Cities: Skylines but ecosystem repair. Plant forests, regrade areas of mountains to mitigate landslide potential, reintroduce species and study their functional relationships with each other… Game progression comes in the form of additional research grants or new area assignments which present new challenges and unlock a new set of tools/procedures, but the successes from previous sites allow for migration of the reintroduced species into the new site.
Terra Nil is like 80% of this.
I’ve only watched gameplay of Terra Nil, but it seems like it’s just an environmentalism themed puzzle game. You could replace all the titles with colors, and all the buildings and what they do with arbitrary rules, and it seems like it wouldn’t look anything like an ecosystem sim. It would be like taking the game Lights Out, changing dark spots to “growth”, light spots to “wastelands” and saying the goal is to balance out the ecosystem.
I didn’t see the late game though, so maybe I didn’t see where it shines.
I was hoping this was the direction Dyson Sphere Program would go. I think it would be an interesting twist on the factory management genre if nature was working against you; not in a Factorio “aliens will attack you if they see your pollution” way, but a “you’re producing pollution, this is creating more in-climate weather that is damaging your factories and changing the landscape dynamically” sort of way. I think this was the natural next step given that the game is already about climbing the Kardashev scale, producing more energy so that you can construct the means to produce exponentially more energy. Seemed like the natural next step would be exploring the balancing act that has to happen to achieve that energy production without also creating systemic issues for yourself that make it infeasible.
Instead their latest patch adds aliens that attack you 😕.
I guess this game just doesn’t exist, but remember that tweet of the guy who had a dream about an open world pirate exploration game with Waluigi in it?
That game.
If you go role play as Waluigi in Sea of Thieves, that’s kinda the same thing.
Eve Offline, with all other players being NPCs.
I have a mental hangup with the very real dread of when hosted multiplayer games die, that all the time and effort I have spent, and all the things I’ve built, will just suddenly disappear. It’s why I run a private G17 Mabinogi server on my pc, rather than playing online.
It used to exist, but not so much anymore. I miss heavily community based FPS multiplayer games. With custom servers and so on. I played Counter-Strike: Source last night, what a breath of fresh air!
Same, I played some Day Of Defeat: Source also a while back. I got onto a server, people were talking about random things and seemed to know each other, there was a sense of community, it felt like a local bar.
It’s 3am and I’m chilling and talking with strangers while surfing on CS:S. God, I miss this.
I miss that in newer games. It’s all matchmaking, all competitive and in many ways, modern games like this feels “no fun allowed”.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
It was really fun to play, and I quite miss it.
So if your team is loosing you try to get shot deliberately to not be the last?
What was that called?
Reminds me of zombie panic
That does sound like a lot of fun.
So, if I die first in every round, I win?
Here’s a weird one I had a half-baked idea for: Tower Defense Metroidvania. The idea is that your an acolyte of a temple (or a mechanic in a space station, whatever), and there’s an armed group trying to force their way past the temple’s traps and defenses to get to the heart of the temple and steal the macguffin; that’s going on in a little horizontal track at the top of the screen, and meanwhile the rest of the screen is Metroidvania gameplay as you navigate the interior of the temple (or space station) to activate defenses, acquire magical relics, and eventually awaken the temple’s guardian spirit. You lose if the bad guys get to the heart of the temple, you win when you successfully gather everything you need to awaken the guardian. In the meantime, you have to decide when and where to spend resources (including time) shoring up the “normal” defenses (that delay the attackers) and when you need to just push onward to awaken the guardian.
Modern AAA matrix game
Truly open-world Star Wars. Like a Breath of the Wild game except with multiple planets and all the Star Wars stuff.
We had something close to it with SW: Galaxies, but… RIP SW: Galaxies.
I want a game that’s somewhere between Animal Crossing and Dwarf Fortress - something with the extensive world gen of DF, but with cute goofy animals, and maybe a little less grisly. So less sudden death by wildlife/zombies/collapsing ceilings, and more adorable wagon travel, trade and founding of settlements - which you then get to live in!
That sounds like a great idea. I’m picture something with the world and artwork of Root, but yeah, gameplay like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld.
So when you say “less sudden death”, would there still be death? Or would it have the potential as a kid-friendly intro to the simulation genre?
Omg yeah I had the style of Root in mind too!
I go back and forth on how much of the dwarf fortress vibes to let in. Probably it’d be a bit distressing to see your adorable villager friends just straight up die. On the other hand, it would be kind of interesting to experience them getting old and passing away, plus racking up memories, hangups, traumas and complicated social connections like the dwarves do.
Me and my SO had this idea (based on where we live lol) for a game that’s like Animal Crossing where it’s all cute and you build houses and a town for cute animal characters, except they’re all shitty crackheads so like you build a park and the next day there’s shit on the floor and all the streetlights are broken, you have to fish in the river to get old bikes and shopping carts out and so on.
A few things come up for me.
An rpg based on wheel or time or storm light archives
Open world top down skyrim-like with combat more akin to ghost of tsushima than traditional 2d zeldas. (As in focus on bad guys, dodge roll, fluid combat)
Modern single player carpg, similar to original forza horizon
Storm light could work, but I think it’s more about the politics than the power sets. Idk maybe it’s gets more fantastic. I’m only on book 2.
Mist born would also be a great universe and the powers are really adaptable into a game, IMO.
There are definitely adventures. But even the concept of the powers aligns well to a game. Wouldn’t need to follow thr narrative, but I dont think it would be bad if it did. Would have some cool cut scenes and missions
I will start. I want to see a game that mashes factory building with either FPS or RTS, where one or more players create a supply chain inside a zone/factory and the other one or more players utilise the ammo, weapons, vehicle etc.
This sort of sounds like Foxhole
Thank you for your suggestion. I’ve looked at this and it is really very close to what I was thinking.
I bought it and I will play it this weekend.
Wasnt there a starship troopers game that was pretty close to this? Swear I saw a jackfrags video on a game like this.
I think I’ve seen Orbital Potato on YouTube cover a few games that might come close to that idea
The WoW raiding experience, but without the MMO, and possibly the addition of rogue lite elements (each raid is a run with its own progression, but wiping would be allowed and embraced).
The format of DRG or Gunfire Reborn is pretty close, but 1) I prefer the high fantasy setting of warcraft to the gunplay, 2) I’m not interested in procedural levels, and 3) I want the focus to be on polished boss mechanics.
Dungeon Defenders is also close, but 1) you’re defending instead of delving, and 2) it is also focused on killing waves of trash mobs rather than boss mechanics.
Destiny bosses are sometimes well designed, but 1) don’t care for the gunplay, 2) classes hardly matter, 3) it’s a max of 6 people, and I think closer to 10 is the sweet spot.
Gauntlet from a few years back was probably the closest, but still far from the mark. It could have used more mechanic heavy bosses, more meaningful gear, and a larger party size.
I’ve always thought it was weird that there hasn’t been a Hunger Games video game. Not to play out the teen movie storyline, but as the Battle Royale part.
Imagine creating a character using typical RPG elements (strength, endurance, speed, crafting, survival, etc.) with a limited number of points, the same number of points as everyone else. Then you’re placed inside different large arenas that have environmental hazards for a Battle Royale survival that could last up to 30 minutes per game if you’re good enough to make it to the end.
You have to survive against random encounters just like the gamemasters use in the books, dangerous animals, and you can get sponsorship drops like the COD kill streak rewards (healing items, tools, weapons). You could even make it through by not killing anyone if you’re good enough at surviving the environment, but you’d better hope you don’t end up in a fight.
I just think a game like that would be sick.
It’s not a dedicated game and idk if servers even run these anymore, but the original popular “battle royal” was minecraft hunger games servers and they did kinda run like that - no stats obviously, but throwing you empty into a bounded world where you’d have to survive and craft and kill monsters and each other. I think some of them might’ve even had like your sponsor drops where you’d get potions or enchanted stuff
A modern dungeon keeper.
I was going to suggest War for the Overworld but at eight years old perhaps that doesn’t qualify.
Subnautica in space. “Breathedge” came close, but it just didn’t quite get the sandbox element right.
“Subnautica in space” as in “outer space” or “on an alien planet”? Because outer space is kinda empty. Probably wouldn’t make for as lively a backdrop as under an ocean
The way Breathedge got around it initially is the starting area is a ship crash, so you collect broken bits of the ship(s) (which includes water and food).
But space is vast. Why couldn’t there be space fauna? Or a way to travel to nearby system planets? Its fiction, after all. We don’t need to be constrained by reality.
If you get a spaceship and can just go wherever, that sounds to me exactly like NMS. I think part of what makes Subnautica what it is is the constrained resources of the environment, and that feeling of being stranded. NMS lets you just bum around space forever, which is fun, but you don’t really feel that need for survival like you do in Subnautica.
NMS is survival in space, insomuch as planets are in space and you can fly around in a ship, but you start on a planet. I was thinking more like having to survive in space by building the ship in space, building a station in space, etc. Space would be your primary sandbox, rather than planets (at least initially).
The normal NMS experience isn’t quite what I’m envisioning. Maybe if you started on one of those abandoned freighters, though…
