If you were to actually start working on a game concept, what would your big idea be? What kind of game would you most want to make?

  • knife [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Playing Elden Ring and Ghostwire Tokyo back to back made me realize that more than anything I want more ways to interact with a games world.

    Like, being able to interact with a world as gorgeous and vibrant as Elden Ring's mainly through violence feels like a waste. It seems trite but I actually felt that "if only we could talk to the monsters" sentiment from that infamous Doom review.

    Ghostwire Tokyo is also a pretty game with a lot of attention to detail, but you can't touch anything.The game is set in a densely populated urban center but you can't enter in almost any building that doesn't have a quest attached to it. That sucks.

    Basically my ideal game would be Stanley Parable: Raphael edition

    edit: also an immersive sim set in an alien ecosystem. Think like Prey meets Rainworld with 10x the biodiversity. Honestly I'm waiting for more games to be inspired by Rainworld, that game is special

    • OutrageousHairdo [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Genuinely would love this. The problem is of course that dialogue is much harder to do, because a player can fight the same AI 1000 times, but will never want to have the same conversation twice. You'd need a dialoguing AI before this becomes feasible for non-AAA shit - something like AI dungeon but hyper tuned, and preferably with highly limited input so that the player can't ask it to do their math homework or something else that would break the illusion.

    • Quimby [any, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      I've often thought about this too.

      I think there are 2 main reasons we don't see much of that:

      1. immersive simulation is HARD.
      2. there is something innate about combat-as-play. it used to really bother me how hard (though certainly not impossible) it is to think of cool game ideas that don't involve combat, and then I started to think about how basically every land animal that plays does play-fighting. Like, there seem to be a few major categories of play: racing, fighting, and for humans, simulation (e.g. the Sims, Farming Simulator, playing with dolls irl, etc). Part of the appeal of roleplay is that it allows us to go beyond that, but video games struggle to handle such a large space of possibilities.

      Skyrim is the reigning king of intractable worlds, especially with mods. You can befriend animals, build houses, harvest crops, get married...

      That's also one of the reasons The Witcher 3 remains my top game of all time. The world feels alive, and you can sit down and play cards or flirt or catch up with old friends or watch a play.

      • knife [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I'd say yes. All movement in the game is physics based, including the player, so there is a lot of awkwardness involved, but you eventually kind of get the hang of it. I'd also like to say that the game is hard, often in a kind of unfair way. IMO, not an issue of game design, more so a consequence of trying to make the player feel like prey. Basically there is a chance you might feel the game is not worth the effort, and that's fine.

        I think it is worth it because there's nothing else like it. It really makes you feel like you returned to monke, and experimenting with how the different wildlife behaves is really cool. Also the lore is fucking bonkers and the pixel art is gorgeous.

        • Tapirs10 [undecided,she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Guess I just need to put time into figuring out how to play. Git gud, as they say. I had the same experience with elden ring at the beginning, figuring out how to work with the camera and game and thinking "how could anyone like this?" , and now I love soulsborne combat.