Ask Lemmy

Conscripted

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

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

Oh, this is gonna be one of my longer comments..!

Imagine the Fallout universe only less grim and less apocalyptic. There have been not dirty/radioactive world war, but a massive solar flare that fried all global electronics. This leads to mass disarray, as society is so dependent on electronics that we're facing a total societal collapse. However, people do not turn wild and crazy like in the Fallout franchise, Metro franchise, or others.

This is set in the year 2051, about 4 years after the solar flare called the DC (The Digital Cleansing). The first few months after the DC people panicked, and raided most stores and such for food, and a lot of people died, especially in the bigger cities, due to lack of food and transport. A lot of people thought ahead however, understood what this meant, and moved out into the countryside to live off of the land just like humanity did back in the days.

You are a Longing One; someone who longs for the times of the past, looking through ruins to find functional technology. You disassemble it, learn it, document it, and rebuild the modern society from your little village. Most people are helpful and encouraging of your adventures, but of course some people who believe the past should stay in the past.

You will face environmental dangers (abandoned structures and global warming related events), manage your resources on your excursions (hydration, temperature, sleep), and dig through all kinds of buildings - libraries, research institutes, governmental offices, and normal homes.

Back home in your village you will be able to grow fruits and vegetables, tend to animals, and trade items with your neighbors for resources both for survival and for excursions. You get to help your neighbors with quests like finding certain items in the ruins or helping them rebuild something on their farmstead.

The ultimate goal of the game is nothing more grand than a village that thrives - you grant them electricity, steady resources, and a happy life, while finding small stories both in the present and the past that tells you of how things were and have become.

A mostly peaceful game, where there's realistic documentation about how technologies work, and a village that grows from your contributions.

Native American game where you free your captive tribe and hunt colonizers. It could have some mythical elements like controlling animals and using ancestors to help control the environment for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd have Larian make a Star Wars RPG.

I want the realistic dragon sim mmo that was promised.

Dark Souls Miyazaki and Ghibli Miyakazi team up to make an action game that's either based on or has the same vibes and visuals as Princess Mononoke or Nausicaa.

No game, but a universal game integration machine: play gta in the city you built in skylines. switch to either forza or nfs for the racing and have your character use tekken style combos for fistfights. all shops and services ingame are either idlers or self manageable via a sim game.

Warhammer 40k city builder.

There's this thing floating in my mind for some time. A colony management game, where the colony is regressing instead of progressing.

You manage an isolated colony on a deserted planet slowly falling apart, desperately trying to mitigate the damage and survive the fall. You begin with automated system managing the colony, so that you won't get overwhelmed by all the systems. Then, systems begin to fail one-by-one, by external factors putting them in strain. Maybe the colony train network goes down first, then the communication network breaks down, leading to civil unrest. Next, heating fails, then environmental shielding, and oxygen goes out. You can utilize emergency systems and construct makeshift components, but it can only lessen the impact, not reverse the entire breakdown.

Maybe this is uncommon because sense of despair makes it unfun, but I would still find it interesting.

Half life 3

I will call it prime minister.

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

It's simCountry but very little clicking.

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

They probably do it.

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

You can fire the ones who suck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visitors

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

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

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

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

Tinder, but not for profit.

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

"pod",

A game where you start with one von Neumann machine, and find yourself in a procedural generated solar system. You goal is to learn everything you can from this system and copy yourself then send you and the copy to the next solar system. In time you should find yourself managing a huge amount of pods.

But space isn't as empty as it seems, some systems are inhabited and will fight you. Preferably those enemies would be procedurally generated too, so that every playthrough is completely unique and weird.

A game where you walk around an existing town and fix things. It teaches you real stuff about how the things you're fixing work. For instance, you can fix light switches and do so using examples of how real wiring works.

I've always wanted to play a game like "tropico" but instead of managing a parody of a banana republic, you have to manage the decline of a parody capitalist empire.

A game where you feed and pet and take care of guinea pigs. Varieties of vegetables and reactive chin scritches and they yell at you when they notice you going about your business. Also my guinea pig has to be in it you have to ruffle his fur or you will instantly die.

Possibly a setting in the Andes, I dunno it would be funny to be a guinea pig herder. Otherwise it just has to be comically over designed and marketed as competing with Death Stranding.

Portal 3. I've played the fan sequels and they're pretty good. I want more. There is never enough portal.

Factorio is almost perfect so idk how you'd made a sequel better.

Star craft 3 or maybe a 3rd person star craft? I wanna drive a Goliath or a siege tank around.

Been toying with an idea for a while. Cosmic horror where the only way to win is to leave almost immediately. You play as a group of four engineers sent to repair comms at an Antarctic research base. The goal is you arrive, see shit’s fucked, and head back to the boat immediately.

If you choose not to, you assign one weapon/tool to each party member. Wrench, welding torch, ice pickaxe, etc. The trick is that the tools determine which characters die, so even if you start over and change the assignments, whoever has the wrench dies at the same time, every time. And I want there to be “wrenchable” objects after that story point that you can’t interact with.

In addition, I want Bloodborne style sanity points that you get for interacting with the world, and the more you have, the worse things get for you. Essentially, I want to punish people who play games the way I do and explore every single crack.

Oh, and I want the monster at the end to be surrounded by invisible eyes that become visible as its head passes through them, like it’s emitting bubbles in reverse.

Edit: Forgot to mention that you can go back to the boat AT ANY TIME. The endings just get worse for you (and eventually, the world).

A space combat sim with accurate relativistic physics.

Star citizen… but like not a scam front.

I’d take freelancer 2.

Faster than light but with submarines

Grim Fandango 2

TL;DR Something like Kerbal Space Program but with a bigger emphasis on setting up interplanetary logistics and colonies and an eventual win-state.

So, the premise is that you are the overmind for a race of eusocial cephalopods that live on an Enceladus/Europa like icy moon orbiting a gas giant. You've got the beginnings of a space program using the fact that your workers can survive in hard vacuum for a short time so you can build and send rockets up (easy due to the lack of an atmosphere and small gravity well) filled with eggs and plan manoeuvre nodes where an egg will hatch giving you temporary control of the craft for the life of the current worker (you can also hatch an egg on an ad-hoc basis but carefully planning missions is encouraged as, without other life support, the mass of the eggs is the primary payload mass that determines your delta-v).

You start off low on metal to create rockets (probably a starting stockpile + a very slow trickle auto-mined from your home moon to prevent softlocks) but a metal-rich asteroid has recently been captured as a submoon to your home moon. So your initial goal is to use your starting metal to build something capable of reaching this submoon, mining it, and getting back home to give you more metal to create bigger rockets to explore the rest of the starting gas giant moon system.

You can also start setting up experiments on the different moons and in orbit + a communication satellite infrastructure to get the data back home to start working your way through a tech tree giving you access to more components to build rockets from, more experiments to set up to bring in science faster and, in particular, electronic control systems that allow you to automate parts of the launch/manoeuvre process to break your dependency on the egg hatching mechanic (although these would only work in areas of space you've already visited manually to keep that mechanic working for exploration)

At some point, you unlock the ability to set up colonies on different bodies which allow you to automatically mine resources, build rockets in different places and start to use the automation tech to move it autonomously between orbits and ultimately between colonies. Setting up and expanding colonies would require a resource only available on bodies with a thick atmosphere (of which there would be one in your starting gas giant moon system + a standalone planet that's harder to reach at first but doesn't require you to climb out of the gas giant gravity well to help you expand out into the rest of the solar system) in order to make you still have to face the challenges of getting a rocket out of an atmosphere and/or let you play with SSTO space planes etc.

The point of all this would be to ultimately collect and ship enough resources to start putting together components for a big colony ship that would have to be built in sufficiently big colonies on specific types of bodies and then hauled to the edge of the solar system for construction. You'd then be able to send the fully built ship off into interstellar space and "win".

Also, use n-body physics (potentially a restricted form so the planetary orbits are stable and it only applies to your rockets/satellites/stations) to let super-nerds set up ITN style low energy transfer orbits passing through Lagrange points because why the fuck not. It's a fair amount of extra work for a fairly niche use-case but you did say no compromises.

A realistic* Pirate open world by Rockstar. Basically the best of Black Flag and RDR2 in one package.

*in the sense how RDR2 is realistic and how we imagine pirate life was. Not too theme park-y like Pirates of the Caribean but also not hardcore grim and ugly.

The idea of Star Citizen, but actually finished and without selling individual ships for real cash.

The orange box 2.

VR game. Finger tracking controller mandatory. Basic gameplay is that of a wizard, casting spells. Each finger is an element, like air, water, fire, earth, life. You cast a spell by holding an element and drawing a shape in the air then gesturing. So a fire bolt would be hold fire, move in a line to point the direction, release fire mid throw. To make a fire ball, hold fire, then draw a circle in the air, then throw, release in the throw. Allow the user to make up spell effects by combining elements, shapes and gestures. Combine air and earth, draw a spiral, point at an enemy to trap them in air bands and earth bonds. Paint an ally in broad strokes with life to heal, etc. Moderate inspiration from Wheel of Time, if you've read it.

The gameplay of finger-wiggling mage sounds fun. Add bullet time for easy mode/overpowered.

Picture this:

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

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

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

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

mobile game like flappy bird.

instead of it being a bird, its a top-down view of a toilet and the player has to piss in the bowl.

levels get more difficult as you progress.

• piss blasting poop off the bowl
• pissing around the soaked lunker that will break open and end the game (it slowly follows your stream so there's no way of avoiding it)
• avoiding dripping on your pants
• piss out the fire
• drawing in the snow
• exotic places to piss; next to an electric fence, on a presidential face, in a bottle, down a tube, space station toilet, etc

there would be power ups/downs too;

• piss blaster to increase pressure at a loss of volume
• increase bladder size
• gonorrhea/blood
• acidic piss that eats through stuff
• dick size increase/decrease
• Parkinsons
• drunkness
• kidney stones

I would expect there to be around 32 levels, a compelling storyline with relatable characters, and a way to freepiss and piss with friends.

since it's a mobile game, hold the phone like a penis. tip it downward to piss faster/harder and swivel it to aim.

the name of the game would be called "Agents of P.I.S.S"

if successful, DLC will be published for Christmas called "Merry Pissmas" and will include voice acting by Patton Oswalt.

good luck whoever wants to take this game. I've been sitting on it for 20+ years.

make my golden dream come true!

A sequel to Half Life Alyx

The timing of my suggestion sucks somewhat, but I've had this idea since playing RDR2 when it was still new: a trilogy of RDR2/GTA hybrid games based off the RDR2 map (potentially expanded into new areas in places).

First game set in late 1920s, streets have cars and horse and carts on them, all the fashion, music (jazz), radio shows, drugs, bootleggers, heavy/dangerous industry, advancements in shipping and flight; but modelled onto the exact RDR2 map including every building. Obviously some areas could be unrecognisable other than the road layout if the area had seen a lot of redevelopment since the turn of the century. The game would need to have GTA at it's core and make the 20's feel like the peak of modernity and wit, and not feel like a dingy pastiche of the era. It would need to have echoes of RDR2 through it given it's set not long after the RDR2 story finishes.

Next game set in the 1950s, same map/same ethos, but you take the 20's version of the map as the starting point so there's an evolution of the idea. You could even follow the main characters and businesses on from the 20's game. I think you'd need more map to play with for a 50's game as there are a lot of new industries to explore and find space to place on the map. With that being said, whatever space you think you would need for v2 or v3 of the trilogy, should be added to the 20's edition so you see the entire map expand through the three games rather than having new areas bolted on in later additions that don't have any history to them.

Last game set in mid/late 70's.

I always say if I were a billionaire I would fund games and shows left and right, there are so many ideas that die or fizzle because of lack of funding. Seems like most people with money have no other passion but their money and controlling others.

Personally I would sponsor whatever cyberpunk game CDPR is working on next and for an original IP I'd like to see a medieval era ghost of Tsushima like game with all the longswords, chainmail and leather armor that comes with that.