Five games I want to see made (and the games that ALMOST get it right)
Content Warning: This article talks about blood and shows a bloody screenshot from Bloodborne (spoilers I guess)
Preface: I don’t think a game is bad just because it doesn’t quite succeed at what I’m looking for. Rather, the games on this list do something that I think is cool, but isn’t quite polished in the game it’s in. I want to highlight what these games do specifically with the hopes that someone will refine it into the game I want it to be.
True MMO combat in a singleplayer game
When I think of MMOs, I don’t just think of a massive world with thousands of players inhabiting it. I think of hotkeys, button rotations, and the tank/healer/DPS role dynamic. You don’t really see that in singleplayer games, which is why The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians landed on my radar after someone recommended it to me. It’s a game that claims to replicate World of Warcraft’s combat almost 1:1, and while that’s definitely not the case (apart from maybe the aggression system), this game definitely encapsulates the MMO combat I yearn for.
At least, it almost does.
A common problem MMOs encounter is balance. You want every class to be viable, and you want every combination of class to be viable as well. That doesn’t mean every MMO should be balanced to let you run with a full party of tanks, but every class within one role should synergize with all the other roles. Every healer should be able to sufficiently sustain tanks. Every tank should be able to mitigate just as efficiently. Every DPS should output a similar amount of damage. Obviously a meta is impossible to eliminate completely, but the game shouldn’t be completely one-sided towards it.
This where The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians falls short. It essentially requires you to meta-game, figuring out the exact party build from the beginning to succeed. Last time I played, I restarted the game about four times before deciding to put it back down, getting increasingly more frustrated with every restart. But this is still a really good idea, and I want to see someone make it better.
Non-lethal Hitman (or: A game about social manipulation)
I know Yandere Simulator is a laughing stock at this point, but before it became a drama magnet I remember one of its planned features really resonating with me: Non-lethal takedowns of rivals. Your goal in Yandere Sim isn’t specifically to murder your rivals, it’s to eliminate them; make sure they don’t get in the way of your goal. And there are plenty of methods in-game that don’t result in bloodshed.
So what if you took out the bloodshed entirely?
This doesn’t have to be a clone of Yandere Simulator; just anything where you’re trying to prevent someone from doing something you don’t want, but explicitly not killing them or causing physical harm. Maybe a game where you’re a lowly janitor of a corporation, manipulating your way up the corporate ladder by spreading bad rumors and/or blackmailing your coworkers; or even helping them find better work outside the company. Or how about a game where you start as a lowly citizen who decides to get into politics, competing to win elections against local government at first, working your way up to state positions, running for president, maybe even trying to get a spot in the United Nations.
Just any kind of game about social manipulation. It’s the one good idea Yandere Simulator had and I want to see it in something explicitly not Yandere Simulator.
A bloody game that goes all-in on blood mechanics
I really love blood in video games. I love the crimson showers created by weapon strikes, I love seeing it splatter on walls & character models, and seeing it in action is a good way to add intensity to your game’s combat.
So obviously my favorite game in this department is… Overgrowth, but Bloodborne is a close second. They both share this spot. But I’m highlighting Bloodborne specifically because I Mandela’d something in its trailer that I’ve never seen in a game before: Liquid physics
This was never in the game, nor was it advertised in any of its marketing. It got conjured up in my mind at some point in my life and I’ve just never stopped thinking about it. I want a game where blood isn’t just a particle effect or decal on a wall, but has actual properties to it. I want to see it drip down walls & off weapons. I want to see it run down slopes & pool on the ground over time. I want it to never despawn, permeating the environment as I play.
Okay that last one is a bit extreme. I doubt many machines could run that. But my point stands: Make a bloody game that embraces being bloody… and also isn’t made by a Neo Nazi (looking at you, Brutal Doom)
Minimalist Survival
When I played Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, my only expectation was just a Zelda game but really big. That’s pretty much what I got, but something I didn’t expect was just how deep its wilderness survival mechanics were, and how much it accomplished using extremely basic player inputs.
Here’s an example: Say you want to make a fire. To do this, you need wood, flint, and a metal weapon. Well, axe is a common weapon type, so you swing at a tree and it falls down; turning into wood as it hits the ground. Then to get flint, you hit your weapon against a specific rock. You can actually chop any tree down or mine any rock with any weapon you wish, but using specific weapons makes it faster. Then you open your inventory, put wood & flint in your arms, drop them on the ground, and swing your weapon against them. Just like that, you have a fire.
If you didn’t notice, the player’s only really using two mechanics to do this: Swinging your weapon, and carrying items in your arms. But it does so much with these two mechanics. There are leaves you can carry like weapons that create bursts of air, and boats with sails that you can control with these leaves. You cook stuff by holding food in your arms & dropping it into woks. There’s tons of systems outside the player’s control that affect how you traverse the world.
Whatever team worked on Breath of the Wild should make a brand new IP that goes all-in on the survival mechanics, trying to keep it as minimalist as possible.
(yes I know about Valheim. That gets close too but it’s still early access & does things that annoy me. I’ll probably review it once it comes out of early access)
An RPG that lets the player GM for themselves
When developing an RPG, most games try to simulate being a GM for the player. But The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim does something different. Instead, it gives the player freedom to mod the game to their personal liking, and effectively become a GM for themselves.
Vanilla Skyrim I would describe as simply ‘okay.’ It’s a first/third-person open-world dungeon crawler with minor life sim elements, but I’m not sure that’s what the game wants to be. It’s really indecisive with its mechanics & doesn’t really commit to any particular RPG subgenre. But that’s what makes it work so well as a vessel for modding. Since it can’t decide what kind of RPG it wants to be, it lets the players & its modding community decide for themselves. No one player’s version of Skyrim will be the same, and there’s a beauty there that has yet to be replicated.
That said, you can definitely feel some of the limitations. Creation, and more notably Gamebryo, the engine that Creation is forked from, was never built for mod support; or at least not the version of Gamebryo they forked. Modding Skyrim is basically sandwiching a bunch of files together and hoping they don’t overwrite each other too much. Often the files included exist solely to keep the game stable, as every file in the stack results in a less sturdy sandwich. There’s no such thing as a bad engine, and I don’t think Creation or Gamebryo are inherently bad, but for what Bethesda games succeed at (not necessarily what they’re trying to be), shifting to a different engine would be a great benefit.
But it doesn’t have to be Bethesda or an Elder Scrolls game. It can be any new IP. For all the talk of RPGs that people claim are ‘better than Skyrim,’ I’ve yet to play one that actually strives to be a better version of Skyrim. I’m not looking for a better story, or choices with consequences, or even better combat. I specifically want another first/third-person open-world dungeon crawler with life sim elements & mod support to tweak the game into whatever I want it to be. I know that’s getting specific, but that’s why I wrote this article.
Conclusion
I’m not a developer. The most I’ve done is write design documents for theoretical games, but I’ve never actually developed or playtested one myself. But something I’ve observed as someone who enjoys the medium is an extreme reluctance to use ideas from other games. I think that comes from a fear of ‘oversaturation,’ and I want to write an article about that too. But if you’re a developer and find a mechanic in a game you like, don’t be afraid to use it in your own game and refine it into something better. All art is copied from each other & transformed into something new. Don’t afraid to do the same.
