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[Aoi]

One of the things that makes M:AD kind of awkward is that it's actually entirely possible to paint yourself into a corner through various means as early as selecting seed planet (though, to be honest, you have to be pretty oblivious to screw up that early). And, due to how the game works, you'll never really know if you screwed up until you just can't seem to progress no matter what you do.

And as I recall, the other agent of the Hoods that you have to fight against is actually

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

yourself, from an alternate timeline.

[Reelya]

I know. Its one of the reasons I dont like MMO's, their precision-engineered balance reduces your choices to very carefully selected options, all your options and paths have already been planned out for you on a whiteboard in a sterile office enviroment somewhere.

But I dont blame the designers for that, its sort of a requirement for multiplayer games because as you said, the players will tend towards the most efficient strategy.

What I said is just what I would like from my POV, something that favoured creativity over victory.

*sigh* There are so few games like that.

That sounds like it would be very hard to design for. For that you need emergent elements, and by their very nature it's almost impossible for devs to actually predict what the outcome of emergent elements will be. It's also quite likely that with emergent elements there will be big swings in play style as new combos and exploits come and go, and this will tend to shed players who can't or won't keep up. So such a game might constantly see its player-base being bottlenecked.

As for the carefully crafted (overly crafted) game balance thing, that's kind of inevitable because of the above considerations. They don't want big swings in player numbers if things like new strategies or builds come and go and wipe the floor with existing characters. They want a steady experience for as many players as possible, i.e. fairly predictable outcomes based on the decisions you make. You shouldn't be destroyed because other players came up with something new and you didn't keep up with the latest strategy guides, because that removes the sense of there being predictable outcomes based on your decisions. The player in a well-designed game MMO or not, should totally be penalized if they play poorly, they shouldn't be penalized because someone else worked out how to royally fuck them over, because that removes player agency, and is the reason for ragequits and bottlenecking of player numbers.

There's also an important balance that's often overlooked. There's internal balance between options, but also the external balance of playing that game vs trying some other game. Just nerfing the too-powerful option can backfire. It does not in fact force those players to choose other options in that game unlike the expectation. They could just choose another game. Hence, the propensity for successful MMOs of proactively preventing the too-powerful strategies from arising in the first place. Allowing the swings back and forth and then nerfing stuff causes you to leak players from both ends.

[Niveras]

Anno with a medieval- or high-fantasy set dressing.

Basic population is your run of the mill tiers of wealthy citizens, but your specialized population are districts of different fantasy archetypes. Witches, wizards, shamans, priests, warlocks, among others. Their labors consist of alchemy, spells, magical rituals and communion with divine/demonic/elemental spirits to manage magical or otherwise ephemeral resources.

Actual gameplay could be pretty much carbon copy of Anno 1404, 2025, 2205, or 1600, it would more or less just look different (though I expect there'd still be some changes to supply chain management to accommodate what makes sense in the setting).

I'd prefer to focus on the interconnected industry of a magical society moreso than niches being filled by singular powerful individuals, so I'd rather not see adventurers per se. However, if you loosened the normal Anno restrictions of island gameplay and instead do something a bit more freeform with a procedural map where AI adventurers pacify the countryside that you later expand into (something across between Factorio for expansion in a flat open map but Anno for scale & supply chain gameplay) it might work.

.

In a similar vein, a Factorio-like automation set in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where you're a (singular) contractor in the late-ish game hired to clear fungus from a procedurally-generated region. Since mind worms had some value in the SMAC economy (energy credits), you could probably spin research into applying mind worm carcasses to advance in tech. This could probably even work as a Factorio mod.

[Niveras]

Not so much an entire game, but a concept behind a game's world-lore:

An MMO of WoW's production values, where instead of the story being plotted and planned by committee, it is actually loosely played as a competitive 4X game by the devs against each other. Devs choose or or assigned a faction to lead, and trying to "win" the game 4X-wise pushes where and what content they develop in-game that actual players are playing.

This is a bit muddled since players generally hated the idea that first Thrall was Metzen's avatar, or that Sylvanas was now the favored poster boy (or that devs favored the Horde in general). However, the difference is that, even if these characters are mary sues or author expies, they have no competition from other devs. What if Thrall's decisions for the horde had to be justified not as "good content" by a committee, but to actual people who are representatives of the other horde leaders?

If a dev leaves the team, the character dies - could be dramatically to push the plot, like Caine's death, or it could be accidentally for shock value, shaking up the narrative that way.

The basic premise is that the dev team acts like the world is an empire-level tabletop RPG (as opposed to the usual murderhobos), but players are adventures in the world their machinations create.

(I guess the actual idea is to have faction leaders actually act like human beings and react to politics - interpersonal or diplomatic - as they should, not just go along with whatever because that's what the committee wrote.)

[Dunamisdeos]

Ok so Hogwarts Houses, the video game.

That sounds lit.

[LordBaal]

I have been thinking about a hugely insanely detailed grand strategy game. Total War like but with every feature ever in all of them rolled into one and then quite some more stuff like larger strategy map, cities creation and destruction, provinces/regions creation/modification/destruction, two or more layered maps, roads creation/destruction a la civilization, city managment more like a city sim, say banished or foundation like. And Medieval 2 mod flexibility (but enhanced).

[delphonso]

I want Kenshi that is:

1. Optimized, so it doesn't melt my PC.
2. Semi-procedurally generated, so it has some replayability. Exploration is the main part of the game, but isn't enjoyable a second time.

Been playing Horizon's Gate and thinking about doing a Let's Play on the forum, but unsure since it has the same issue as Kenshi in that regard.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I have been thinking about a hugely insanely detailed grand strategy game. Total War like but with every feature ever in all of them rolled into one and then quite some more stuff like larger strategy map, cities creation and destruction, provinces/regions creation/modification/destruction, two or more layered maps, roads creation/destruction a la civilization, city managment more like a city sim, say banished or foundation like. And Medieval 2 mod flexibility (but enhanced).

Not quite THAT grand of ambiton, but Manor Lords looks likea  city builder + Total War combined

[LordBaal]

I have been thinking about a hugely insanely detailed grand strategy game. Total War like but with every feature ever in all of them rolled into one and then quite some more stuff like larger strategy map, cities creation and destruction, provinces/regions creation/modification/destruction, two or more layered maps, roads creation/destruction a la civilization, city managment more like a city sim, say banished or foundation like. And Medieval 2 mod flexibility (but enhanced).

Not quite THAT grand of ambiton, but Manor Lords looks likea  city builder + Total War combined

Yeah, I already got an eye on that. It seems like something half way of what I want. If it has a grand campaign map it would be awesome, but from the look of it, it seems it will be a Stronghold on steroids and way more details.

[Egan_BW]

Time to describe a game I'd like to play as exactly as possible!

Lots of people like to play multiplayer games with friends as a way to hang out. So this is intended to be a game played with friends where there's not much pressure, and you also get the pleasure of hoovering up loot. Concept came to me while talking to twitch chat, I don't think there are any games like this where you're not constantly fighting enemies or something.

The setup is that you're a scavenger going through an abandoned, alien city. You left earth on a spacecraft because it became unliveable and went to the nearest inhabited system. When you got there, you found that the people who lived there left too, for the exact same reason you did.

Either alone or with a group of friends, you descend from your ship in orbit on a lander which also holds a wheeled vehicle of some sort, which you can use to get around quickly and to stow your loot when your inventory gets full. The vehicle has a storage capacity of its own, so when it gets full you have to head back.
For 2 minutes every 10 minutes, your orbiting ship passes overhead and you're able to fly back to it. If you miss your window, you'll just have to wait for it to come back. This would give a little bit of time pressure, but you don't actually lose anything if you're late, you just have to wait longer.

As for actually playing, you're walking around in first-person, picking up materials and technological doodads, using tools like scanners or diggers to find more loot, and avoiding hazards. There's no enemies or really active danger and even if you get yourself in trouble nothing should be able to kill you instantly, but if you do die you don't respawn in the same expedition. Generally danger is something you either have to come to, or something you cause yourself, like by cutting down the support beams of the building you're in.

The environment is procedurally generated from blocks and destructible, especially using upgraded tools. Hazards are things like radiation or extreme heat and could be braved with suit upgrades. Some places are dark, making you watch your flashlight battery, or underwater, making you watch your oxygen supply.

Once you've returned to your ship with your loot, you can use it to upgrade your ship, lander, vehicle, suit, and tools. Lander upgrades let you access more areas and increases the window of time where you can return to orbit, vehicle upgrades increase how much storage it has and how well it can navigate terrain, suit upgrades let you survive in hazardous areas for longer, and give you more inventory space. Tool upgrades do lots of things, like scan for valuable loot, cut through walls, dig for artifacts in the ground, or set up ziplines to get around easier.

[JoshuaFH]

That sounds really frickin' cool Egan, I'm a sucker for digging deep down-type games. I'd only be concerned by the 'procedurally generated terrain' part, because if the main challenge and reward of the game is exploration, the areas that you explore have to be interesting and follow their own ebb & flow of challenge and reward, something I could see procedural generation struggling to deliver at a high and consistent quality.

Though I may be misinterpreting the idea, and the main focus isn't exploration, but rather the 'hanging out with friends and hoovering up loot on a time limit' part, in which case it would remind me of Pikmin, but in this example you and your friends are the pikmin.

[Egan_BW]

Went with that mainly for the fact that it means you don't end up learning all the maps and rushing through them speedrunner style.

[JoshuaFH]

Speedrunners are crazy people Egan, random procedural generation doesn't scare them at all. Spending thousands, or tens of thousands of hours churning out fast clear times in random seeds of Minecraft is a real thing they do. You'd think that certain games would simply have too much randomness to be realistically speedrunnable, but you underestimate their insanity.

[Egan_BW]

I don't mind what actual speedrunners do, I just think it would break the theme if everyone ended up going through things that way as a result of getting used to the game. It makes it less like you're visiting a new place each time and more like you're visiting the same place multiple times, with new loot spawned in between.

[Reelya]

The game concept sounds cool.

I'd also like to see something where you get survey results for different planets, and then you can choose one based on the type of adventure you want, for example the survey can reveal that there are hostile life forms, so you get ones where you need to fight xenomorphs or similar and you can have special resources as compensation.

Another aspect to develop is the type of tools and skills needed and whether every character is going to have interchangeable skills or whether you want a system where team members have specializations.

A good model might be one where there are no skills, it's entirely down to player abilities, but you have gear loadouts and a finite number of slots for gear. You can bring more gear but it eats into your inventory slots for carting goods back. So I'd go for a system like Diablo's inventory system where having spare gear takes additional inventory slots rather than Minecraft's one where everything takes just one slot. So, body armor might take up just the one body-slot, but when in inventory it takes up 3x2 slots. Similar for left/right hand items. So you want the player to think "shit, i can bring 5 weapons and 6 tools however that would be all my inventory space!" so that players get into discussion about who is bringing which tools, thus the loadout system defines "classes", with different types of pressure suits giving different trade-offs, for example, heavy armor, jump jets, aqua jets for undersea movement, extra storage etc.