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Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?
859 points by jharohit on May 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 1839 comments
I have usually kept a short list of games that would be fun if they existed. 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.

What are some games that 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 can't believe no one mentioned It Takes Two.

The world is much different - but it has A LOT of the game play you're asking for.

Additionally, I found it to be one of the most enjoyable games I've played in... maybe ever?


We found the writing a little bit cringe at times, but ultimately it's a sweet story, and the gameplay and overall creativity is out of this world. Definitely a GOTY.


Except for the elephant arc.


Yeah the elephant thing was super weird and uncomfortable. I can’t understand how no one in the room pulled the plug on that.


My wife loves to play it, she is still learning how to use the right stick to aim but is getting much better. Know any other girlfriend friendly co-ops?


Unravel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unravel_Two


I think it’s on game pass so it should be easy to try out


Thanks, downloaded it in game pass!


Stardew Valley - a nice and cosy little farming sim, for a relaxed evening

Divinity Original Sin 2 - an entire RPG playable in split-screen co-op, with hard strategic turn based combat


Introduced my partner to both of these games. We completed DOS1 together and played countless hours of Stardew Valley - she would take care of the animals and I would take care of the plants.


For the King is a game I don't the mentioned a lot but it's great. It's much like divinity original sin but more roguelike. My girlfriend doesn't like divinity but absolutely loves For the King.


I've been wanting to check this game out forever. Glad it was mentioned in this thread. I think I'll finally give it a play [=


My wife is in the same boat. Here are some games we play:

- Narrative games. Think anything from Quantic Dreams (Heavy Rain, Detroit), lots of Nancy Drew games, Tell tale Games (Walking Dead). Note that none of these are co-op, but they're fun to pass and play. - Simple platforming games (we're currently playing Kirby and the forbidden land on Switch, will probably play Mario Odyssey after. I let her play the main character but take over if it ever gets tough) - Puzzle type games (Portal)

She isn't great at games, but she's getting better, and she enjoys playing them.


Lovers in a dangerous spacetime You are controlling a spaceship with up to four people, bit with all these weapons, shield and steering you have to swap between these or at least coordinate. Really enjoyed this with 3 other friends but might be even more fun with just 1 or 2 extra players as there should be more running around the spaceship


A Way Out, by the same developer - very campy and a bit shorter. Overcooked - test your relationship.


Portal 2 co-op


My girlfriend and I like puzzle games and would strongly recommend “ibb and obb” and “death squared”


Overcooked 2


My wife and I enjoyed Children of Morta.


The various Lego games are surprising fun and very forgiving to a second player.


Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons


Don't Starve Together on PS4, me and my gf have hundreds hours on it.


Goose Game


Cook, Serve, Delicious 1 and 3 will give you hundreds of hours of ~fun~.


See also Overcooked for more ~fun~

And by fun I mean CHAOS


Kingdom Two Crowns


It Takes Two is a masterpiece; I highly recommend it. But, as the title suggests, it indeed requires two players (only one needs to buy the game, at least on Steam).


Yeah indeed, I'm just playing that now with my girlfriend. She normally doesn't play games, but she even enjoys it. I like how creative the developers are with everyday objects.


wow, my wife and I literally just finished playing this (we are close to the end) and were thinking the same thing. Just a real treat of a game. We have really enjoyed poking around at all the extras and what not.


This.


It's not exactly what you're asking for, but you might want to check out the game Grounded. It's a crafting-survival game that's heavily inspired by "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids"


Not only is it a solid premise, but there is an ultrashort story by Franz Kafka that lends itself perfectly to a cinematic promo video:

TINY MOUSE-SIZED HUMAN:

"Alas! The whole world is growing smaller every day. [Close on the tiny person, panning out ever-so-slowly to reveal, bit by bit, the cavernous enormity of the room.] At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

[Corner trap now visible, the camera holds steady and dwells for a moment on this sad, bleak fate. Suddenly, there is another voice from behind -- this is not a monologue after all.]

CAT, SLINKING INTO VIEW:

"You only need to change your direction." [CAT pounces, and promptly gobbles him up.]


Oh man, the first time I read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH when I was a kid, I was enthralled. My best friend and I would always play that we were the rats and had to hide from the humans while improvising tools, gathering food, and building a base. This reminds me of that and of how fun/creative a game like that could be.


fuuuuuck this would be an amazing game. There are so many directions you could take it. Imagine having to get into the next door backyard, but there's a dog. You have to sneak into the bathroom, find some sleeping pills, then sneak the pills into the dog's food bowl.

It would be like a cross between The Last of Us, Hitman, and The Secret World of Arrietty.


Just a minor thing, but Arrietty is just a movie based on the books in The Borrowers series. Doesn’t matter, your point stands, just like to shout out the original inspiration for the film.


Oh interesting, I had no idea there was a connection. I thought "Borrowers" was just a name OP made up for the idea.


There are also a couple of old TV series based on the books.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0105957/


I would love this. I have played every Hitman - and am currently playing Hitman III... which basically just devolves into me simply killing every single person in the level.

I don't like the difficulty levels of Hitman III though -- I wish there were a hell of a lot more victims to go after.

But the levels are AMAZING and fun and beautiful.

But anything that can capture the Hitman gameplay would be great.

The thief series was also amazing, but its so dated it doesnt run well on my super high-end gaming machine...

But one thing that was super cool in Thief were the arrow types: Moss, Rope, Water... Moss arrows hit the ground and spawn a soft bed of moss to allow for silent walking.

I wish Hitman had some of these elements...


> The thief series was also amazing, but its so dated it doesnt run well on my super high-end gaming machine...

Do you have the NewDark patch?

https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=146448&highligh...

Though I would start with a compilation patch: https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=149669


I am going to apply this advice and determine how much time I have missed wasting...

EDIT: Hitman and Thief are lit the only game-play-styles I prefer....

Whats weird Is that I dont know the difference bewteen I before SEE between Theif and Wierd.

---

Anyway.. if you actually evaluate (ovulate - Lets go deep on etymology!) the mental dopamine construct,

Gaming is a super interesting thing.

SOURCE I WAS THE LEAD OF THE DRG AT INTEL IN THE EARLY 90s...

I saw the first 'unreal engine' and worked on the first AGP platforms and blah blah...

None of that matters any longer.

That said; im not a person who is ignorant..

---


Agreed, the difficulty is way too low. I actually wouldn't mind if they literally made it realistic - get hit by one bullet and you're dead. I'd also like to see them experiment more with social engineering. Something like LA Noir, with branching conversations, where you have to talk your way into a scenario instead of sneaking in. Make the kills feel much more personal.


I've been looking at buying this for a while, you're shrunk and have to survive living outside in your backyard: https://store.steampowered.com/app/962130/Grounded/


It's alot of fun the whole perspective is really cool, can recommend however its still early in dev and content isnt that massive.


Makes me think of the Counter Strike map de_rats where you fought over the fridge, could hide in walls, use sponges as landing pads and iirc blow up the sink.


oldskool CS de_rats players represent!

loved that map. one of fave. and its variants. wish it was party of the current CS:GO distro


https://worldofpadman.net/en/


I was just about to mention that, loved that map. And yes, 5/5 would play this game


sounds like padkitchen.pk3 for Quake 3 Arena


Ah memories


If only we could get the people who made “Ni no Kuni” to make a game out of “The Secret World of Arrietty“ (I highly recommend the UK English dubs if anyone hasn’t seen this yet).

latest from that game developer: https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/23141182/ni-no-kuni-cro...

movie trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMe7PavaRQ


"The Secret World of Arrietty" is an adaptation of "The Borrowers" right?


Yep. And Studio Ghibli, that did Arietty, also worked on Ni No Kuni.


We need to get them to make dark cloud 3.


This reminds me of the game Prisoner of War. The setting is completely different (you are a POW in a german concentration camp) but the mechanics are pretty much there:

- Live in the "walls" (barracks) - Sneak out during curfew to do tasks and build things to open up more areas, and also for food - You nurture a relationship with the other prisoners and new ones arrive often

Check it out!


Not that it's what you're looking for exactly. But if you like the idea of being as tiny being in a home with massive humans, check out Mister Mosquito on the PS2, or Chibi Robo on the GameCube.


Hah, I thought of the mosquito game too, but for some reason I thought it initially was released on the Dreamcast. But I can't find any mention of that.


Wow great callback, I remember I only had this on a demo disc. I wonder if it is worth seeking out and playing the whole thing now!


There's a subplot from the show Solar Opposites (the show itself is just okay) where people who have been shrunk by alien children live in a segmented wall and form a society there - there's even mice.


Just to follow up: I watched this entire series and it really captured a lot of the vibe, ingenuity, brutalism, and collaboration that I was hoping for in such a world. Thanks for this recommendation!


I think that story in itself needs a show. In my opinion it’s better than the main storyline. The wall story has everything parent wants, going out to gather food, escaping dogs, riding mouse etc.


I can't seem to find it, but I read a description for a game in development that seemed really similar to this, a farming/crafting simulator where you start in the basement of a house and can expand to the kitchen etc. You have to avoid the house cat etc.


Totally different game of course, but this reminded me of Katamari Damacy! In many levels you start tiny in a room somewhere, and have to roll up paper clips and thumb tacks in order to grow and roll up successively larger things, while avoiding gigantic pets, and so on. Apart from being hilarious and sometimes challenging, I also found it an interesting psychological effect to come back to the same place when you're 100 times larger, now able to roll up humans, cars, the entire house... :)

Katamari is a casual game (I prefer this genre) but now I wonder if there would be some way to make a more "simulationist" game that uses this scaling effect somehow.


Elusive People. Supposed to be released next year by Chibig.


wow, thank you for recommending this - the graphics are not quite what I'm after, but the concept definitely is - albeit the tiny humans seem a bit too large to live in mouseholes


Sim Ant had some mechanics like that


Not sure if this idea was inspired by it, but if you haven't read it yet, definitely check out the Bromeliad Trilogy by Terry Pratchett.


It was probably inspired by the children's book series "The Borrowers", which was also made into an animated film.


There's a few live action films and series too.

I believe the Terry Pratchett one is currently being made into an animated film or series.


My partner and I enjoyed the Good Omens TV series, even though it was a bit silly.


So i'm guessing it would be a mix between isometric view for open space (like if you had a Borrower City or sneaking outside of the walls, for example) but for climbing through the walls it would be top-down (or i guess, out to in).

I really like the idea; i'm thinking much in the same art style as something like Arrietty just slightly more western cartoonish vibes, but only subtle changes.


My twitter feed showed me this fanart mockup of an Arietty game today so I thought I'd share it here since Arietty is based on the Borrowers. https://twitter.com/cloudtrumpets/status/1529465790247870464


You're describing Arietty by Ghibli, even "Borrower" is the English translation for the little beings :)


Well, no, obviously not. The Ghibli movie is a takeoff on the Borrowers series by Mary Norton; there is no reason to believe tetris11 had the movie in mind rather than the books he referred to by name.


There's a story called "The Borrowers" from the 50's. I'm not sure which pre-dates the other.


Arrietty is based on the book.


The micro machines racing games or the ps1 era game Toy Story 2: Buzz Lightyear to the Rescue, might scratch some of the exploring houses as a little thing itch.

There is a TTRPG exactly matching what you're after. Small folk setting for fate core. http://www.warehouse23.com/products/the-small-folk

Which has a brilliant play through in this podcast https://tabletoptales.roleplayingpublicradio.com/tag/top-of-...


Sounds like a DLC or sequel for "Grounded" from Obsidian Entertainment.


Somewhat similar: https://store.steampowered.com/app/962130/Grounded/


I've been playing this with my kids and we're having fun! It's also on Xbox Game Pass, in case you're a subscriber and want to try the game.


The idea reminds me to the game Sneaky Sasquatch (on Apple Arcade).

In that game you (a Sasquatch) has to steal food from campers, resolve some mysteries, play mini games, build your place, and go to work disguised as human.


special shout out to rat pack map packs for counter strike back in the day!!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1487800/Little_Hats/


this is pretty close, thanks for the recommendation!


It sounds like a complex "Tom and Jerry". Interesting..


Something similar exists, it's called "Ghost of a Tale" - very beautiful game:

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


It's more action-adventure than sandbox but you should check out Chibi-Robo.


I know it sounds insane, but this is honestly my favorite game of all time. I would love to see an updated version for today's systems.


It's a crime how few of Skip's games are possible to play today.


Very close plot to an all but forgotten 1960s American Sci-Fi TV series produced by Irwin Allen (Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Poseidon Adventure) called Land Of The Giants imdb.com/title/tt0062578/


Also 'the borrowers', as OP makes referrence to


There's also an animated movie with the same premise, The Secret World of Arrietty

https://imdb.com/title/tt1568921/


It's the same premise because they're ideas based on the same thing. The OP mentioned The Borrowers as inspiration. Well The Secret World of Arrietty is based on The Borrowers. I think it's even called something like "Borrower Arrietty" in Japan as well.


There was a very old tv show based on this exact premise

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Giants


You mean like this?

Household, via @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2lm/household


YES PLZ!

I loved reading the Borrowers books as a kid and would play tf out of this game haha


Aside from the end, this seems kind of similar to Stuart Little 3 'Big photo adventure' for the Ps2. From what I remember, I really enjoyed the game.


https://worldofpadman.net/en/


Reminds me of a wolfenstein map that was basically small humans in a large room. Honey shrunk the kids vibe.


Have you never watched "The Littles" growing up - this was exactly them.


This is almost like a cross between Pikmin and Little Nightmares. Cool idea.


Reminds me of Roald Dahl's 'The Witches', oh and Toy Story.


Reminds me a little of Chibi Robo on the GameCube.


Grounded?


Parasite (movie).

Sounds similar to the movie Parasite.


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.


I'm currently obsessed with an idea of scaling SimCity-like simulation to a whole country. Since it's infeasible to place roads and buildings manually at such scale, it would have to have an AI to grow cities automatically based on simulated demand and higher-level policies.


You might be interested in what I'm setting to out build. I'm working on Archapolis, a city builder with real time traffic simulation and interior views of peoples homes (which you can customize/build yourself if you want). While the game wont scale up to the country scale, I do want the player to have a more hands on approach to managing the city. Im thinking it would be cool if the player could hire their own board if they wanted to, otherwise they would have to manually manage that aspect of the game (e.g. no fire marshal could mean manually sending out fire trucks to fires, scheduling building inspections, etc).

Here's a tech demo of what I've been working on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI

I created a path finding algorithm that can simultaneously path 300,000 units to random destinations at a comfortable frame rate. Units can choose from any of the shortest paths between two points (there are many in a grid), and from those paths, can also choose the path that matches any preferences they have.

Very early stages of development still!


This is really cool, and I enjoyed hearing explanations of your process and decision making in the video. It sounds like you have a lot of ideas on how to develop "personalities" for units, and that's something rarely seen in game AI, so I'm eager to see where you go with all of this!


Thanks! I appreciate it. The player connecting to the world they build is vital IMO.

I'll be using old.reddit.com/r/Archapolis if you want to know when the first release is out.


Have you Transport Fever 2? The AI manages growth of the cities while you work on building out the logistics. The better your network, the faster the cities grow. Since there are planes involved I would classify the scale as being nation-sized.


Yes, but the scale of things in TF2 is very symbolic. Cities are a couple of train lengths long at best, and grow by attaching new short roads at random. That's fine for the needs of the game, but isn't really a country-sized simulation.


Similar with it's predecessor, transport tycoon or the newer openttd


There's also Voxel Tycoon in the same vein. Early access but polished enough to have a go. It adds a dash of Factorio to the resources.


A game like this exists and has existed for many, many years. It's a relic of the old internet.

https://www.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgip?plogplay


Why sim city and not cities skylines?

(I don't have an opinion either way, just curious.)


I've just used a classic name for the genre. I'm a big fan of Cities: Skylines.

At a country scale some simulation techniques need to change. For example, tilemaps become ridiculously inefficient (a byte per 10m^2 becomes tens of GBs), so they either need some form of compression, or the simulation has to use vector-based maps instead (more like Cities Skylines).

Another quirk is that at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter, and that starts looking just like a normal distribution of the simulation data you put in.


>at a country scale agent-based simulation becomes less interesting, because individual agents don't influence much, only their collective behavior is big enough to matter

This is very untrue, which is why this problem is infeasible.


For example rush hour is an emergent phenomenon. But it's something that is happening pretty regularly depending on typical work schedules. You can simulate thousands or millions of agents with their intricate goals of their daily lives to have it emerge naturally (and it's very fun to program that), or you can just hardcode fixed times for rush hours. In a big-picture view of country-wide statistics the difference between these approaches is underwhelmingly small.

It's sort of like simulating every atom of an object vs using Newtonian physics. There is a difference in accuracy, but it may not even become apparent or matter for gameplay.


Why do you say it’s untrue?


https://duckduckgo.com/?q=emergent+behavior+agent+based+simu...


I'm pretty sure they're using SimCity as a trademark-turned-common name like Kleenex, band-aid, etc.


The techinical term is "genericised trademark" IIRC. Same goes for "Civilization" upthread, and for things like "Tetris" or (edit: to the extent trademark offices are corrupt enough to register it in the first place) "Chess".


CivMC is starting up tomorrow. It's a Minecraft server with 100+ people organizing into nations, building out their facilities, and arguing over land. The planning level decisions are a little simpler than you're looking for; where to put farms, roads, housing, vanity projects, and military structures, and when to replace them. But the fun is that you're working with real people to make it happen, instead of doing everything yourself.

Nominally it's an experiment to see which government and organizational structures are the strongest, though being a multiplayer game it can devolve into who's fighting skills or automated bots are the best.


I think Paradox's games would be up your alley, with the upcoming Victoria 3 probably being the best fit due to its focus on economic details and sociopolitical dynamics.


Victoria 2 was an absolute favorite of mine. I'm excited to see what they'll manage to do with Victoria 3. Vicky 2 unfortunately suffered from a pretty rough UX beyond even what EU3 & HoI3 had in terms of information visibility and user interactions.


Yeah, I'm really excited too. Vic2 is my favorite concept of the Paradox games; simulating economics, industrialization, and mass politics like it does is a great idea, allowing for a grand strategy game where the everyday lives of your populace still very much matter. But the UI's not great, the economic simulation is kind of janky, it's much more railroaded and inflexible than the modern games, and it's extremely Eurocentric.


I think the Tropico games covers a lot of this.


I have been thinking about this concept / similar concept for a long time.

My chief complaint with Civilization games is that they've become a history-themed board game. A fun board game, but less and less it doesn't feel like a history simulator.

The problem with "country" simulator is that countries are a more modern concept, the vast majority of human civilization doesn't feature strong nation concept. How do you model a country that goes from Villanovans to Romans all the way to Italians?

How do you model a civilization which can boom and collapse? How can you set the systems up to support things like the mayan collapse or the bronze age collapse? The fall of the roman empire? Technological regression? How technology truly transforms culture, engineering, politics, etc? Adding +1 to a score is nice and dandy but how you simulate your nation having dynamic classes enjoying luxuries based on location, industry and technology?

I want to see that the urban elite are using silver utensils while the farmers are stuck on wood. I want to see that the civilization used wood too fast and used it all up, causing a collapse.

I actually envision the map as a grid with each grid holding information about the people there. Population, class, technology, industry, culture etc. A rural tile would have low population and be influenced by other tiles. An urban tile might be generating let's say `copper age 3` and in a radius around it for some distance, their tools would be upgrading towards that level. But invading and pillaging this urban tile might lead to those levels dropping, setting a region back in many ways.

The hardest part I have is that I just want a pure simulation with no user input. Gamifying it ruins the purity of my simulation and leads to civilization the game!


If you haven't already tried them out, I'd highly recommend the Rhye's and Fall of Civilization (RFC) genre of mods for Civilization IV. Civs spawn in their historical period (and location) and are given a set of historical goals. Maya may have been doomed to fail, but the historical victory goals make every country unique and interesting. A stability mechanic keeps countries in check and provides proper friction to nonsensical actions. Persia is much more capable of conquering and stabilizing the Middle East than say Japan would be. Economic downturns give instability; barbarians pillaging the Greek countryside could be the final straw leading to the collapse of Alexander's empire. Each civ also gets their unique power (before Civ 5 did it!) in addition to their unique unit(s) and building(s) that help them orient towards and accomplish their historical goals. Greece's Great Person generation bonus will help (and is probably necessary for) them to achieve their goals of being the research a number of techs. Persia's power helps them manage instability from maintaining a far-reaching empire.

Overall, RFC essentially builds a new game on top of Civ4. The best part is that there's a number of RFC-derived modmods with varying locales and mechanics. Here's a few that I would highly recommend:

* RFC Dawn of Civilization[0] - An actively developed fork of the original mod that keeps the "vanilla" feel and the global map.

* The Sword of Islam[1] - A Middle East themed variant that although is long-abandoned is one of the most polished modmods

* RFC Europe[2] - Self explanatory. Focused on Europe starting from the rise of the Franks ending with the Industrial Revolution.

[0] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/welcome-to-dawn-of-ci...

[1] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/the-sword-of-islam-rf...

[2] https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/rhyes-and-fall-of-eur...


I'm sure it will end up costing $10k USD for all the DLC, but Vicky 3[1] might come near this in some ways... probably still too macro though.

[1]https://store.steampowered.com/app/529340/Victoria_3/


Unfortunately, Victoria 3 is rather unfun due to a number of fundamental flaws. The trade system is even more tedious micro than HoI4's trade system. Plus, the simplifications to the economic simulation introduced (chiefly infinite supply and complete lack of stockpiles) remove most fun mechanics (and a sense of realism). In Victoria 2, a very strong strategy as an early industrializer is to stockpile machine parts to delay other countries from industrializing. Victoria 3 simply has no analogue intentionally. Heck, Victoria 3's embargoes can't even be country-specific, they're good-specific and not even absolute! To top it all off, the developers are very explicitly encoding their political biases into the game's balancing. There is simply no reason to not be woke in Victoria 3. The only benefit that you receive for not being extreme lib-left is the ability to magically make more infrastructure appear with more "authority" mana, but the amount gained is insignificant.

I'm sure mods will make the game somewhat more fun and I'm probably going to buy the game for that reason, but after playing the beta I have absolutely no faith in Paradox's ability to live up to Victoria 2 despite it being a heavily flawed game that ended up being mostly a commercial failure. The worst part about all of this is how much effort they're spending on completely inconsequential things, like replacing the icons for POPs with horrendously ugly, anachronistic 3D characters. Something tells me that it was just an attempt to recoup losses from CK3's development. But don't worry, I'm sure Paradox's newfound console audience will enjoy Import-Export Trade Deal Manager 2022 and keep the company afloat.


Well that's a bummer. Thanks for the info


I'm really enjoying Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic

It lets you control a small country and build basically everything from scratch, factories, railways, housing.

Honestly it hits most of the points you describe above.


You might enjoy Rebel Inc.

It's a bit more abstract and counter-insurgency focused than your description, but sounds pretty similar.

https://www.ndemiccreations.com/en/51-rebel-inc


Suzerain - does that, more from the political pov. You are elected president of a somewhat democratic country. Then you are presented with choices and the game starts.


I'd also highly endorse Suzerain - but I don't know if it's a great fit for them. Suzerain is essentially a political narrative game where the player is navigating through an amazingly deep set of pre-scheduled events and crises and trying to effect change.

It's also strongly influenced by Turkish politics, specifically the rise of Erdogan, which was a very complicated time for Turkey.


This somewhat reminds me of Majesty series of games. You built cities and paid for people to be educated, but the goal was to defeat monsters, but your only control was to place bounties on them. The populous would do whatever they wanted.


You might find Hidden Agenda interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Agenda_(1988_video_game...


For a more general list:

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

I recommend:

Conflict: middle East political simulator Shadow President

There's also an interesting one reflecting Stalin's challenges after world war 1 - he has to choose between guns and butter to prepare for the coming conflict with Hitler. Don't remember the name...


Stalin's Dilemma. https://www.old-games.com/download/4428/stalin-s-dilemma The author's "No Greater Glory" on the US Civil War is also very good.


That's the one, thanks!


Have you played Democracy?


The concept of the game of "Democracy" is nice, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right.

If you really want to shape a country in your direction, autocracy, or dictatorship is the only way. Otherwise, you become just another populist leader that always wins elections but nothing changes.

Just like in real life ;)


> Democracy is a nice concept, but the issue is that its main goal becomes quickly winning the elections. And once you start listening to the majority and adapt your party policies to whatever the population wants currently, you keep winning the elections, but can't do much to influence what you think is right.

So... it's pretty realistic then?


Sounds exactly like the current implementation of democracy.


Except in current democracies there are lots of important popular issues that voters want addressed and yet politicians refuse to, because their owners are against it.


And the scalings are completely nonsensical. A strategy that is literally impossible to lose with is implementing every policy that increases patriot membership. Before the first election, you can make 100% of the population permanently patriots. With that, a handful of pro-patriot policies will guarantee every election's success. From there, you can implement whatever policies you want with almost zero backlash. I'm sure someone will tout this as "realistic", but that's hyperbole at best.


Someone should make a version of Tropico but it's a democracy and you're the media, deciding where things get built indirectly by choosing which stories to run.


"Headliner" is a somewhat similar concept, though it's lacking the simulation aspect


I played Democracy 3 and you didn't have to get elected the first time. I reduced funding to religious schools and then the religious voter demographic eventually went away after a few elections and then there wasn't any opposition to science funding.


Isn't that the point? It's harder to win while doing what is right? Or you want the game to reward unrealistic do-good scenarios?


This is why we need Sortition.


Nah, I actually won the game (Democracy 3) by building a libertarian utopia with zero taxes, no public services, ignoring the clamor for new laws etc, and had all KPIs on green.

Then was killed by a nun who disagreed with my no-state-religion policy. :D


These are not the issues.

If you were to 'take over Iraq' the first thing will happen is that one of your political challengers will use all of their means to usurp you.

The issues are power, control, corruption, clan loyalty, incompetence, dysfunction, bureaucracy, radicalism, laziness, embezzlement, short nearsightedness, lack of key resources, petty infighting, political inconsistency and duplicity from supporting nations, bureaucracy etc..

What happens when the entire system is corrupt? The Judiciary, Police, the Army, the politicians? Everyone is trying to embezzle, selling votes, stuffing ballot boxes, using multiple ledgers, giving their family members jobs, handing out MD's to the rich kids?

Some Billionaire owns the TV Station and is lying about you daily, destroying your ratings. There are protesters outside your door while you're trying to 'plan the buildings'.

The guy who funded your campaign to ascension wants special state-guaranteed contracts.

The rebels in that 'ugly border area' have killed some civilians and the locals want blood.

... and consider that many of the same kinds of constraints exist even in modern countries.

'Building Bridges vs. Schools' is completely pedantic exercise.

They should make the game called 'Saddam' and see how a regular person might fare at that 'job'.


Pull the rug with negative interest rates and land value taxes and general anti rent seeking policies to make corruption highly unprofitable.

If you get 10 million through corruption you are basically set for life in a positive interest/rent seeking environment because interest acts like a force multiplier on your original act of corruption that gets stronger over time. So your personal goal is to earn as much money as possible, as early as possible and through any foul means. I.e. the reward function strongly favours corruption.

With a negative interest rate, corruption no longer guarantees a high social status and automatic wealth accumulation which means you will have to do honest work until you retire if you want to keep your money. Automatic wealth accumulation is the primary metric that makes money laundering profitable or not. If you can only make 25% of the stolen money clean you can still grow it exponentially over time after it is clean.

If the land value tax is paid out as a dividend then everyone, even the destitute, would benefit from classic USA style homeowner corruption (artificially distorting the allocation of land by restricting it's use).

Another form of corruption would be to spend your student loan on Bitcoin when it was still under one thousand and then skipping college because you "made it". You earned money without producing anything, you are a net negative to society if you don't work for even a little bit.


Check out the Clarus Victoria games, especially Predynastic Egypt. It's not quite a city builder, but closer to Civ. You start from building a settlement - some basic fields, huts, cemeteries, temples, barracks, and so on. It's nice, the map changes based on progress, and you end up growing from a city to taking territories up and down the nile.

Marble Age is notable too and has some mechanics unique to the game. Story is mostly the same, but there's three city states with slightly different tech trees. E.g. you'd need to fight the Persians at some point. Athens would be the classic path of farming, making alliances, building a wall and armies. Spartans need to raid for slaves for growth, but hold off on killing neighbors before facing Persians. Corinth would be more trade based and consider buying mercenaries and buying out the other city states.

I've bought all of them because they're an excellent ratio of time for fun as far as games go.


U want victoria 3 game by paradoxplaza


Maybe City State? https://store.steampowered.com/app/774351/Citystate/


That would be a fun game. Do as well as you might, and then in the end, you get screwed over by one or more of the global powers. Would you like to play a nice game of Kobayashi Maru?


Heart of Iron 4 mixed with Millennium Dawn: Modern day mod is something that resembles what you’re writing about, but on bit on a higher level.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=27773...


Special bonus action subgame for Afghanistan: Exfiltrate stolen central bank funds from the US :-)

https://therealnews.com/afghan-central-bank-calls-us-theft-o...


Plus free equipment donated by the USA. Plus no media coverage at all covering your atrocities because the media is aligned with those that pulled out, so everyone's going to focus elsewhere (Ukraine as an example).

I lived there for more than a year and a half. The things happening there now are terrible. But you don't know about it, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it right now. It's a massive tragedy.


There are plenty of boardgames to choose from:

- World in Flames

- Churchill

- Fort Sumter

- Food Chain Magnate


Also

- A Distant Plain


a similar but smaller policy based simulation game:

You are the government leader of a nation and a new pandemic is starting.

The science is not clear yet. How do you manage as the leader? What policies do you set up? What research do you pursue? Along with variables of budgets, economy, population morale, upcoming elections, travel, etc.

If there was a good model of how the policies affect economy especially, it would reveal to the players how hard lock-downs are on the economy.

If the dynamic between the federal state and city governments are modeled, it would show us how actual policy implementation happens. Just even how hard it is to test and track the spread of a pandemic.

This could indicate to people how hard it is to lead in such a situation. At the same time help the player evaluate how things were handled recently.


It's somewhat old, but the Caesar series might be what you're looking for.


Isn't that more of a city builder, like Sim City? I only ever played Pharaoh, so I may be off.


It does start off like that, but I think after you start an industry within your city, you gain access to empire management, where you start organizing trade between other cities, building roads, managing armies, etc. It's been a long time though, so I might be misremembering.


It's really mostly the cities, outside of the city management is really secondary (at least in Caesar and Zeus which I have played the most). I strongly recommend the whole series, they are really great games.


What about Colonization?

I probably spent more time playing it (and Alpha Centauri) than Civ.


I would like to have a civilization where you start on earth and then mid-game you launch your rockets and colonize another planet with aliens.


Before we leave is somewhat similar.

Build up a civ on 1 planet, scale to multiple planets, survive space whales...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/


This is basically what Civ 2 + SMAC/X is.


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.


The problem is, games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried.

Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.

Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.

If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.


My best idea so far for addressing this is to give all players exactly three characters, which they can switch between at any point. The goal would be for most of your "boring" productive output to be determined more by (character) resource allocation rather than participating in the grind yourself all the time.

For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.

You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.

It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)


I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.

In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.

So I wasnt convinced it would stick.

I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed


If you can passively make more money with more characters what stops someone from having a ton of accounts and just funneling resources?


I'd like to pretend the cost of a license would mitigate this, but yes, it would probably be disastrous in practice.

The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.

I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.


> A virtual economy implies work.

a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .

It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.


>> It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.

Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).


The difference between stupidity and genius: stupidity has no limits. — someone


Well it's fun until logistics goes on strike and demands changes: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/foxhole-players-launch-...


Savage also mixed in RTS so you could have one player play StarCraft while the others were units


I would argue that this is the exact problem of current modern games. The parent is suggesting something alternative, fun with other people.

Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.


Love Ironman mode in RuneScape for this reason. Taking the economy out entirely improves the modern game experience.

Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back


I haven’t been into MMOs in a long time, but years ago, I remember desperately trying to find a good one, but I found that not only do a lot of them have some grindy linear progression, but even worse was it was always so limited. I got sick of games that looked amazing but had basically no content.


Puzzle Pirates was the best game ever for a number of years.

An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.

Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.

Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.

And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.

Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.


Wow, thank you for this blast from the past. I remember getting rich enough to own one of the bigger ships and losing it in in a fierce PVP battle. Good times!


This is subjective. I played FFXI for over a decade and despite it being more or less a second job, I truly loved coming home and hopping on and see what we were fighting for that evening.

Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;

You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.


Is FFXI what the poster was describing though? I got the impression that it was a world where the economy was mostly controlled and defined by the community via trading, crafting and agreements.

That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).

Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.


Most MMOs are overly focused on player engagement. MMOs should have built in botting mechanics, so you can just let your player do the tedious stuff while you are asleep/working/living real life.

Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.


One of the Final Fantasies (I forget which one, 10 was the last one I personally played, so I only ever saw my sister play it) had a concept of actions you could program into your off-hand characters. You had only a basic number of slots to define command to begin with, but as you progressed in level, more slots opened up and you could program more complex behaviors.


I believe you are talking about ff xii with its gambit system. It's sort of a simplified programming tool to program your AI companions behavior without having to directly micromanage them. For example, a companion can be programmed to heal ally if their HP is less than 50% hp, cast specific spell if there 3 enemies or more, attack nearest enemy in that priority order. I wish more games have this system.


The gambit system was pretty polarizing. Programmer types liked it, but a lot of people perceived it as "the game playing itself" and didn't.


The key is to have your characters work while you work. Kind of like EVE Online.

In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.


Try limiting players to 60 minutes per day. In the BBS days this worked because you got two TURNS per day. 24/7 access is what kills this sort of thing, IMHO.


This could be interesting. I feel like the problem with MMOs that give you too much freedom is how players with more time will just completely dominate everyone else within days of any new content launching. Also, in my experience bad/unfun behavior in general gets worse the more populated an MMO is (FFXIV being a nice exception), and this solution could help keep traffic down. The only problem is that no dev trying to make money would ever time-limit their players.


Perhaps time limited but only per realm/server/world? That way someone trying to get their fix can play across multiple isolated economies but still allow players to play more if they really want to (lets be real people would multiaccount anyway)


This was usually done by having separate instances with different time limits. That way all the lifers with 12 hours a day to spare could play together and let everyone else enjoy themselves.


I was thinking of something similar recently as I am a big fanatic of PvP games of different kinds. Problem is as I get older I have less time to play to keep up with my enemies and would love to have "adult" servers which are only on at certain times of the day (maybe even with some auto grinding on the off hours). To allow people to be on more even footing. I bet there would be a decent chunk of people who would enjoy this.


Turn based games can work well.

There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.


I beg to differ, World of Warcraft is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. It was destroyed when they changed the game to have multi-server raids etc. that ended the social aspect of "your server is your world." No longer did you have to make friends and have a life on your server that was as addicting as real life. You just had to queue up and let the computer match you up with people. And then the magic was gone.


Have you played any sandbox games more seriously and joined some guilds etc? I would say WoW was more of a "world" in the start (but not on a comparable level to others) and turned less and less so over time. The one thing blizzard always managed really well however is a crazy level of polish. I am sure they could make any kind of game really shine.


The one way I can see for true MMORPGs, as outlined by the GP, to work, as I can see, is basically having an AGI director to handle arbitrary actions, along with a BCI to actually take those actions.


I've also been thinking about using small containers in the cloud to basically run NPC lives inside a MMORPG. I thought this would be what New World would bring to the table honestly.


That’s actually a fascinating idea.


And basically stolen from a certain type of manwa. (Overgeared in this case)

addendum: also infinite dendrogram


> The problem is, games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried.

Doubt.

I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.

Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.


I don't think it's a problem of fun, but of profit. I too want an mmo that is closer to a social experiment than a slot machine, but one of those is easier to make and has a more reliable business model to justify the expenses to make it.


Second Life was once this grand experiment. I recall you ended up with weird things happening virtual real estate tycoon Anshe Chung being chased by a horde of scripted dildos chasing her avatar around. All the money in the virtual world still can’t save you from trolling.

I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.


The line between work and play is not are clear cut as people think. Look at farming simulator games, be it the Harvest Moon style ones or the proper farming simulators. Look at trucking simulator games. Some programming games have problems harder than what I face at work. Many jobs can be turned into play by removing certain parts. It won't appeal to everyone, but the idea with an MMORPG would be to have many such possibilities and a player can have fun even if only a few matches with their preferences.


Along these lines, I remember Skyrim once being described as "at heart, the world's greatest hiking sim." Maybe Minecraft shares some of that.


Isn't there a pretty broad swath of what people find fun? I mean isn't Eve Online called a "spreadsheet simulator" (Long before the recent Microsoft Excel Integration)


Not true, EVE, Albion are like that (and probably a good number of others). Some survival type games with PvP features parts of that as well although they are regularly wiped. While the demand is smaller than mainstream MMOs the following is way more hardcore, there is a reason some of these games are going strong after 15-20 years.


Isn't the OG Sim City something like "work"?

I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?


I played Tera about 10 years ago, when it was good.

Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.

There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.

I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.

Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.

At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.

Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.

Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.

But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".

You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.

Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.

But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.

Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.


Not even MMO. I play Apex Legends, a character based BR. There is a ranked mode where each rank have an entry cost and you get points by placement and kills. While it’s a team game, the entry cost was so low that you could play aggressively - killing a few people and dying soon after - or survive by hiding - ratting - and get to a high rank easily. It quickly became a solo game, where people abandon their team to push fights they can’t win, hoping for a few kill, or leaving their teammates in fight they could have win otherwise.

They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.


Your experience with TERA is akin to mine. Not only the game was innovative, skill based and overall fun to play, the interaction with other players was like none I had ever experienced.

BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.

[1] https://tera.fandom.com/wiki/Alliance#Exarch


Ha, I tried, but no dice. Too much competition (and people cheating with multiple accounts). Best I got was Assault Commander, but I kinda liked to stay Defense Commander, the buffs could make a good party unkillable :D.

Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.

The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.

I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D


>The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.

I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.

>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.

Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.

I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.


I think you underestimate the number of people who live their lives on these games.


There are probably a number of MineCraft servers that achieve this. Back about 10 years ago there was the /r/CivCraft server. Not sure which ones are active now, but it did feel like a real world with a real economy, since there were even shops you could set up to sell materials for a price. You had to be careful who you piss off also, since people could be "jailed" in the ender world. There was a large element of alliance making / political process in the game since you have strength in numbers.


Minecraft is indeed a great example of a game pushing the envelope on player freedom - and allowing emergent gameplay.

Tip of the hat to you, good sir!

Still, Minecraft is pretty limited mechanically. The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention. The games' mechanics - all the technological progression and stuff - work perfectly fine in single-player. Also the number of players per server isn't quite on MMO levels...

But yes, some elements of Minecraft would be great ingredients of the game I'm proposing.


> The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention.

To be fair, neither does real life. Real life shops, jails, etc, are just collections of atoms with certain emergent properties resulting from how players have set them up.


> The game doesn't actually recognize any of the stuff you mention.

With mods, it does.


I haven't heard that name in a very long time.

Tell me, what town did you mainly reside in? I was over in Chiapas with the crazy leftists, one of whom erected a wool statue of himself. We were largely untouched by the HCF invasion, except for when their skirmishes with the World Police got close to our borders.

I offer you this classic, and hope you recognize it: https://youtu.be/BAzsolKHJfc


Yep I remember that like it was yesterday! If I remember correctly, in the Civ 1.0 map I hung out a lot in Haven and in Mt Augusta


Mt Augusta was a little before my time. By the time I got into the server, it honestly felt like one of the most difficult places to get settled into. Crowded, property costs too high, chaotic.

Dirty Ancaps everywhere. </s>

I'm pretty sure it was somewhere between late 1.0 and early 2.0, but I ended up in Carson City for a bit when it was coming online. Where they made a hole in the ocean, and turned into a city. A fun place to hang out and talk shit.

Do you have any 2d world maps of that era?


Sorry can't find any 2d world maps from the time, I'm sure there are plenty on the subreddit if you go looking :-)


The best Minecraft MMORPG I've seen is Monumenta ( https://playmonumenta.com/ ), which is made in the spirit of Complete The Monument (CTM) maps like Ragecraft (which is also a great experience!). A good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEK-djlOkqE


I remember playing on towny servers years ago and holy crap that was fun. The kingdoms and roles, and wars managed to be more immersive than games based around that concept (cough bannerlord)


Expanding on your idea, I thought it would be interesting to have an MMORPG with multiple completely different clients. The easiest example might be in a future/sci-fi game, you have a normal game client for people moving around the game, and a Stock market client for people who want to play the stock market in the game. You could have a business simulation client as well maybe for shop keepers. Maybe a news website to try and bridge the gap between them all, but you could play one game (the stock market game) while never logging into the First Person "MMO" client but you're completely integrated. If you could think of a number of these different clients, I think it would be interesting.


I love this idea for so many games, but I'll try to stay on topic.

From elsewhere in thread, heavily snipped:

  games like that aren’t fun. It’s been tried. [...] hopping online to go do your second job [...] implies work [...] no one wants to do that work
I wouldn't want to do data entry in an FPS game, no, but people love "bakery simulator" type resource management games. It would be cool to link my grocery-line-time-waster score into my overworld bank account, enabling me to shop around for gear in stores set up (but not manually run) by other players, to use in the FPS portion of the game where I steal morsels from the full-sized humans (or am I getting my threads confused?).


EVE tried this with Eve Online + Dust 514 which was a PS3 exclusive. There were cool concepts like having your space ships show up to air strike the planet as they were fighting on the surface. It was interesting but ultimately Dust felt extremely low stakes in the world of EVE. I can’t really speak to its other problems I only tried it once or twice.


Dust 514 was a really, really cool idea that was dead on arrival because CCP (the company behind Eve) released it on a platform that was nearing the end of its lifecycle, and refused to release it on any other platform. It also had to introduce the Dust players to a fair number of the Eve mechanics, particularly around loadouts (fittings) and the economy.

The fact that the spaceship game was intertwined with the team-based FPS was really cool. FPS players (on planets) could be in the same clan/guild/corp as the spaceship pilots, and could call in airstrikes. In the spaceship game, your corpmates could maneuver into position and rain down lasers. This interaction had an effect on the local economy, which was an incentive for the spaceships to show up for airstrikes.


Yeah, I imagine a challenge would be making a second really fun game in a different genre from the first. The different 'games' would probably have to be relatively lightweight and lean into the fact that it's the interaction that is the fun part. Having a space MMO developer somehow land a super popular AAA FPS would be near impossible. I like how the battlefield games let you fly airplanes, but then it's not really a full blow flight simulator.


I'm a huge fan of API-first design and would love to see MMOs embrace this. Anything you do in game could be doable via APIs and those could be open to 3rd-party clients. That would allow people to develop those kinds of specialized clients.


I agree, I've always thought it'd be cool to develop a game that, for instance, you could meaningfully play from a full fledged console or a mobile phone. They might be different components or aspects of the game, but both would contribute to your world/quest/whatever. And just like real life, some people might specialize, and only ever play one aspect of the game, while others focus on other parts.


WoW had its auction house in the mobile client for some time. I don't know why they removed it. I suspect that people just automated it.


I agree. The beef I would add with those games is that they feel like theme parks. There's no real frontier. Elite Dangerous came close, it was a thrill to be the first one in a system. Genuinely don't know how you'd solve that, though.

One obstacle you have to overcome is that there has to be an investment that is risked by the players. There's not much of a cost to gank someone usually, or it's simply not allowed at all except in a controlled way. One thing that forces people into social cooperation is to protect against the potential for loss. As I understand it, confrontations with other players in EVE Online are dangerous because of that investment of time and/or money. That's part of what makes roguelikes and battle royales so compelling. That said, you have to balance it against being appealing enough to more casual players--how do you encourage investment without making it a boring grind or too expensive?


There are other ways next to protection against loss.

SWG for example had all items being player-made in addition to slowly loosing durability and breaking eventually. That means, instead of finding loot you can then use indefinitely, you were dependent on economy supply chains. SWG also made you dependent on player services - like doctors, entertainers and such.

I think there could easily be many casual friendly playstyles, like farming, harvesting, herding, entertaining, being mayor in a player city, etc. - in addition to more combat oriented play. Players should be able to choose one style or the other, or mix and match to their liking. And every such playstyle should both need and provide "stuff" from/to other playstyles on a regular basis.


Elite Dangerous is one of the most fulfilling grungy space sims I've ever played. I'm not much of one for the dog fighting side of things, but I do keep coming back to Elite to just do cargo runs or swap over to an Adder and push myself into the dark - scooping fuel off suns and try to avoid space hazards while just ogling the beautiful scenery.

It is a very strange "game" though, so I understand why it's not for everyone.


I have a MUD open right now in another window. I still play it because despite the lack of graphics, the freedoms of player interaction are interesting and far beyond whats available in modern open world games.

Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.

Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.

Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.


MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/


All of your points also exist in Renaissance era Ultima Online. There are a number of custom shards with playerbases that want this exact experience.


Yup! Ultima is another great game from when they were still 'figuring out' open world games, before they became stale.


In terms of mmorpgs, I'd love to see a game with actual human GMs behind the scenes enabling players to have far more latitude in their actions. I'm envisioning something like a cross of EVE and tabletop rpgs.


You should check out MUDs - MUDs (being entirely text based) are easy for any old person to modify and create within... no texture or graphics work - just writing. As a result a lot of MUDs have extremely dynamic worlds that have large ongoing plots being managed by the GMs.


The old Ultima Online had GMs pop in and create quests and random events. Non-scalable, but - oh - so much fun


"Non-scalable" is a rather medium excuse though. There's quite a few ways around this:

1. Raise prices enough to employ enough humans. I imagine there's quite a few people out there who'd be happy to spend a pint's price on a quality gaming experience.

2. Give the GM better tools. Higher level half-scripted events + better sentiment monitoring. I imagine a single competent GM can run in parallel a bunch of events keeping quite a few players engaged.

3. Recruit experienced players to do this job for you. I imagine there's quite a few people who'd do this job for in-game goods, as long as an hour of GM-ing gives a couple hours worth of grind of goods.


Currently building this. We're launching in August.


Give us some kind of link / mailing list so I dont have to remember 'til august. Spoiler: I wont remember.


Seconding maerF0x0, what's the game called?


Gemstone IV does this.


I'm currently building a game like this and it's pretty close to finish.

The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.

However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.

The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.

Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!


Gives me rendevous with rama vibes!


That's the one! :)


Can I piggyback on yours?

A true FPSMMORPG. Closest thing we have to this with a good community is Destiny. I wish for fully open worlds, good storylines and everything you said. I believe that was the original idea with the project that became Overwatch but sad it didn’t pan out.

I understand that level building and all is much harder when the expectation of detail is higher in FPS but hopefully that gets easier with better tools. I would think that it’s still Bungie’s ultimate goal. Hopefully Destiny can evolve into that. Whatever game does it right, has the potential to be one of the biggest games ever.


While Destiny fits the RPG portion better - Planetside 2 gets much closer to the MMO side and I really, really want to see someone else make a similar game without the terrible components. PS2 if the monetization was toned down and the global player interactions were ramped up would be an amazing experience.

You'll get snippets of how awesome the game could be if you play in an active outfit and try and coordinate in platoons... but oh gosh does that game have its warts as well.


I don't particularly care whether it's first person or some other perspective. Whether it's a shooter (or some other form of combat) isn't really relevant to my point either.

Open world yes - that's totally an ingredient that goes in there.

Storylines rather not. The thing is that storylines are pre-written, canned content that's just identical for every player that consumes it. In order to fit my bill, the "plot" of the game would actually have to be defined by what players are doing (and the game simulation reacting to that) - it would have to emerge dynamically. Saga of Ryzom originally tried to go a little bit along those lines, but due to the technological constraints of the day, the game world would have to evolve through updates/patches mostly.


The issue with SoR was not really technological constraints. More budgetary and time constraints, and the people who had the creative vision left shortly after release.

The commercial game is now run by a finance guy and a web developer, pretty much. Neither of which seem to be interested in pursuing the original more daring vision.

The tech is definitely capable of being expanded into a real dynamic world.

What you see in the game right now is effectively auto generated placeholder content that got rushed in to have a deliverable by release.

Imagine if the tribes and mobs actually moved their locations dynamically, instead of being in the same spots eternally. Players could help out tribes, supply routes for trading goods between tribes would need to be maintained, mob populations would be affected by player activity, etc.


Destiny was amazing but good god the grind...

Wonderful screwing around game. An extroverted friend of mine during the pandemic made it his primary social network. Made a lot of friends.


You might enjoy Eco. It's not quite an MMO, but it is a multiplayer game that can have large server populations where everyone must work together to advance through a collective "tech tree". It starts very similarly to a Minecraft playthrough, but has a much deeper cooperative progression of advancing different trades and resource gathering methods until the server can construct a laser cannon to destroy the meteor en route to impact the planet. There are also pollution and environmental mechanics, and diplomacy and collective governance. So you may have a player who produces lots of ore, but poisons the oceans to do so, and other players can collectively lobby to restrict that through the government. But at the same time, everyone must rely on the production of ore to further advance the tech tree.

It can be a lot of fun with the right group of people. There's also a lot of flexibility for adjusting the game's parameters, so you can make it work with 2 people or 20 so that everyone needs to work together but the tasks don't seem insurmountable. It's one of the most novel and interesting multiplayer game concepts I've played in recent memory.


It's never gonna be a AAA game. The broader market just doesn't want this, and you'll need the broader market if its a AAA game.

New World hit on some of these points at one point, but they backed down pretty fast.

Ashes of Creation may or may not hit some of these points. But that game is... overly ambitious, to say the least. They're trying to go full tilt on everything and I'm skeptical as to whether it's gonna work out well in the end.


Ever heard of A Tale In The Desert?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert


Oh man, I loved this game almost 20 years ago.

My friend and I started building on the side of a pond far away from everyone. We would get home from school and tie our house phone to our heads with our dad's tube socks so we could stay in constant communication while we collected resources and build up our enterprise.


Yes! It's amazing that it is still going.


Most popular MMOs do have healthy economies and virtual cultures. You do need to participate though. If party play is enforced then party members certainly do affect game mechanics.

Maybe you want a pvp focused MMO? Maybe something like PlanetSide with more of an economy? Either that or maybe you want some big story points influenced by players?

Honestly I think you'd probably be disappointed unless you are personally part of the group that made the influential change. That takes a lot of investment as the mechanic would either be pvp or feel like its on rails.

Maybe you just want an RP wow server and a guild that is into grinding for Glam/RP loot according to their own stories?

I don't see how it's a technical problem at all. It sounds like your major issues are with story telling. Can you explain what technology you think is missing?


Some persistent world NWN servers might fit the bill. Some are heavy on roleplaying, and are more of chat servers with optional combat rather than a traditional MMO setting.


NWN is a great example as well. It's imho quite underrated/overlooked how ground-breaking that game was, considering it's editor- and GM-tools.

It's a bit too static though, to fit the bill of what I'm longing for. Needs less pre-made modules, more dynamic simulation - so that the game world actually evolves in response to what players are doing. ;)


The Mount & Blade Warband Persistent World mod servers are like this. All equipment and resources have to be mined, crafted, and used by players, and the only gameplay was player interactions - trade, banditry, war. Amazingly good fun when you're on the right servers with the right people. No idea if its still active or not.


I’m not sure how WoW isn’t/wasn’t just ticking off boxes? That’s all MMORPG’s ever basically. “Go here, kill boars, bring me 5 of their tusks. By the way it’s a 25% drop rate so really you’re killing ~20. Oh and they’re often by themselves across a large area. Oh and other players need the same amount too so you’re competing for the kills. Oh and there are baby boars harassing you that don’t count. Oh and there’s no quest marker until you’re mini map can see it so it’s going to take you 10min of wandering around a featureless field before you know you’re in their spawn area.

As obnoxious as I’m being, the thrust of basically any MMORPG is grinding hours of boring tasks to get minutes of awesome time with the fruits of your labor. That’s how they make you stick around - roadblock after roadblock after roadblock. You remove the grind (d3 auction house) and you remove your players.


FFXIV doesn’t really have mandatory grind. They instead make the main story actually good (better than most other FF games) and so people will buy the expansion packs even if they don’t stick around every other month.


I agree but there’s a reason I didn’t say “literally every MMORPG does this.” FFXIV definitely stands out as a notable exception. SE is also big enough that they don’t need FFXIV to generate insane revenue to justify its existence, and good on them for making good use of that. It’s a profitable title that has also built them a lot of good will as a company, good will that’s been sorely needed lately.

My point is, most MMORPGs depend on giving you relatively simple tasks but finding ways to make them take three hours.


> a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you

Feels like a FAANG job


So the largest public server (white tiger) for the game eco https://play.eco/ might scratch that itch.


I would be in your views on it's economy and settlments gameplay in SWG. In some ways, Star Citizen may shape out to be a good replacement for SWG, if settlements, economy and manufacturing come out well there would be scenarios that aren't possible without an organisation or cooperation and real benefits to being part of a settlement. Think manufacturing pipelines and trading routes that can't be handled by one person. There are also ships you couldn't possibly fly and afford on your own, capital ships and the like.

The caveat to a game like that, is it lives and dies by it's player count. You really want to be on the bandwagon when it kicks off.


For me, this is a role that MUDs used to fill. Text-based online games with player driven governments, economies, and theologies. You, as a person, could work your way up a ladder to be a renown combatant, or diplomat, or merchant; but, none of that had any value if not for the other people playing the game. You got dropped off in a virtual world and truly had agency to play a role.

Ultimately as I got older they became too much of a time sink and I just can’t play them anymore, but back in my high school days they were an absolute blast.


Check out Foxhole. There's one server with thousands of people fighting on one map in a massive war. All weapons, ammunition, structures, etc are built by players from mined resources. The "High Command" Discords for each faction have their own internal tools used for gathering intel with computer vision and stuff. There's also a live map of the war: https://foxholestats.com/


I've heard of some success with this where people using mods on minecraft to implement economies on private servers.

But yes, sandbox MMO's were a different beast than the themepark MMO's we have today, I had high hopes for Everquest Next when it was announced (like ten years ago now) but it ended up vaporware I guess, and that was the last I've heard of anyone actually trying. I guess metaverse might count but I've mostly ignored anything that facebook tries to do.


"Id 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."

This describe Soulforged perfectly: https://play.soulforged.net/

It's funny but if you drop by the Discord, we've been having lengthy conversations yesterday on why this might not be fun.

The short of it is that it hurts solo players and individualism. Communes are extremely powerful and necessary for progress. There are also certain professions that are popular (like mining) but gated because of the rarity of mining picks. So a lot of people give up on their mining dreams for the greater good. The mining problem was patched just this morning, but solo gameplay is still a problem - you need to be part of some group to get anywhere.

The other major problem with a sandbox is many have no idea where to continue. They chop wood poles and then chop higher level wood and making housing from that. And then don't really have much to aspire for other than hoarding wealth. So the dev is adding quest-like features: one classic MMO quest system and a player based system, where people can pay for say, ore, or a rare material found from certain beasts.

But the world is based a lot on the players, from settlements to the name of materials.

If you guys plan on joining, civilization is past the river. Head south outside the tutorial cave, then keep moving NE past the bridge. The roads are also player built but nobody got around to making roads for the newbies.


On a bit of a tangent, there was a prequel. A plague hit - it was very annoying but lethality was low.

Half the player base decided to quarantine. There was a route west, which involved a dangerous swamp and a climb up a mountain that most newbies couldn't make if they didn't have the right buffs. New citizens would be escorted to the mountain, quarantined for 4 days, then buffed so they could cross it.

The other group was the "gains" group. They figured out that sparring increased stats rapidly and they could buff stats to the point where the disease was no longer a problem.

So then there was a PvE war with the orcs, which hit an uneasy peace, where the player base decided to just give tribute of weapons and armor to them. A third faction spawned, the orc sympathisers, who snuck more steel weapons to the copper age orcs. A smith player unlocked the orc race this way and black market emerged trading iron to the orcs.

The gains faction were uneasy with this and broke the peace treaty. The rest of the game, unhappy with breaking a treaty, moved west.

The gains faction conquered the orcs. The orc god was impressed and there was a party involving player-crafted beer, and a brawl with a god that increased someone's dodge skills to superhuman levels. The orcs were assimilated and they created a warrior-murderhobo faction in the north. They took on small territory, near a rich mine and some rare leathers used in armour. By the end of the game, everyone up north including chicken farmers had the highest tier swords.

The isolationist faction had a larger block of land and established trading relations with the dwarves. They got access to many of the remaining dungeons and artifact zones.

Sadly the game died shortly after, because of tech debt, server costs, and a burnt out player base. After a year, it was rebuilt into what became Soulforged today.


> 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.

Tibia too. It used to be an extremely social game. Everything was hard so people had to play together. It's been modernized and made much easier, nowadays it feels like the magic is gone. The changes began with restrictions on player killing and spiralled from there.


I think it’d be cool if all the players in a server are part of a country in a constantly changing state of warfare and alliance with other countries in a huge world. Where your goal is not to level up, but to participate in actions that expand your homeland or fend off invaders or expand your economy.

The larger and wealthier your country becomes, the more you become a threat to other powerful nations who will want to stamp you out. Or maybe there would be revolutions, alien invaders, etc. if you become too powerful.

Alternatively, if the players of the realm fail to defend their lands or make peace with their enemies, they might be conquered and forced to live under another empire, fighting their wars and paying high taxes, until one day they can scheme to win their independence again.

Of course, this does essentially mean your world can become irreparably messed up, but that’s life. Maybe people would give up on a server and move on to a new world with new ambitions about how they can do better next time.


God I miss the glory days of Ultima Online.


This is happening right now, but in small MMOs, usually with 128 or 256 maximum players online. Most common in heavily modded Minecraft servers, but also in many other games. There are also some roleplaying focused servers in games like GTA5 or Rust, which generally reset much more quickly.

Also see this game, ECO: https://store.steampowered.com/app/382310/Eco/

listen to first 10 minutes of this podcast: https://podtail.com/en/podcast/brad-will-made-a-tech-pod/79-...


I have high hopes for the upcoming MMORPG from Riot Games (maker of League of Legends/Valorant/Legends of Runeterra/Wild Rift). So far all of their new games have been very solid entrants in their respective genres. They have consistently had strong storytelling and art/design throughout their games, and they've mentioned there will be a focus on co-op content in the RPG. It's probably still several years away, though.

That said, I think part of the problem is that we've all gotten older, and no one has time to spend 5+ hours a day in a game world anymore. The younger generation may be able to experience it, but for those of us who have memories of old MMOs, it's unlikely we'll ever truly relive those nostalgia-filled moments.


These aren't quite true MMOs but will scale up to 40+ people online at once, with totally emergent social structures:

+ Rust

+ Ark

+ Conan Exiles


I think the recently-released V Rising could be added to that list as well.

Seems a great game.


Can confirm. Is excellent.


Look for the Ryzom Core Discord or IRC chat. There's a couple of us in the open source community hoping to build such a thing, based on an existing MMO codebase and assets.

The key point is that all missions should be impactful on the world, and not merely reward oriented.

We have the tech for an MMORPG. We've been working on simplifying the onboarding curve for new contributors first. In a few months we can start exploring game mission mechanics. :)


Lots of games have dedicated "role-play" servers. When I read your comment i instantly thought of this: https://www.polygon.com/22512951/gta-online-new-day-role-pla...

Conan Exiles is another game that has RP servers of a different variety.


Some of the browser based games like Travian, Inselkampf and OGame had similar meta games like Eve Online where the diplomacy, alliance management and game tool building took up far more time than the actual game.

They were for all intents social constructs with the game as the centre point. I'm looking to build a new version with different scenarios but it is the social aspect that makes them so compelling.


This is basically what people mean by The Metaverse. Digital cash + social interaction + player created environment and content. Getting all three of those right will be a big winner since it will literally mean the creation of a second world that people can inhabit. I don't think it's possible without any of those three elements.


What about an MMORPG with Chronotrigger-like features where two or three players together can do a special move.


I have been trying to make one like this for a decade, kind of a next-gen UO. Right now it's big ideas and the beginnings of a world. I'm not promoting it but feel free to take a look! I have a discord for discussing these games as well, though it's not active.


I think the constraint here is that you need people to create novel objects with novel functionality in the virtual world and then sell them to have an economy. That might be tricky but if you could solve it well then, your imagination is the limit.


If people love the world they'll be happy to make things without financial recompense. Lots of folks used to run RP guilds in WoW and other games with entire worlds constructed out of whole cloth - if you build a flexible system and supply the players then DMs will emerge and create gameplay within the world - just like D&D DMs get into it for the fun alone.


I can see a couple of obstacles:

Complex simulation based mechanics are much harder to implement than more basic fighting mechanics.

Puzzles require more work and hand crafting than creating new monsters to kill.

The whole project is probably more work, harder to scale, and has an unproven audience.


- 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.


Star Citizen itself is my answer... I remember reading an article in Popular Science about it [0] when I was a kid, and specifically the sentence about "For example, designers modeled each ship’s landing gear to retract without interfering with the hydrogen fuel system that feeds the nuclear reactor." That sounded like the coolest thing ever.

So, now that I've gotten eight years older but still haven't seen the game release, it makes me kinda sad.

Relatedly, another PopSci article [1] promised that flying cars would be available by ~2015. That never happened either :-(

[0] I read it in print, but here's the online version: https://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/space-game-gets-real/.


I, too, wish Star Citizen existed. It currently doesn't, despite periodic appearances to the contrary.


LevelCap has done some great star citizen videos recently, just him and some friends playing the game. If you're interested in the current state check out his channel:

https://youtu.be/ONYFCKdrPLs


Star Citizen was the first thing that came to mind too! I "pledged" in 2017 as a teenager and now I'll be graduating college next year. Unbelievable how poorly the game's been managed.


WC: Privateer is a little bit like that, especially if you played the WC (wing commander) games first. Moving from a military, "we have budget for everything" (ammo, missiles, fixes) to a "oh, should I fix my auto pilot or buy an extra missile?" setting feels a little bit like that.

Plenty of low-brow there as well, and basically being forced into the plot against your will is very on-point for a "I just want to make a buck" character.


Yeah - Privateer 2, the darkening got me into the whole genre. Five CD-ROMS in a multi disc case, Clive Owen, Mathilda May, Jürgen Prochnow, John Hurt, Christopher Walken, Brian Blessed and Amanda Pays and Dani Behr playing in the cutscenes. If you could have walked around the space stations and planets in3D it would have been as close as it gets to this.


I could see something like this being REALLY cool in VR.

Elite Dangerous supports VR but everything is too clean. You need that layer of dirt and wobbly landings for authenticity.

(Disclaimer - I've only played all of like 15 minutes of ED in VR)


In this same vein, I want a modern remake of Escape Velocity with the high quality choose-your-own story arcs, but multiplayer. The graphics could be absolute garbage and I'd still play it daily.


I think Mount & Blade: Warband is a bit like that, but in a medieval setting, of course.


Fwiw Endless Sky is a pretty good remake of EV, though it's fairly linear and single player.


Unfortunately development has been paused for over two years now. But yes, outside of Arpia + some other total conversions for older EVs, this is really the only thing out there that directly scratches the EV itch.

The closest contenders IMO are StarSector, the X series, Free Space 2 with extensive modding. Then many games that are similar to those 3.

I have still yet to find a space game holistically more enjoyable than EVN though.


Hmm, paused by the main dev? Probably yeah, but community continues to develop it if you check the discord group and git commits. There's some model/sprite rework and the coalition campaign that they were working on the last I checked.


Try the new Rebel Galaxy game. It does blue collar space game quite well, even if it didn't end up being my cup of tea


Thanks for the referral. The trailer sure looks like something I'd be into.


Not a video game but there's a board game called Galaxy Trucker that ticks a few of these boxes--low brow, space trash, best effort ridiculousness.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31481/galaxy-trucker


You're describing the game X4, minus the land combat.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/392160/X4_Foundations/


I played the X series since X2, I found the latest X3 (TC, AP) more enjoyable than Rebirth and even X4. X2 had the landing part (quite annoying, in reality), X3 had the fun, later games had better graphics but not the same immersion. Unfortunately the universe is quite limited, even with 100 sectors, and very static endgame.


I'm imagining the 1970s but in space, like a Heavy Metal[0] video game.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Metal_(magazine)


Space Station 13?


Ostranauts definitely gets the "flying heaps of scrap" and manual landings down. Last run my first ship was a converted cargo container with no life support.


Problem with the space heap of scrap aesthetic is that in real life space, even aside from all the other problems you need a lot more radiation shielding than that to survive outside low Earth orbit.


Not if you know how to cure cancer ;)


Sounds like Space Quest but with modern game play.


This is what i want!! Space quest with Botw gameplay!


Lol... very much so!


> trading

How can that be enjoyable though? You're just hauling cargo from point A where it's cheap to point B where it's expensive. Even in Eve's player driven economy it's a grind.

> exploration, space and land combat and great characters and stories and I'd never stop playing it

Completely agree. I really enjoyed exploring planets in Elite Dangerous.


This is basically the Star Wars aesthetic, I hope we get a nice non-MMO open-world Star Wars game again. We probably will.


This is the exact vibe Anachronox (2001) had.

It's 86% off on Steam right now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/242940/Anachronox

But it's not a space combat sim, it's a sci-fi RPG.


I really enjoyed that game. Tons of personality.


Sounds like an infinite procedurally generated VR game of Red Dwarf.

But not this https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Dwarf_XI:_The_Game


Beyond good and evil 2? If it ever goes out...


Holding my breath...and turning blue.


X4: Foundations, gets closest to this for me.


With a sidekick called... Murty?


reminds me of battlestar gallactica and landing without clamps


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 <time period> (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.


An alternative approach is to limit the precision and latency of commands.

For example, you can tell a soldier, "attack this general area" or "attack in this direction", but you can't actually micromanage their movement and other actions.

Then you introduce mechanics/stats like "communication effectiveness", "professionalism", "morale" which increase or decrease the precision, latency, and effectiveness of commands. For example, an elite special forces unit might have perfect command reception, allowing you to micro it. But a grunt would have very low reception and need a nearby commander's aura to boost their reception and allow even the most basic commands through.


And what about the grunt who reads the map upside down?


We don't call them grunts, we call em butter bars (2LT).


I always loved the experimental RTS game Liquid War: https://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/

The only player input is to move a beacon. The beacon has the same movement speed limit for all players, so the only thing left is to strategize how to move the beacon so the "army" can engage in the best way.


This reminds me of an old RTS(?) game called Majesty. The interesting thing there was that you build buildings and such, but you have no control over individual units. You can try to motivate them by placing bounties and such, and different unit types are more or less receptive to those incentives. So speed/micromanagement have very little benefit, though strategy and efficient sequencing would still be relevant.


Turn-based strategies might suit you better.

There is a reason why they are a completely different genre of games.

I enjoyed playing Age of Wonders (all titles) because I was getting frustrated with Starcraft: Brood War.


They do.

But I also like the real-time aspect. I like the urgency. I just want something in the middle between "You can't move your hand ultra fast so you lose" and "I will spend 10 minutes considering the optimal move".


I agree 100% with this and havent found the right game for it. not exactly RTS, but friends and I play Civ5 with 1-2 minute turn timer and it's a pretty good balance.


I think there might be enough of a market for something in-between.

There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.

Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.

I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.

turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.

Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake


Age of Wonders was great! They've done some really good mods with new units, more maps and changing the difficult so the heroes are not too strong.


This (or, the experience you're looking for) is available now, by using compositions more suited to it and adjusting your play, but it does require departing from the meta (which I agree is over-focused on micro).

It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.

There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.

Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.

Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.

Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.

This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.


This one looks interesting: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1309610/Line_War/


To extend this a bit, I'd love an RTS where I can create macros or programs and assign them to units. I'd love to watch them play out, then tweak or reassign macros to units in real time. I keep wishing Planetary Annihilation had an API.


This exists, it is called Screeps.


It's a 14 year old game at this point, but I enjoyed "Tom Clancy's EndWar". It's meant to be played with a gamepad, so it doesn't have much micromanaging. There can be at most 24 "units" on the map at any given time, 12 per side. Multiplayer splits divides the unit count equally among members of the team. Each unit is comprised of a bunch of smaller units (vehicle units are 4 vehicles, infantry units are 4 groups of 5 soldiers, etc.), but you control all of them as a single unit.


Why not just make it turn based then?


Because real time is more exciting.

I love turn based games, but there is definitely a different feel with a RTS that feels less ‘boardgamey’.

I know what OP means - ie StarCraft without the micro.


Age of Empires 4 removed a lot of the micro common in the previous games. You can now no longer dodge projectiles which is a major win for non micro gameplay.

I have played it for almost 50 hours now and I don't feel you have to do things too quickly if you aren't aiming to be in the top 100. If you have already memorized your plan and responses, it becomes pretty slow and stress free.


Because not every trade-off is best resolved by taking the extreme.


Personally I like the idea, it doesn’t need to be fully turn based - there would still be some skill involved in using your orders efficiently. Plus, there would be a new emergent gameplay mechanic to manage: not overflowing your order queue with extraneous commands.


Turn based games with too many players become boring when you're waiting for your turn.


I used to be very active in the Incremental/Idle game community and penned a few games myself.

At some point I toyed with the idea of an Idle strategy game. Battles would play automatically, and as a player your intervention was purely at the strategy level: manage your armies, resources, etc. Think Total War but every battle is auto.

This was a bit boring so I pivoted a little: battles would be mostly automatic, but players had a limited number of actions. For each battle players would set up their troops and these would fight automatically. You'd have a limited number of action points, say 6, that you could spend on things like spells or reinforcements. Also you would win 1 action point for every minute.

I wrote a prototype for this, but I never made it work. In my mind I imagined an epic struggle where two players would fight tooth and nail for several minutes until one just about won the battle. In practice battles were either an endless stalemate or one player quickly steamrolled the other.

There might be a good idea there, but it might require far more work balancing and pacing that I could put into it.


That's what World of Warcraft does, it has a Global Cooldown system to help account for unstable connections.

It's only 1 second or so, and lots of actions are off the GCD, but all you would need to do is extend that time and put more things on the GCD and you'd effectively get what you're looking for.

I don't think it'll slow things down as much as you're hoping for, though.


It's about the number of orders you can make for individual or small groups of units, e.g. split attack orders so each part of your army blows one enemy unit in one shot thus not wasting DPS. The best example is Brood War pro player Jaewong who literally had 70+% win rate in a rock-paper-scissors called Zerg vs Zerg.


If you’re not familiar, RPGs call a similar mechanic to this “active time battle” or ATB—more or less turn-based but the turns are asynchronous and constantly ticking, and if you miss giving an order before one elapses, it’s gone. I know that’s not what you’re looking for, but maybe the term will help in your search.


Honestly, it's a big conception that success in RTS games rely on high APM. Great strategy and macro will get you to the 99th percentile in most rts games. I notice that a lot of players that are in the lower percentiles are those who focus more on trying to improve APM rather than strategy or macro.


>Great strategy and macro will get you to the 99th percentile in most rts games.

... if you meet the bare minimum.

You won't have large success in StarCraft if you won't even notice the banelings running toward your marines, not even talking about splitting them.


There are some assumptions here:

- you made marines

- they are accessible to a-moving banelings without having to go around terrain and/or through tank fire, marauders, mines

It's quite possible to do low-apm styles in SC2, but you have to actually do them, rather than trying to be budget Maru.


Infamously, successful SC2 pro player Whitera only had about 100-125 APM. I manage that pretty comfortably as a middle aged dude. I think you could definitely do more to de-emphasize micro, but even the big bad SC2 isn't as high-APM as people think.


This isn't what you are asking for (sorry!) but the "Creeper World" series are RTS where you are encouraged to slow time down, or pause, when planning. Doesn't work like that in multiplayer, but I enjoyed the campaign. I'd just stat with the latest one (4).


Check out Winter's SC2 Low APM Challenge. He gets to the Masters league with all three races - using 100-120 APM in the diamond league, and way less in the lower leagues. He keeps emphasising how much of his "brain time" actually goes to decision making (he's also pretty good at explaining his thought process), and how much of the APM is actually just making units.

Most engagements are just: form a concave, pre-split/siege, cast a couple spells, a-move.


I want an RTS where you script / pre-plan unit response trees, and have limited intervention once executing. This would favor the clever and tricky over the fast.


You mean Screeps. The javascript rts


The game "Bang! Howdy!" comes to mind. There was a mixture of realtime and turn based where you could queue an order for each of your units, but it will be executed only after cool down from the previous order passes. All cooldowns were ticking down in sync according to global clock. The unit without queued orders and off cooldown was just staying in place and the orders issued to it were executed on the next tick.


There's an older game called Kohan you could check out. Click speed is not super important compared to positioning and company builds. Doubt there's a multiplayer scene, but I haven't played in forever.

Also check out Beyond All Reason, it's a modern Total Annihilation where you're essentially trying to automate economy and production and the game provides a lot of tools to do that.


You can look at mobile games like Clash Royale. It's like a mini RTS, you get certain amount of resources per time, and deck builder combined.


Try Northgard.

It's an RTS but with very calm/slow pacing and is very forgiving if you don't want to zone into it like other fast paced rts games.


I was thinking this same game. I quit playing starcraft/warcraft etc, because it is so important how quickly you can play and most of your focus is on the micro of your army, rather than how strategic you plan you base. While northgaurd is a very strategic city builder/resource management type with just enough fighting to keep everything interesting. Very small armys (12 is a very large army) so micro during battle is slower, less important at most for a few minutes. Putting the priority on how you have planned your base/resources. A much welcomed change in rts games.


I got this game because I thought it would be like that, but unfortunately there's still a lot of micromanagement available with units at war, something I specifically was trying to avoid. Your melee units will get kited around.

I would have preferred it to be either "enter tile and attack what's there" vs "retreat".


Oh, I would love this. I think it could work very well as a real-time game, but with the caveat that when units begin attacking each other the micro control is temporarily relinquished, so that you can direct the events via high-level orders and a strategy behavior for the AIs simulating the battle on each side.


1) Northgard isn't that, but it is a proper RTS with a way slower overall pace, so it might scratch the itch.

2) Anachron is a RTS with time travel, and issuing commands in the past depletes a resource, so it does something similar but for a very different purpose.


If you don’t mind learning a board game or a handful of UI quirks, Board Game Arena’s real-time mode more-or-less does this. And they have some great games on there, too.

https://en.boardgamearena.com/


Make actions have cost, and / or put cooldowns on orders. Still allow the ability to burst out a high APM for a short period of time, but design it so overdoing it is suicide.

Give the kids a fighting chance, ya know?


That's the point of a pool. You slowly regain them until your pool is full. You can burst 5 (or whatever k) moves at once, but it takes time to refill the pool.


fair enough, but pooling them assumes all orders are created equal - which could be a tight game-design constraint. but i agree what i am saying is in the same spirit as that


I also want an RTS that doesn't turn into a RSI speedrun. Your idea for APM limits is great, but my idea is that AI could handle micro. Let Deepmind control each unit while the user gives high level commands.


A lot of the newer RTS are designed so that micro matters a lot less


Yeah, things that were powerful micro in StarCraft I, such as moving marines apart to reducing incoming splash damage, can be done automatically by the AI (either with formation commands or with “incoming baneling, spread out”).


Offworld Trading Company is a real-time economic strategy game. It does have a fair amount of things to manage, but having no units means the APM is far lower than a traditional RTS.


I would recommend the Total War series. Rome II and Medieval II are my favorites. Both are slower RTS games that rely more on strategy than on APS.


HUGE +1 In a similar vein, I want an FPS game where there's no benefit to having reaction times over some modest baseline like 300-400ms


You may enjoy Grand Strategy games over RTS then. EU4, CK2/3, HOI4, are the Paradox titles; Total War games have that aspect as well.


Fancy to try chess?


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.


https://endless-sky.github.io/

> Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to the classic Escape Velocity series. Explore other star systems. Earn money by trading, carrying passengers, or completing missions. Use your earnings to buy a better ship or to upgrade the weapons and engines on your current one. Blow up pirates. Take sides in a civil war. Or leave human space behind and hope to find friendly aliens whose culture is more civilized than your own.


I quite liked Endless Sky (which is no surprise because I quite liked Escape Velocity). Last time I tried it, the storylines were far from finished, but it was a good time.


It's got that... "in progress" feel -- and probably always will.

I love how many people it has fiddling with the code and storyline.

I know it's not something that can realistically happen, but I'd love for all games to switch to open-source after a few years of being available commercially.

It's cool to see continuous development on Endless Sky. At times... wish some features and improvements would go faster, but hey... that's part of playing with a non-commercial product. It's just a casual train-set in my basement... tinker a bit, play a bit, it's just sort of fun to see both sides.


Starsector might be worth trying out, depending on your choices you can land on either side of the hegemony's good graces and get mode 2 or 1. Check it out.


Have you seen ΔV: Rings of Saturn? I think it has at least the first part of Mode 1 that you're talking about.


Thanks for this. I tried the demo and bought it after enjoying it! Cross-platform on Mac, Linux, and PC, too!


I feel like you might've heard of ‘Space Rangers’ (just ‘2d space trading with pirates’ does rather hint at it), but if not—it's about a third to a half of what you described, plus some other stuff on top. IDK if they ever made it multiplayer, though—maybe in the Steam release.


There is no multiplayer mode for that game.


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.


Halcyon 6 could be this, but ended up having far too many grinding fights.

For me, the main appeal of SC2 and first Mass Effect game was a sense of a huge undiscovered galaxy where the wonders are. The joy of finding your first rainbow world was immense.


Starcom: Nexus temporarily scratched this particular itch for me. There is no economy in the game, but there is ship building, researching, collecting resources, interacting with ships and planets, discovering stuff, space battles and a mystery that takes 10-15 hours to unravel. It's a top-down 2D game with free movement. The gameplay is balanced and fun, and the game doesn't always give you quest markers to chase, so you are expected to be observant.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/863590/Starcom_Nexus/


Well, you may be interested in the latest effort by the original devs:

https://www.dogarandkazon.com/

https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/

EDIT: Looks like this is being developed just presently:

https://www.twitch.tv/pebby

https://www.reddit.com/r/uqm2/


How do you feel about Stardock's Star Control reboot? For me, it felt like a big tech demo, but not fully fleshed out.

Btw, Mass Effect was very inspired by Star Control with its use of minigames for mineral collection. I really want a game that's more of a 50/50 mix between Mass Effect and Star Control.


My disdain for Origins is just about Brad Wardell's treatment of Fred and Paul and his complete disregard for which rights he purchased versus which he didn't. And that really hurt because I liked Stardock so much - I remember reading something about how he built the original Galactic Civilizations and each ship was its own window due to how he misunderstood the system, and I really admired the pragmatism and get-things-done attitude. And then he was a massive jerk to these other people I think are cool.

The game itself was lovely. The writing was good. The art was good. The combat was fine. The lander and everything adjacent to it was frustrating; not only did it bounce around like a caffeine-addled pigeon, the things you'd do with the resources were not satisfying. The game was short, but it was supposed to be a platform upon which other people would build using a campaign editor, and then the entire community hated Stardock and nobody wanted to create more content.


Interesting, I always thought of Mass Effect as a spiritual successor to Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic. Never played Star Control though, may need to check it out.


Both Star Control II and Mass Effect create this sense of alien-ness, where you feel like you're really trying to deal with alien races using human concepts and, unless you can break out of that mold, you won't succeed. In SC2 this is quite literal, since the game runs on a clock of sorts, and it's possible to get into an unwinnable state.

The best part of SC2 is that it is impossible to know ahead of time if your encounters will result in making loyal allies or barbaric enemies. The only way forward is to keep exploring the galaxy.


If you like that feeling, you might enjoy the old game Vangers. It's not quite ‘take these completely foreign things and do barely understandable tasks with them’, but the mood is definitely there.


It was ok, but it felt more like a checklist of progression then the wonder of exploration.


‘Space Rangers’ does a bit of what you describe, though not much. In fact, I learned about SC2 much later after playing SR, and realized that SR borrowed a lot from SC2. But perhaps SR can satisfy some of the itch for a new game in the genre(s), for those who haven't seen it yet.


Space Rangers have far too dense world. The vastness of the galaxy is part of what makes exploration so fun in SC2.


Or an update or sequel to the Electronic Arts Starflight series!


Star Control is a spiritual successor to Starflight - the star system exploration screen is virtually identical between Star Control II and Starflight.


Totally aware! Huge fan of both. However I think I in general prefer the overall vibe and lore or Starflight to SC2 myself. Both series are great though.


Btw, I'd love to have something like SC2 in the sense of the huge galaxy to explore and mystery to unravel, but with space combat like FTL!


All I have to say is, this game sounds bad ass!


You're kinda describing EV and EV-likes.


When I google "EV," I get news articles about Tesla and their competitors. What does EV stand for in this context?


Escape Velocity


You mean Ur-Quan Masters? http://theurquanmasters.com/

A new version is being developed!


I'm not up-to-date with the ongoing state of the UQM2 effort, other than awareness of the subreddit and the streams. They communicate mostly via video and I prefer text, so I haven't kept up since the kerfuffle with Stardock.

I did only play Ur-Quan Masters, though, and in like 2006, at that. I wasn't aware of the original until UQM.


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!


That's what Artemis is.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/247350/Artemis_Spaceship_...

When I worked at SpaceX, a dozen or so of us once played it between the primary and backup mission control rooms. It was nice having the expensive headsets. All I remember is someone on the other team "hacking" our spaceship by using the company IT system to remotely reboot our team's computer terminals.


Well, that's some dedicated griefing lol


I'm surprised no one mentioned SpaceTeam yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3fsvKnIVJg

It's not exactly what you're looking for, but still the most unique and fun game I've played in this "group of people piloting a spaceship" genre.

You play on a phone with other people physically next to you, each person being presented with a randomly generated UI elements with labels that's purposely confusing.

To keep your ship traveling and alive, commands will randomly pop up on everyone's screens with instructions of what to do; The vast majority of which are on other people's devices.

If your team doesn't react fast enough, you eventually lose.

Sometimes you'll be hit by astronomical events like black holes or asteroid fields which cause the game to go much faster, leading to people stressfully yelling "WE NEED TO CREAM THE CORN. WHO HAS THE CORN, CREAM IT RIGHT NOW!"

Not what you're looking for, but I think a lot of readers here would enjoy it :)


SpaceTeam is so much fun.

I always want to suggest it to people who don't game much, but it can be a real struggle to get people to download an app. So, I have it on two devices, so I can handle at least one real stick-in-the-mud.


I found getting everyone’s phones to connect a little cumbersome too. This was a year or two ago though, maybe they’ve fixed some bugs.


It is particularly annoying, and unpredictably annoying when trying to connect over bluetooth, because apparently every bluetooth radio is some completely unique thing that has grudges against other bluetooth radios at random.


Huge fan of SpaceTeam but boy howdy does it stress me out sometimes haha. Lots of good memories of playing with my family and hearing the most absurd phrases being screamed at the top of their lungs.

RECOMBOBULATE THE AERATOR! PAY TAXES! SURVIVE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!


i was going to say spaceteam. not at all the game they were looking for but absolutely a game everyone should play.


It exists! https://store.steampowered.com/app/252870/PULSAR_Lost_Colony...


PULSAR even has VR support, as well.

PULSAR with just a tiny, tiny drop of SpaceTeam would be ideal, IMO. At least last time I played it, it was a little dry. Random stuff should happen in the bridge when you get hit (not full-wacky SpaceTeam stuff, just, like, piped shooting out of the wall) (I haven't played in a while so maybe I am out of date).


That one.

And barotrauma, I Can't remember another game now


Barotrauma is a hoot. Beater submarine being piloted by a bunch of QWOP-level controlled smack addicts.

And almost everything has varying levels of complexity. Sure, there's a pretty deep medical system with dozens of medicines of varying side effects and effectiveness for whatever ails you. Or you can just stuff yourself full of morphine (leading to the aforementioned crew of opiate addicts). You can just set the boat's ~~on board barbeque~~ nuclear reactor to automatically scale turbine output and heat levels, but either through manual management or more advanced logic circuitry you can make your boat better suited for high-intensity situations.

It does take a handful of friends to really enjoy, though. Makes it hard as an adult, but scheduling play sessions is a nice social gathering.


When you grow up, scheduling a game is THE difficult task.., for everything.., but some Saturday nights the submarine is alive with the full crew


Pulsar is great! I haven’t played in ages so not sure how active the community is. But I had some good times playing in random lobbies in that game.


Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime also has this mechanic. https://www.loversinadangerousspacetime.com/


Great game. Highly recommended.

I want a game like this but as a company simulator with metaphorical roles, with the businessmen from Adventure Time.


Not first person or multiplayer but in case you're unfamiliar with it:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/212680/FTL_Faster_Than_Li...


+1 for this, I wasted SO MANY HOURS on this game. very high replay value.


I don't know if you have anything to do this year, but their follow-up 'Into the Breach' is also amazing.


Damn you, I just got out of a crippling factorio addiction ...


Haven't heard of that - I'll check it out.


NOOOO!


Fantastic game. It’s my usual “play on iPad on plane trips” game actually.


I had this idea a while ago, and it just never materialized:

- Every player can use their tablets or phones, and as many as they'd like

- Each device can be assigned with different controls

    - Wasn't sure if this would be decided before the game starts or if some player could control it, or if anyone can just add in controls as needed

 - The game plays only on the ship bridge, there would be no first-person anything

 - One device acts as the viewer screen
Scenarios would be things like escorting a ship through hostile space, delivering cargo, peace treaties, or search and destroy. One thing I wanted is the game to favour fun over realism. Like a player could go rogue and navigate the ship anywhere they wanted, or start firing on a friendly ship. Controls should be easy, like navigation could be as easy as scanning for nearby locations and then picking it, letting the computer plot a course.

I liked the idea of players all hanging out in a living room, connect the "viewer" player to a TV, and just have fun. Some scenarios and situations would involve teamwork, like having an engineer reroute power from navigation (ie nav has to slow down to make power available) to weapons for more powerful shots.

I thought it would be fun to build, but I just didn't have the time to develop it myself.


There was a game around 2000 called Allegiance that reminds me of this idea somewhat - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(video_game).

It's been ~22 years since I've played it, but IIRC there was one player that essentially played an RTS game, but the various units they were "controlling" were all actual players flying their own spaceships. I don't think there was any concept of different players working together on one ship, but there definitely were different ship types each player could choose to fly.

It wasn't a market success, but I always wondered if that was somewhat caused by the way they released the game: there was a long and very large free beta program, and by the time they decided the game was finished and put it in boxes I was a done for a bit and took a break. Always wondered how many people felt like I did.


The FreeAllegiance community is tight-nit, alive and well last time I played it in 2008. It's one of the most team-oriented games I've played.


If you are okay with trading life in a vacuum with life under pressure: Barotrauma [0]

> Barotrauma is a 2D co-op survival horror submarine simulator, inspired by games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Space Station 13. It’s a Sci-Fi game that combines ragdoll physics and alien sea monsters with teamwork and existential fear.

You have roles in your submarines, such as a medic, mechanic, engineer, captain. Everyone can do the same things, but some are better than others at different things.

If you have time, you can build your own submarine. The game also has a good amount of mods available.

Quick note: The game is in "Early Access".

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/


That sounds similar to Artemis[0] and EmptyEpsilon[1].

The interface is just a proxy for spaceship stations so you can't run around the spaceship though.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/247350/Artemis_Spaceship_...

[1] https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/


Last time I messed with it was years ago and it was somewhat buggy, but the concept is awesome: https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/


For a cooperative space ship bridge game, you may enjoy the board game Space Alert [1]. It is real time and mostly tactical, but it makes for a very interesting challenging experience as the time constraint does not allow a single player to commandeer each detail, but rather you need to successfully delegate which at least I have found to be very challenging with the teams I have played with.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38453/space-alert


For the space combat FPS I think you're talking about Angels Fall First (https://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/Angels_Fall_First/). Players start on a capital ship and can walk around, fly fighters, and attack as well as board their enemy.

The old Battlefront 2 also had a (simpler) form of this type of capital ship combat, where the bases were the ships and players would dogfight in space and attempt boarding actions.


Oh wow, I think you’re right! You wouldn’t believe how many years I’ve been trying to find out what that game was. Thanks!


Maybe you already know of these: Artemis[1], Empty Epsilon[2], and (full disclosure, my own) Space Nerds in Space[3], and there's a (mostly inactive since Covid) forum for the genre is at https://bridgesim.net Also, previously:[4][5]

[1] https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/ [2] https://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/ [3] https://smcameron.github.io/space-nerds-in-space/ [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28345868 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28343941


Not exactly what you’re looking for but comes pretty close if you’re not familiar: http://www.loversinadangerousspacetime.com/

That being said I would love a more grown-up version of this with more than two players.


+1 for lovers in a dangerous space time. Cute graphics, and definitely solid game play.

My friend and I used to play it a lot, but we were hilariously bad at it.

We would end up bickering at each other over mistakes and sometimes self sabotaging the ship out of frustration. All in good fun though, we had so many good laughs over dying in stupid ways.

Definitely need at least 1 friend to play though. Single player gives you a little CPU dog that you command around, but it's not nearly as fun.


It's even more insane and hilarious with 4 people trying to coordinate things. I personally found the best way is to assign everyone a station based on their preference/skills e.g. one friend loves playing with shields, so they are always in charge. Then find out who can steer the best and give them that as permanent role... granted it can be slightly less fun than the chaos, but I find utter chaos eventually gets old after you've died 100 times on the same level because everyone's running around trying to control everything.


I think Artemis is exactly what you describe minus the fighters https://www.artemisspaceshipbridge.com/#/


Guns Of Icarus fits this almost perfectly, but instead of being set in space it's more steampunk vibes.


Oh yes, I forgot about that. There was another airship game too I think, although it was less “play as a crew” and more “team deathmatch on airships”. I’ll have to look into guns of Icarus again. Is it still active? From the steam reviews it sounds like it may be dead.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1055610/Deep_Space_Battle...

Still beta and lacks players but I think that is exactly what you want


That looks great actually, thanks for the recommendation. I’ll be sure to try it out!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/247350/Artemis_Spaceship_... is old but pretty much what you're describing!


Not a video game or with combat like that but there is a board game called Space Cadets. It is what you say in that each player has their own role but it is also real time and quite frantic. I'm sure there are lots of YT video reviews of it.


Oops, I meant Captain Sonar. Sorry, wrong Geoff game.


Is that pilot + crew thing not something that you can do in elite 4/elite dangerous? I don't know if they added FPS yet but I think getting in a fighter etc while.aomwone flies the mothership was a feature.


If you like the concept, definitely give Bridge Crew a try in VR. It's almost magical being on the bridge, and moving your hands to manipulate controls.


Lovers in a dangerous spacetime mostly fits the description though it is definitely not what you have in mind :)


Spaceteam is sort of an extreme abstraction of this idea.


yea, give me Sea of Thieves gameplay in space


Star Citizen is the closest thing to that. It’s not without its production flaws but what they managed to build is breathtaking.


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.


The closest thing to this I know of is The Forgotten City. It has some fantasy elements and the city itself isn't a real one.

Premise:

"The Forgotten City is a narrative-driven time loop adventure in ancient Rome. Discover the ruins of an ancient underground city, travel 2000 years into the past, and unravel the mystery of who destroyed it by cleverly exploiting the power to wind back time. The fate of the city is in your hands."

Developer comment on historical authenticity:

"In terms of historical authenticity, we engaged two historical consultants: Dr. Philip Matyszak, who has a D.Phil from Oxford and teaches at Cambridge, and has written 17 books on the ancient world. And Dr. Sophie Hay, who has spent 20 years excavating the ruins of Pompeii. Dr Matyszak helped us to create a game world with historically authentic art, architecture, costumes and customs. And Dr Hay helped out with a comprehensive review, ensuring our architecture and art was consistent with her observations of Pompeii, which was preserved in a very similar time period. We spent over 20 months on this and exchanged 300+ emails and did video flythroughs."


The recent Assassin's Creed games had a limited approximation of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh4Iy-p943M


Wouldn't that be like really boring? I mean most of the real events (real in the sense of the more realistic possible, ignoring paintings, poems, tales, etc) are nowhere near as fun as is portraid in the media.

People die all the time in the most boring way (illnesses, accidents), battles are not that epic, no monsters or great heros, overall knowledge of the people are very shallow, etc.


I think assassins creed has sort of the right idea. You’re doing other stuff but normal people are around you.

Think a mashup of AC and forgotten city (a Roman game with a time loop that focuses on talking to the locals).


I am actually excited when seeing a historical movie without epic exaggeration. Recently this TV series was my favorite: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10405220/

It presents a primitive material reality, but also the culture and supernatural beliefs.

It doesn't have to be without monsters, it just have to portray them according to beliefs of people of that time, and not according to our modern interpretation, or modern appeal. It could be an opportunity to also document ancient societies, culture, mythical beliefs too.

An addition. Also make a survival mode, where you are not just sightseeing safely, but also have to survive whatever is happening.


I love the historical aspects of the assassins creed games but often grumble that you don’t really get to see much of what day to day life was like for certain groups of people. There was a game pitch I really liked where it followed an immortal person who was winding their way through history. Made it easy to make it into a series.


Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time was very cool - Myst style point and click puzzle game. It probably feels very dated now though.


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.


That would be quite an impressive game. Each simulation would need to be automateable in case the player does not want to manage that particular aspect of the game. Otherwise the game will fall into the trap of "trying to please everyone pleases no one".

Anyways, I'm working on Archapolis, a city builder game. The game will feature more hands on management than existing games in the genre, such as being able to design/build your own buildings. The player will see the interior of the buildings so making the exterior pretty wont need to be worried about. I'm also aiming to have a city board that will automate parts of the game for you if you choose (like having a fire marshall to handle fires)

I've got a tech demo of the path finding code up on youtube here, in case you're interested in path finding hundreds of thousands of units efficiently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI


Also been slowly brainstorming a city sim technical design on and off for maybe 7 years as a side project that has a few similar goals in regards to large unit counts and custom buildings so it seems we have similar interests there. It feels like it has a high risk of becoming an endless feature creep project, though, so it's been hard to prioritize as a focus until I can settle on what the soul of it should be which informs all other decisions.

Just guessing From what I see, it looks like you may have chosen a technical path that doesn't scale well even if the resource usage is reasonable at this scale (constant time != constant resource). There are certain features I want to have that I think your approach doesn't make viable, so depending on how your game evolves the algorithm may get in the way. You've probably already thought through some of that and figure with some optimizations maybe it will be enough for your needs. Might even have a little extra versatility in other ways.

Hope you find success! I'll keep an eye out on your project. One bit of feedback though, I would personally change the name. It's not fun to read and doesn't roll off the tongue very well.


I've figured out how to make the path finding scale well-enough. Before I was using a hash table but that ate up 12.5 GB of space for 10,000 nodes. I looked around for better hash libraries and managed to lowered the RAM needed to 10 GB.

Then I figured out a way to store the results in a vector while still maintaining constant time access, which lowered the space needed to 2.5 GB. (This discovery came after the linked video, hence not being mentioned)

For reference, 10,000 nodes would be about 50 x 50 blocks (~4 nodes per intersection). Using Manhattan sized blocks, that's about 13 square miles of city, which is the same area as 3 x 3 Cities: Skylines tiles. Should be way more than enough!

Regarding the name, my first choice Metropoly was taken by existing companies (plural), and there's a domain squatter holding metropoly.com. Im not attached on the name yet so there's room to change it.


That's good to hear. Off-street areas do have their own cost as well which doesn't sound included in that, but there are other ways to optimize those which can depend to some extent on the designer feature set.

Gah, it's so tempting to share my notes, because you'd appreciate a lot of the ideas in there. It's probably a bad idea though, because part of the motivation to actually develop it would be to share those ideas and the vision some day. :)


It's a solved problem. Off road travel off screen will use timed-teleporting, on screen I will use A*. I dont need to worry about real time path finding inside homes (no traffic, no combat, etc) if the unit isnt visible.

If this is something you are serious about then I'd recommend unlocking your enthusiasm and ideas. I'm not able to connect with you if you're secretive and indirect. If that makes sense then you're welcome to send me an email (see profile). My door is open to working with up to a small group of people, provided they can support themselves now and its a good fit.


We have very different lists of constraints that forced us to reason towards different optimizations. Unless your aims change drastically before launch, I don't think there's much risk that our projects would be highly redundant. It seems like you might have a larger focus on individual unit identities ala Dwarf Fortress than I do, but I still prioritize the value of identity highly with a different design approach.

Enthusiasm isn't a huge problem, it's partially that I have a great many interests of varying levels of importance where appealing ideas just pour out of my mind and that whole process enriches all other interests. The difficulty is that it keeps adding more and more considerations, so there's more complexity to comb through in order to prioritize.

Being vague is intentional, but not out of any disrespect. I'm doing strange things and part of their future appeal might be that they are strange, which wouldn't be the case if they become common in the market before I ever even get around to finishing it. :) That strangeness is also part of the problem, because there are a lot of harder to predict things that may go wrong.


Yes, I imagined that a component could provide some inputs (e.g. Grain) and outputs (e.g. Bread) with some default link between the two, and that would apply to all instances of that component within the world, unless a player took control of an instance and modified the behaviour. The nice thing there is that backing out of the instance allows for a different link between input and output to be created, without needing to simulate the full process.


This sounds cool if a bit overwhelming.

I always wanted to combine the Sims and Sim City. I imagined a multiplayer mode where you could live in the same city with your friends and your choice of career would allow you to use a different game mode at the SimCity level. E.g. your sim becomes a teacher, so now you decide where to place schools, etc. You have to work as a team to make sure all sims are happy in the city.


This can be done, but not as interlocking or real time as everyone thinking. It's designed around "points". Factory (or maybe materials) points, health / hospitality points, etc.

Basically you'll be given some "special" buildings where you can place the other-genre games . Let's say that you have a "60x60 1 level hospital" that when you placed it in the city, you can interact with it via theme hospital style.

Now in theme hospital-like, it has reputation / ratings where it translate directly to "hospitality points" for your city. When you exit the mode, it stopped the simulation and the points freeze. Similar with factory points.


Kind of. I picture it as being a function of input to output, so if the input changes, the output does too, but the output change is based on what changes have been made by the player.

E.g. if you have a hospital which can handle X patients per day and has a reputation of 90 when doing so, increasing the number of patients to 2x would probably decrease the reputation. You don't need to model the full hospital to determine this though, just have a "max patients" value which, when exceeded, puts a fractional multiplier on the output.


Well that's what "city stats" do. As you've said, population number decides the # of patients, # of workers in factory (we don't have that advanced assembler yet, haha), # of students for educational area.

And those "points" will also feedback as the input. Such as better hospitality points increase population cap, higher factory points allows the use of more equipments, higher education / tech points allows the use of more advanced equipment and ability to hire better doctors / engineers.

Now each "special building" have "budgets" assigned to them by the city. Those budget that'll be the balance and limit for equipment / room purchases and hiring, rather than directly received it from patients.


This reminds me of the Crusader Blade mod which combines Crusader Kings 3 and Banner Lord 2 to let you fight the normally simulated fights in CK3 in the battlefield of BL2, and passes results back and forth between the two interfaces.


Not quite what you describe but check out Workers and Resources.

It’s like Sim City meets Transport Tycoon. Rather than just building a city it’s about setting up all the supply chains to be self sustainable


This combined with the “fractal game” concept.

It would be a big open-source project (I mean it could be closed-source but it’s a massive effort with massive risk, it would take a billion-dollar company and I doubt any wants to invest in this).

It starts out as just a super-general world simulation, but people can flesh out the details by providing more specific simulations and also mini-games. All of the mini-games are optional, and the localized simulations aren’t run if they’re not requested because they get blurred out* into the bigger simulations (e.g. you can simulate population and income without caring about one cities’ paper production efficiency), so contributors have a lot of freedom in what they can make.

e.g. someone creates a “Fifa” style soccer mini-game. If you don’t like playing soccer, there is also a basic “soccer-management” style simulation where the soccer teams play against each other automatically and the team rankings / income / effect on news and culture will update. If you don’t even care about soccer, the soccer/management simulations won’t even load, and the effects on economy and culture will be blurred out.

How it could be implemented: there is a massive shared database of resources on everything (population resources, income resources, hospital resources, building layouts - all by location), and functions to automatically compute these resources over time when the players not explicitly interacting with them (e.g. update population and income, but also generate new cities and building layouts). Basically, everything in the game has data by some sort of location, an automatic state transition function, which may take other kinds of data and other locations, and possibly a way to manually interact via a user-controlled simulation and/or “hands-on” interaction mini game.

Along with this there is a standard-issue game engine and libraries which the smaller simulations and mini-games are built with. Each of these smaller-systems and mini-games are a module which can be loaded in when they are requested, but are “blurred out” by default. Initially only the global simulations are enabled.

The player makes up their goal: it may be to maximize the worlds income and happiness however they want (e.g. by building nice buildings, an efficient factory, train stations). Or maybe the player is evil and wants to kill off the population via bad decisions which cause the economy to crash, and unsafe research causes a deadly virus to be released. Or the player just wants to build cities and roads which are fun to race in and then drive a race car around everywhere.

Anyways, it’s obviously super ambitious but it would be a nice experiment. Like a generalized, open-source, modular reimagining of Dwarf Fortress.

* When a simulation is “blurred out”, I mean it’s affects are roughly estimated when the user doesn’t explicitly load it. Otherwise a) the game would slow to a crawl because of 10,000 simulations running at once, and b) a poorly-implemented simulation (e.g. which allows the player to generate infinite money, or just crashes a lot) won’t ruin the entire game, the player can just ignore or even specifically disable it. Simulating every minute detail of the world is a kind of hard problem, but since this is ultimately a video game we can just ignore 99+% of it, throw together some basic population and economic theory, and later on transportation theory and culture/politics sim etc., and say "close enough".


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...


This gave me the cool idea of a kind of recursive/fractal game where there is the main game you can play by itself but the devs keep it open for people to slot in sub games for the bits they've simplified.

So if Factorio did this you could play as normal, or play the fractal version where you can go in and control the mine or anything else. Maybe there'd even be sub parts in the mine like repairing machinery or something. The full range of macro-micromanaging would be pretty interesting.


That's cool! I was actually thinking of something similar, a game mode where you could take a control over a vehicle, like an excavator, and just have fun with it in the game, mine, dump, call trucks, etc.

This could be even cooler in multiplayer where many people could be controlling different parts of the factory, different vehicles, etc. But this sounds like a little too much work to get it "right".


After the first two paragraphs I was just about to recommend a game I found recently called Captain of Industry! cool to see a dev in here. best of luck with it!


Thanks! I am curious, where did you learn about this game?


Through looking for 'automation' games on steam, and also a YouTuber called Aavak has played some of it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7o9OTDOCRA&list=PLGe_S5n7Mj...

Seriously wish the best for you, developing and releasing a game at all is a big feat, gaining traction is another beast entirely :)


Oxygen not Included is sorta kinda like this. It's a 2D, from the side colony management game where you have to survive on an asteroid. You have to manage oxygen production, get rid of carbon dioxide and other unbreathable gasses, find water, grow food, keep your base from getting too hot (or too cold) because thermodynamics is a thing in this game.

Mining is just "go mine here" but your colonists can only hold a certain amount of materials so retrieving mined materials can take a while, especially if you're mining far away from your base. Plus you have to worry about the materials being hot, or being affected by germs. You can technically mine out the entire asteroid, but I've never gotten close to that because something always goes wrong and everyone dies. There's only a limited amount of resources after all.


Oh, that game has been on my wishlist for a while. Looking forward to giving it a try! I've been a big fan of Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program (though didn't care much for Satisfactory), as well as colony sims like Banished, Rimworld, and Oxygen Not Included. Looks like Captain of Industry combines aspects of both genres.


this is one of the greatest trailers i've ever seen its hilarious!

those **ing pirates!

im going to buy this and play it!


Thank you! That trailer is actually nearly 1 year old now, it's from the pre-alpha stage of the game. Unfortunately, we had no time to update the trailer with all the new things. We are way to busy with all the release preparations. Last time it took us around 10 days (2 people full time) to make it.


What game engine and stack did you use to finish this? It's very well done, how big is your team and how long did it take to get to beta?


Thanks! We use custom engine written in C# for simulation and Unity 3D for rendering. The game simulation can run without Unity.

Our "team" is tiny, it's just two of us. We've been working on it past 6 years as a hobby project over the weekends. Last year we decided to quit our tech jobs and focus on this full-time. We work with freelancers who do 3D art and music for us.


This looks fun and interesting. How much does it reflect real world processes? After playing this, would I have a better working understanding of mining, refining, and logistics?


While being more realistic than other games, I'd say it is not realistic enough to simulate real open-pit mining. You would not recommend to plan real mining operations based on the results from the game.

For example, the way how terrain collapses during mining is balanced to make a fun game rather than trying to be super realistic. We don't take into account weather effects (esp. rain). Also, in reality, hard rock needs to be blasted, but we don't have this feature (yet). Refilling of vehicles is mostly automatic, given that they have fuel available somewhere reachable. Etc...

On the other had, similar to other sim games, you will certainly need to think and plan your mine/factory well in order to be successful.


Having spent hundreds of hours on the above games, this is an instant buy for me. Congrats on nearing the finish line, can’t wait to play.


This looks very cool! Will give it a try soon :D


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.


>they're all best played very consistently for many hours at a time

Why do you think that? BotW I found was very amenable to consuming in short hour or two sessions, although it was incredibly easy to get sucked in for longer.


I do find when I come back to it after a week or two to it I have to go "now what was I doing??"


Writing yourself a note before you end your session is probably a good idea here.

"Trying to kill Molduga for <reasons>, but want to use different armor, so traveling through Hebra for Coolshrooms".


I personally forget the controls (Witcher), or forget quest and storylines.


BOTW has the controls issue too, absolutely— its scheme is a bit of an oddball compared to other modern over-the-shoulder action adventure games, and that's made it hard for me to jump back in after a period of playing more conventional games like AC, Spider-Man, God of War, etc.

The story though? Lol, BOTW has none. You just show up and chase whatever catches your fancy while the princess hangs out at the castle doing all the work keeping the monster at bay.


I so wanted to like the Witcher, but the controls were absolutely nuts. Actually maybe not that bad (ahem, Outer Wilds). But for a casual gamer they were not intuitive and were extremely forgettable. Plus you couldn't easily go back to the little training dojo.

Good controls and quick review/tutorial seem to be overlooked opportunities for improvement that would dramatically lower the bar for casual gamers who want to play more games but quickly get frustrated by any kind of friction.

("Previously on" or self-evident state is increasingly dead even in TV/series so I guess it's not surprising it's disappearing from games too.)


Are you talking about The Witcher 1? That game had whack controls for sure, and all in all I'd say isn't worth playing.

TW2 and TW3 are some of my favourite games though and IMO had fairly straightforward controls. I do think I switched between playing with controller and keyboard + mouse though, so it may be worth trying controller in the 2nd/3rd games if you hadn't done that.


I played W1 and W3 several times and had no problems with the controls, but I was never able to accommodate with W2 controls, so I never played more than 15 minutes at a time, with many attempts. It was kb + mouse.


It feels like as gamers have been getting older and having kids, there's a huge market for games like this designed for limited play time. I want to be more into shooters too, but I just don't have time to get good enough to enjoy them.

I do really appreciate Halo for finally going back to "everyone, regardless of level, starts with the exact same equipment and skills". That levels the playing field and I can still have fun (even if I'm not good) without playing a lot.


I think this is part of the appeal of rogue like games such as Hades. Exploring large 3d environments isn't as rewarding when I can only play a half hour at once (while simultaneously attempting to get the baby to sleep). I'd much rather get straight to the core gameplay before I crawl into bed, exhausted.


I play Xonotic, a free software FPS that uses the Darkplaces engine.

If you're up for twitch shooting, play instagib.

If you want action, hop onto a Clan arena match (team Deathmatch but 1 life per round, and you start the map with everything).

OTOH if you're too tired to frag, hop on a Xonotic Defrag Server, where your only goal is to practice movements to finish a track on time. Xonotic has some very cool quake like movements, and there are almost always people on the Relaxed Running server (but they also have >1 hr puzzle/trick jump tracks).

It's so much fun, even just for the 20 minutes I can usually get before going to bed ;)


In the same logic, a RPG where no one can play more than X hours per week (e.g. 3). Or instead of a nominal amount of time, a chapter of the story per week. We all progress together at a slow pace. Something akin to a tv show.


That would be really bad if you have a few days with very bad weather and too much free time to spend in the house.


other games would still be available in the world where this game exists ;)


Something that will remind you where you left off (what you were doing, where you were going)

So... Skyrim’s quest log? A huge list of every quest you’ve encountered in the game so far, with the ability to pick one to be highlighted on the map and radar. Boot it up for the first time in a while and you can immediately see what Past You was officially working on. Pretty much every big sprawling open-world game has one of these, with a zillion text snippets to describe every possible stage of what’s happened so far in every quest, and what you need to do next.

Add a handful of generalized user-defined quests like “I am gathering (list of resources/items) so I can (make this thing/exploit this bug/do this quest a particular way)”, or maybe just an in-game notepad with some text completion assistance, and that probably covers any possible “where did I leave off”.


I'm currently building a game like this and it's pretty close to finish.

The game is a Space Survival MMORPG that takes place far into the future, where human civilization is stranded in an O'Neill Cylinder in space. No one in the cylinder knows anymore how they got there and why they are there in the first place since so much time has passed. Technology has also been lost due to the very long time periods, so life and survival is tough in the cylinder.

However, the longer someone survives, the stronger and the more rare their character becomes. We expect only a few percent of players to survive for longer than a couple of weeks and only 1% for longer than a month. However, those that have survived for longer than a month are very strong characters that can usually lead and provide protection to a village of 50 to several hundred people.

The biggest danger to the player are other players, since the entire game is PvP. This means, you need to quickly band up with others to protect against other players. There are no guns in the game, since there is no technology in the cylinder, so it takes several minutes of beating someone up to to actually get their health to zero. There is also voice chat, so it's quite brutal.

Here is our teaser trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg4GHUIXB8U and here is some pre-alpha gameplay footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFHzg0R8sUo. We'll likely be able to go into early access in June on Steam, it would be great to get your feedback on it!


You might enjoy Valheim, it's a survival game which you can casually enter in and out.


From my experience a boss battle or a dungeon run in Valheim takes all afternoon, and that's if you have a group supporting each other to make things quicker.


I want to see a rise of roguelike open world games.. something you can complete in maybe 10 hours.

Then reroll and do it again...

Add multiplayer and be double plus fun!


That sounds like Elden Ring.


The game you're looking for is final fantasy 14. The first like 100-200 hours of content is free as well so go take a look.


Because of this I find myself gravitate towards sports games like Fifa. Easy to get right back-in on offline career mode. I just stay away from FUT (Fifa Ultimate Team)


Red Dead Redemption 2 is perfect for this


You should look up Veloren or the game it's spiritually based off of, Cube World


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.


As a former Mormon, I can see that first idea being absolutely hilarious if implemented correctly. I'm imagining all sorts of increasingly absurd scenarios you could place the Mormon main character in and the kinds of jokes you could make, there's a lot of potential haha. Stuff like coffee and tea being special attacks that the bosses can use, or dialogue with lots of really unusual swear substitutions. I think letting the player die and having the degree of heaven they get into be based off of their score in-game could be a really hilarious feature.

I think mixing in just the right amount of janky ragdoll physics and glitchy NPCs would actually augment the game, and I could see it being a game that streamers and their audiences would find funny too.

There would definitely be some ultra-strict/traditional Mormons who would be offended by a game like this but I'd say the vast majority of the membership would find it quite entertaining.

Edit: Could call it Mormon Missionary Simulator to both give the game a slightly tighter focus/story and also indicate that it's part of the wider genre of "XYZ simulator" games that are often pretty absurd and funny.


I'm working on Archapolis, a cross between sim city and the sims (and inspired by Dwarf Fortress, Cities Skylines). I'm working on real time traffic / pathfinding currently. My game can handle 100K to 300K agents path finding simultaneously to random destinations.

Game is still very early development, but here's a tech demo video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI


That's really impressive! I haven't even come close to developing a game since I played with the old school Game Maker back in high school, but pathfinding seems like a very intriguing challenge. You've got a new YouTube sub. :)

What's the tech stack you're using for the game? I'm not really familiar with how games are typically made these days other than that it seems like a lot of people are using Unity.


2x Thanks!

I'm using C++, SFML (graphics framework), and SQLite (for data storage/saves). Game & engine is developed from the ground up.

A lot of people choose existing engines for their games. I definitely would if I were to go 3D.

With 2D grid based games, it's not too difficult to get an engine up and running. It took me around 6 weeks IIRC (no physics or networking code though) to have basic tile placement functionality and outputting the game world to the screen.


Such an interesting, orthogonally-aligned set of game ideas. Being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I feel like I've been playing 'your game' my whole life!


Of all the places to see someone from the LDS church, I NEVER thought it would be on HN! Not sure why it is such a surprise, but it is nonetheless.


My IT department manager at a previous job was Mormon. He was a big Star Wars geek and could code with the best of us (but never had time to do so in his position, too many meetings). I didn't know for several months he was Mormon. His only tells were some self-censoring (like saying "cheese and rice" or "cheese and crackers" instead of certain common blasphemic exclamations) and he had six kids. Really cool guy. He eventually moved back to Utah to work for a tech startup there (the tech scene is actually pretty big in Utah).


LDS is huge and contains very smart people and, despite some questionable historical beliefs, they’re not AFAIK anti-science in any way. HN is huge. Definitely gonna be some overlap


As a non practicing Mormon it was extremely strange to me when in my 20s I was exposed to the broader Protestant/Evangelical world in the US how many weird anti science things existed that I’d literally never been exposed to as a Mormon.

When I moved to a nicer neighborhood and went to church once or twice I was amazed how many Pediatricians and Pediatric Surgeons who work at the local childrens hospital are Mormon.


But... why? Education is hugely emphasized in the church. There are tons of members in all the STEM fields and they read the news just like anyone else. Have you ever seen a Tesla? The security chip in it was designed by member. Have you ever used an intel pentium processor? The original one was designed by a member. That person eventually moved up into management at Intel and recruited heavily from BYU so many Intel chip designers are members.


There are many of us on HN.


Dozens!


The Mormon game concept is a good one. As a former and still somewhat Friend (Quaker), I can relate to the concept of "no good deed going unpunished." One can see the humor, irony, playability and enjoyment of it in a video game done well. As Mormon themed it would have limited reach but it would have dedicated followers. The TTRPG "Dogs in the Vineyard" is outstanding for what it is, has limited reach in RPG circles, but it does have a dedicated player base.

The game concept is something I would play. It would fit well in any setting historical or fictional. A half-dozen elves trying to bring sensibility among Orcish chiefdoms guided by an avatar of Illuvar. A unmodified human among the transhuman houses of the galactic empire trying to re-cultivate aspects of humanity guided by an enigmatic Foundation, etc.

Regarding "Monkey Town," you might like Keith Laumer's book "The Other Side of Time." It starts off slowly, is all over the place, but has an alternate universe with several sapient primate species working together.


IMHO, we don't need a game to teach people to see all interactions as religious persecution. That's already a ridiculous problem in our society.

The only worse thing I can imagine would be combining persecution complex-inducing game with an FPS.


It's interesting that you say that. That really wasn't how I imagined it, and I'm a little confused how you interpreted it as such. My thought was that it's a point of view that most people haven't experienced or thought much about. Just because the playable characters would be from the LDS church wouldn't mean that all or even most of their interactions would have a religious motivation. I imagined it more like getting "boy scout badges" for good deeds from the perspective of that particular religious group and for the game to be more light-hearted rather than dead serious, or even suggesting any sort of religion to the player.

Maybe you're right and I'm suggesting something that isn't really appropriate. I would play games more if there were more slice-of-life type games from different perspectives, but with some humor in there too.


Honestly, I like the concept of this game. If you dropped all the proper names you mentioned and just call it "Just Be Nice" it would be palatable to 1000x bigger audience. You don't need to be religiously motivated to find it challenging to be nice in particular scenarios. It's a theme I've never heard of explored and I would like to play it (but without the Mormon stuff)


I guess that doesn't resonate as much with me. Your point is totally fair, and maybe people would like your idea a lot more. Despite my atheism, I'm much more intrigued about a game that's more from a particular point of view and I just don't have a problem with characters that are religious. A more culturally homogenous game might be less appealing to me. I'm sure it could be done right, though. The Mormon aspect, I thought, would give such a game a lot of interesting gameplay scenarios out-of-the-box that wouldn't be as easy to explain in a more generic game.

Thanks for the feedback. :)


FWIW: I think most members of the LDS church have a good sense of humor for things like this done in good taste, even if they're not 100% representative of their beliefs.

source: am one myself. This is true for the other members around me as well (friends, family, etc)


I am imagining they are aliens instead of Mormons, but they look exactly like humans. Maybe they moved here (secretely, of course) because some other mean aliens have taken over their planet. Since they are unfailingly nice, they just left their planet instead of fighting for it. Now they're here on earth and dealing with humanity's response to their niceness.


Agree with this. I would never give a "religious game" a second thought. Automatic pass, irrespective of the mechanics.


The first one reminds me of people playing GTA just for ambulance missions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC7blFgcZWs


I'm down for extreme Mormon simulator


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.


I would take that a step further, and say more like Tribes 1 with modern graphic. I feel like the modding community was out of control in a good way on Tribes 1. Flying around with unlimited jetpack and a automatic sniper rifle in Ultra Renegades trying to capture a flag that's is in a base that's booby-trapped with a bunch of turrets was way ahead of it's time.

It still blows my mind that 007 Golden Eye existed as a popular game at the same time with Starsiege: Tribes when they were worlds apart in quality and gameplay.


T1 remains my favourite Tribes game, especially with the mods (Shifter ftw!). T2 was ok, but too focused on glitz and I didn’t like the change to the skiing mechanic.


I'm with you. T1 discfusor sniping+skiing was deeply satisfying.


T1, I randomly was thinking of this just last night. I put so many hours into that game and loved the mods. Putting laser turrets behind shields/walls to protect them was so cool. I think it was the first fighting/building game I'd played (FPS at least, I loved AoE/StarCraft/etc) and I wish I could go back to those late nights playing with friends.


> It still blows my mind that 007 Golden Eye existed as a popular game at the same time with Starsiege: Tribes when they were worlds apart in quality and gameplay.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but I do think that GoldenEye was relatively more accessible in terms of MSRP and technical setup.


That takes me back. I vividly recall some ultra-heavy armor that toted around 6 chainguns, 3 on each side of the screen. It was great at blotting fast movers out of the sky.

The modding scene for Tribes 1 really was something else.


BattleField 1942 was released a year after Tribes 2. It got a bunch of praise for FPS & vehicles, built-in voice chat, seamless outdoor AND indoor environments. It sounded familiar.


Tribes was released over a year after Goldeneye.


While it wasn't perfect, I really enjoyed the brief existence of Tribes Ascend. It makes me hopeful someone else is going to pick up the genre, maybe even the license.

Hi-Rez certainly weren't a good fit for the game. I'll know better than to spend money on anything they're doing in the future.[1]

[1]: https://www.maxlaumeister.com/articles/rip-tribes-ascend/


Ascend was fantastic until it went free-to-play and Hi-Rez desperately tried to monetize it.

I would want Tribes: Ascend back again as it originally was, but with good support for mods and private servers. That would make me happy.


The out of the blue update actually fixed the game substantially, but unfortunately it seemed to have been a last ditch effort and leadership at Hi-Rez (which probably boils down to Erez) lost interest entirely when SMITE suddenly became very profitable.


I enjoyed this game quite a lot, I never figured out why it didn't take off even when it was free.


It was hugely popular before being free. The problem was that some basic options for the classes that were strictly better or required for gameplay (the worst offender here is likely the Jackal[1]) were gated behind days of grinding or microtransactions. Newly introduced options usually had some severe balancing issues. The core audience and biggest advocates for the game were people that played Tribes and Tribes 2 decades earlier - they didn't really like that they couldn't buy the game outright and have all the content in it unlocked at a reasonable pace.

[1]: https://tribes.fandom.com/wiki/Jackal


IMO for two reasons, separated by player type. Casual players were turned off by the grind, and experienced players (read: players of former games) were turned off by the dumbed-down mechanics as compared to previous games.

By the latter I mean mostly the decision to eliminate base play, i.e. gens/turrets/invs mean basically nothing because you spawn in your load out. Also, the jetting/skiing physics are kinda wonky, in ways that I think negatively impacted gameplay.


The usual performance problems with tribes games, also the usual unintended difficulty increases by trying to make it "easier".


In case the T2 fans here weren’t aware, it’s a free download now and people still play. There’s a Discord community and we do pickup games every month or so. You can get it here: https://www.playt2.com/


Oh cool! I played for a while back in the post-TribesNext days, but haven't touched it in years. Are there still pubs at all, or do you pretty much have to wait for a scheduled game?


Yes, there’s only one active (non-bot) server but we play every night! “Discord PUB” is the server and it’s usually LakRabbit from around 4–6pm Pacific, then CTF for the rest of the night once enough people join up.


I wasn't aware. I...I'm not sure I should....


> And there is nothing as elegant as killing with slow ballistic projectiles like the Spin Fusor.

I loved aiming ahead near the ground of a skiing opponent and hitting them with the splash damage.

But the most amazing moments were when you hit someone mid-air. :)


Thank you, Tribes is great... Shazbot!


> I don't think that there has ever been a better multiplayer FPS.

100%

Tribes 2 should have been "THE" early 00's FPS to play. Instead, it was Halo, a game that I insist did not introduce ANYTHING new to the FPS genre, yet people went crazy for.


Did you ever play Fallen Empire: Legions or Legions: Overdrive? It's a shame we don't have more in the FPS-Z genre. If there were one free software title in the genre, people could at least spin off a few games from it. I wonder if anyone's tried building such a thing on one of the Quake engines.


Check out Diabotical. It's a bit dead but it was a ton of fun for the first few months. I think it's dead because of epic games contract. It's more like quake than tribes but very nice fast paced arena fps.


Tribes 1 was where it was at. So much fun at LAN parties. The Tribes sequels only got worse, in my opinion. They were just clinging on to what made Tribes great, but kept losing something every iteration.


I haven't really played either, but I always think about how similar Fortnite is to T1 renegades. You can build, you can taunt, dance etc, big open world.


> you're wasting too much time on looting.

But that's the most fun part of Apex ;)


Sounds like titanfall 2, other than the battle royale part.


It’s been a while since I played Titanfall, but I remember it as mostly ground-based FPS. This video gives you an impression of Tribes 2 fights: https://youtu.be/Kj6K_d6Zsuw

There were also other roles you can’t see in the video (at least in the first minutes): there was an invisibility shield that allowed you to infiltrate enemy bases. You could set up sensors to make invisible opponents visible, deploy small turrets and radars. You could spend all game just repairing things like turrets, radars and inventory stations, and that was an important role in CTF. And there were vehicles that needed pilots, you could control turrets…


Humans taste like fish.


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?


This is such a stupid comparison that I can't believe I'm making it but Puzzle Pirates actually did a lot of this. You'd sail around on ships for the navy, "fighting" pirates (via competitive puzzles) to earn a wage. You start with a tiny, default shack and a cot, but could buy larger properties and better furniture. If you saved up enough, you could buy your own ship, and become a pirate yourself – or go straight and buy actual in-game businesses to start selling wares: https://yppedia.puzzlepirates.com/Shoppe_management

It lacked every ounce of the beautiful simulated West I love in Red Dead, but the core gameplay mechanics you're talking about are all there.

...I'm speaking in past tense but apparently it's still around? https://store.steampowered.com/app/99910/Puzzle_Pirates


I started playing RDR2 but stopped before I got too far in the game. It drove me absolutely nuts that speaking with an NPC that had a side-quest threw me immediately into that side-quest without any option to do it later. I guess I wasn't supposed to talk to them if I didn't want to do the side-quest, but how was I supposed to know if I wanted to do the side-quest or not without talking to them? I couldn't get past it.


I want this but with the Yakuza series.


Or Cyberpunk


Yes, love this.

I tried to explain to someone why I disliked the missions on RDR2 and they didn’t get it. The missions reminded me that I was playing a game, I just wanted to explore and hunt.


Absolutely. Same as with the train — I don't buy a ticket, because that enables fast travel. I just climb aboard and travel. I remember the first time I stayed on the train for the whole journey, it was a whole experience. Such an impressive world. Rockstar could do so much with it, but they just focus on making it into GTA of the Wild West, sadly.


Yes the train was great. I also liked to set a waypoint get the horse going then switch to cinematic mode. Nice way to see the game too.


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


For 4 - worth checking out Squad. 50v50 matches with quite a bit of realism baked in. My favorite moments are getting setup in advance where the enemy is likely to advance with a trusty MG, going prone and just waiting for them to run into my sightline.

While having quick reflexes is always a benefit, positioning and teamwork is more important in Squad.

Finding a server with consistently decent squad leaders is definitely important to get the most out of the game. If the squad lead isn't talking for more then a minute or two, leave and join another.


You can get a bit of mileage out of Fortnite by landing in less popular areas and building up your inventory as you slowly work towards the eventual late-game circle. Hide in a house or bush if you have to. Crouch a lot and get the jump on others to improve your chances.

I'm 40+ and play Fortnite with my son, and while I worry his gaming exposure is very heavily weighted to one game with minimal story, we have a great time working as a team and talking about strategies to maximise our chances. He's 9yo and a very strong player. I don't find reflexes to be that much of a problem, but I'm not sure how old you mean by "older"!


> Civilization like civ 1

You might like The Battle of Polytopia. Not the same but has similar vibes.


1.

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

Watch this space, it's already decent and also OSS.

PS: One hill I will die on is games using Discord as forum/wiki like this one does. Try searching google for information about unit or something, nothing. I guess I will have to make unofficial wiki/forum one day.


w.r.t. (4.) it sounds like you may be better off with an FPS 'sim' type game over arena shooters etc. These suggestions may not be your thing though but I thought I'd post them anyway:

If you like your FPS games with a side of inventory management and googling around for wiki hints, have a look at Escape from Tarkov. I'd suggest watching a bunch of Pestily's content (his The Raid series on youtube) to figure out if the game is for you. IMO it rewards experience over reflexes - but may be a different kind of 'experience' from what you are interested in. Lots to learn about map layouts, ammo types, etc.

Also have a look at the new Arma game (called Arma Reforger), seems like it could be (or become, with updates) interesting.


For 4, try out Hell Let Loose. It is multiplayer fps with heavy focus on communication and classes. I can guarantee that you don't need much reflexes because I have played and enjoyed the game at >200 ping :)


> FPS that can be played in large scale format but doesn't reward 14 year old reflexes

FWIW I've recently gotten an Oculus Quest 2 and I've been playing a lot of Pavlov Shack. I was afraid of the quick-reflexes, playing-all-the-time, fearsome 14 years old (and judging by their voices, there's a lot of them), but I've been doing pretty well - usually ending up with a 2:1 or 3:1 K/D ratio, top of the team table, and playing maybe an hour every other day. I'm very surprised by this, and I can't really explain it - I'm not a gamer and the last time I played an FPS seriously was before 2010. TLDR: Go get 'em!


I play pavlov on PCVR and it’sa bit of a different experience. Not sure if there is cross play but most of the people I’ve played against are much more experienced. I think a lot of the people that spend a significant amount amount of time playing also use a mount for their controllers to improve stability and aim.


I use a Sanlaki gunstock, and it has improved my aim massively. Headshots were practically impossible before, now they work routinely if I aim properly.


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

http://freeinfantry.com/


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.


Path of Exile. It has the most complex and detailed magic system from any game right now. Insane amount of unique spells that you can combine several ways with all the different weapons and armors and on top of that you have a gigantic skill tree

Just the passive tree alone makes my head hurt all the time and that's just one single aspect of adjustment of your character https://poeplanner.com/


I wonder if it would be fun to make magic a deeply unintuitive visual programming language.


I am working on a game with exactly that mechanic: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1482640/Nurose/ I like to think that the visual programming is pretty intuitive even for non programmers.


Neat! I wonder if one could do a gesture based programming language in VR...


similar to the wand building in Noita?


Its pretty old so maybe just useful for inspiration but the old Amiga/Atari game Dragon Lord / Dragon's Breath (Europe) has a very interesting custom magic system in which you can create unique spells using combinations of various alchemical reagants.

FWIW I think it's a very difficult thing to create such a system, without making it a tedious exercise in testing ingredient combinations.


This! I talked about it in my comment but it ended up with me rambling about my idea of the game. I'd definitely be the slow ritual kind of guy haha.


Here are a couple interactive fiction games with complex magic systems:

- Suveh Nux by David Fisher

- The Wand by Arthur DiBianca


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.


This also sounds a bit like Planetside 2 [1], which had a similar structure. A relatively large open world where small "provinces" were contested by factions in FPS King-of-the-Hill combat. This meant that any one province action was a part of a larger "front," across which factions would often mass & press offensives. Capturing the entire map led to some kind of reward, and then a reset iirc.

Nothing like rolling up in an APC with 12 people in voice chat on the tip of the spear, or coordinating an entire battery of MAXs keeping the skies clear. Some of the best gaming in general I've ever experienced. Gradually, though, pay to win mechanics pushed me away, and I've not played since 2014.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetSide_2


Planetside is incredible. Battle royales came and go, Battlefield franchise deteriorated, but Planetside 2 is on it's 12th year and still delivers.


These have existed already: Natural Selection, its sequel Natural Selection 2, and Nuclear Dawn. The idea is nice but the actual gameplay isn't fun or sustainable because there's too much interdependence on having a top-notch commander AND having a team of exceptional FPS players; you can't really find two teams of 12 people who can all carve out time to play.

The gameplay is sustainable for a little bit in terms of randoms joining servers but all that's left of NS1 and 2 are extremely niche competitive scenes that don't reach the scale of what you want and Nuclear Dawn has no playerbase. It's a nice idea and NS1 produced some of the best competitive FPS players for a few games (Quake 3/CPMA/Live, Team Fortress 2) but ultimately it lacks the fun factor needed to keep a substantial amount of people playing.


Huh? Natural Selection was insanely fun for me. Either as player or commander. Only reason i stopped playing was because the community shrank too much after a while. Most matches felt nicely balanced and enjoyable even if i lost.


Natural Selection (2) is close on a round-by-round basis, but isn't an RPG. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4920/Natural_Selection_2/


Game is so incredibly fun but so difficult. The people who play it regularly are just Really, Really Good.

Even after 40 or so hours I was still getting absolutely destroyed, chasing the high of kill streaks I'd gotten early on (against other new players).

Is it still active? Part of me wants to give it another try, though I know only pain and suffering awaits.


The mid-game lerk and fade gameplay versus shotgun marines favours skilled players a lot.

A good lerk can soften up marines forever and a good fade has little reason to die while continually getting kills everytime it leaves the hive.

A good shotgun or rifle marine can cancel out 2-3 alien skulk players every wave. The skilled dominate midgame.

The end-game onos stomp and xeno ganeplay versus exo and jetpacks levels out the skill required across players and becomes more enjoyable for everyone. Though games rarely get there without demoralizing everyone midgame.

It's strange to me that the skill required peaks midgame and endgame is full of stunlock mechanics, tanky units and suicide tactics.

I would put the highest skill mechanics on display in the end game so everyone has a good time before the domination of skill kicks in.

It's still active, 4-5 servers in the US full every night and a bunch of UK, Euro and chinese servers. One aussie server.


It's death spiraled at this point with the only players left being the god-like skilled. So not especially newbie friendly, which just means the community shrinks more.

Plus Unknown Worlds has moved on to Subnautica, so all updates are Community Driven now. Which is pretty neat tbh.


Battlezone and Battlezone 2 are kind of like this - and they are GREAT games that recently had soft remakes

https://store.steampowered.com/app/624970/Battlezone_Combat_...

https://store.steampowered.com/app/301650/Battlezone_98_Redu...


Hell Let Loose does something similar. Each team of 50 has one commander, and multiple squads with infantry (all human players). The squad leads communicate with the commander, their squad, and other squad leads in order to accomplish plans set by the commander. The commander can call in recon plans, artillery, tanks. Good communication and coordination can win games. It is a rather brutal game though.


Reminds me a bit of the old Battlefront Galaxy Conquest modes, though the overview mode would need a lot more work.

I think the overview position would need complicating factors to make it hard - otherwise they would just be frustrated at the grunt soldiers not taking objectives.


NS/NS2 and Savage have already been mentioned. Natural Selection being my particular jam.

But does anyone else remember the Sourcemod Empires?

FPS/RTS with TANKS! And a Tech Tree!

Unfortunately the Source Engine really doesn't like tank physics.


Red Orchestra 2 is something like this, though not quite what you describe. The commander can call in artillery strikes and recon planes that show where enemy troops are on the map and set waypoints for different squads.

It can b