So I got a bug in my butt to install Mortal Kombat 11 last night and was doing the story mode which is basically like a movie with intermittent fights and it occurred to me that I love Mortal Kombat but just the characters, the worldbuilding, and the lore. I’ve never been big on fighting games and as I age, I am finding it harder and harder to pull off special combos quick enough to even do much other than slapping buttons and hoping for the best.
My favorite MK game was one of the ones on PS2 where the story mode was basically God of War gameplay turning it from a fighter into an action adventure game.
If Midway were to make a Mortal Kombat title that was like Dark Souls but set on Outworld or something, that would definitely be my jam.
Another would be Warhammer 40k. I am not at all interested in the PnP gameplay nor a lot of the video games. But I love the lore and the game Rogue Trader is fucking dope, playing more like a traditional CRPG in that setting and not an RTS or straight up shooter.
Do y’a have any games like that? Where you like everything about them except the actual gameplay?
I just wish No Mans Sky had some point.
The point is to get super high and hang out on toxic planets for the trippy colors.
Based and “I hope this place has ancient bones…”-pilled
The point is to learn 3+ alien languages word by word
Sometimes I feel similarly about Elite: Dangerous. Disclaimer: I haven’t played NMS because E:D gets all my spacetime tokens and I’m fine with that. “Community goals” (high payout limited time events) get me to play because it gives me purpose for a week. For the most part though, I like coming to it for an hour or two when I want to take a break from story-laden games. Hunt pirates for an hour, fly out of inhabited space and explore for an hour (well, an hour out, an hour there per session, an hour back next time), or just chill with music and asteroid mining.
So I do wish there was a plot at times, but I do appreciate it for mixing up the routine with simple cruising
The point is to spend hours travelling across the universe looking for an Earth-like planet, with green grass, blue skies and relatively safe temperatures, instead of just going outside in real life.
I just wish they’d dedicate one or two of their major updates to integrating all the random features they added into a cohesive whole. Right now there are dozens of systems that are almost all pointless shallow grinds as well as completely isolated from every other system. It’d give the game some real depth if these mechanics interacted with each other in any way.
That, and fix their damn inventory system. It’s been a decade and multiple overhauls and basic crafting and inventory management is still unpleasant and tedious.
Someone remade Portal as a browser-based side scroller, and I fucking loved that game.
I played through Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, and with how hard every NPC was flirting with Aloy, I wondered “Why isn’t this a post-apocalyptic dating sim?”
In Divinity: Original Sin II, there’s a game-breaking mechanic where you can plant tea plants in pots, grow new tea plants, harvest them, and then use the buffs from drinking tea to get infinite moves during fights. I actually got into the whole management of the tea farm, and I don’t want to totally throw out the RPG combat, but I might like it if farming and then using your crops to win fights was an entire game unto itself, rather than just a broken exploit.
I played through Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, and with how hard every NPC was flirting with Aloy, I wondered “Why isn’t this a post-apocalyptic dating sim?”
I mean, Aloy is super cool, badass and hot as fuck, if you’re single, the only reason not to flirt with her would be fear.
I thought that with how things ended in HFW, the next game ought to be an RTS.
EVE online
I loved the lore, the feel of danger in low/nullsec. But I just don’t have time for a second job.
X4 doesn’t have quite as good lore imo, but for me it really scratches my eve itch without having to go back to that mmo. I think it’s the interconnected economy of the sandbox.
I wasn’t familiar so I looked it up. I absolutely love the visuals of X4, I might give it a go some day
If you pick it up, know that it has a huge modding scene that makes an already great game even better. I can recommend a few basic QoL mods if you want, though the 9.0 update is coming soon and will probably break most of them for a while.
Also, the base game has some arbitrary mechanics meant purely to punish the player so veterans can’t steamroll the NPC factions too quickly, at the expense of making the new player experience harder. There’s a list of these mechanics (and links to mods that reduce/remove them) here.
Everytime I read about some insane awesome event in Eve I think, “I should totally play that.” Then I get bummed for a moment that I won’t be able to. Then I remember what you said, it’s a second job, and I smile and get on with my life.
Maybe I’d just like to be an Eve battlefield reporter.
Probably all gacha games, like Genshin Impact or FGO. There’s a lot about those games I like, but the fact that they’re gacha actively gets in the way. If they were just regular games, most of the problems, which boil down to maximising play time like tedious grinding or filler in the main quests, would disappear.
Yeah, same here honestly
I’d love to see Doom as an Assassin’s Creed style game, where instead of it being wall to wall high-intensity violence there is a slower-pace open world story and every once in a while you’re dropped into a kind of death match arena to face a boss, but you can also run into them in the wild and have to scramble to take them out before they get ya.
You might like Strife
Turns out: Pokemon.
I tend to only play a Pokemon game every decade or so because the formula has been basically the same since the original: you catch pokemans and then cock fight them. And I just only have so much bandwidth for that.
But over here in Pokopia I’m building habitats for them and we are all hanging out, and it’s awesome. Yes, I will build you a little house, Bulbasaur.
Hades and Hades 2. I am someone who is a huge fan of visual novels and the games already have a fantastic dynamic between characters and amazing writing.
i just hate that I have to play a game genre im not good at to get more of a story I’m extremely invested in. and characters I’m attached to.
Though the genre kinda makes the story!
At least it has god mode. I’ve basically accepted I play most games on the lowest difficulty possible.
Total War Warhammer 1/2/3! I hate RTS combat. If these games were turn based they’d be amongst my most played.
A civ 40k would be awesome!
A good one yeah :)
They did however already make an OK one with a terrible DLC strategy (there’s €200 of DLC).
WoTCGW and shoveling slop with their ip, name a more iconic duo.Is it owned by WotC now? I thought it was Games Workshop.
My bad, you’re right. I get them confused cause I always think of 40k as a tabletop game and for some reason my brain connected that with WoTC. I’ll edit.
TBF there ain’t much to pick between them when it comes to business practices xD
I’d be so all over a proper turn based Warhammer game.
Shadow of the horned rat and dark omen both do the same but just a little closer to the tabletop game afaik (but they’re a pain to get properly running).
Then there’s SOVL which gives a proper turn based mechanic that’s pretty close to Warhammer fantasy of old in the style of classic white dwarf battle reports.
There’s also a game in cooperation with the people behind 9th age but also, didn’t get it working yet.
Meager pickings :/
For the record you can auto complete the battles and just play them as turned based strategy games with no tactical component. That may or may not be what you’re looking for, but just figured I’d let you know.
My experience with autoresolve is that it punishes you for not fighting manually. You can basically always get better results if you take charge, and in the (old) Total War games I played resolving often cost half your army even when you vastly outnumbered/leveled the enemy.
Anyone who knows their way around the tactical battle system can generally outperform the autoresolve, but for this person’s use case (no tactical battles at all) that just sets a new difficulty baseline. If that’s too high, bring the game difficulty down. Problem solved.
Yeah, I know. It’s barely even half a game at that point though so what’s the point?
I mean, there’s enough game there that people routinely run “Auto resolve only” multiplayer games, so clearly there’s a decent number of people who think it’s worth doing.
Alternatively, if you want to keep the tactical battle element but find the “real time” aspect hard to manage, I’ll point out that you can give orders while paused. So you can effectively make it into a turn based game. Total War combat is pretty slow already, compared to stuff like StarCraft, and there are plenty of tools for building multistep orders and so on. Honestly, that’s how I play for the most part. I watch things play out and whenever I need to issue new orders I pause first.
I’d love it if Secret World (preferably the original release, not Legends) was a singleplayer RPG instead of the half-assed MMORPG that it was. You could lower the enemy density and respawns, maybe add some computer-controlled party members Guild Wars 1 style, and it would be the dopest thing ever. The lore, vibe, and worldbuilding in this game is immaculate, it’s just a shame it’s strapped to an MMO framework.
I loved being a healer with claws. It was such a weird combo.
The AEGIS system in the original really sucked though. It’s the one thing Legends improved.
World of Warcraft, but predominantly as a persistent single-player world where you can invite players in (ala. Diablo 2).
I love the world building of Azeroth (even the bow out-dated, throw-away, pop-culture additions); just wish I could play and experience it all at my pace - family life currently precludes me from being able to invest sufficient time to play an MMO.
just wish I could play and experience it all at my pace - family life currently precludes me from being able to invest sufficient time to play an MMO.
Wayfinder does this pretty well. There’s some rough edges from where they pivoted in the design, but I got it on sale for less than a single month of WoW, and have been playing through it at my own pace ever since.
Dead by Daylight.
The idea evolved out of turning horror games into multiplayer. As balance adjustments were made over time, the horror element was depleted and most of it is based around pathing between obstacles as a slower character, against one very powerful melee-based character.
It’s certainly fun and bearable in its current form, but: The objectives based around “escaping the killer” tend to result in lopsided results (eg, one player that hid and escaped feeling proud, while a very good chaser gets few points since they died). The game is not accessible to players intimidated by horror, and some effects even trigger certain phobias or bodily resistances (eg, The Plague causes some empathetic vomiting issues to some people) Plus, some players taking the killer role sometimes associate a bit too much ego to their result (they do badly in matches, and blame the game, stating “I’m Michael Myers, dropping bits of wood and puny flashlights shouldn’t phase me”)
I really love the idea of asymmetrical games like DBD but the community always ruins it. Evolve was absutely incredible in the first few weeks before players optimized all the tension out (and before the backlash over what is now laughably tame monetization).
Warcraft
I love the lore and story, especially Warcraft 3, but a story-driven RTS makes no sense to me. I like both separately, but not mixed together. Probably same thing with Starcraft, but I’ve never tried it.
Probably same thing with Starcraft, but I’ve never tried it.
Oof. Yes. I recall Starcraft II’s tutorial requiring what felt like South Korean world champion commands-per-minute play to get through maybe the third level of the tutorial.
This doesn’t apply to a specific franchise, but I sometimes think about how fun it would be for game franchises with a lot of characters to have games designed around replaying them with the different characters. Some examples would be:
A game with every Final Fantasy character that plays like Vampire Survivors. Each character would have their own sets of equipment and attacks they can obtain.
A game that is basically Sonic and the Black Knight be re-imagined to be more like either Monster Hunter or Kingdom Hearts. Each character could either have their own sets of equipment or have access to most of the equipment but use them differently.
A Touhou game that’s some form of an RPG, whether it be turn-based, action, or something similar to FF12. I know that there already are some RPGs featuring these characters but (on top of mostly being adult games for some reason) they all only have a few of the characters and they are very short and the RPG elements are usually quite limited.
Also, not really a specific franchise and it’s technically the same genre but I’d like to see more fighting games play like Dissidia Final Fantasy. I want to play more fighting games but Dissidia is the one of the only fighting games that I’ve ever been good at.
I just want two genres to merge. Give me Skyrim (and/or Oblivion or Morrowind) but with the survival/crafting/building loop of Valheim.
FO4 is almost there if you play it in Survival mode.
For sure! I have spent countless hours building settlements and micro-managing trade route. Now just gimme the same thing, but in the Elder Scrolls universe and I’ll be a happy gamer!
elder scrolls 6 will most likely have that, much like fallout 4. but it will probably still be a long wait for that lol
Enshrouded is kind of close. The third-person combat and limited NPCs detract from the comparison, but the exploration and setpieces match or exceed anything Bethesda has ever put out and the survival gameplay is basically Valheim but with 10x the content.
I’ve got ~500 hours in Enshrouded, versus well over 5k into Valheim and gazillions in the Elder Scrolls series. Kind of close is a generous assessment.
Admittedly I’m in the middle of a playthrough and currently deeply enamored with the game, but I’ve enjoyed Enshrouded much more than Valheim (which I also loved, to be clear). I’ll probably start noticing all the flaws I’ve been ignoring soon, but right now it feels like Valheim, but more. More recipes, more enemies, more options for farming and better animal tames, much better combat, a building system that doesn’t drive me crazy, and a hand-built world that is vastly superior to the samey procgen of Valheim.
The comparison to the Elder Scrolls is much less flattering, admittedly. It’s only in the world design and exploration that I’d put Enshrouded ahead, and even then I bet many players would be annoyed by just how much Enshrouded uses verticality in its map (which I love, but I’ll admit it makes overland travel a pain).
The entire world being one map so a hole in the internal walls of a dungeon could lead directly outside is a massive step up from Bethesda’s engine where dungeons are basically their own separate universe. I just completed the Blackmire tower the other day, a dungeon that had the branches of a giant tree punching through its sides and forcing you to take alternate routes. I fell all the way to ground level several times but still had a blast exploring the place.
I’m not super far in. I have three characters* that are all around the same point, at or just after the boss fight at the end of Pike’s Reach. It’s possible the rest of the game lacks the same polish the early areas have.
* One created when the game first entered Early Access, one for co-op, one newly created to see all they changed in the opening hours.
I love soul calibur 2’s story mode i wish it was a devil may cry
