-combat skills (like a tale in the desert, osrs)

- large community with many worlds / servers / regions

- holiday events

Ever now and again I go hunting for this sort of game and come up short.

Kinda like "Seeing Like a State" sim (but with less grim/more pro-state viewpoint). A god-game/Civ combo that operates on worldwide scale, but you don't get to order people around, like move meeples from farmers to scientists, or maybe even have legible pops (any more than states at a given historical stage did). Starting at the earliest stage where you are a budding city-state but not in the middle of an empty chunk of map - as with real life, most of the environments worth exploiting would already be populated, and you have to conquer/absorb/convert/assimilate/... all those peoples.

Excellent turn/reaction based squad tactical combat. Think OG XCOM: UFO defense, only 2+ players. Frozen synapse is about the 70% solution but only abstract and pretty repetitive. More players, more varied units and terrain, asymmetric fights for score, etc.

A Fantasy RPG where you can program magic spells.

Start with some foundational spells, traditionally that would be elemental spells but one could imagine those spell based on the physics engine to manipulate objects. For example, the three first spells could be Force, Mass, and Acceleration(perhaps having some cryptic word associated with them). Just using a keyword might apply a "buff" to your character, making it "stronger", "heavier", or "faster". The fun part of course would be to compose them e.g. `acceleration . mass` to inflict damage by ramming into an opponent.

I imagine the skill tree to be divided into language features and "spells"(those being associated with elements of the underlying engine). As an example, the player could unlock "variables" on one side and "Other", the ability to apply effects to objects other than yourself, on the other side. Everything limited by the resources of the player. Maybe a "magic book" system with limited space forcing you to golf your spells to put more of them in one book (therefore having more spell available out of your workshop). Engine-related spells would be limited by the player's mana. Spells could scale via the level of fundamental spells composing them. Self-applying spells could have a constant cost, while "other-applying" spells could raise the amount of mana required depending on the distance.

Actually, I don't think I would even want to fight in that game so there should be a way to level up by creating spells alone. Maybe link "XP" to an in-game object, "mana stone"-like, and make it available by fighting monsters and quests or merchants Building some kind of github-like market of spells outside of the game would create a nice community feel. The game could perhaps be multiplayer, making an in-game spell market more relevant, but the potential to break the game (figuratively and literally) makes that very hard to imagine.

I'd make that but I have to start "finishing" side projects instead of just starting new ones. Also I don't know anything about game dev

Factorio but with RTS-style units whose behavior I can program in Python/Lua/Whatever.

I wish hosties jailbreak where the T's spawned with deags on counter strike source was still around. Rebelling as a T & patrolling the utter chaos as a CT, with no central CT as warden, was some of the most fun I ever had in my life.

Secondly, I miss the glass map on CSS.

Zombies is still around. These three games, & Last Chaos MMOPRG (before the new map update) were my go-tos. Zombies %10, hosties %80, Glass %11, and Last Chaos %9 (although constantly when I got into Last Chaos). There's an extra %10 in there but simply rebalance them lol.

As a side point, camping in the vents on the olympics maps for CSS hosties jailbreak map, before people found out you could aim for the corner vent, was also incredibly fun.

Polished, complete, co-op multiplayer "FTL: Faster Than Light" for up to 8 players

I'm aware of: - an FTL mod (unfinished?), - Tachyon (work in progress?), - Undercrewed (a bit too much arcade/action and kind of short), - Among Us (but that betrayal aspect...) - Interstellar Rift (closest but too grindy, too long, the encounters leave much to be desired particularly from the perspective of a crewed ship) - Space Engineers (but requires too much understanding of how and why the ship works for some people, and doesn't really have a "series of encounters" mode I'm aware of) - Star Citizen (TBD...)

Also, just generally that co-op games would support more than 4 players.

A remake of The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. You built a maze/castle with traps, defenders, etc and your gold was stored at the end of the castle. You’d raid other castle to try and get their gold, meanwhile your castle would get raided.

Creative and new/fresh puzzle designs would keep your gold safe, meanwhile on attack you’d have to really plan and think how to move forward. There was pvp and pve, and I never felt the need to grind hours and hours because 1 good defense or attack felt rewarding.

RIP. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mighty_Quest_for_Epic_Lo...

An epic open world game where the side quests unlock only after you finish the main story :)

I would love some kind of game where spoilers on the internet don't affect the feeling of discovery within the game. It seems too easy to just look up game secrets on the internet now, and it's almost necessary to do so in order to 'keep up' with other players (mainly in an MMO type game). I don't know if something like this exists now, or how it might be done.

One idea I've been kicking around is to have some sort of disincentive to posting in-game discoveries online. For example, the usefulness or power of an item is inversely proportional to how many instances of the item have been found. Not sure if this is really feasible in practice though.

I'd like a simulation of the birth and growth of civilisation where I could change parameters and see what the different results would be.

Parameters would be things like the probability distribution of various characteristics such as aggression, intelligence, passivity, individuality and so on.

There would also be environmental factors for the planet, the availability of various resources etc.

I feel that war is the inevitable way that groups work out who is boss until we sort out some sort of world government and I worry that we never will because our nature doesn't allow it.

I know that such a simulation would be useless because of not being based on any accepted model but it would still be interesting to try.

An RTS or turn based one where all units start as villagers, but you can’t actually command them to do anything; you can only incentivize behaviors for instance by assigning cash bonuses to those actions (except for villagers who join the military, which you can order). The more they do certain actions, the more they get skilled at that action. But as the game progresses, depending on your strategy certain actions may become obsolete, or you may need to rebalance; but the more developed a villager’s skill is, the harder it is to retrain them. So basically the game would be one where the more you lean into one direction the harder it gets to pivot.

This is going to sound a bit dark...

A game version of Threads

You run a country in the run up to a nuclear war, decide on whether to attack first or wait and retaliate, survive in your bunker and get to run the county for the next 10 to 20 years

Like a long term version of Defcon.

Medieval castle building rts with 4x elements and actual siege strategies. Ie, a well thought out sieges or well thought out castle designs would allow for taking control of areas decisively or defending an area while expending few resources.

I envision an infinite game. Procedural, but only to an extent. I want it based on the internet and how it changes. Sure, you could just use the entropy of change on the internet, but it would be neat/interesting if names were also to derived from news headlines story lines. Perhaps creative image searches could compile new textures for characters and the environment. I suppose something akin to Little Big Planet, but with the ever-changing internet informing the play and world. I know that's a little vague. Hadn't locked the idea down to a particular genre of game. Perhaps a rogue-lite, given the procedural nature?

Studio Ghibli's 'Kiki's Delivery Service' as an open-world game whereupon you actually hop on your broomstick and have to deliver parcels to individuals across the village where she lives.

Think a 'crazy taxi' RPG where you fly to deliver parcels instead of passengers.

You would have to deal with issues like weather conditions, weight vs. travel time; and occasionally race against competing witches.

It's honestly a 'take my money' situation - I've considered doing it as a fan game, but I would need a small team, and of course we wouldn't be able to profit from it. I'd ultimately love to see it adopted into even a mobile game.

Battleheart Legacy 2

BHL is the perfect action adventure RPG, I just want more of it. A more expansive campaign, more plot lines, more character classes and abilities. I go back and play through BHL every 6 months or so and have done since it came out.

[Star Wars: Galaxies 2]

A sequel to the original Star Wars MMORPG. Rather than an MMO, it might actually be better as a survival game, ala ARK, Rust, or Conan Exiles. A smaller scale might make it possible to do more interesting things with the engine.

A Star Trek Bridge Commander (2002) type game on a modern engine with minimal gameplay changes.

There seems to be nothing like it since - combat with large complex ships where everything is about power management, positioning, and strategically targeting the components of other vessels.

Divert power to shields? Your weapons recharge slower. Divert power to engines? Other systems are hampered linearly. Fighting a fast ship? Target their engines. It’s tough to describe because there’s no games out there that come close.

The mod community over the years ported nearly every sci-fi ship out there from Star Wars, Stargate, BSG, etc and actually made some effort to balance them.

A David Cage-style drama with better writing and isn’t supernatural or sci-fi. He did Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, and Detroit, all of which I love, but the dialogue is pretty atrocious and the stories go off the rails by the end.

Edited for clarity

I've been thinking about simulations of public infrastructure.

For example, a game where you manage the international ingress at an airport. You design the queuing patterns, decide how many booths to staff, what to ask the travelers. You're rated on speed, cost, and so on. Think Papers, please, but instead of working one booth you're managing the whole airport, or maybe all airports across the country.

Or managing a post office. Again, you'd have multiple conflicting goals, and you have to navigate many tradeoffs.

The problem would be striking a balance between an accurate simulation and something that's not excruciatingly boring to play.

Gravity-oriented shooter where you fight on tiny planets with primitive weapons.

Because the "planets" are so small, gravity and Coriolis forces influence projectiles: hitting the enemy often requires shooting over the horizon, or relying on the planet's rotation so your spear lands in the right place.

Running fast or jumping off a tall structure can put you into low orbit. Planet sizes range from about the volume of a house to the volume of a skyscraper. Planet shape influences your tactics - cube planets have less gravity near the corners, spinning ringworlds let you jump from one side to the other, etc.

Super Mario Galaxy plus Fortnite

Something like a mix of base building and FPS action/horror. Like Fallout4 base building with STALKER athmosphere, during the day you would explore and gather useful materials then come back to the base before nightfall and put those resources into upgrading the base for defenses, like walls and turrets, then at night there would be an (increasingly difficult) assault on your base. You find the survivors and get them to join your base, they also give you quests and such. You'd also fight during the night along with your base dwellers, as an FPS action. I can elaborate more if interested.

The sailing equivalent to MS Flight Simulator.

Matrix: Operator

You take on the role of an operator (e.g. Tank) from 'The Matrix' movies to guide your team through an operation (recon, retrieve, destroy, etc... standard mission types). You have a large-scale but limited resolution view of the world where you can spot hazards if you're attentive (because they may only be briefly visible) and advise your team how to proceed (avoid, engage, abort, ...). I'm thinking of a text console oriented game, you type commands to send to the team (which they could follow, ignore, or misinterpret) rather than selecting and controlling them directly.

I want a modern version of Dune 2000 or Cossacks: Back to War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_2000

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4850/Cossacks_Back_to_War...

I guess Starcraft is the current good RTS but I find it a bit too much. Maybe it's nostalgia but I found those games a lot more approachable and fun to play. I guess I want Starcraft but set in real world.

Maybe something like this already exists?

Give me another Freespace game. I never expected to get such excellent storytelling from a space sim.

Other than that, I'd really like to get a game based on Mistborn. I think the allomancy mechanics could be very fun in a video game.

Im surprised no one thought of mixing up the strategy aspect of a masterpiece turnbased game like heroes 3 , with the character progression of Captain Tsubasa 3's rpg, thru event generators from actual battles.

The closest thing I've seen is "traits" developed by leaders in games from paradox.

1st example: Stellaris, or Xcom. However, traits are limited to being bonuses. They arent part of telling a story.

A more interesting use case was traits in crusader kings 2. There, traits, are somewhat part of the story. However, said traits are most often the result of player decisions, vs player strategy or actions.

I really want Stardew Valley but like an MMO and with more combat. I like being able to just sit on my farm and what not, but it'd be more fun with a thriving community. I also get very bored with the combat eventually. I'm thinking something with a little more magic focus too (maybe you can make spells, make the material for spells, etc, and get to decide your profession like WoW to encourage you to work with your community).

Since Stardew was created by a single (obviously very talented) dev, I always feel like I could get a first pass at this done, but free time is always an issue!

Competitive PvP game (fpp or moba) played on randomly generated intersting maps.

I hate how all this cool games have just a handful of maps that players learn by heart up to specific angles, locations, sounds and timings.

When we played Quake in lan parties we had a mappack of thousands of maps and played on one map only for some time, rarely ever comming back to the maps we already played.

This rewarded quick orientation and finding cool rewarding elements of each map quickly before your opponent manages to adapt.

In MOBA or RTS games additional thing might be the fog of war so you need to scout the new random map to find out what's there.

A driving arcade game where one player drives and the other guy shoots. It is the blend of two awesome arcade games: racing and shooters. This was the game I wished existed 25 years ago and I am still waiting for it.

Something like Darksouls but set on a space station or massive spaceship (abandoned?). Gloomy, dark, creepy, atmospheric, similar approach to level layout/design. Battling aliens and robots or just other humans.

Empire Earth 4 would be nice. I always enjoyed empire earth 1 and 2 more than Age of Empires - not sure why exactly.. maybe the speed was a little slower, maybe AoE did not have religious takeovers and empire earth did?

Maybe it was getting super effecient with just a few keyboard shortcuts to select all X on the screen and things like that.

Maybe it's because I enjoyed populus on the Amiga..

but any way - it was fun to play single player vs computer and fun to play against other humans. Can't recall if we ever did LAN playing or not, but should.

I would buy copies if it was out today and try to get others to play it as well.

A proper gregtech (4/5) successor. Everyone finds that factorio scratches their industrial engineering itch. I still yearn for 3D routing and exponential density improvements. By using basic combinational and sequential logic and clever 3D layouts you could really capture a lot of space and material efficiency. That kind of gameplay is totally missing from factorio. The other 3D industrial games don't seem to quite nail it. The gregtech successors also don't quite nail it.

I have to credit GT in inspiring the direction of my career. I wish there were more games like it.

I feel like I just want an old-school mystery game that takes deductive logic to its limits. Awesome graphics, great story, and lots of clues, where if you struggle to combine new clues (premises) and they're not otherwise needed, they'll disappear and be replaced with a lemma/therefore/derived-clue that gets you closer to your end goal. Ultimately it would be a whole bunch of dressing on top of those grid logic puzzles, but where the system role-plays it and helps give you more clues if you spend too much time struggling with those certain hard parts.

I want a language learning VR game where the goal is to interact with AI's such that you understand their instructions and they yours. Very much as if you were a child having to learn while playing with adults.

I want a heist-like (or maybe Hitman-like) game that has significant social interactions. Specifically where NPCs can decide whether or not to trust you, based on freeform speech input. Could be text NLP, or speech recognition.

I love the idea of bouncing around people at a cocktail party, trying to deduce some important secret that no individual will reveal, at least not unless you act that you already know. Maybe you've gatecrashed some kind of Hannibal Lecter party, and everyone but you knows who the next victim is, so you have to discover who/where/when and prevent it.

1) Games should be able to operate in more moral ambiguity than clear black and white prescription

2) Game mechanics should violate your expectations more.

3) More variations on theme see https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/gsg-content/uploads/2018/...

most games operate in a very narrow rangen of expectations that lead to a staid and predictable experience. Almost all first-person games suffer from this sort of homogenization.

A modern single-player Ultima franchise game

I want something that involves advanced science, but doesn't feel forced.

A grand strategy game, that my friends will be willing to play.

I love Paradox games, but none of my friends are willing to play a game that involves staring at maps and reports for hours on end.

That or something like the old Mount and Blade: With Fire and sword conversion.

I love musket warfare games, but they either feel too realistic and immersive (War of Rights) or too much like multiplayer FPS (Holdfast).

With Fire and Sword though has mount an blade tactical mechanics, but is also arcade-y and fun to play without devolving into multiplayer nonsense. Update that with a modern engine and FPS mechanics and it could be great.

An adventure game, of the old style with a plot to solve, like Police Quest, Rise of the Dragon, Space Quest, Pandora Directive, and such, but with 3D graphics in the style of a first person shooter game (like CoD, Quake, Halo, and such), and, why not, some chances to be involved in the ocassional shootout (in fuller FPS mode, but only as a rare break from plot solving, like old adventures would have some action sequence or logic puzzle to solve, not as a big part of the game)...

Don't know why they never really merged adventure games with FPS graphics...

I want Else Heart.Break(), but with more plot, less bugs, better programming language and bigger, deeper world to explore. Possibly, with multiplayer, though I'm not sure it would bring much into game

I'm just here waiting for the matrix. Metaverse type content is pretty clearly the future of gaming, but VR doesn't cut it. What we need is a dream like state we can plug into for full immersion.

I've wanted something that merges the 3D martial arts combat of Bungie's old game Oni with the freerunning environmental exploration of Mirror's Edg3.

Bonus points for multiplayer mode, hand-to-hand weapons, and just a little more granularity in the hand-to-hand combat engine (when Barrabas would hold you up in the air dangling for a full second before uppercutting you into the stratosphere, it always seemed like you should have been able to kick him in the face). Decent enemy AI would be important (Oni's was not especially good).

iNaturalist as a Pokémon Go style game.

- take photos of animals/plants/fungi, upload them to iNaturalist, and submit a correct identification in order to "capture" them.

- the initial CP of your "captured pet" is determined by the most granular, correct identification you can make before other iNaturalists chimed in.

- synergies for collecting "pets" within the same taxon group or with known mutualistic symbiosis

- virtual battles between "pets", with special relative strengths/weaknesses depending on some kind of "domain" of the pets.

A real time strategy game like Wargame or WARNO[1] but using REAL 3D map data from Apple/Google maps. So you could have a massive scale ground and air war using real map data in say, the south bay area. You could garrison an infantry unit in you house or call in an air strike on your office building. This is something I have wanted for like 10 years lol

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1611600/WARNO/

- A modern equivalent of Wing Commander, Freelancer or Tie Fighter with a strong story line and in depth controls (but ideally would be playable with a modern gamepad)

- A remake of Sid Meier's Pirates! But with realtime action basically Mount and Blade but at sea.

- A realistic wilderness survival sim without silly supernatural or horror elements, the point is just to stay alive and either get rescued or walk out

[Edit with more thoughts] - WW1 aerial combat sim (basically Red Baron with modern graphics)

- Subnautica but set in space perhaps the wreckage of a space station in an astroid belt

I game in which I would generate, color and transform a natural looking landscape by either thinking about it (preferably), or by moving my body or hands, singing, etc - whatever. With undo please.

[Tactical Warfare]

You create a set of complex processes/tactical moves that is then simulated by computers to play against other players. This could be a small team in something like call of duty, where you choose your bots equipment, and decisions they would make for scouting/in combat/etc. Then the teams of bots play against other players bots to see who wins. You can then review footage of your bots against other teams to identify weaknesses and "re-program" them to try again. Leaderboard are how you see progress.

A massive online game where one person is "The Beast" and thousands of villagers are tasked at slaying the beast. The Beast can choose between a multitude of powers without the others knowing what these powers are. The villagers can choose from a multitude of tools / weapons in order to slay the beast.

Once selected, these are locked in and concludes what both sides have to work with. If the villagers don't have the right tool set(s), it may be impossible for them to win.

From there, it's all about defining the powers of both sides.

It's called 'State Street Dodge'. You play a bicycle messenger in 1990s downtown Madison, Wisconsin, rushing important legal documents across the isthmus. You ride a super sweet freestyle BMX bike, and you rack up points for doing tricks, jumping beer truck ramps, riding up walls, and dodging the ever shifting throngs of college students, hayseed tourists, and harried bureaucrats. Bonus levels let you switch to skateboard, Rollerblades, and fixie. Soundtrack is awesome. Lots of Easter eggs.

DayZ with WWI biplanes.

Also a massive, singular world where people who were playing an FPS, people playing Railroad Tycoon, and people playing flight sims were all playing simultaneously in the same MMO world.

I want an arbitrary daily life menial task sim, in VR, with crypt of the necrodancer rhythm mechanics. Something about doing simple things in discrete movements to a beat sounds very fun to me.

I really wish Twilight Imperium would drop a 5th edition, additional factions, or another modifying expansion.

If you're an open minded nerd, I highly recommend this is like 10 hour board game. It's an excellent detox from your laptop, a balance of hardcore strategy and fun, and great way to socialize with a committed crew.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/233078/twilight-imperium...

A VR game with solid Souls-like combat. Block, poke, slash, slam, flick, roll & jump using buttons :), and explore the heck out of a huge world with massive detail. Basically Elden VRing.

I enjoyed space-trading games back in the BBS days, but somehow MMORPG blew those out of the water because people will play 20+ hrs per day and skew the economies into country-sized alliances (`Eve` I'm looking at you). No Man's Sky sort of picked up on that, but it had too much going on. Maybe both of those games were the pinnacle of the genre and I just didn't have the patience, but it seems to me there could be something large-scale that appeals to casual gamers as much as die-hard farmers.

I've been thinking about a life-sim type game with a rogue legacy type spin.

Basically you get N actions per day (3, 5, 7, whatever works) that depend on your characters age. You might start as a baby in some random family archetype (poor/rich, dumb/smart, lazy/athletic, etc.) and after a few years you get control of the daily decisions your character makes at a granular level. Like, study in the morning, play in the afternoon, watch TV in the evening. These are more "influences" and your character can kind of rebel. Like if it gets too stressed because you are forcing it to study/work all the time then the character has a stress break and maybe gets drunk in the evening.

As the character gets older the available tasks change. As a toddler its games and light-learning, as a pre-teen it is school and sports/hobbies, as a teen it is education and social activities, as a young adult part-time jobs or university, as an adult marriage, raising kids. Perhaps as you get older you get more actions e.g. N actions per day increases.

Eventually you get to retirement then death and then you can choose one of your kids to continue the legacy. Or you can start over with a new random kid in a random family.

The gameplay would be simply choosing one of a few options available to your character at each time step. So you have N time steps per day and M available actions. The M actions are chosen in a weighted random manner from a set based on your characters abilities which changes over time, maybe some light RPG skill tree system. Could possibly be managed with a "card" system as well and would possibly shoe horn into Slay the Spire type mechanics. Overtime both positive abilities and negative abilities compound. Like, if you have too many "curse" cards in your deck, maybe your only options for an evening decisions are "drink alcohol", "ruminate on past failures", "argue with spouse".

In some sense, think of it like the day-to-day mechanics in Persona 5 mixed with the character building of The Sims. The goal of the game is to make many lifestyles possible. e.g doctor, lawyer, rockstar, president, social worker, janitor, game developer, soldier. The more difficult job types (e.g. CEO of a massive corporation, Senator) might take multiple generations to work towards.

A simulation of the Battle of Midway from the Japanese perspective. Japanese fighters with limited radio communication. Signal flag communication between naval vessels. Fog of war. Flight deck operations modeled. Fire control and damage control systems modeled.

Seems like a complex thing to model. One of the turning points of the battle was a flight of American dive bombers which followed the wake of a Japanese destroyer to the aircraft carriers. The destroyer had fallen behind while engaging the American submarine Nautilus.

Not a game per se, but a setting I'd like to be explored: may it be in film, literature or gaming:

A Member of a civilization near the heat death of the universe:

Live has flourished throughout the universe for the last 100 Billions of years, but the only things that are inevitable are taxes and the heat death. How do you cope with the dying of everything? Gain energy by evaporating stars near a galaxy size black hole. Embrace the infinite darkness or join a cult that exits the universe through a ring-singularity into a new big bang.

A game where you fight massive dragons in space in your spaceship.

I'm talking dragons like Rayquaza from Pokemon.

If someone doesn't build this then someday I'll learn some C++ so that I can build it myself.

A modern version of XBattle, a 1990s Unix game. It most resembled an RTS, but very abstract. You manipulated flows of "troops" to try to take over territory. The game had a lot of variant rulesets each of which led to an interesting game.

There's been some efforts to release modern versions of the game; some rewrites in Java, at least one browser game. None took off.

https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Xbattle

Fantasy investing in private startups, following real world metrics. Long duration, play and forget, but come back with new virtual/fake credit to make new picks every x months.

Band / Label / Venue manager. Like a football manager but you're handling bands of various stature and the associated economic realities. It could have periodic rhythm game elements that vary based on the genre, and having the genres and music be procedural / open-ended could be really fun.

You can 'watch' shows if you like, and have your group(s) play with friends' bands or set up package tours.

also: - battle of the bands / showcases for new groups - oregon-trail style tour issues

Third post now, but I'd like to see a kids' game built around schemas ("up", "down", "on top of" etc) that uses voice recognition to promote and reward speech in young children. My specific use case is children like my son, who are mostly non-verbal but who can occasionally muster the words to ask Alexa for a song (or badger me for chocolate). Games are a great way to tease more language out of kids like him, but there aren't many that fit.

Would love more cyberpunk games. 2077 was flawed but still scratched the itch and really made me want more of this genre.

I would love an RPG set in some world like Gibson’s sprawl trilogy. For example an open world game where you had to make deals, do biz, and of course hack anything. I feel like the world of a dystopian cyberpunk just has so much to explore, from how giant corporations would operate to the way cyberspace would look and feel.

Something like Skyrim but cyberpunk. That would be really amazing

This detailed depicton of Khazad-Dum does something for me. I want to spend years with buddies carving out an underground empire https://i.pinimg.com/originals/40/9d/45/409d4562dddbda73f01d...

Also, I know it's very bad taste right now, but... a game taking place in Azovstal, with the underground faithfully modeled.

> Long ago one my bullets in the list was a procedurally generated planet-sized planet with a full diaspora to explore. No Man's Sky fulfilled that for me.

Elite Dangerous fulfilled that for me. Nicest community of players I've ever seen but the company in charge of the game is doing a terrible job managing it. They dropped console support for the game and I just lost all interest.

I've heard good things about No Man's Sky and the company developing it... I'm thinking I should try it.

I want a new version of SSI Strongholds from the 90s. I guess there's no point though .. that genre has sort of evolved to something far better and I'm just nostalgic.

I wish there were real sequels to Deus Ex and Baldur's Gate II.

And by "sequel", I mean incremental improvements to the game mechanics, and more content. Not a complete reimagining.

The Hitman series has been very good at not trying to reinvent itself each time. The first sequel to Deus Ex however is probably the biggest disappointment in gaming history. Baldur's Gate 3 seems to have nothing in common with BG2. The look, the feel, the mechanics… Everything that made it compelling. Gone.

Pokemon go that's actually a game and not a one trick pony relying on the AR gimmick.

The fact that real life locations carried that game for so long is so sad because it could've had so much potential if the game was designed to be a game. You know, fun.

You should've been able to have actual battles instead of just spamming the screen. You should've been able to go to heal at Pokemon centers.

They should've taken all the proven game mechanics of the original games and adapted them properly

Sorry this is sports related but I’ve always wanted to see a league where players can only play on their regional/city team. So if you were born in Dallas, you can only play for Dallas(you can move to a new city but you always play for the place on the birth certificate. International players would require a draft or maybe an international league. This would create more long term strategy and have the added bonus of pumping money into and improving youth sports

I wish for a game like GTA but with a lot of advanced mechanics: - Driving like NFS - Shooting like COD - Fight mechanics like Batman - Open World exploration like Elden Ring

Different genres of games for people who aren't seasoned gamers. I will never be "good" at most FPS and adventure type games, and don't really care enough to spend the time to get good at them, either.

Games beyond click-throughs, simplified turn-based games, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, the 900th iterations of crosswords/hangman/sudoku/etc, would be nice.

Intellectually, emotionally and/or aesthetically satisfying low-skill games are what I want, I guess.

Minecraft, but with a first party,full-featured 3rd person view without perspective distortion (see: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-127400?page=com.atlassian....) I am not Paul btw, glad someone else actually notices the source of extreme motion sickness.

Something like the old Risk game for Macintosh. It has no animations, no flashy graphics, just a simple, fast interface. I can finish a whole game in less than 5 minutes. But the AI players are way too easy to beat.

I'd love a simple, animation-free Risk game like that, but with much better AI players to play against, and with different maps one can play.

Modern Risk games are way too flashy, and worse, they take so much time between turns to display multiple screens and animations.

A much better Master of Orion (MoO 5?).

Best ever: MoO 2 [0].

Latest installment: MoO - Conquer the stars [1], or MoO 4.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion_II:_Battle_at_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Orion:_Conquer_the_S...

I’ve thought it would be interesting to try whole new means of gameplay interaction. For example, a game in which you interact with NPCs by speaking to them (I think that we may finally have the tech to accomplish this).

I was also thinking a game where the microphone must be on where you need to coordinate with other players as quietly as possible to achieve some objective (sort of a video game version of A Quiet Place).

But mostly, I scratch my gaming itch with boardgamearena

I'm not sure about entire games, but I do wish for a few mods for some Elder Scrolls games.

Morrowind: Ability to join the 6th house with an alternate ending where you get to destroy the gods by piloting Akulakhan.

Oblivion: For the Shivering Isles DLC, the option to become Jyggalag (instead of Sheogorath 2.0) and take on all of the island's inhabitants.

Skyrim: Have the Forsaken as a joinable faction for the civil war, become a Briar-Heart, team up with a Hagraven companion NPC.

A squad-based instanced dungeoneering game, halfway between World of Warcraft dungeonering and Heroes of the Storm, but with community-contributed dungeons and dungeon progressions.

Specifically, I'd like people to be able to use something like the StarCraft map editor to design and build whole complexes and progressions of dungeons through which they and others can play (and potentially compete).

Ideally, the classes themselves could be customized/buildable.

Competitive deckbuilding card game called "Bulletproof" where, at the beginning of every game, three 20 sided colored dice are rolled, with each color referencing a specific rules card and each number referencing a specific rule variant. The purpose of deckbuilding, then, is to not only build the deck that is not only most likely to win, but the deck which is most likely to be tolerant of rules variations. Hence the name.

I created Empire because that was the game I wished existed.

I want a VR game where you're a bumblebee who's goal is to collect pollen in a yard. Your opponent is a spider who's goal is to catch you. They get to set up webs around the flowers before you spawn in, and maybe they can also shoot sticky webs at you to trap you.

Whenever you are trapped by the spider you get to enjoy the fully-immersive experience only VR can deliver of being eaten alive by a spider! Fun for the whole family!!

I wish there was a game that was hosted on an enormous and powerful server. Imagine a game that is designed to run on terabytes of memory, even more storage and a whole bank of GPUs. Basically a game that takes full advantage of a super computer, played remotely. You could have unprecedented detail, full physics and ray tracing, maps as large as planets with full detail and no loading times. Fully destructible environments.

I want a two-person local network game to play with my son (let's say 6-10yr age range). The game play should explicitly have a parent-player and kid-player with different difficulty of controls and types of actions. I think collaborative games will likely work better, but competitive might be fine too if it allows for different skill adjustments.

Just make the game fun for both of us, I'll play almost any genre (except violence).

Combination FPS/RTS - Like Natural Selection 2

New good space shooter a la Freespace. The recent star wars one was alright.

More Descent - Played reloaded and it was awesome!

Jak and Daxter, Croc, all narrative adventure games i loved when i was younger. that genre doesn't seem to get much development anymore. indie games of them are somewhat unpolished.

Subnautica was the perfect survival game. really good at striking the balance between casual but fun with nice story. and gorgeous!

A modern remake of the Quake II mod Gloom. IIRC, but the internet seems to have forgotten it, it used to be called Aliens vs. Marines before it got FOX'd. Might even have been the origin of that term. Not sure. Asymmetric class-based FPS with evolution/progression elements. Similar idea to Natural Selection, but quite different in practice.

There was a similar game called Tremulous much later, but I never ended up playing that.

I've really wanted a Stargate-esque galaxy explorer type game. Something 2D (like RimWorld graphics) that has procedurally generated planets and addresses, base management, etc

No Man's Sky is ok, but the alien life is mostly focused on lower intelligence animals, and base building feels clunky relative to what you can do in games like RimWorld or prison architect.

I've thought about learning unity to do this, but I have not had the time.

A game that makes obvious the games, lies and manipulation of modern politics.

A game that requires people to utilise the dirty politics strategies in order to win, thus making it obvious to the layer how politics actually works.

Things going badly for you? Start a war.

Some bad news in the media cycle? "Throw a dead cat on the table" (look that one up if you don't know what it means).

Have to agree to something? Agree but don't do it.

Need to win an election? Make empty promises.

Half Life 3…

Rome Total War or Empire Total War but more realistic down to the unit level. Soldiers getting injured, losing limbs, having field medics doing amputations, dressing wounds. Real baggage trains, supply trains. The whole logistics and wounded aspect of war is completely ignored in these games. Now that they’ve gone the “arcade” route I don’t think this will ever happen.

VR mode where you can fight first person as a unit in a cohort.

Flight sim battles with small toy sized aircraft flying around inside a house. Have to deal with pets/insects/kids etc. while battling as well.

I grew up playing Runescape before World of Warcraft, and always loved the high fantasy theme. I'd love a single player game, fantasy style, with Runescape like aspects. The colours, the elements, the warrior/archer/ranger, the music. One thing you have to say is that the Runescape music really worked for us as kids back then.

Perhaps not the grind.

But the high fantasy atmosphere is something I wish I could experience again.

I want a game that is a spiritual successor to Bullfrog's Gene Wars -- something that builds on an ecological / biosphere motivation. Seeding new plants to change local ecologies, breeding creatures (units) to select for needed characteristics, base building reflecting on the environment... I think there's a lot of interesting gameplay in that area that hasn't been explored yet.

Social/political MMORPG sandbox, where players are allowed to make their own rules and means of enforcing them, with AI blended into population

An intuitive, quick-to-learn-but-hard-to-master successor to the WC3 map Warlocks (simple top-down multiplayer shooter with varied, strong mechanics).

There was an attempt, called "Spellsworn", which flopped very hard. Battlerite was also somewhat similar, but more cluttered and degraded very quickly.

It doesn't even have to be fantasy-based, in fact, I would like even more a successor to Comet Busters versus mode.

I want to play as the AI that helps people survive deep space travel, but I want it rogue like, with tons of builder/resource driven tradeoffs

Something like "Ar Tonelico" (or any musical lore game) but where you actually have to sing to get attack/defense bonuses, etc.

As you progress, the system goes from really simple songs and rhythms and gets increasingly complicated until you are sight-reading a semi-random song at the final boss.

Bonus points if you feed this into an MMO so that people have to genuinely cooperate to take down the big bad.

Fortunately the interactive fiction genre is still going strong. Every year, the Interactive Fiction Competition has at least 3~5 excellent games.

I wanted a game that was massively multiplayer and combination RTS / FPS.

Would have 2 teams, of 100s of persons on each side. There'd be a general for each side who would oversee a tactical map and give orders to units. But these units are the rest of the team members, so each engagement on the map is being fought real-time by real people!

So Rise of Nations for the general and Battlefield 1942 for the troops...

Voice-control Star Wars / Star Trek space command RTS game.

I want to be Admiral Ackbar shouting "GREEN GROUP, STICK CLOSE TO HOMING SECTOR MV-7" and for that to actually result in RTS units moving on a map. I want to be Captain Picard shouting "ALL POWER TO FORWARD SHIELDS" and for that to actually result in a change in resource allocation of the 'power' resource.

An evolution simulator that can simulate a 3+ layer food chain, both animals and plants. With enough degrees of evolutionary freedom for evolved organisms to surprise and delight.

I took a crack at it about a decade ago. It's hard. Was able to get 2 stable layers for hours (maybe a "season" in game time), but over a long enough period the population always became fairly homogenous.

Guitar hero but I can plug in my real guitar. Or piano.

If I spent all the time learning guitar hero songs that I spent on a real guitar, that would be awesome

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OHHqCrPx0WM

It was a location based strategy game I built (with lots of help) but failed to take off. Building games like this is super expensive.

If we built it again today it'd probably be on a "layer 2" chain (Ethereum) and the parcels would probably be NFTs.

A sequel to the first Deus Ex that was basically an expansion or extension of the first. Kind of like what Paradise Lost was for Postal 2

Train Engineer Simulator

I want a very slow, casual game that takes days — running a train in the mid-1800's U.S.

Mostly I want to, from time to time, look over and see the scenery I am passing through, once in a while adjust the speed, stop and take on coal and water. Most of the time I want to ignore it and be doing other things.

SlowTV + Casual Gaming

I would like a Dark Souls that isn't always so dark and has more NPCs. I love the aesthetic of the games, but when all the NPCs are either psychotic or suicidal it starts to get too depressing for me.

Also, more games where the NPCs don't just stand around like statues. I like playing games that are immersive, and that more than anything really just kills the vibe for me.

An MMORPG with a procedurally changing world, that changes in accordance to interactions with the players. Where those interactions aren't just "pick from a list of actions" but rather interacting how youd would in real life.

But that'd basically require an AGI to handle conversations and content, along with a BCI for interactions. So, unlikely to ever exist.

A modern remake of the original Phantasy Star Online (Dreamcast).

Keep: - Dark atmosphere - Offline or online - Solo or party-based - Classes, skills/weapons based on classes - Rare/unique loot - Mags - Sound/Music design - Multiple areas - Progressive difficulty / replayability

Remake: - Combat - to modernize the combat, it could resemble something like Dark Souls.

A new Freespace, with multiplayer mode but also with the same epic and chilling storylines from the first two games.

I’ve never found a game that replicates the feeling of FS2 but that could be because I’m old now and most of my childhood joy is dead. Excellent game mechanics, short missions, gradually upgrading ships and weapons and the feeling of a vast universe to discover.

Crusader Kings + Mount and Blade

One is focused on strategic and the narration, and the other has better in-person tactic battle.

Both of them are serious time-consumer, and I experience most flow states with these two games. Combining them organically would result a huge time-consumer that can be played all year without getting bored.

(There are mods that bolt them together but feels not seamless and coherent)

I want FutureCop: LAPD Precinct Assault Mode . But as a team based MMORTS, and allow players to enter first person mode and assume control of a unit to do combat. It doesnt necessarily have to be future & robots either.

A MMORTS play as a general mode combined with Call of Duty + Team Fortress first person play w/ objectives, capture points, sniping, vehicles etc...

Mixture of UFO and Invisible Inc. Tactical game where you rely on stealth and elusiveness to infiltrate alien ships and bases to steal their technology to develop new gear to ultimately defeat them (by covertly planting doomsday device under their noses of course).

Game that makes you feel like you are one wrong step from detection and disaster like Invisible inc did.

An RPG game without gameified environments. eg: Cities are as big as real cities, even if it's only partly interactive. With Death Stranding's emphasis on the traversal through it. I want that feeling of actually travelling a huge distance. I know it's not for everyone, but a lot of people like Death Stranding and Elite Dangerous.

Rock Band 3 was pretty close to that game for me. It convinced me to get real drum training and to learn the keyboard.

I want to play a game where all the NPCs are AI trained with Seq2Seq neural networks. I have been trying to write the game off and on for a while, but it's not easy to write. There are some things that come pretty close, but are not quite there.

I'd like a modern day remake of Sony's Infantry. The community was a large part of it too, so it's not just remaking the game (itself) and calling it a day.

I know there's http://www.freeinfantry.com/, but for whatever reason, I haven't gotten into it.

A game that employs the surreal visual style of the early CGI between the 70s and the 80s. They had a certain style that is easy to recognize. Dark backgrounds, models of the world and characters that are meant to express a technical achievement, high contrast, etc. The animation series ReBoot came later but it heavily relied on that aesthetic.

Bird of prey simulator.

I would love to "pilot" a golden eagle on the steppes as it hunts sheep on a cliffside. Or an owl using its incredibly acute hearing to locate mice in the dead of night. Or a swift flitting around the top of a river collecting bugs rising from the water. Or a peregrine falcon diving at 150mph onto a flock of unsuspecting ducks.

A deep, open world RPG (akin to fallout, or the Witcher, say) set in a pirates of the Caribbean/monkey island type setting.

Die Hard X Splinter Cell But taking place in a highly simulated skyscraper

Pretty much an immersive sim similar to the "One City Block Action RPG" described by Warren Spector But with a big emphasis on the stealth aspect, and fighting mechanics like Sleeping Dogs (environment interaction)

Where you approach the game, an hostage situation for exemple, how you wish

The only games I ever play are single-player straight-forward ones, like the original Halo.

You're a fellow with a gun or two and there's not much else to know: there's no upgrade ladder, no downloadable content, nothing else to pay for... just go through the story, shoot things and hide behind things, and be on your way.

More classic Halo-like games please.

Something like Age of Empires, but with specialize cooperative play, ie one (or more) player manages and defends the base/economy, and other players command different armies that are part of the same team.

Maybe also throw in the ability to depose other members of the team (with various risks of trying to do so), so you never know who you can trust.

A "One City Block Stealth Action RPG" like the one described by Warren Spector but with a big emphasis on the stealth aspect.

Basically Die Hard X Splinter Cell Set in one highly simulated skyscraper where you approach the game how you wish with fighting mechanics like Sleeping Dogs (environment interaction) and immersive sim possibilities

A remake of Alien Legacy, done well, with a more extensive storyline and bigger universe. I would pay crazy money for that.

Until recently (and for decades indeed) I'd have said Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 3. Which is now happening :).

Aurora 4X. It's an unbelievably deep 4X space game that exists but is unplayably slow so in essence it doesn't.

A game based on "The Richest Man in Babylon". Depending on difficulty, you might be just poor, or maybe indebted, or maybe a slave. And you need to follow good financial principles to get yourself into a rich man. All the while you are lured by various things you can spend your savings on, leaving you penniless.

Factorio style component logicstics mixed with Kerbal Space Program style micromanagement of functional designs would be a blast.

Make me design an assembler for assembling my own robot arms, then strap them to a cart (that I assembled in a different factory), put an AI into it, and use it as a logistics robot for building more things...

Something like StarCraft, but each unit has to be piloted by a human (using a first person shooter interface). The leader player sees the traditional high-level StarCraft interface, and directs the troops. Each individual troop sees some on-screen representation of its “orders” (“attack this unit”, “move over here”).

I would like to see a historical simulation or strategy game, but at a higher level of command. Most such games require you to micromanage to decide what every factory should build etc. Instead this game would be from the level of a country's leader - not worrying about low-level details but setting grand strategy.

A modern tactical game that rivals Final Fantasy Tactics. Heck, I'd be happy with a PC port of War of the Lions.

It's not a specific game per se, but sometimes I wonder how it would turn out if a decent game dev were to take one of those clickbait-y mobile game ads (you know, the ones where it is obviously a dolled-up mockup of a game that doesn't really exist) and actually attempted to make the game it is depicting.

A VR game where the objective from the perspective of the player is to balance a large ball on his head. The ball has a tendency to tip and so the player must position his body and head to keep it balanced.

All this happens while music is playing.

From the perspective of those watching, it looks like the player is dancing extremely well to the music.

I know the "neural plasticity" genre turned out to be bunk, but I intuitively believe you can make video games that make you smarter. dual N-back training is a simple form. I think if you did research on what actually made you smarter you could make fun interesting games that actually made you smarter.

A hybrid of Kerbal Space Program and DCS. That would basically keep me shackled to a screen for several days on end.

The space phase of Spore, but done well. Serious UI, customizable defences for when you're away, deeper skill tree, better scaling (spore gets quickly unplayable when you start to grow seriously), more incentives to expend across the galaxy, maybe scriptable units to automate conquest at some points, etc.

A new, modern Twinsen's Odyssey/Little Big Adventure. Looks like someone is working on it here[0], wish them all the best.

https://twinsenslittlebigadventure.com/lba-new-name-twinsen/

I have big lists of them. I've made a small subset, to date, to scratch a personal itch. But I quickly learned that time is the bottleneck, not simply having good ideas.

I'm currently making a game, in my free time, about what might be the most important topics facing humanity at present. (so... no pressure! lol)

Star Wars Galaxies 2.

This time without that NGE BS and no playable Jedi.

Yeah...I'm aware of the emu but it didn't age well for my eyes...

I want a shooter based MMO. Closest thing I ever got was destiny but the MMO aspect of that was weak. Think world of Warcraft but the main gameplay is fps.

I love MMOs but I hate grinding in spam clicking the key aid for abilities. I want an mmo that lets my mind go numb from work like call of duty without the toxicity.

Monkey Island 3 - not the ones that came since, but something more true to the original.

Kingdom Come - 2

A return to old school party RPG games.

Something that isn't a FPS, an anime "go retrieve the turnip from Farmer Tim" game or a guy with an axe jumping around with flashing things like a console game, killing thousands of monsters.

A game based on the Bobiverse book series.

The game procedurally generates a universe which you can explore. You can also make copies of yourself (ship) and can interact with other "Bobs" in each star system. Each clone of yourself is a true AI in the game with its own personality and decision tree.

jedi academy 4

I cut my teeth writing mods in quake-c for jedi outcast (jk2) and jedi academy (jk3). I was never hugely into starwars but playing what is essentially quake 2/3 with force powers on the quake engine was always an excellent game. I wish raven and lucasfilm had continued with the series.

A single player rpg where I wasn't the most important/powerful person in the world. Something with NPCs interacting with each other and affecting the in-game world entirely independent of my actions. NPCs could collaborate with me or compete with me depending on their goals.

Vehicular combat with mechanics as polished as Rocket League. Inspiration could be drawn from Twisted Metal and cart racers like Mario Kart. I see Rocket League players make incredible aerial shots and think "what if they had to line up a projectile with an enemy in the air"

A version of the C64 DropZone game on iOS. Tilt to move, tap screen to fire, shake for smart bombs.

Same original graphics.

A website with classic games (tic tac toe, crossword puzzles, minesweeper, soduko, etc.) that collected all (and I mean all) the data from every game and showed insane statistics about how well you did, relative to all the other players. If possible, showed you how to get better.

Weird thought but one where it is a simulation of the world/(the player) makes real money.

As in you could clock in/do a job in this 3D environment. I realize probably not efficient but it would be for say bed ridden/disabled people that can use their brain but not their body.

Terminator RTS with units you can send back in time to same location they were sent from. An alert would be broadcast that a time rift was opening and what time was the target, to allow for players to counter. AI would play out the game from there and update current state.

Band / Label / Venue manager. Like a football manager but you're handling bands of various stature. It could have periodic rhythm game elements that vary based on the genre, and having the genres and music be procedural / open-ended could be really fun.

I'd like to play with a game that's like Civilisation, but when you start, you don't know what world you're playing in. You only know what your ruler sees and hears. You may send your Columbus across the Atlantic, and you will see him arrive to India in the East. Later on you may learn that he instead discovered a new continent. Maybe. Maybe he really landed in India in your game. Or maybe he was a fraud and found nothing, and all the lands he reported on will disappear from the map when you send more ships to follow his route.

Similarly, you wouldn't know which technology would work in this world and which not. Maybe alchemy would be real, and you could develop it to mass produce rare materials. Maybe it would turn out to be fake science only. Similarly, magic and religion may work as either basic mind tricks and psychology that enlightenment would mostly cancel out, or be part of the reality of the world, and you could get gods fighting on your side Greek mythology style, or wizards casting spells even deadlier than tanks and nukes.

I guess this system would be already a bit too hard to implement, but if I could keep wishing freely, it would be awesome if you could actually govern by writing whatever law you want. So you wouldn't just click a button to switch from feudalism to theocracy or communism, but you would actually have to come to an agreement with power figures (or classes) in your society on how your state would work. You could grant rights to tax trade routes in exchange of doing military service for example. And later you would need support from some other group if you would like to abolish this system.

And by the way the amount of people interested in playing huge simulations makes me think that we living in a simulation because someone likes to play it might not be that sci-fi. At least even we have a kind of drive and motivation to build and play such a thing.

I want a red alert game but its also a first person shooter. If I had any game dev skills at all this is what I would build.

Basically make it easy for you to control a unit a first person perspective with all the correct controls. If that unit dies you are take back to RTS Mode.

I've always wanted a sequel (or spiritual successor, or rip-off) of "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King". It was just a WiiWare game, but I really remember enjoying the building and simulation aspect of controlling RPG characters.

A team building game for the remote-first world.

My managers usually do cringe worthy "get to know your colleagues" events.

If there could be a game where me and my teammates could collaborate, work towards a goal (that is not programming), while also talking, I think that could be fun.

I tried making a game BazaarJump while learning unity solo, it is a game about chase in the bazaar making destruction of stuffs in an endless alley bazaar. I never got to finish it when they stole my laptop. I am still hoping to get time and rebuild the game.

I want to change some life configurations and see what is going to happen after 1000 years.

Let's say, humans found a way to live without eating and drinking, now how life is going to look like after a some time?

It is basically a more sophisticated and realist version of the game of life.

I just want the same games we have without the need to connect to a network. Why can't 2-4 players sitting beside each other, play monopoly, or poker, or any other simple board/card games? Why do we need to connect to servers and buy add ons, etc..

A space trading and combat game (like Elite or Wing Commander: Privateer), but set in the Star Wars galaxy. An addition thing you can do is search for new hyperspace lanes.

The same thing, but in the setting of The Expanse books and TV series.

I'd love to play an adventure game based on S03E03, "The Very Pulse of the Machine" of the "Love, Death & Robots" series.

Exploring Io, finding ancient aliens technologies and merging mind with machine by taking drugs. That'd be amazing.

Factorio meets Kerbal Space Program. I want a logistics/factory game in space with realistic orbital mechanics. You gather fuel and materials to build better space ships to get more distant/rarer materials, and automate the logistics of it all.

A Zachlike about shader programming

Super accurate spaceship builder game.

Specifically, ones that has electric wires, water pipes, air ducts, control cables.

If you want a missile launcher you gotta have conveyors moving the missiles from storage to launchers.

Something like Oxygen Not included, but in 3d and building spaceships.

A game where you hunt creatures from Greek myths with sort of normal hunting equipment/guns (which are good for distracting/getting attention, not damage) and an emphasis on traps you can craft. So basically perpetual boss fights.

A good multiplayer, browser-based RTS in the style of Age of Empires (yes, I'm old).

Metal Gear type game except your power is essentially to shrink down like ant man. Bad guys are very powerful but so is your ability to stealth. Later into the game they catch wind of their miniature foe and come up with countermeasures

Mostly I'd just like better versions of games that did exist, and were enjoyable, but which had obvious ways to improve them. Dungeon Keeper comes to mind.

I see some other comments echoing this idea, such as "Star Control II, but more so.".

This post is brought to you by Epic Games looking what feature set to add to Fortnite next, so they eventually become Ready Player One to launch into any game with your already bought and infinitely expanding inventory of purchased skins.

I want an RPG which has:

- the open world and exploration of Xenoblade Chronicles

- the long-term play and grinding of The Last Story or Diablo 3

- the wonderful motion-control of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (the Wii version please --- archery on the Switch just isn't the same)

A vanlife game that allows free roaming of a world that uses the real world’s roads :).

An open world pirate sim does sound good:

https://mobile.twitter.com/caldy/status/877661229254180865?l...

I'd like Stellar is 4X strategy but with the chance to drop into a Freelancer style dog fight to tip the scales on battles that could otherwise be predicted on a calculator. Bonus points if my friends can pilot over a lan, too.

RTS in which I can become a unit on the field and make it an FPS. 1000 soldiers (or tanks, or jets, or artillery) on the field, I select one, I "impersonate" him in battle.

I should be able to switch to every other alive unit on the field.

A modern take on the game Freedom Fighters. It was the only single-player game I've played that convincingly felt like playing with a team. A modern version might let real players optionally jump in to fill the support roles.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe upgrade.

I just love that game and nothing really replaced it, to my knowledge.

SAO (without the staying in the game part.) and or The Oasis (from ready player one)

Azad - from Ian Bank’s player of games: not in its avatar as an entrance exam for Azadian civil services, but just for the complexity and sheer range implied by the game.

Then, Thud, the game loosely described by Sir Terry Pratchett in Thud!

Elite Dangerous but with Gundam/Robotech-like mecha instead of boring ships.

I wish there was an arena defense game with multiple classes. It would be a co op game where you fight a waves of enemies as a team and then a boss each round. You can purchase items and upgrades inbetween rounds

Without doubt - StarCraft FPS!

Civilization, but the online multiplayer isn't garbage and the game is competitively balanced.

Tribes][, only it still exists.

Android: Netrunner, digitally, but with a user interface that's as good as Hearthstone, and also playable on mobile.

I'd like to see more games that reward altruism. A mechanic that might achieve this is a game in which the player who wins is the one who's closest to median number of points between all players at the end.

There was an old starcraft mod that was like playing Risk and was an absolute blast and could be played in an hour or so (as opposed to normal risk games that take a few hours), I would love something like that again

A modern Never Winter Nights

A platform that allows anyone to create content for a rpg-action game

An FPSZ like Tribes. Apex Legends seems to be the closest modern game in spirit.

Large scale turn based overworld with real time combat zombie civilization game where you start out as the last outpost and have to retake the world. Like Xcom. Maybe a mod like this exists somewhere for some game.

Like GTA but with the ability to really do real life scenarios and not scripted stories. This mixed with a solid multiplayer mode then we would be at secondlife/GTA mix and people wouldn’t leave home anymore.

- Magic carpet III - Populus III - Sim Ant II - A new sequel of Black and White

I always used to joke that I wanted a cross between Mario Party and Golden eye

https://gamerant.com/black-glove-cancelled/

This game looked like a lot of fun. It’s a bummer that it got canceled.

I always wanted to try MUD with creative mode, when player may create new areas/items/mobs using code and textual descriptions. Like Minecraft/Interactive fiction hybrid or AI dungeon without AI.

Fighting game where you play realistic kittens, (play) fighting realistically.

I wish this game did not exist.

(sorry - rules stipulate I have to share.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

Reboot of Pharaoh, with modern graphics, and more expansive cities.

I loved that game as a kid.

I've had this idea for a puzzler with 5 space dimensions and 2 time dimensions, but I just haven't had the time to implement it.

Also, it sounds cool, but I don't think it'd be fun, just a neat curiosity.

A persistent sandbox like mmo world with full 3D physics, maybe with low poly graphics. The game is based on free form crafting (like in a CAD modeler) with no preset items at all. Is that too much to ask?

Really wish there was a new installment to the Star Wars Jedi Knight series.

Robotech, specifically Macross. I know there have been a couple attempts, but I haven't seen one that scratched the itch. I want variable controls depending on the mode of the Valkyrie/Veritech.

a modern version of escape velocity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_Velocity_(video_game)

A second game:

A VR dnd first person rpg. Wizards have to actually chant and draw symbols in air to cast spells. I still remember the scene in which Raistlin fights against Fistandantilus and would love to play in a game.

A modern Jedi knight game with the lightsaber strength of the classic game.

Sim City/City Skylines but for multilevel cyber/solarpunk cities.

A game playing in the Bobiverse. I would love to upgrade my von Neumann probes, clone myself and land on a megastructure to go swimming and fighting with Quinlans on the look for Bender .. You get it.

Impossible without huge leaps in AI, data collection and privacy violation, but a game where you can relive recorded moments of your life, but change the decisions and experience how that plays out.

The Last Starfighter game from the movie, always remember watching that movie and wishing it was possible to play the game. Basic by any 3d space game standard now but had a nice style and looked fun.

Titanfall 3 with both single-player stories and multi-player stories, separate arena-style multiplayer modes, ranking, self-hosting and maybe even an open world sandbox mode with and EVE-sized scope.

Give me Red Dead Redemption 2, with infinite random tasks (both lawful and unlawful), a slower in game clock and the ability to do some base/village building and I’d be the happiest gamer ever.

Open world game/exploration about Indo-Aryans some 4000 years ago.

Give me an AR game where I can play a skirmish RTS (or, hell, turn based) using the world around me as terrain. I want to be able to set up a virtual tabletop game in a coffee shop basically.

Armored Core with AC2 controls, MGS VI with Kojima having full control, a new Street Fighter 6 with 4's play feel, Cyberpunk but it's fully developed story and play wise, Sekiro 2.

something that is similar to some relaxing animations that turn up on instagram from time to time. super smooth animations and physics with a mixture of puzzle elements and just pleasing to watch rendering. the scenes should be either focussing on materials like soft metals, clay and mechanics like pendulums etc. or on hyperrealistic plants, water, mosses and maybe some fish. you would in turn either play a machine or nature level where the results of each would make up some sort of sculpture or world.

Age of Empires but in the browser.

No install. Only web technology. Easy multi-player Possibility to do Massive Multiplayer (100s) or just 2 or 3 Either blitz game (couple of hours max) or persistent

I would like to see a 3D version of the ZX spectrum games Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy.

I will never pay $60 for a game and don't own any consoles or a powerful GPU but I'd like to see it done.

I would like to have a MMO where some mobs have NN based AI and learn how to fight better each time (but without cheating). I wonder what strategies would people use to defeat them.

Tomb Raider (2013) hit a real sweet spot with stealth elements, action setpieces, and some (but not all-encompassing) open-world exploration, and I still want more games like that.

There's a lot of 4x games that factor in unrest / rebellion uprisings as something you have to manage.

I want a 4x game where you play from the side of the unrest / rebellions.

The game idea I documented about a decade ago and have yet to start on because I never pushed myself to spend the required time to learn the C programming language enough to do it.

half-life 3

A new Rocket Jockey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Jockey

Factorio but like age of empires (i.e. resource gathering with humans instead of machines and an infinite playing field and no RTS component - just infinite empire building).

I wish that a multiplayer, turn-based version of Master of Magic existed, with one game taking 2-4 hours.

Right now looks like it's only HoMM 3 that is a TBS with cyber sport dimension.

The Last Night https://www.reddit.com/r/thelastnight/

I would love to have age of empires 2 but with an mmo sized map. And thousands of players at the same time. Don’t ask me how you would actually win, but I like the idea.

Something like Pokémon Go where the main goal is to meet people and make friends. You get points for finding out information about people and doing activities with them.

I want to drive cars in a full earth simulation. Let’s say Google Maps but in 3D. Pick a car, picks GPS location and drive. If you misbehave you’ll get chased by police.

Diablo 3. Not the abomination that exists today, but one made by the actual creators of the first 2 games; one that actually matches the look and feel of the franchise.

Lego Technic Forza. Build your lego technic race car, tractor trailer, dump truck, crane, or whatever, and then drive, race, and build in an open world lego sandbox.

Apiary Simulator - Manage a your honey bees year round from pollination to honey harvesting and overwintering. Thinking something like Starcraft mixed with Sim Farm.

A round-based, no-respawn 1v1 first-person shooter. I'm sick of having teammates, and some of the best moments I've had while playing Siege have been 1v1.

I'm well out of the loop with games so this might exist already, but a game where you control all different kinds of animals - from mosquitos to blue whales.

The original Deus Ex from eidos had a multiplayer bolted on that had some really great multiplayer mechanics that I wish would have been made in a modern engine!

I want an MMORPG.

Except with the ability for the community to develop new content.

And the community at large to vote on what new content goes into the game.

Let the players build the world and balance the classes.

A true planetary scale RTS, which kept the conventions of the RTS genre intact.

Supreme Commander gets close to this, but I want the full surface area of a planet as the campaign.

A raccoon heist game. You control a squad of raccoons going on an increasingly complicated series of heists. Like goat simulator but with raccoons doing crimes.

Basketball but with hockey penalty rules. Instead of free throws, the offending team plays down a player for a few minutes. Play continues. Fighting is allowed.

AR artillery battles - strap on some AR goggles and man the helm of an artillery company taking on others within range who are also playing on the same server.

Non repetitive MOORPG, do hate that i háve kill samé monster Like 100x.

Think at least diablo Like world generation would be nice. Nôt sure how to generated True unique enemies.

As a kid I wanted Zelda: Ocarina of Time - but with Pokemon

Got a couple ideas I've wantes to implement but haven't made the time to build them:

stardew valley meets fallout.

Subnatica in space. Inspired by an episode of love death plus robots.

I want a game, driven by AI, whose sole reward metric is my biological response, like maximize heart rate, eye dilation, adrenaline, etc.

I want to see if an AI can break me.

Give me a CaRPG with Rocket League mechanics and an open world based on platforming and racing. Slow trickle of performance and weapon upgrades for the car.

A FOSS fast paced first person shooter with customizable loadouts, user run dedicated servers and community built maps. Think call of duty meets openarena.

A game like SimCity but based on Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language et. al. combined with ecology (e.g. Permaculture or Syntropic agriculture.)

A competitive description game. Players write descriptions of images under time and other constraints and the audience votes on the results in real time

An actual modern successor to Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire. The one they built was too Civilization and not AC enough (eg. No unit build system)

A ps5, modern version of Carmaggedon! Modern video games aren't funny anymore (with the exception of GTA5, but not sure they will hold the line).

Factorio as a 4X game when you create factories and develop technologies to expand into new previously inaccessible areas and exterminate new threats.

Dragon Quest Builders 2, but for Oxygen Not Included crowd.

(Seriously, DQB2 is a kids game but it does a whole bunch of things really well, it’s just too lightweight.)

Nagel: "What is it like to be a bat?"

A first-person shooter played by sound alone. Screen is black. Clicks go out and you locate targets based on echoes.

Bullet hell shoot em ups with great design. These games look either retro in a bad way or cheap like candy crush. „Hell is other demons“ was great.

I hope one day we are able to simply walk/drive/fly around the worlds created for movies like Monsters, Inc., Secret Life of Pets, Luca, Turning Red, etc. The artists and modellers have done such a fabulous job of creating these insanely detailed worlds, and I would love to be able to actually explore them at my own pace. For me, this would be a great use of VR, though I think we're probably at least several years away from having the hardware necessary to render that all in real-time at a quality that I'm hoping for.

Second Portal 1

No bothersome worldbuilding, characters, lore, narratives and tie in into other frenchises.

Just puzzles and mindgames with malicious AI in unknown testing facility.

Star Citizen. But, you know, ahh, actually complete.

1. A coop game like Fallout: New Vegas. Post apocalypse. Deep story / lore. Ethical dilemmas.

2. The game TIS-100 was supposed to be a minigame in.

Unreal Tournament 2004 opensource rewrite, where i can load into the maps from the original.

the orignal linux binaries crash on current linux distributions :(

A climate change simulator.

You are the head of a global climate change task force and are tasked with fighting climate change with diplomacy and technology.

Portal 3, Witcher 4

Anything based on Invisible Cities by Ítalo Calvino

The Glass Bead Game, from the Herman Hesse novel of the same name. I could see myself really getting in to that and getting good at it.

An open-world Anachronox 2.

What an amazing universe they created for the original one. It was ahead of its time and is criminally underappreciated today.

I used to enjoy adventure games of the 90s. For some reason companies aren’t making these anymore. I’d like a new Monkey Island release.

iPad game similar to Red Alert 2, anything from Command and Conquer series (except 4), Age of Empires 1-2, Rise of Nations, Company of Heroes, Battle for Middle Earth 2 etc. You get the idea. Real, Real Time Strategy games. Would pay 50$. No in game purchases though. Only DLCs. I'll do this when/if I exit my startup. Even basic tower games are rigged.

I semi-regularly wish I lived on the timelines in which Star Wars Battlefront III and MegaMan Legends 3 hadn't gotten canceled.

I want a 1000 player action 3rd person MMO engine... So I'm making it.

Just decided the world will be voxel.

The gameplay should be very punishing! PvP everywhere.

Someone please just make a decent, well-funded game in the Tribes genre.

It's a genre I wish I could experience with modern game design polish.

The game to educate children math operations. Like multiplication table but with visual effects, so it's interesting to play.

I would like to see a multiplayer version of the original final fantasy in the browser.

I think browser based games have some interesting potential.

Tank simulator like World of Tanks but with actual ballistics and ray tracing. Totally sick of rng hit boxes. They are insulting.

OP here. I'll share the most complex (probably never gonna be made) game idea in my current list:

One Game which has it all - re-creating Dante's Inferno.

=====

Types of game mechanics:

Overview - Cut scene

First Circle (Limbo) - 2D black and white like the game limbo

Second Circle (Lust) - Isometric like monument valley

Third Circle (Gluttony) - Mobile AR game to collect resources like pokemon go

Fourth Circle (Greed) - resource management/strategy like factorio

Fifth Circle (Wrath) - 2D pixel art like Duke Nukem

Sixth Circle (Heresy) - classic text adventure

Seventh Circle (Violence) - Glory Kill 3D system like DOOM

Eighth Circle (Fraud) - another mobile game with puzzles

Ninth Circle (Treachery) - VR

=====

Easter Eggs:

- The text adventure level (Sixth Circle) should have an easter egg which helps you freely move to any circle (a hidden response option)

=====

Storyline/Premise for the Rounds:

First Circle (Limbo) - our protagonist wakes up in a world where life is monotonous and structured (think start of Walter Mitty)

Second Circle (Lust) - evening party in club, has to socialize, meets a girl/guy he likes, they end up the night together

Third Circle (Gluttony) - morning has to find ingredients around the house for a full breakfast around the house to have a breakfast. She leaves but with cryptic messages to find her later in the game.

Fourth Circle (Greed) - goes to office and needs to manage his team/business i.e. product launch or bidding on a complex contract or moving supply chain around the world kind of optimization problems to improve top line or bottom line. (think strategy gamnes)

Fifth Circle (Wrath) - does something wrong, now has to run away from various bosses and colleagues who send monsters/killer robots after him (think Matrix)

Sixth Circle (Heresy) - someone starts texting him, as God, suddenly on an app he didn't know he have. Red pill or blue pill. obv takes the blue pill and turns out it was the same guy/girl from Lust/Gluttony stage and now they want him to fight for the survival of the civilization (Maybe a third pill for the Easter egg?)

Seventh Circle (Violence) - he is given weapons to fight back through an army who is ready to destroy civilization! Finally he ends up being killed.

Eighth Circle (Fraud) - wakes up on a multi generational ship which arrives a new solar system. turns out everything so far was simulated dreams in a cryo chamber to bring humanity to a new viable solar system.

Ninth Circle (Treachery) - but now he finds out that the solar systems has an alien race like Borg who are evil and he & everyone on the ship must fight once and for all to win his and everyone's freedom!

An open source Gary’s Mod style modular universe focused on modding tools and a strong plug-in system - but in Unreal Engine 5!

Dwarf Fortress, but with the Minecraft engine.

That game would destroy my personal and professional life and I'd love every second of it.

Fpp pvp game where players are cats that fight not with guns but with cat parkour moves executed with help of the environment.

A Civilization-like game where [nearly] all societal advances come through spycraft/clandestine operators/operations

Pokémon MMORPG.

I know there were a few mods that added online servers to older ROMs. But I would love to see a fully fledged GameFreak version.

Massive Chalice 2, essentially something where you build your dynasty and all the shortcomings of Massive Chalice 1 are fixed.

I just want a better UI for DF so I guess a game I wished existed would be a modern DF with better multi-processor support.

Ninja ball.

Basketball + Soccer + Rugby + parkour + that Mesoamerican sport

All tiebreakers are settled by team brawls

The losers are sacrificed to the winners deity (optional)

Planetary annihilation but with better AI and better handing of scale. Even on pretty punchy hardware it slows down easily

Any game based on Philip K. Dick's books

A road & track racing game with realistic physics and handling, but focused on time trials and solo challenges with arcadey combo scoring mechanics (like say the cone challenges in Project Gotham) only. Like rallying but for GT cars, open wheel cars, bikes, etc

Basically, a single player leaderboard racing game where your skill alone determines how well you do and you don't have to deal with the worst part of most racing games - other cars on the track

I want Factorio with more interesting enemies and stuff I further expand. Played some popular mods but they don’t cut it.

Will Wright’s original version of Spore before Chris Hecker was able to get it really dumbed down focusing on cuteness.

Minecraft-like builder with portals allowing seamless travel to/from other servers. (or this feature in Minecraft)

I've always imagined what would it be like to have a modern version of Atari's classic "Hero" game.

Oni

https://www.bungie.net/Oni?LOCALE=en

Descent but with modern graphics and an outside world. There's nothing like being able to move in all directions.

A modern take on Pathways Into Darkness.

Basically, the same UI centric text based adventure FPS horror RPG but with freshened visuals.

A first person shooter where you are a reporter taking photos or videos of historical events.

Basically, Pokemon Snap but for history.

My dream is a lot more narrow: I want a mod or an official game mode for Deep Rock Galactic where two teams of 4 dwarves race to the center of a cave for resources and have to take it back to the drop pod. It should disincentivize players from fighting each other directly, but instead deploy traps and waves of bugs against each other.

It's SUCH a good game as it is. I think it could only improve with the addition of creative PvP modes.

Bird Life Simulator. From scavengers to hummingbirds, and everything in between. Would need a killer flight model.

I just want an M1 build of Overload. Modern 6dof shooter at 60fps on a modern laptop. Is that too much to ask for?

A first person shooter with a fully destructible world and good graphics. If there are sniper weapons they should need real skill, like adjusting wind speed and humidity, but if they are correctly setup, are super deadly.

I dislike the "you need to shoot a full magazine of bullets to kill an enemy player" of the recent years. Give me back the days where movement skills and mouse aim would be an advantage when playing online.

Kingdom hearts 3 without the rest of the junk they included.... essentially what it was supposed to be a la 2006.

I wish there is a web based road building game. Like simcity but without economic system, only traffic system.

A grindy 2D platform MMO like Maple Story, but set in the world and with the art of Ori and the Blind Forest.

An update/remake of the old car company simulation game called Detroit.

An update/remake of the incredible machine.

Another 'Haven and Hearth' or 'Wurm Online/Unlimited' clone with more focus on QoL

A tibia-like MMORPG but in a world of Mechas and Mechanics. "Monsters" are robots gone rogue.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

Startup simulator / business games in general (i.e. run a lemonade stand but multiple industries)

tiny hell (like tiny tower) Instead of customers for different types of businesses (retail, restaurant, etc.) it will be souls to be tortured for different sins. Occasionally a well know politician or celebrity appears that you get to pick which torture you want to apply.

Time crisis but cooperative- one player drives a car and the other fires the light gun. So much fun.

Pokemon roguelite. Nuzlockes are hugely popular, and I feel that could fit the roguelite format well.

I just want Portal 3..and 4..and 5..and so. If there are 20+ FIFA games, I want the same for Portal.

Like "The Long Dark" sand box mode but with realistic graphics and a full seasonal cycle.

"Influencer Simulator"

Take photos, alter them and try to obtain as much clout as you can for sponsorships.

I love the building in subnautica, I'd love something that focuses on that aspect of the game.

A large scale sequel to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Seriously. I still play ETQW, 15 years after release, so...yeah.

A 3D 3rd person adventure game where the player is a kid growing up from toddlerhood to adulthood.

Some games based on ecology, where you play an ant/termite colony or a species for example.

Team-based PvP racing game where teams consist of drivers, pit crew, engineers, manager, biz dev

A realistic down-to-earth game that's totally off the wall and swarming with magic robots.

Guild Wars 2 but with the same instance mechanics as well as the guild capes from Guild Wars 1.

- non-violent and non-jingoistic sports - games that teach you real stuff in a non-trivial way

A Hitman-esque stealth hacking game with real VMs running real software would be cool to see.

Some ideas I had. Wishes, dreams, etc. :-)

1. You run a food truck where you serve hotcakes. It's a rhythm game though, with elements of animal/pet care.

2. You manage an empire but are allowed to pick any given time and place during which to build your empire. You are given a varying batch of starting resources that should allow the empire to get off the ground. Like superpowers, maybe you have amazing charisma or the ability to fly. The type of empire is also mutable. So you could build a media empire starting in early 1900s Berlin and watch it eclipse the entire idea of WWII within a decade. Or you could start a hot dog cart in Siberia and end up with Putin as your temporarily ally as you sweep through northern China within 20 years.

3. You are in charge of demolishing old infrastructure that is getting in the way. You learn the ins and outs of this kind of work as you play. For example there may be incentives for looking after wildlife that are living around the structures. But it may also cost you; however the game rewards creativity in this area. (Business game though doesn't sound right for what I had in mind. Maybe more of someone who's on the gov't side of managing the contractors and their work...)

Just tabletop simulator but better, and ideally so you only need one license to host a game.

A QWOPlike about figure skating (there is already a good one about gymnastics - Pro Gymnast)

There are already so many comments here, but I would pay $150 for rocksmith built for piano

A decentralized more fantasized/cooler/more customizable and violent Minecraft.

A spaceflight combat game set in an existing sci-fi universe (like Mass Effect or Halo).

Some kind of RPG where you're a primitive human (70,000 years ago or something).

A baroque space opera CPRG. Baldur's Gate, but in a sweeping interstellar setting.

A fully functional Star Citizen.

A racing game with relativistic effects, where vehicles would go at speeds close to c.

An autobattler team vs team where you need to programe your team to cooperate for win.

Oh I know! A crossplay version of For The King for: PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.

I always think of how a game where Minecraft meets Starcraft would be really awesome.

Classic WoW but set in a new world. Same gameplay, just a totally new world/map

A new Lands or Lore.

Or, a remake of Tie Fighter.

A competitive game but for middle-aged men. Games don't defend on reflexes.

God of War based on Indian mythological characters like Pashuram or maybe Shiva.

Half Life 3

Would love see a remake of "evolution: the game of intelligent life"

Something that creates a sensation of wonder as you play it, like Outer Wilds.

An evolution simulator that goes from molecular soup to galactic intelligence

Sword art online but you know… without the not being able to log out part

Generals 2 that played like a mix between Supreme Commander and Star Craft 2

Final Fantasy Tactics Switch

Sea of Thieves but in space.

I'd wish for something like TES Oblivion with the darkness of Berserk.

MMORPG like Mobile Legends, the load is fast, support low-middle hardware.

Soccer game but you are the...

* ball

* referee

* goal-keeper (FPS)

* commentator

with graphics of modern Fifa games.

A new version of Command & Conquer Generals, on a modern game engine

Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind 2022 edition. Gothic 4 by Piranha Bytes

Myth from the late 90s was awesome. It still would be if it was around.

A high-quality, completely FOSS shooter/fighter/soccer game.

a game like overcooked except where the players are parents (or babysitters) taking care of too many toddlers that are needy and bent on finding everything dirty or dangerous in the room.

Subspace Continuum was nice ... a Linux or web version would be nice.

A bug-free enhanced ArmA game or a combination of Civilization + Anno

A slower paced, less micro-managy StarCraft and WarCraft 3 for iPad.

a 4x strategy game focused on terrain and logistics

Geography shapes nation borders and supply plays a decisive part of winning wars.

in a Civ game, a battle unit siting in the wild for hundreds of years is just absurd.

A modern good Thief game

a CCG with a viable pro circuit , a buy-once-and-get-max-allowed-copies-of-each-card-in-the-new-set DLC business model, and competition design that disincentivizes netdecking

coop game EXACTLY like wow (5/10/20) instances, with time runs, achievements and item progression, etc. and where you have to think very well your strategy in every pull.

edit: typo

Actual Guild Wars 2. I'll never recover from that betrayal.

Anything that would give me back the vibes of red alert 1/2

An exact clone of Pokemon Snap, but in the Final Fantasy-verse.

Spore, but what we all wanted it to be instead of what it was.

MechCommander 3 with MC1 aescethics (not Mechwarrior 5 mod ;))

Point Blank for Oculus Quest 2. I'd pay $500 for a clone

I want a 4X strategy game with an AI that doesn't suck.

The fusion of DCS:World, MS Flight Simulator 2020 and ARMA 3

Also how about a game that uses my worthless crypto kitties

A Pokémon game made by Rockstar Games sounds pretty sweet.

Came here to see if someone said "Star Citizen."

I want a modern version of the Command & Conquer RTS

A legit Robotech VR game with the original characters.

A Diablo type ARPG, but set in the Starcraft universe.

Aquaponics simulator

Updated and more realistic version of Sim City 4

lots of these fake instagram game ads would be pretty cool if the gameplay was actually as in the ad videos and not completely different crap.

I want something along the lines of: Infantry Online

A game about game developers and how they make games

Unreal Tournament 5

An official MechWarrior/Battletech game in VR.

A proper, decent conclusion to the Ultima series.

- follow-up to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

- Megaman Battle Network 7

Command & Conquer - Red Alert 2 : Remastered

Caesar 3 but with modern graphics.

Loved this game as a teenager.

An infinite, but realistic space game.

The origin story would be that humans build AGI within the next 100 years. That AGI then builds an FTL drive, and it keeps going from there.

Initial missions to different parts of the solar system take place, and that just keeps expanding to the far reaches of space for thousands or millions of game years.

I’d like for the game to just expand until the end of the universe, allowing humans to evolve for millions of years, discovering everything from new life to multiple dimensions, and even discovering pocket universes.

This would sort of be in the vein of Three Body Problem Death’s End. In the open world style of GTA.

Mechwarrior in VR

TL:DR, A multiplayer FPS that relies on traps and deception more than "action."

I've been around long enough to have played both Doom and Duke Nukem over a phone/modem. I remember with Duke Nukem especially, the ability to place laser tripmines plus chat made for a really thrilling experience, it was as much as about trying to decieve the other person into going the wrong way as it was having good aim.

I feel like Among Us, et al, of course has this trickery part, but I don't think I've seen the two combined. Kind of reminds me of Spy v. Spy from the olden days of Mad?

The world always needs more 3D platformers.

I've wanted a Pokemon MMO for 20 years

would love a columbo game where you have to commit the perfect crime and an AI columbo tries to prove you guilty :)

Something like Rebel Inc. but better done.

A remake of "Big Red Racing" =)

HL2 open world.

StarCraft 3.

I want RTS to make a comeback. Sick of mobas.

Open world, First person based on Akira.

Tell some y’all read books during recess

Dual Universe but with a good UI/UX

Command & Conquer (a new iteration)

Mortal Pong II

Ultima Online. Pokemon Gameboy series.

A really good realistic sailing game.

Warcraft 4 developed by NOT blizzard.

honestly with StepN I'm making 1000$ a day by running, i don't need any other game :D

Build-A-Puppy

NBA Jam 2023 without touch controls

Avatar: the Last Airbender in VR.

I wish someone finished Star Made

A modern remake of GoldenEye 007.

Total War combined with Sim City

Star Citizen

Age of empires for native macOS.

SSX 2022 and Zelda Multiplayer.

A huge open world 3D platformer

Daggerfall and Star Citizen ;)

Need For Speed: But in India.

For the swedes: Jönssonligan.

Need for Speed: But in India

Online versions of various now-iconic boardgames (or analogues):

Dune

Fortress America

Supremacy

etc

"Diablo, but on my phone!"

- Nobody

Mixture of Satisfactory and Subnautica where you build intricate factories under water and the surface is dangerous because of periodical hailstorms that would wreck your buildings there and scorching heat that makes the hail melt and maybe even briefly boil the surface.

As game progresses climate get worse and you are forced to retreat to greater depths with your factories and you need to research technologies that enable that in time.

INTRO: you crashland in a small capsule, much like in Subanutica. You have a multitool with a pocket dimension for inventory but it doesn't let you deconstruct the capsule. So you scout around in shallow waters not being able to do much because multitool is not suitable for biomatter. You find a cave with a pocket of air. Then the first hail comes. Initially it's not that bad but gets larger so it starts dealing damage to you. It could kill you if you didn't retreat into the cave you found underwater. It ends quickly but as you emerge you find out that your capsule was broken into pieces. This time your multitool has no trouble of recovering scrap materials and placing them in the pocket dimension along with a fission battery that miraculously survived. You are building enclosed space under water larger than your capsule but with thinner walls. It's still full of water but you build your first water electrolizer powered for now with recovered fission battery. Oxygen is used for pumping out water to provide space for machines you can build inside. With the structure full of oxygen your suit can create breathable atmosphere inside of itself. Fire would be disastrous, but you are hoping at some point you'll be able to find ways to produce inert gasses to make interior safer. Hydrogen is stored to provide your constructions with neutral bouyancy. You fashion out a knife out of scrap and go out to look for something to eat. You submerge your first building a bit deeper but only as deep as thin walls allow. You are starting to wonder how will you get power when fission battery runs out. You scan your environment with the use of the multitool and when you find useful materials AI of your multitool unpacks new construction plans and production recipes that let you build more and explore further.

Tens or hundreds of hours later you float quite deep admiring your sprawling web of minifactories connected by flexible conduits carrying various material and parts at dazzling speed. Most of the connections go even deeper to rare mineral mines but some go up to get some ice from massive hail that periodically strikes to be utilized for cooling (when summer arives) and for extraction of substances only available in the atmosphere of the planet that get captured in the hail as it forms there. Apart from wildlife there are small drones around that swim in swarms and maintain your structures and upgrade them when it's time submerge them deeper. You wonder, what this planet throws at you next and how bad will it affect your operations and plans.

Portal 3

Elden Ring 2: Oldest Ring

Ender's Game games.

The incredible machine 4

Fallout: London

or any other european city

more thief like games really. stealth is so underrated in games.

Asymmetric RTS and FPS.

Grand Theft Pro Skater?

Justice simulator: same concept as sim city, but focused on how policing, social services, education, welfare and prisons tie up. Aim is net zero crime, with all policy options available from totalitarian state, through centrist managerialism, all the way to left wing defunding the police.

A 'survival horror' war game from the perspective of a refugee and/or genocide survivor. I feel the mechanic of death can be explored in new ways it has not yet been in games over all. Also as powerful of an emotional tool as only a game could use, compare to other medium.

Faeria, but successful

Chrono Trigger Remake

Gravity Force + Elite

The Glass Bead Game.

A Stargate based RTS

Super Mario galaxy 3

Lawn Darts!!!

Because Darwinism rules!

I would like 2D remakes of some of the currently popular 3D games, kind of exact opposite of how they remade some old 2D games into 3D.

https://xkcd.com/880/

system shock 2 and Braid for the mobile phone.

Alpha Centauri 2

Zone of Enders 3

Elder Scrolls VI

The original guildwars was way ahead of its time and they completely gutted the pvp and skill system for guildwars 2. I wish a new game was made that actually stayed true to the spirit of the original.

Star Citizen :(

KingdomCome 2

SimAnt MMPORG

Warcrafts 4-9

a AAAA Terminator open world game

SimSkiResort

Star citizen

Heroes III:)

Star Citizen

Planetside 3

Star Citizen

Starcraft 3

Half Life 3

A game with faster horses.

;)

XCom has had a few re-makes. All were pretty solid. Especially with the Long War add-on. I wish they would have taken the air-combat equipment and combat management from XCOM Apocalypse... maybe a bit of a "real time" mode for some of the more tedious missions where you're just endlessly reloading and shooting though. 100% prefer turn-based, but there are times... when you're just cycling and bored.

Fallout 1 & 2 & Tactics needs a re-make. Mutant Year Zero, was pretty good. I hate that they took Fallout into the FPS genera.

MOO has some re-makes. None of which were very good, in my opinion.

Escape Velocity has Endless Sky and a few others, always Eve Online if you're feeling like you need to go down that rabbit hole.

Civ has so many re-makes... it's gotten too complicated, they need a "simple mode" again to keep my interest, I don't have time for 40-hour long multi-player games.

WoW is back. But... the community is distilled toxicity at this point. Just... never a more fitting phrase, "You think you do, but you don't." Try interacting with anyone in that game for 30 seconds and you'll think you got lost in the depths of 4-Chan.

I fired up an emulator and played Phantasy Star and Dragon Warrior (at like 6x speed) and those were fun. I'm sure there are more advanced re-makes.

Secret of Mana is still fun.

Zelda... so many remakes, most are good. A Link to the Past for SNES still holds a place in my heart. The new FPS versions are less interesting for me.

Diablo... new version coming out. I'd love it to be... just a tad less grindy. I know that's the whole premise, but it got to the point where you were just trying to zug a map as quick as you could to get gear that you're just going to shard... and for that 1 in 1,000 chance for the upgrade you want. I'd love it if the upgrades had a bit more predictability to it. Fine to have them be random still, but you need a better way to grind up the "perfect" stats so it's less of a slot machine.

I don't know, like what else should be made? Might and Magic was pretty fun. And Darkest Dungeon was great.

Plants vs. Zombies I think is still around?

Man, there's no shortage of good games... I really miss the thrill of coming home from school to play video games. Games are all so much more now... but that thrill of staying up until 2 AM playing, trying to stay hidden so my mom wouldn't yell at me, trying to be the first kid in school to beat the game... like... the games aren't as fun as they used to be. Ha.

Especially online games. Holy hell. Just trying to play any game against teens who have unlimited free-time... and their hate-spewing potty mouths... it's not fun. I avoid most multi-player games as a result of how bad the communities are... especially towards new players.

VR Tarkov

I have two games:

1. Time travel small openworld stealth game:

Imagine a small town were you start out and suddenly you can travel in time like 30 years ( ;) ) and all of your actions have real impact. You travel back, plant a tree, you travel back to the present and its here.

There might be a big diamond coming to your small town as an exhibition and you want to steal it. You can steal it by building a tunnel in the past or other things like starting to work there and copy a key. Or you could become the towns key maker and wait until the museum wants you to copy the key. Or you could become the towns security system expert and actually sell it them.

Problems: When you can travel in time, you are rich anyway. I haven't thought about it for a while what further implications it have but i do remember an nvidia demo were you saw a car age (like it becomes super rusty while watching the video).

The complexity comes from all the implications you need to take care of. therefore a small town.

2. A story line clicker game (spoiler alert! ;)):

Style: 2d pixel iso. You want to become rich and in this world clicking the mouse is how you earn your 'clicks'. You start out small in your kids room. Sitting there clicking (player has to do it manually). After a while you are allowed to move to your parents garage, you get a desk, you can now click faster. Than you hire some friends.

The transition is basically: your kids room, garage, small office, big office. When you start owning an office, your character sits in front / at the top and looks down to office talbes and the clickers.

Over time you can expand, you can order overtime, you need to hire new staff. If you burn them out you have to hire activly more and faster.

As a side quest you could persue a romantic relationship.

The game is over when your character dies. Your character dies of an heart attack in the rage of 60-90 years depending on what side quests you do and then when you had your heart attack, a high score is calculated additionally to all of clisk you got.

The twist: you can also persue a romantic relationship and if you do that and you spend time with your partner (like in mini events) you earn way less clicks but 1. you hit a higher age like 80-100 and 2. surprise: your highscore gets an additional happines multiplyier which will always be higher than your highscore without a partner in life. This also unlocks a hidden achievement and the happines mode / display and only after you went this route the happines factor is shown in the highscore calculation.

Basically the game should motivate you to be super aggressive first: Lots of overtime, killing your employees and using drugs and rehiring constantly for the persuede for the highest score and after your second playthrough and achieving a specific highscore you get hints that it might be better to be happy.

Silksong

I gave some thoughts about it.

Here're interesting things that I'd love to explore given the chance and skills.

1. This game is MMORPG. Think World of Warcraft game.

2. Everything is realistic (more or less).

3. There's no fixed story.

4. World is generated initially but then shaped by NPCs and PCs.

5. Every NPC is controlled by AI. Every creature controlled by AI. Not stupid AI but real AI. Some creatures fight each other. Like wolves sometimes go hunt rabbits, rabbits don't want to die so they learn to hide, wolves learn to find rabbits. Wolves learn that humans are strong so they coordinate with other wolves to kill humans, etc. Some wolves are stupid, some are smart, some have scars from rabbits. Wolf parents teach their pups to hunt. They probably have some initially trained AI, but then everything is trained inside the game.

6. Human NPCs learn their complex lifes, interact with other humans, mine, grow, fight, kill, conquer.

So far it sounds like dwarf fortress, but I want to underline that behaviours are not mechanical, but rather more real-world where creatures are learning from their mistakes.

7. Human NPCs provide quests to PCs which actually generated from their stories. Like some tribe stolen women from other tribe, now their chief asks travelers to return women.

8. Everything is free for all, you can kill anything or help anyone.

Basically it's fantasy world with extreme freedom and extremely advanced NPC AI.

Also it's MMO and I'd love it to be as "realistic" as possible (in some weird sense of reality, of course). Things are mundane. You need money, you need to find ways to earn it. Distances are tremendous, like in real life, you need to walk for hours to reach another village or for days to reach another city. Mounts are not magic, you need to care about them, feed them, you can spoil them and they'll die (and they cost huge amount of money). Wolves can eat your horse. Wizards can portal people but that requires extreme dedication, costly reagents, so only very rich people can afford that. No flying gryphons, sorry. You can't just resurrect after death, probably you need to create new character and start from the scratch. There could be resurrection spell, but again it must be performed by other players, probably by several skilled priests with very costly reagents and only for a limited time after death, if corpse is not damaged severely. Scars and traumas affect character and could be healed, again, by extremely skilled doctors and costly reagents.

Interaction with NPCs is done using either speech or written dialogs, not just by selecting things in the list. Like they talk to you and you talk to them. NPCs can lie to you, of course, take advantage of you, etc.

Loom 2

Vespers 2

Portal 3

Portal III

all the way

Stray.

Quidditch

new game+ on my life, fuck

silksong

I love space battles and am surprised there’s not a whole genre of games spawned from Homeworld around '3D Chess' strategy where you rely on orbital mechanics to win. Bring Ian Banks Contact or Star Wars battles to life under a plot of humanity being hunted to the brink of extinction. I'm pay good money for a 3D strategy game that builds on Homeworld design by adding ‘rock/paper/scissors’ unit tactics from Starcraft 2, the atmosphere of Three Body Problem or The Last Angel, and huge capital ships of FreeSpace 2. Send your fleet into a hostile solar system to destro orbiting shipyards, or try to hold a solar system against an invading armada where you can’t save every planet. You’d invest limited resources to build say 1-3 capital ships which are dependent on a screen of specialist railgun ships, anti-missile ships and carriers. Feel free to build this as I’m not a games dev.

There are so many cool 3D tactics available, similar to the 2D Into the Breach, eg a space station can defend a whole region of space with beam weapons, but you can launch an asteroid at it that makes it vulnerable for a short window, detonate a precious gravity weapon, or sacrifice ships to get a railgun ship close. A railgun ship can kill a capital ship, but only if you can close enough to fire. Capital ships beat all small ships, but are slow. For example, charging 10 carriers down into a planetary gravity well to take out an orbiting space station, sacrificing them all to bring one dedicated railgun ship close enough for a killshot.

I can see a huge payoff for learning basic orbital mechanics and ambush tactics to overcome a superior force, eg commit ships to an attack by accelerating them on a path that may take several minutes to play out, and manoeuvre in a ‘bullet hell’ of slow-moving missiles. Homeworld was too focused on ‘just click it with ships’. I want to pick the right ships for the job, a la Witcher potions. Then I need to use them strategically, eg attacking front-on means I’ll face a powerful front shield and lose, but if I setup a pincer movement from two directions I can target their rear weak shield and win.

Envision a mission to say, commit genocide by glassing every planet in a solar system with asteroid strikes. You can pick one planet to take out with a surprise asteroid attack, but defensive orbital space stations then protect the remaining planets, so you need to bring your fleet into the system. Deep in the system are slow-moving capital ships that will kill any small ship they catch.

General ideas below: - Capital ships cannot accelerate quickly, leading to hit and run tactics where you fight where their capital ships are not. If your capital ship dies, you die, but you can use it to turn the tide of battle. - Stealth ships and ‘glass cannon’ ships, eg an unshielded missile ship that can kill everything but dies in one hit. Do you commit ships on an approach course to that high value carrier, or is it protected by an invisible fleet of stealth ships? - Most weapons take time to take act and everything has a multiple ’hard counters’, eg a gravity weapon that destroys a large area but needs the firing ship to be protected, stationary, for 30 seconds to trigger. ECM ships expose stealth ships but have no weaponry and stop working under missile fire. - Tradeoffs between shield/armour vs engine and weaponry, eg some ships can only shield one side, so a ship is safe against a single target but will die against multiple targets. Shields are limited and some can’t be used while the main engine is running, but kinetic weapons can one-shot your ship once shields are down. A railgun ship is a sitting duck for 10 seconds before it can fire. - WW1 biplane and naval battles eg get up close behind an enemy ship and shred it’s shield weak spot, missile ships that work best up close but are useless at a distance, countermeasure ships. - Billiard ball ship momentum, eg fast ships can fly in quickly for a safe flyby but then need to turn around and decelerate, while slow ships become easy targets once capital ships deplete their shields. You have to send your slow ships first, then launch the fast ones to overshoot them. - Missions with fast scouts or asteroids as weapons by accelerating them to 90% of light speed beforehand, aiming them like billiard balls with planetary flybys, but you need to base your entire strategy around them. Eg a shoot asteroids at a deep space station. They’ll arrive in 5 minutes, but the space station will see the attack a minute out and shut down shields in order to move out of the way. Do you accelerate your fleet to 10% lightspeed to get there quickly, knowing that each ship will have time for only one shot? Or do you go in slowly, hoping you can kill it before the arrival of two capital ships coming out of the gravity well? - Orbital choices matter, gravity wells are slow to escape, so fast ships can only change orbit slowly or through planetary slingshots. You can match speed with an enemy fleet, but you can also send ships from the other direction at high speed to discover stealth ships or snipe their capitals. Ships are often weak in one direction, so you have to pincer them before they can surround you. - So many great scifi plots to draw on, especially around forbidden weapons, AI and an Ian Banks-style technological race against far-superior aliens.

A game where you build and defend forts with other people.

Fortnite sort of started like this, but the single player mode was a microtransaction abomination that was more akin to a excel spreadsheet than a game.

The beta of battle-royale Fortnite had a lot of this organically at the end of the match -- teams would each build towers and attack each other. Was a blast, but quickly was micro-optimized into kids using their reaction time to instabuild crap and shoot each other while making windows. Really awful gameplay.

A Dungeon Siege remake that runs on Mac. The original had a good formula but a lot of games now are too showy and complex.

I want a no mans sky that lives up to it's idea 10000000x better then the current game.

A procedural universe where each world has the density of detail as GTA 5 or Elden Ring or SOTC and the same amount of variability as well.

This could be achievable in the future by throwing some ML into these procedural algorithms. We already sort of do it with text.

A game where you can legally make money

The game i am currently working on obviously

A game that will help humanity while playing -- protein folding as a game?