I was going to make this thread, but saw one already existed.
My biggest one:
SUNLESS SEA, DONE IN THE STYLE OF ASSASSIN'S CREED IV: BLACK FLAG
Sunless Sea had a wonderful setting that was completely wasted on a game with awful gameplay. It's not just that it was text-based, the game wasn't fun to play, it was too driven by the quests and the mechanics of things like combat and trade too punishing and clunky to be enjoyable.
The premise of the setting was that Victorian London falls through a giant sinkhole into this massive cavern (the Neath) that contains an underground ocean, on which islands float around, mysteriously rearranging themselves. The Admiralty has to regularly send out explorers to keep track on where everything else, and as one of these naval agents you interact with all kinds of Victorian, Lovecraft-ish, and surreal stuff. Lighting is a huge part of the game (unless there's a specific thing creating light, it's pitch black), and is used like a gameplay mechanic where you ration fuel that can keep the lights on in an ocean full of monsters like giant crabs.
It could have been absolutely amazing as a Black Flag-style game where you pilot the steamship and go onto islands in a third-person perspective, fighting off ocean monsters and exploring strange underground landscapes - temples, luminescent forests, shanty colonies, stuff like that - in a very dark and surreal environment, and if the islands could actually move while you explore that would be great.
Mostly I wish there were more historical-setting games in the vein of Kingdom Come, Assassin's Creed, and Red Dead Redemption, but set in more obscure periods. Specific ones:
GRAND THEFT AUTO: TEXAS
Texas is a criminally underused setting for video games, I don't understand how nobody has made one despite there being tons of video game representations of places like Los Angeles and New Orleans. I picture the GTA version of Texas as being like San Andreas, broadly divided between San Antonio, Dallas, and a sort of hybrid Galveston-Austin. You'd have desert, forest/swamps, and plains, Mexican cartels and White biker gangs and Black gangbangers in the East Texas cities, and so on. Could also have the neighboring provinces of Mexico as a part of the map. It would be an amazing and diverse setting for a modern GTA clone.
THE COLONIAL/EARLY REPUBLIC AMERICAN FRONTIER
It's annoying to me how games feel a need to try to shoehorn in gun-like weapons or automatics into settings where they'd be rare. People just assume that if it's not Medieval-style combat or they have an assault rifle, then it wouldn't be fun. That's completely the wrong way to think about it, in the scale of combat that games take place you wouldn't have engagements with waiting twenty seconds to reload your musket, you'd just shoot off the musket then engage in hand-to-hand combat. That's how Assassin's Creed 3 did the American Revolution, by giving a special dodge ability to avoid volley fire and most of the time you're fighting enemies using bayonets like spears.
With a more detailed hand-to-hand combat system (based around knives, war clubs, tomahawks, etc.), a game set in the American frontier of musket era, based around frontiersmen and Indians, would be very fun.
THE COALFIELD WARS AND MOONSHINERS: FAR CRY MEETS GTA MEETS RED DEAD REDEMPTION IN PROHIBITION APPALACHIA
1920s Appalachia has a lot going on with both moonshiners (involved in the liquor trade to the Mafia) and Communist-agitated coal miner insurgency. I picture a game that plays like a hybrid of GTA and RDR, where you have both urban areas (based on Northeastern cities) and large rural areas, and can do both old-fashioned activities like hunt and forage and ride horses in the rural areas and more modern things like race early cars and gamble in the urban areas. Either a plot focused on the coal wars (more like Far Cry, guerilla warfare across an open sprawling landscape), or focused on the moonshiners (running liquor down twisting roads fleeing from revenuers, raiding rivals' stalls, etc.), or somehow a mixture of both. I think it would be really unique and one of those things people would never think they want until they saw it.
RED DEAD RUSSIA
Russian settlement of Siberia is greatly underused as a setting (basically an analogue to the American West), and the Russian conquest of the East and the whole Russo-Japanese War/Russian Civil War/Warlord Era period would be really cool for doing something like RDR (trains, horses, guns) in a setting that's very similar but still different, imagine stuff like a horseback train robbery where you're fighting alongside Mongols or fighting with a revolver in one hand and a katana in another.
SENGOKU JIDAI, DONE IN THE STYLE OF ASSASSIN'S CREED IV: BLACK FLAG WITH CHARACTER SWITCHING
I wouldn't particularly want to see an actual Assassin's Creed version of it (I don't think the AC lore adds anything to anything), but a Western game (I don't like weeb shit) set around Sengoku Jidai, especially including the naval/seafaring aspect of it, would be great. You've got ninja (climbing around castles, stealth-assassination), wokou (pirates, raiding the Chinese coast), samurai (Ghost of Tsushima swordfighting), and other stuff. There could be a thing where you switch between characters like in GTA 5, it was interesting how that game gave you specific characters to encourage you to roleplay different things with different people, and I've thought games should try to take that idea further.
MESOAMERICA
Nothing specific, just criminally underused setting, you can imagine fighting in both jungle and city environments with weapons like atlatls and macahuitls and blowguns, fighting jaguars and playing pok ta pok and shit like that.
A FARMING SIMULATOR THAT'S SET IN THE 1800S
Something, that can be more laid back like normal farming simulators or more serious, that is an actual pioneer and/or plantation simulator. A big part of what I get out of things like Don't Starve and Minecraft and RDR2 is living on the land. I'd like to be able to play something that revolves around a core gameplay loop of just keeping a normal frontiersman or farmer going, potentially with family life/content outside of that. Like something where a normal session of gameplay includes things like hunting deer in the woods, herding cattle (I'm one of the few people who actually liked that in RDR and thought it should have been a side activity), harvesting crops, drinking/dancing in the town saloon, helping Timmy out of the well that Lassie told me he fell in, dying of dysentery and getting scalped by Indians.
W but more realistic, open world, and slower paced. Possibly even make it open source after it stops selling so people can make their own content for it.
