If you could design a perfect video game

Assuming there’s no limits on number of polygons, time and effort needed and that you could have any video game you’d like, how would it look like, would it be an improved version of a game that already exists, a combination of different games, maybe something completely new?

Here’s mine, to sum it up it’s Gta with a realism level slider set on 9000, so Gta, but:

  • with more RPG elements (real jobs (military officer, factory worker,…), several choices to talk with pedestrians, to ask them for directions, ability to buy&sell stuff from street sellers, etc.)

  • realistic vehicle physics for everything, not just good car physics and bad plane physics

  • several large cities and many smaller towns that are really far from each other (at least a distance of an hour or two in real time between large cities, so that when you travel to another city to do missions, it feels like a whole new journey)

  • different countries with their own police and army factions. These factions can occasionally enter a war and fight other’s armies,etc. (think of gang wars in Gta San Andreas or Saints row 2, but on a much larger scale, this would also affect pedestrians, traffic,etc.)

  • meaningful public transport in which you can ride in first person, trains, buses, subways, airplanes (so that you reach cities in 10, 20 minutes instead of driving for hours)

  • police that doesn’t know automatically who and where you are if you commit a crime with no one around and police that doesn’t send dozens of cars and choppers on you, but also police that will keep passively searching for you until you bribe someone or escape to another country somehow. If you kill someone and no one sees it, you still might get wanted after some time (due to police investigations), stolen cars will not automatically have police chase them (unless you are seen breaking in), but if you drive a stolen car and don’t change the plates, the police will start chasing you when they see you. If chased by the police, you could hide and wait for them to go away and they won’t just spawn to wherever you are like they do in Gta, so it would be much easier to escape them, but they would come to your house or workplace, so you would have a higher incentive to bribe them, instead of the classical having 5 stars, hiding in a subway tunnel and exiting after a minute as if nothing happened. Wearing masks, being stealthy and so on when doing missions/robberies would make it much harder for the police to identify you.

  • hundreds of military vehicles, weapons,etc, each with realism on Arma 3/DCS/Squad level

  • ability to join armies as a soldier for a salary (to train for using various weapons, to participate in mil exercises and wars) or to even command armies at different unit levels (which you would be able to do by doing the real jobs rpg element and going to a officer academy to become an officer)

  • ability to buy many different houses and objects and have bills&taxes related to them, the larger the property, the larger the expenses. If your wallet gets empty and you can’t pay, you are out on the street and you have to earn money from scratch to buy or rent a new house/apartment.

  • real time duration

  • optional food, drink and sleep system, you’d buy food at shops, street merchants, pick up fruits in nature,… and store food and drinks in the house or a backpack. If you somehow get broke and can’t afford anything to eat or drink, you progressively get sick (since it’s real time duration, it would take a few real hours), you could also sleep on the street if you have nowhere else, but weather, animals and criminals could disturb your sleep and you’d have a risk of getting sick, injured or mugged.

  • construction system, you could buy a empty lot and build a house like you would in Sims, the more you earn, the bigger the house you can construct

There’s probably a lot more I could think of, but that’s most of it, a Gta type world that is much, much larger and that is much more realistic, where you can choose to be a criminal and have police on your back, police which is there to stay unless you bribe them, get arrested,etc. or a ability to live a life of a normal citizen and have different careers, earn to buy vehicles, properties, food,etc., drive in public transportation if you don’t own a vehicle (and don’t want to ride in a stolen vehicle) and much, much more.

As far fetched as this all sounds combined like this, each of these things I counted already exists in various different games, Arma 3 for example has gigantic terrains, AC Odyssey and even the old Scarface game have a system of passive chasing by the police (mercenaries) and bribing them to leave you alone, games as old as Mafia 1 from year 2002 (yep, almost 20 years) have a first person public transport system (a tram and a light rail system), many survival games have food, drink and sleep systems, many games have construction systems and ability to manage properties, there are a lot of strategies in which you command with various military units, pretty much all of those things have directly or indirectly appeared in games for years now, but haven’t been combined in a grand scale open world game, for now at least, but computers are becoming more and more powerful and games will only become more complex as time passes, so who knows, maybe some day we could see a game that has all this.

Well, the way I see it, a threadshit is better than no response at all, soo…

I’m not sure I would even consider what you’ve outlined to be an idea.
Among AAA games the goal has basically always been more realistic graphics and physics, better AI, more interaction and generally more content. There are probably a dozen studios that have partially achieved some of the things you’ve described and are working (too many) hours to remove the “partially” and “some of”.

To engage with the OP a bit more though, my dream game would have all the detail and complexity that you describe but would be more of a fantasy environment. I want escapism. That doesn’t need to mean orcs and magic, in fact I look forward to more games being less based on conflict and combat. You don’t need that to make great games e.g. Subnautica, The Witness etc.

Minesweeper with real IEDs, just to keep things interesting.

A crossover between Dig Dug, Leisure Suit Larry, and the Aliens movies.

I basically just want Better Skyrim that isn’t limited to one backwater of the world and has more reasonable population densities (not necessarily realistic but not goofy). Maybe a little more variation and depth to the magic and combat systems.

I ALMOST loved Elder Scrolls Online, but the fact that my favorite part of TES games is exploring the various dungeons finding unique notes and armor and designs is really lost given than ESO’s dungeons are all based on the same handful of templates, there are effectively no unique items to find, and the cities are all cookie cutter clones with functionally identical vendors.

If they wanted to set it in the world of Dishonored instead of TES, I wouldn’t argue, either.

Alternate: an open-world, meticulously-detailed game set in ancient Rome. Movement and exploration like an Assassin’s Creed game, but without the plot baggage of that series. And more interiors and interactions with characters at different levels of society.

A Fallout MMO. But not just another MMO lootfest.

First of all, I’d want it to be huge. As in, hundreds of square miles of several different areas mapped out: California, Nevada, east coast, and fill in some areas between showing the progressions of the BoS.

And no fast travel. There would natrually be vehicles, from motorcycles, motorboats, and technicals all the way up to BoS airships and vertibirds. But to get from place to place, you would actually have to travel in real time. For areas that are not adjacent, say the northern half of Illinois and Omaha were game areas, but Iowa was not, you’d have to talk/drive/fly through a generated landscape with random encounters. Or maybe instead of actually spending 9 days of playtime walking, you say “Ok, I wanna go to Omaha.” And while you still have to wait however long it takes your vehicle/feet to get there, you get notifications through an app or something that tells you you have an encounter/locations/situation, and from the app you can choose what to do. Kind of like the wasteland encounters in 1/2. Maybe you bypass the town, or check out the enemy’s stats and just click the ‘fight and continue’ button. Or of course, log in or use a lite version of the game on your device to play through the encounter.

The ability to rise up in rank, and command/participate in large-scale battles. The battles would mostly be fought with NPCs, but high-level PC ‘commanders’ would be calling the shots, and other PC ‘squad leaders’ with a squad of NPC could be out in the battle, possibly using skills/perks to buff their squad.

Enough side quests, or smart side quests, so you don’t run in to instances where something is gone when you get there, or the objective has already been accomplished and you have to wait for it to respawn.

Different servers set up with finite end games e.g. objectives like Risk. Once the objective is met or time for that game is up, everyone gets booted, takes their experience, and finds another server.

Real factions that matter. All factions playable, including no-faction roles such as settlers or shopkeepers. Factions are largely permanent in the current game, but can be switched once the game is over and a new one is joined.

I’m not even close to done.

That’s something I’ve always liked the idea of- where you’d start out as Private <whatever>, and you’d be a trigger-puller, and that’s it. As you got better in the game, you’d get offered promotions to higher ranks, and with those promotions, your gameplay would change.

For example, if you were promoted to Corporal, you’d be a fireteam commander, meaning that you’d have some authority over 3 or so other players to accomplish a mission.

If you were promoted to Sergeant, you’d command a squad- 2 fireteams. You’d issue your orders to the fireteam leaders.

And so on, up the chain. I suppose they’d need to cap the rank at a certain level for each game- if you were playing “Enlisted Man”, you’d probably cap out at Captain/company commander. Then you’d have to buy “Field Grade” and play battalion and brigade level commanders. Then “General” and play division, corps, army and army group level roles. You’d be able to play upward and transfer characters upward if you so chose, for purposes of cosmetic stuff and what-not.

I suspect that the pyramidal nature would be taken care of naturally with good game design- the vast majority of people would want to only be enlisted and shoot the guns, with fewer wiling to play at each higher level- how many people want to actually play the Eisenhower role versus playing the Captain Miller role anyway.

Of course, there would have to be some sort of reprimanding mechanism for insubordinate players- if you’re a fireteam leader and one guy keeps lone-wolfing it, you’d have to have some kind of mechanism for the leader to reprimand him in an effective way- like if you get a severe reprimand, you have to sit out 3 matches or something. And also some kind of upward review mechanism as well- that way, if someone was ok by their commander’s view, but sucked to play for, that would be taken into account.

It’s my dream game, I have no doubt there would be such a mechanism and that it would work flawlessly :smiley:

Remember “L.A. Noire”? A Playstation 3 game made by Rockstar, with a semi-open-world environment, but based around the gameplay mechanic of finding clues, organizing them, investigating leads, assembling more clues, talking to people using an “intuition” system where you have to read their facial expressions/tone of voice and choose whether they’re lying outright (which would need to be backed up by proof), being untruthful but without proof to confirm that they’re lying (‘doubt’), and believing them. Really cool 1940s aesthetic, car design, actors motion captured meticulously onto the characters (including some of the cast of ‘Mad Men’, in both major and minor roles.)

Well, I recently re-watched Mad Men and I thought it would be amazing to have a similar game, wit the same cast of characters, the same design aesthetic (but set in the late 50s and early 60s), that’s simply a Mad Men video game adaptation, that would use the very same gameplay mechanics as L.A. Noire, except instead of cracking cases, it was designing advertisements. All the different ideas - the concepts, the visual art, the slogan, etc, would have to be formed, and it would be done in the same way - by gathering aesthetic clues from the environment; from talking to a variety of people to get their advice, including psychologists, pop culture figures, etc, as well as the other advertising designers in the agency (played by the actual Mad Men actors, acting in their Mad Men parts…Roger Sterling, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell, etc). Each “case” like in L.A. Noire would instead be a different ad campaign for a different product. But just as in LA Noire there’d be an overarching story.

I guess you’d either play as Don Draper, or play as Ken Cosgrove (since that guy already did the lead part in L.A. Noire and proved that he could convincingly do a performance as the lead in a video game)…or you could design your own character or something, the “new guy/girl at the office” but all the other characters would stay the same. Also since the office is filled with innuendo and co-worker hookups, there would be aspects of the game where you could hit on other characters or react to being hit on and possibly establish a relationship (or make enemies, depending on what you do right or wrong.) Anyway, just basically L.A. Noire, but with Mad Men.

A JRPG like the early Final Fantasy games, but with a few points where the game can branch in a different direction. I’m not talking about something like Elder Scrolls where you can move from one adventure to another in whatever order you want. I’m thinking more like having points where if you’re character or party are at a high enough level that you can change the whole direction of the game. With Final Fantasy IV, for example, one branch point might be Cecil winning his fight against Kain during the siege of Fabul.

Well, the problem with what I want is nobody would do it. I want a fantasy MMO that requires a monster computer to run it. They’ve been doing least common denominator graphics for a long time. But if you have a monster machine and set it on ultra, I want it to look as real as anything out there.

Last MMO I think that tried that was EQ2.
Such a game won’t happen because nobody’s gonna make an MMO that will drag 90% of the user base’s computer to it’s knees.

And, obviously, it has to be a good MMO, as fresh as can be.

Whatever the user interface is, there would be an easy and intuitive way to scale it to the perfect size on your particular machine.

I’d like to order a Dark Souls-style third person RPG, with difficulty comparable to the Soulsborne games and similar oblique environmental storytelling. But the game has a Marvel Comics license and a wide range of playable characters. Equipment pickups and the like - as well as NPC interactions - would all depend on the character you choose, and the play style from character to character would vary so widely that each playthrough would effectively be a new game.

It exists already. Check out “real life”, available for every platform today. Be aware, though, that there are no refunds, the death system needs a LOT of work, and it’s always multiplayer with a bunch of idiots.

[Moderating]
Moving from CS to the Game Room.

The movie had its flaws, but Surrogates (2009) is pretty close to the idea of the OP. From the safety of your interface chair, you control a superhuman robot and get to fully experience what it experiences, though hopefully without the death part. The film depicts surrogate soldiers jumping into battle and it’s easy to imagine any kind of sporting event or scavenger hunt or any other challenge being crafted for the robot to navigate.

And if it’s too much hassle to have the robot walk through the real world, I gather it could far more easily be virtual.

I thought decades of Soviet research already culminated in Tetris, the ultimate video game. There is even a cognitive effect named after it.

An open-world game based on the Dresden Files books, with a strong story and characters, complex, interesting missions, and a good balance of magic/hand-to-hand/gun combat (with some driving thrown in). Sort of a cross between Witcher 3 and GTA.

Star Wars. No RPG has ever captured it as well as the original *Old Republic *games. No space sim has ever captured it as well as the *X-Wing *space sims. So staple those together.

Give me new stories, modern RPG mechanics (I’m a fan of the Divinity games), and crank the graphics and scope to 11.

Can you have cigars and scotch as power-ups? And also a sexual harrass-o-meter that you need to maintain in order to not be seen as a sissy around the office. Otherwise you’ll lose your crack at the Pepsi account.