Ask Lemmy

I will call it prime minister.

The player plays the role of a prime minister running a country leading a team - played by AI agents - of staffers. You start by talking about your ideal government, and the game builds an organization that suits.

It's simCountry but very little clicking.

Each 'day' starts with a verbal briefing over zoom with your staff. They tell you what's going on and then you tell everyone what to do.

They probably do it.

It probably has an effect, largely dictated by studies and historical record.

You can fire the ones who suck.

You have a court system and some senator-types who are largely NPCs but have themes and goals like planetary advisors of old space planetary management sims.

You don't know who's lying, you don't know who's effective, you don't know what her the approval numbers are honest.

If you get too bad or you offend a whackadoo cult you get Kirked or Nixoned. It's all a turn-based thing where the entire interface is you talking into a zoom call - with admins, with talk show hosts, with your spies.

Good luck, Senor Presidente. Try not to get "recalled" or accidentally discover socialism.

Primary gameplay loop of FTL: Faster Than Light, but an overall structure and writing of a Fallout game.

Instead of leveling up an individual persons skills and gear you're hiring crew and equipping a ship, which you manage by manning stations etc.

A social media game that rewards players for demonstrating they they read the entire item they're commenting on and they understand what it says.

Visitors

You're a the leader of an alien race roaming the universe in search of sentience. You arrive to Earth and your projections see that human life will perish in less than 100 years unless humans revert the damage to the planet.

You explain this. You promise amazing tech and knowledge if the changes start happening. Nothing changes in the first year. In fact, trillionaires push through social media and the news outlets scream about the danger of "the alien woke mind virus" and people starts hating you.

Your mission, through draconian and inapelable actions, is to decimate the power of trillionaires, redistribute wealth, ensure all countries have progressive governments which promote education, science and general prosperity. Violent, backward, antiscience countries, regardless of their former power, must get removed from the political scene so the more humane, friendly, humanitarian countries start collaborating in improving the world.

It would be a total commercial failure, but what a notion.

I'd want to do a near remake of Deus Ex, the original, with the first person interactive/immersive simulation aspects and role playing, but set in the Murderbot Diaries universe. You get to play another recently freed security unit and need to escape to some outer rim world. Maybe Preservation Alliance? Maybe you'll do some good along the way.

My design path started from the idea of “An open world game, with a chain to keep you broadly on a certain path”. So you can explore, but should never go TOO far from your moving “home point”.

I’m sure many gamers will decry not having total freedom to go anywhere, but I’ve found some of the best stories in games do require some restriction on player freedom. So, yknow, live with it.

The basic idea I have is of a woman in love with a traveling doctor, who falls ill, and enters a coma. She loads him into a small wheeled caravan, and starts a journey across open lands, initially to locate another doctor familiar with his condition, but then eventually to verse herself in experimental medicine enough to cure him herself. On the way, she learns basic swordfighting, other strange recipes and brews, and meets a variety of societies; some great, some selfish. There’s heartbreak and sacrifice, but in the end the Doctor is cured from his coma.

I will make Nintendo make so many copywrite infringements against high profile corporations, with a 10 year DLC cycle.

Oh uh, as for the gameplay, its just animal crossing with swords or something. Not really important

It's an over complicated mess.

A roleplaying game where each person can build their own world with its own mechanics and aesthetics.

Within the world, the leader gets to build the economy, deciding how players can trade and how they're taxed. As well as getting to build he aesthetic, deciding what the ecology is like, what races and species exist, etc. and the very laws of physics, deciding what combat is like if it can even happen at all, and how players can build within their world.

Then there's some form of optional inter-world mechanics where there can be trade or war.

So everyone has the option to just ostrich unto their own ideal world or live inside someone else's world. You can just make yourself the absurdly OP god of you world with a class that's exclusive to you and stay there all the time, or you can build somehow elaborate and fair that brings a lot of other people in.

Having more people participating in your world would translate to more power in the interworld mechanics, and the leaders in those mechanica get to have the most influence over how they work.

It's a game build by its players that grows and evolves over time eventually containing its own history that the players created.

Idk, somewhere on some machine I have like 40 pages of thoughts on how this would work that are now well lost.

But I think it'd be kinda cool... if impossible to build and hopeless to fairly maintain

Two options: The Elder Scrolls level open world with BG3 level writing (incl. branching paths and party members) (and add some better realtime gameplay in the mix too), or a BeamNG / My Summer Car style realistic vehicle sim with a Kenshi style open world and survival elements (imagine you've got a mission involving a faction far away, but midway there the check engine light lights up and it's becoming nighttime...)

I've actually been thinking about this the last few months. Everytime I think of something I wish a game would do that it doesn't, I realize it would be boring if it did. I don't like tedium, but without it, a lot of games would just play themselves with you watching. So what even makes a game fun to play?

Rule 1: Soundtrack with Iron Maiden Rule 2: some game stuff.... listening to Powerslave

Black and White 3.

Fuck those games were good. Prefered the first one though.

Oh god, where to begin? Which ONE? Let's go with the zombie survival idea that's NOT based on killing zombies.

CONTROLS

I'd start with a first person control scheme based on primarily using the trigger buttons to grab items, then the shoulders to cycle between uses. A gun would have shoot, hit, and throw. A sword would have swing, poke, and throw. A broom would have the same, with sweep added. Using "throw" gently should just drop items. From there it's about coming up with fun items and interactions. You should be able to grab things like furniture and dumpsters and walking should push/pull them.

CONTEXT

A few blocks of a big city. Enterable buildings, climbable areas, lots of junk to pick up and use, some base building... You start as a random person in a random situation. Extra lives would be in the form of other survivors you rescue (either by helping them barricade or by bringing them to your base,) and becoming them if you die. Different survivors have different skills and inclinations, like faster/more stamina for the athletic, better results with medkits if they're medically trained, better aim for military/law enforcement, etc. If you declare an area your base and it passes a secure check,, the game won't spawn zombies in it. They'll wear down access points over time, however, and possibly get in.

STORY

Put in a light story based on survival, not "solving" the crisis. Like a good zombie movie, the big danger is the people. But the reason to go light on story is because you want to go heavier than normal on random events. Small ones would be the other people that spawn, and where they spawn, and their own situations. Big events would be like a horde, an explosion that opens a new extra area (small but interesting,) a plane crash, etc. A few major, many smaller. There should be enough events that it's unlikely you'll get a major one repeating in back to back games. Your first dozen playthroughs should feel moderately different from each other.

WINNING

If you survive X in-game days you get a chance to get picked up. If you miss it you have to try again in X more days. Access points get written down in your base quicker as you make it more difficult. In hard mode fewer hits make you infected, and you get more dangerous humans. Or go "realistic" with one hit infects. Infection slowly drains your max health until you convert. This gives you a few in-game days of play to get your affairs in order, with subsequent injuries draining that faster. Game duration is different than difficulty, and changes the frequency of exfil attempts. Maybe every 5 days, every 7, every 15, every 30... Or go endless and see how long you can survive as zombies get back up eventually and resources become more scarce.

And ideally multiplayer. That'd be neat.

So, slightly unique controls, lean in on procedural changes to the world and characters, narrative based around events not hard coded story, and customizable elements like difficulty and game duration.

I want Sugar Rush from wreck-it Ralph to be a real game. That or another Sailormoon SNES style puzzle game.

Picture this:

Side-scrolling/three-quarter perspective, SNES or Genesis era Vampire game. The game is very high contrast, to let you play with light and shadows.

The game starts with you getting bit by a vampire. The goal is to find and kill the vampire who bit you to avoid becoming one yourself. You have to fight your way through various monsters, like vampire underlings, familiars, etc., with mini-bosses sprinkled throughout.

As you progress through the game, you slowly develop vampire powers as you're turning. You get stronger, faster, learn to fly or transform into animals... whatever. You can slow the progress by hanging out in sunlight, drinking holy water, eating garlic, etc. However, you can also speed up the progress to become more powerful by hanging out in shadows, drinking blood, or handling cursed items.

At the end of the game, your character decides whether to kill the vampire or embrace the lifestyle, depending on how far your transition has progressed throughout the game.

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

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

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

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

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

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

An idea for a game I had as a kid before I realized such limitations existed was a game where you start from the earliest parts of prehistory, and you are Death. The Grim Reaper. Shinigami. HE WHO TALKS LIKE THIS. However you want to slice it.

From the beginning, you decide who lives and who dies, and the manner of their demise; your choices would influence the course of history not only based on who is left living, but also the way that people died would influence future cultural or historical or societal developments. For example, a beloved public figure dying of cholera might encourage more medical research.

Possibly, advances in medical technology or safety measures could thwart or balk you, although I would prefer to take the angle that death can never be denied and is inevitable.

This would not work as a video game because there would simply be too many branching timeline possibilities for one, and for two, there's not really a win state. It would be more like a sandbox or ant farm.

I want a Muse Dash cross over with all other existing DDR or rhythm games in existence so that every possible song imaginable that has ever been in a game like that is covered in muse dash. Yes, even Mario DDR from Gamecube era. I want it all in one single game.

A AAA Brütal Legend remake with Gameplay Fixes for these weird RTS scenes.

Alternatively No One Lives Forever 3.

I'd force EA to produce a free, open-source, non-monetized, heavily-marketed AAA game openly criticizing the corruption, human rights abuses, and other crimes of their current owners, the Saudi government.

Whatever happens afterward would be the real entertainment.

There is no answer here other than Half-Life fucking 3.

If there were any way to legally force a game to be made, it would be HL3.

It would be called something like "Brutal Earth" and would be like a cross between Civilization, Command and Conquer and a first person shooter. Each server has a set number of players that control some part of the globe, starting like 5,000 years ago. Each year is 8 hrs real time, when a battle starts time slows down to real time, in times of peace time flows faster to keep the scale. It takes about a week of real time to birth a generation in game.

When you enter into a battle with another player's people it turns into a first person shooter for the duration of the entire battle, whether you are online or not. Each player inhabits one of the soldiers in the battle at random and plays through their eyes first person until they die and then their soul is immediately sent into the next live combatant until you have win the battle, concede the battle or have no live combatants.

The game ends after 7 years or if a player takes over the globe before that.

Star citizen… but like not a scam front.

I’d take freelancer 2.

Conscripted

A game where you're conscripted into an army for an authoritarian regime and sent to commit atrocities against innocent people on their behalf. You can play through the game normally, following orders and getting an ending of some kind.

Or, you can go AWOL, betray your country, and organize a resistance. This option will not be advertised or indicated by the game in any way; it's available only to those who dare try to go against the game.

A hardcore dinosaur survival game. You're a primitive human on a randomly generated island full of dinosaurs. Your only weapons are spears, clubs, bows, etc., no guns. You can't have the dinos as mounts or pets, you are trying to survive them in their domain. The goal is to survive and build a base that can provide you with enough protection to continue surviving while exploring the mysteries of the island where you can. I imagine it would be quite difficult to do this.

Call of Duty but from the prespective of the Vietmanese or Afghanis or Iraqis or etc, etc, etc.

I want the realistic dragon sim mmo that was promised.