Games You Wish Existed - The vidya we'll probably only see in our dreams

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Day of the Cope said:
I want a Dark Fantasy version of Harvest Moon where you can raise mythical creatures like ents, gryphons, and dragons. Imagine being commissioned by a King to raise a certain kind of beast for his prick of a son to kill to shut him up. Or you can be ordered to breed a certain kind of mount with magical traits, so now you have to grow certain crops. Of course, it's easy for the whole thing to get pretty "feature creep"y, but it's easy to see how much you can get from my general description.
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I could see something like that playing in well to an idea like you're trying to breed war beasts for a military, or going like a rancher route with it where you not only have to breed and take care of the dragons but also "break" them to ride, stuff like that. It's a neat idea.


Rocket wingsuits are so incredible in real life I don't get why nobody's made a game with them as part of the combat moveset. (I first came across them in Steep, but that's just a sports game.) It could be just real wingsuits in something like Far Cry, or it could be something like "the Rocketeer" with very stylized science fiction feeling. Basically, when has anyone made jetpack games except San Andreas as an easter egg?

I think it'd be interesting to see a game that depicts musket linear warfare, but with two gimmicks. You have to march, and you have to actually reload your gun. What I mean is, marching is NOT easy. It's something they drill soldiers on for a reason, it is not intuitive, not natural, for a bunch of people to keep proper spacing and position relative to each other, to actually step in time with each other. I'd compare it to a rhythm game. As for the reload, I don't know what the proper term is, but there's that concept in games where you have controls that "feel like" the action you're representing. Clicking the mouse to represent pulling a trigger is the most basic, most common form of that. Usually it's an obnoxious gimmick or a Wii-like sports game, but here what i'd say is this. You have to "pour" the gunpowder in. You have to "pull" the ramrod up and then "push" it down. You have to "cock" the hammer. And so on. AND, you can do these in any order, so that if you fuck up you'll shoot your ramrod out, or load the ball and forget the powder and fuck up your musket, or any number of other accidents.

You see where this is going? Normal shooters represent the feeling of combat and the skill of it through your aim and your ability to use basic thinking to do things like navigating your environment well, tactics. In gunpowder warfare, it's about rote memorization and discipline. Can you do your task properly while under stress. The thing that distinguished good troops from bad troops wasn't aim, it was whether you could get off three shots a minute or four or even five, and if you had the nerve to stand there while getting pounded.

I dig things like Madden now where you control a "team" of people instead of just one, and gunpowder warfare has potential for that too, like rhythm gaming the drumming (drum/bugle the wrong way and you may give the WRONG ORDER, do a song well and it may inspire your troops), being the officer and selecting your positioning well before the engagement, and when you get into a bayonet charge it comes down to Kingdom Come like directional combat (stab in one of five directions, block their stabs).

Would this be fun? Probably not. But for the niche of people that voluntarily play something like War of Rights, I think it would be a fascinating little campaign to play a platoon through battles where your performance in each stage is like a minigame that sets up the difficulty of the next one (choose the best formation, march to that space, shoot and reload as fast as possible, if engaged in melee fight your way out of it).
 
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ok here me out: ac game set during the british raj period. im thinkin 1920s india would be an interesting place to parkour around and stealth shit in, set it in like the Delhi region. lets also make this a challenge: protagonist is a """pacifist""". doesnt kill his enemies. only pacifies them or they only die from their injuries after the fight is long over
 
A Calvin and Hobbes game where you can 'morph' between reality and a given fantasy world depending on what happens in either.

Example: when a player boards the red wagon and starts rolling down the sidewalk, the scenery and background morph to a rail-shooter of Spaceman Spiff flying through an asteroid field while pursued by aliens. If you hit an 'asteroid', everything abruptly morphs back to 'reality' where you hit a telephone pole and wrecked.

Your buddy Hobbes can affect objects in the real world , but he's dependent on not being seen by other people and will 'poof' back into a toy if he is. This sets up puzzles in 'reality' like the ones in the LEGO games when completing a 2-person puzzle with one live player.

Massive amounts of voiced dialog for every imaginable situation = a ton of replay value.

A shitload of undocumented easter eggs and cultural references to find.

Multiple-choice, branching storyline where what you choose has permanent effects for your savegame - acting like a brat can be very fun but you'll get your ass grounded and locked out of a ton of stuff further on. But so will being a goody-two-shoes for too long.

A playable 'epilogue' with Calvin at ~20 where you have to choose what you take and leave behind as you move out. If you haven't played with a particular toy very much during the game, it's locked out from being taken. Bonus heartstring-yanking points for this potentially meaning you have to leave Hobbes behind.

Explorable maps that you have to edit using the mouse or a touchscreen to move a pencil, as if you were really writing on it.

Top-tier talent BGM and original songs...including some that will break your heart even while you admire how amazing they are. ("Rakuten" and "Finding Paradise" have some good examples of this)
 
I've had this idea for at least ten years and I think it sounds pretty simple: A football/rugby type game in a fully destructible metropolis.

The players could be robots, monsters, superhumans, wizards, and other fantastic creatures. The name of the game is hard hits and property damage.
 
Oh boy. Get ready for a long-winded one from me. I've had an idea for an open world racing/driving game in my head since high school.

The idea is for a game called Drive. What this would be would be an open world driving/racing game set in a decent sized map (maybe TC2 size) that's a sort of genelization of the midwest/rockies. That sound pretty standard but bear with me.

The map isn't shown from the start. Instead, every road, area, shop, garage, race, character, etc is discovered via your gameplay, and since a YOU pick the starting location on rhe map without any background (behind a cover story of being willed a house with a few junk cars) everyone's gameplay would be different. I go even further with that.

In this game, every single car, part and body could be interacted with. Cars can be hijacked, stolen, etc. Even wrecks, barnfinds etc can be dragged/towed back to your home and repaired, modified, torn apart for their engine, trans etc etc. You could find a wrecked 32 ford, tow it home, then steal a kenworth and put its diesel engine in said 32, along with its dually axles. There would be no limits. The car list would consist of a varied 600-800 real world cars. What region of the map you were in, what time of day, etc would influence what vehicles you see and are available to you. Classic Jeeps roaming the woods. Commuter cars in the capital city. More performance cars out at night. Etc.

The emergent gameplay goes deeper, though. In this game, everything in game must be discovered by you the player. Driving around you'll locate shops, racers, Junkyards, groups of drivers, dealerships, racetracks and more. Tips about lost cars, barnfinds, sales, stolen cars and racing groups can be acquired from chatting with npcs. Even special or interesting modifications must be found/learned. You wanna unlock metallic paint? You need to find the Hotrod Dennis in Dry Springs and help him out. Wanna unlock hydraulics? Ramone in Rancho Aquilla needs help recovering a stolen car. Wanna learn how to tune your cars for more power? Jesse's Dyno shop in Rainpine will be happy to help....for a fee. You wanna race only supercars? You'll find the Invitational Club in Hedgewick. But the fee will be high. Wanna beat the top racer? You'll need to defeat the rest in the club to get him to show his face.

Now, I hear you. "But wouldn't that give you a limited list of things to do?". Yes. It would. Which is why in DRIVE, player actions would influence the world. See, when you stole that car carrier full of JDM imports from Southbay? That pissed off the cops. And now the entirety of Southbay has a heightened police presence, and that shipper won't send cars to Southbay anytime soon. But the leader of Lucky Dragon is still playing top dollar for those Nissans, so are you going to give up? Or are you going to figure out how they're shipping them now? Or are you just going to go knock off that trailer of vintage mopars over in Rainpine, since the police won't be looking there.

Maybe you really love the dirt oval racing in Wheatheart, but...not many drivers showing up these days. A new fast lap or track record will encourage some more rivals to race. That Jaguar V12 in Hedgewick would look good in your garage, but it's locked up tight behind security. You could bust your way in. Or...you could steal the security van.

Or....if you wanna play it clean. Buy a towtruck. Make a good living. Buy yourself a nice new Mustang GT and cruise the highway roads of Southbay while the storms roll in. Fix up that old Jeep Cherokee you bought from the farmer in Wheatheart and offroad to the top of Whitehawk Peak. Or maybe prep that Barracuda you dug out of De'Alean swamp for paint.

The point would be a driving game where every action had a reaction, a result And a consequence. Where it would take hundreds of hours for gameplay to get remotely stale. Etc. Been thinking about this a long time.
 
I want a Fire Emblem style tactics game that goes infinite with generated in-game history and has different lore settings, procedurally generated maps, also with autoplay. Some areas are high fantasy, some are dark fantasy, some are more normal fantasy elements. Some training, lineage, base building, and relationships between characters. Also with traits, perks, event upgrades, and personality and behaviour modifiers.

I want to basically buy procedurally generated characters, throw them at the enemy, and have some survive to create their own story and lineage in the game. I also want to be able to make a character a captain, or have characters defend others in autoplay, while others will charge recklessly or cower.
 
Deadwaste said:
ok here me out: ac game set during the british raj period. im thinkin 1920s india would be an interesting place to parkour around and stealth shit in, set it in like the Delhi region. lets also make this a challenge: protagonist is a """pacifist""". doesnt kill his enemies. only pacifies them or they only die from their injuries after the fight is long over
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No I'm automatically on board with India. I'm not really into the 1920s period (is there something specific about it) but conquest of the Mughals by the EIC, Carnatic Wars, and Mutiny are all valid subject matter. I want to see India in more stuff in general.

Only problem I have with yours (and it's honestly an interesting idea, I don't think you'd want it to be literally in the AC series but playing as a Jain pacifist or an itinerant monk or something could be really interesting) is that I really want elephant warfare in more games.

@Glowie Hunter Art Bell That's pretty similar to my desire for a game that's basically car mechanic simulator but with a large interactable open world map. For me I was going more of a Grease-like 1950s SoCal setting, and the idea of having minigames appropriate for that time*, and like a county or two as the map. Kind of something like if you took the businessy gameplay of CMS (repairing cars, flipping cars, acquiring cars from junkyards and such) with exploration and races and soft-body damage (like Wreckfest), and then embed it in a world where you interact socially with the locals like a farming sim like Harvest Moon. But your idea about being able to drive around, find stuff in the world (steal it, buy it, do a quest to earn it), work on your car to soup it up, that both of ours have in common. You'd think someone would have made it already.

*Things like fishing, bars with cards, dice, darts, dancing to rock'n'roll, pool, barfights, shooting targets, bowling, trying to cop a feel at the drive-in theater.
 
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Deadwaste said:
ok here me out: ac game set during the british raj period. im thinkin 1920s india would be an interesting place to parkour around and stealth shit in, set it in like the Delhi region. lets also make this a challenge: protagonist is a """pacifist""". doesnt kill his enemies. only pacifies them or they only die from their injuries after the fight is long over
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Which is why Syndicate is a huge missed oppurtunity with such asinine stuff in the actual game. Everything is heavily caricatured.

www.youtube.com

Britain's First Muslim Converts - Documentary

BBC Documentary 'Great British Islam' this documentary tells the little-known story of three Victorian gentlemen - William Quilliam, Baron Headley and Marmad...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

This story covered in BBC in a previous era regarding the first Muslims in England is seriously some pre-woke Assassin's Creed-tier conspiracy stuff. The first English convert went back to England, founded a Mosque, then one day disappeared after he built up a foundation for the religion to propagate. He was living under a separate identity when he was found years later and it was VERY vague as to what he was undertaking after he seemingly abandoned his original "mission".

AC Syndicate should have used this since it's not only based on a real grounded event that happened, but it would have been a great opportunity to showcase an as-is London rather than the... heavily over-the-top stuff they went with. Templar enforcers roaming the streets with the cross on their shoulder-capes?

This is real goddamn history about a conspiracy by the wayside and we have a game about the two quipping idiots and their brown Alfred who should have been the main character anyway.
 
Liquid Kent said:
Which is why Syndicate is a huge missed oppurtunity with such asinine stuff in the actual game. Everything is heavily caricatured.

www.youtube.com

Britain's First Muslim Converts - Documentary

BBC Documentary 'Great British Islam' this documentary tells the little-known story of three Victorian gentlemen - William Quilliam, Baron Headley and Marmad...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

This story covered in BBC in a previous era regarding the first Muslims in England is seriously some pre-woke Assassin's Creed-tier conspiracy stuff. The first English convert went back to England, founded a Mosque, then one day disappeared after he built up a foundation for the religion to propagate. He was living under a separate identity when he was found years later and it was VERY vague as to what he was undertaking after he seemingly abandoned his original "mission".

AC Syndicate should have used this since it's not only based on a real grounded event that happened, but it would have been a great opportunity to showcase an as-is London rather than the... heavily over-the-top stuff they went with. Templar enforcers roaming the streets with the cross on their shoulder-capes?

This is real goddamn history about a conspiracy by the wayside and we have a game about the two quipping idiots and their brown Alfred who should have been the main character anyway.
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All you need to know is that fucking James Mayer Rothschild died in the same timeframe as the game and yet they used made up characters instead as the villains.

Granted, i think Maxwell "Roth" was probably intended to be Rothschild and they were just terrified of being sued or called anti-Semites.

Weird thing is, it seems like what they really wanted to do was Gangs of New York (because from what I hear Victorian London was clean of the gang problem at that time) but not in New York, probably because they already did gangs of New York in colonial New York (where it makes no sense) and TWO games in NY. And I would have liked that setting (AC: Civil War!). They also totally missed out on having the really weird gimmick gangs of real-life Victorian London in it. Story could have and should have had a lot more fun with itself for what stupid shit it was dealing with. Personally, i think the setting is absolutely ripe for a Bully-like game about being a newspaper boy/pickpocket (I call it "Street Arab").


Another one, just dancing in general, but I don't mean those games like DDR and the one for Wii, I mean more like just dancing in general? Or, alternatively, you might say dancing in more games as minigames. I love that shit, I have an interesting in it IRL but I've always been clumsy and the last time I tried getting into it I just found myself getting too stressed to have fun, though it didn't help hte location and culture was terrible. The onyl games I can think of with dancing minigames are Sid Meier's Pirates with the ball romance minigame and Yakuza with the disco, but there's a ton of other styles and settings it'd fit in, square dances and line dances in your Westerns, folk dances and peasant dances in your Medieval/colonial games, rock and roll, tons of possibilities. But even if not as minigames, I'd pay at least a few dollars for something where you just have a ton of songs across a ton of genres (big band, rock, folksong) to listen to the music and play something like Sid Meier's while watching it. Conceptually it's really not that different from those sports games like Tony Hawk and Steep where the emphasis is on scoring by doing flashy moves.


AC Civil War.JPG

Google Maps mockup of my idea of a Civil War naval map. The diagonal that cuts through Virginia sits just south enough to include the Great Dismal Swamp, which is not historically significant in the Civil War, but was notable as a feature of terrain and a refuge for maroons, and cuts across to allow Appomattox. On the western end, it runs along the ride of Appalachians along the famous Shenandoah Valley all the way up to where it intersects with the Susquehanna and then down to the Chesapeake Bay, taking in some island and peninsular areas of eastern Maryland along the way (for variety). Within this space you have Richmond, the whole Williamsburg-Yokrtown-Jamestown and Newport News-Norfolk areas, Washington, Baltimore, most every Eastern Theater (maybe every single one) battlefield (Chancellorsville, Petersburg and the Crater, Bull Runs, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, Wilderness, Jackson in the Valley, Monitor vs Merrimack etc.), five rivers of note (Susquehanna, Potomac, James, York, Rappahannock), famous plantations of founding fathers and Confederates (Monticello, Montpelier, Mount Vernon, Stafford Hall, Arlington House, Highlands).

Going further down the map, the broad Albemarle Sound, Pamlico Sound area is included and individual shore areas (like how Black Flag and Rogue have little, walled-off areas along their coastlines) for places like Wilmington and explorable Outer Banks, and then finally the map opens back up again for a "thicker" Lowcountry (rendered as islands/swamps you can sail through) with lots of locations, a little Savannah, and a big detailed Charleston with a historically accurate harbor.

Add on NYC, but NYC is almost overkill at that point.

Washington, NYC, and Charleston are the big cities, Richmond obviously should appear a lot too.
 
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Is there a thread for cartoons you wish existed? 'Cause I just thought of a good one - Friends Babies. Like Muppet Babies but with Ross and Rachel and the gang.
 
Maybe this actually exists, if so tell me:

Geology-Ecology Simulator.

So, you know (maybe) how Universe Sandbox exists, you can use it to make clickbait trash YouTube videos about slamming a pea into Earth at lightspeed or you can use it to build solar systems the real way. I can see it having usefulness for science fiction worldbuilding as a person could tinker with their celestial bodies until they work properly to get solar systems that are realistic. If it could have rockets in it (not like Kerbal, no atmosphere or engineering, just the ability to test maneuvers in space) especially useful.

A geology-ecology simulator would be like that with just one planet and a much more detailed surface. You randomly generate a planet, or have it form from its primordial gas cloud, and can sculpt custom features on it. You can watch as its surface evolves through erosion and tectonic drift and how mineral deposits of various sorts form. It's been an ambition of mine to learn more geology (because I'm interested in understanding why resources are distributed the way they are: for example, the oil beneath the Gulf of Mexico and Niger Delta is there because extreme sediment buildup means biomass gets covered, starved of oxygen, before it can decompose).

The geology simulator needs to have climate and weather, I want to see how currents like the Gulf Stream form in the ocean, how trade winds happen, I want to see a desert form behind my rain shadows. Then, if the planet has the proper conditions, have it assume abiogenesis will occur at some point, and then you can watch (set the speed how you want) the world fill in with plant life, distributed appropriately. See the planet green up. Based on the atmospheric conditions and the climate (humidity and temperature), it could display scenery, when you zoom in enough, based on Earth wildlife, so like assume that if it's a climate like the taiga you'll see moose and bears and beavers, if you zoom in on a climate like the Sahara you'll see camels.

The last two features would be big stretches, not necessary, but one would be for it to have animals (could be ones from a list of real animals, could be Spore-like) have population densities across the map, relations to each other, and watch them expand and contract and reach equilibrium but have the equilibrium constantly change with the climate. The second stretch, human civilization layered on it, in a macro scale, no wars or states or kings (but, perhaps, spread of "civilizations" in a very vague sense), just watching humans act as another animal that transforms the land into vast farmland that can be seen from space (like the Nile and Mississippi valleys) or vast cities (like the Boswash corridor), and see the world come alight, in an instant, when they reach electricity.

Such a thing would be extremely useful both for worldbuilding realistic constructed worlds and as an educational tool (learn by playing and watching).
 
Age of Empires meets Anno, the Naval RTS game.

Many RTS games - in the old school sense of building a base, gathering resources, fighting - have naval combat, but usually in a fairly shallow way, ancilliary to the main game. Got to thinking of this because of how shallow Anno's naval warfare is, and how AoE3 did naval a little better because ships did have some more interesting interactions, like being gifted with powerful broadside abilities, or being dedicated to siege warfare, or being mobile barracks.

Way I'd pitch it is this, you have individual islands and those islands can be developed with workers, with buildings, like a typical RTS. The island is controlled by a socket (like the "sockets" for building Trading Posts in AoE3), if you have a harbor in that socket then you get the full control of the island. There's no logistics, all island resources go straight in your coffers. Then, you've got the naval units. But the naval units have different health bars (sails/cannons/hull/crew), and more variety. For example, in Anno it mostly just comes down to how beefy the ship is and how fast it is. But in naval warfare of that period, things like range could matter a lot, or capability to fire torpedos.

I think a naval warfare game of colonialism (maps drawing from theaters like the Caribbean, East Indies, Mediterranean, African coast) could be perfectly fine. There's way more varieties in ships than I think people would expect, especially if the timeframe extended from sail (or even galley) up through steam or diesel propulsion, but the real depth would come from the tactical finesse. I'd imagine ships handling like a more arcadey version of Empire Total War, in that they attack what's in the range of their guns. Select your type of ammo (chain, grape, heat, round, etc.). Go for demasting, boarding, ramming, sinking, etc. Wind and current (the former shifting, the latter stable) and dangerous storms would appear and move around on the map, making weather a tactical decision. Shore bombardment would be allowed, and marine raids would be limited heavily but would be a feature (a choice of a few types of ground forces that you can insert with orders to attack a certain specific building, and enemy defensive buildings/garrisons of units would automatically respond or hold positions at specific terrain), allowing for daredevil raids. Resources would be Food, Wood, Metal, Textiles (cloth and rope), Wealth (gained especially from running trade routes, the one thing that would require you to send ships from your plantations/mines/trading posts to the hub and then off-map to the metropole, subject to raids), and if late-game Coal (replacing Textiles as the input to steamships) and Oil (input to the diesel ships).


Also a real shame we never got an Old World AoE3, I liked AoE3 a ton as a kid, liked its colonial setting, but I do think a more traditional experience that could have featured civilizations like Polish-Lithuania and Sweden and historical campaigns of things like the Thirty Years War was missing.
 
A remake of the old Sim games. Earth, Ant, the cool PC only titles.

Could really do neat stuff with processors now.
 
I've been mulling something over involving an Americana/road trip feel, and being able to go to different sites and do stuff. The way I'd describe the idea at this point is "American Truck Simulator meets Sam & Max Hit the Road", but I'm having problems with conceptual stuff (workable plot, characters, gameplay).
 
I am very serious: I would love a proper Sailor Moon RPG game; for the gameplay, battle system and environment, it could take a lot of inspiration from Persona games...I think it could work.

I am surprised that such a cult anime never got a game release...surely there is a lot of money that could be made from this, look at DBZ, ken, or more recently One Piece and Naruto.

On the topic, did Berserk ever got released as a game?
 
You know how Microsoft Flight Simulator modeled the whole world in one map? No? Well, they took Google Maps to do it. It's basically procedurally generated OFF OF Google Maps. Then it throws in real life weather data to simulate weather (which sometimes is really accurate, and sometimes is piss, it's bad at short-term weather). I've never been a flight sim guy, I just learned about that recently (I guess I assumed it was like flying over Kerbin before) and am now aching to play virtual tourist.

Well, I don't see why (okay, it'd be harder, but in principle possible) you couldn't make a game that uses Google STREET VIEW to procedurally generate roads for a car racing game, like The Crew or Truck Simulator but better. Drive anywhere*!!!

*That Street View has been

Also, more of a game MECHANIC I wish existed, but TOUR BUSES! If you have a modern-day game, have a thing where you can drive a tour bus. The idea came to me as I was driving IRL and thinking about how piss landmarks in The Crew are. A tour bus could work as that you are given destinations to go to and as you drive around your character narrates lore about the area. In games like GTA and Mafia that use fictionalized cities, there could be two tours, the in-universe tour and the behind-the-scenes-directors-cut tour that talks about the real life locations and how they chose to render them in-game. In games with real cities, like Watch_Dogs and LA Noire, it could be just the one tour since it's real locations anyways. What it would do is give a wonderful, interactive, seamless, in-universe equivalent to the education tool of some AssCreed games. I love the idea of a "virtual tourism" game, but The Crew just isn't... good enough.
 
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