Fat Bear Week: The Game. I’d set it in all the different National Parks, though, each one requiring a different strategy to become the fattest bear. No salmon? Too bad. Better find another food source.

Half Life 3

NPC Hospital, where you’re a doctor and have to deal with the massive body counts from other games.

Or a foraging game, open world style, where you have to travel to the right places during the right time of day to pick certain foods. There are lookalikes and also tons of risks like landowners with guns, pesticides, snakes, and tough terrain. I imagine it would be very much like The Hunter COTW but with plants.

Open world mystery-solving rpg that’s set in early colonial New England.

All the different townships are religiously secular and xenophobic. So you have to travel from place to place earning people’s trust, while simultaneously working on different parts of different crimes/mysteries.

It sounds… Complicated. But this is all hypothetical.

I wouldn’t be interested in some stance on religion. Just the point of that’s how it was in some places.

The game could have an occult/magic type vibe. Or not.

Larian Studios presents Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 3

Because 2 will still be in development hell by the time mine comes out

A proper magic-focused action RPG. Can’t find anything that scratches the itch like Skyrim/Oblivion and Wizard of Legend did (in terms of battlemage gaming™). And when it comes to using magic as a tool, many games just pretend that’s not a thing!

Forspoken’s writers probably going to be a reason we won’t get one any time soon though.

Portal 3, no question.

A Build Engine(Duke3D, Ion Furry) or Build Engine style(Cultic) game made around Petey Wheatstraw/Blaxploitation film genre. The “Holly Trinity” of Build Engine games were based on action films, each with their own specific flavor. Duke3D was 80’s action, Shadow Warrior was badly dubbed HongKong Action and Blood was westerns and horror.

Blood and Cultic both have robbed cultist that light up real good with a molotov cocktail. I think it would be incredibly satisfying to light up KKK members the same way.

A Blaxploitation game would be rude, crude, and upset a lot of people. It could also be really fun and something that hasn’t been done before. Most games that try to tackle racism do it was an attempt at nuanced or preachy writing. I just want to beat a neo-nazi with my pimp cane.

Black and White.

A WipeoutXL-esque hover racing game, maybe with open-world-racing-game vibes, with the deep technological complexity of a flight simulator like X-Plane.

I spent a bit of time in college tooling around with it, actually, even though it turns out that years later I’m really glad I didn’t end up in the game development industry.

Way I figure it, it would require you to think about systems-level issues. It’s a Formula-One styled thing so if you end up exceeding the altitude limit in competition, ten second penalty to your time. Do you want to use a lifting-body styled groundplane? Or lift-fans, knowing that that comes out of your power budget but will do a better job of keeping you away from the altitude limit, less susceptible to other people’s wing vorticies, and avoid needing sturdy wheels? Etc.

As open world games have gotten more open world and popular these days, I suspect that the difference between then and now is that it might be funner with tune codes a la Forza Horizon so that you could play it without being quite as much of an expert. And maybe a lot of the more complicated mechanisms might actually be a little less intrusive when you can spend a bunch of time tooling around the landscape running into trees without the strain of competition before you actually get going.

There’s a lot of flight simulator players and frankly part of the joy seems to be that, when it is really really complicated and accurate, you are learning skills that might be useless-ish but there’s still that joy of learning and also of playing around with a large dangerous object that could kill a lot of people and not being worried about that when you flip an airliner upside down. And/or the “I could be an airliner/stunt pilot if the FAA wasn’t so damn restrictive on the medical” vibes.

Something similar to the Sims, but with online federation and an AI component that simulates your characters actions when you’re offline, with a mobile app that allows you to check in occasionally to set goals or make decisions without having to fully engage.

I’d set it up so that if you host the game on your own instance, you could share those resources with others that don’t have their own instance. They would be literally renting a home from you, and they would literally be paying rental fees that you could get a cut of.

As an instance owner, you would still pay housing taxes to fund the game development. Ideally costs would be low, under $20/year.

VR Black & White

SimEarth remake.

Newer games in that genre are all too focused on terraforming or human impacts. I miss the geosphere/atmosphere/biosphere interactions.

I’d probably do something like ARK: Survival Ascended; but rely less on ‘realistic’ dinosaurs, and do something closer to Horizon: Zero Dawn - where the creatures were still able to be somewhat freeform/modified from real species.

From there, I would toy around with a couple of ideas - such as semi-procedural maps (where say, The Island is the same up top, but each of the caves can be generated in different places, and the caves that generate are themselves procedural in nature). I want to be able to tell a story where necessary, but make 1:1 walkthroughs impossible - in order to force people who Google everything, to actually have to explore - while still getting some use out of the searched information.

I’d add a little bit of pal-world to the mix, requiring certain creatures to integrate/operate certain crafting tables, and also some RPG-ish elements where gear could be found that had special traits, such as run speed boots, etc.

Then I would rework boss battles and tames so that you didn’t just zerg them with the “strongest” creature, but would have to mix stuff up - you would need a creature that helped reduce damage, a creature that could hold aggro, maybe some creatures could stack debuffs, and others could remove debuffs from your team, etc. Balance it so only 1 of these things couldn’t defeat a boss, but some intelligent combination of them could do it pretty easy.

A Bureau 13 or SCP game. I like the sort of paranormal/horror aspects of both. I’d definitely want them to be story-rich though and real consequences for your choices (a la The Witcher or Baldurs Gate 3).