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.

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.

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

I’d have Larian make a Star Wars RPG.

I want the realistic dragon sim mmo that was promised.

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.

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.

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.