So, while INFRA already does fully exist, I’d love to see more games like it. It’s really hard to describe what INFRA is without major spoilers, but if you’ve played it then you probably know what I’m talking about.
It’s like… take the new Chernobyl game and remove literally all the death states, then fill it to the brim with easter eggs, lore content, secret rooms and pathways, challenging logic puzzles, stuff like that. INFRA ticked all those boxes for me and I have yet to find a game like it.
Every game that I’ve looked at and been recommended as being “like INFRA” always has some major flaw or some concession that really sets it apart from the original game. INFRA is pretty much all about exploring your surroundings to uncover the plot of the game and even change some of the story if you’re vigilant enough about the puzzles. You can literally complete the game just as a walking sim while doing fuck-all, but I think most players will find the intrigue of the story interesting enough to be almost coerced into going down the other fork in the road, so to speak. Like there are sections in every chapter where you have to use your knowledge in civil engineering to repair some sort of machinery using intermediate logic puzzles, but you’re always able to just skip it. However, completing these puzzles allows you to unlock the story as the puzzles require exploration. Hope that made sense.
I wasn’t expecting to see INFRA mentioned but it’s one of my favorite games for a lot of the reasons you mentioned! It really had a sense for exploration and environments to tell more of the story. And it really is part puzzle game without having any single gimmick like other first person games. It reminds me a lot of Half Life 2’s puzzles (which makes sense since INFRA was also built in Source as far as I can remember).
I’m really itching for more expansions or games like it. Not sure what happened to the DLC they were working on, but there were some groups working on mods.
Skyrim but it’s an MMORPG (and I don’t mean some shitty WoW clone with an Elder Scrolls skin draped over it like ESO)
A single server MMO like eve online, but with real stakes.
In eve, when you die, you keep your character, most of your assets are safe, either by meta gaming or game mechanics.
You can’t *really* harm/steal from characters.
Which reduces the need to work together and defend your character and your assets. Risk aversion and occasional replacement is a valid strategy.
There is more stuff wrong with eve… but the biggest problem is the stakes.
May I introduce you to Ultima Online?
You have some items that are not lost upon death (either by them being special and “blessed” or by you paying some in game gold to insure them (costing you every time you die), but everything else? On your corpse, ready to be taken by the nearest player and even humanoid enemy. More than once have I seen a lich just grab some of my stuff and cackle off back into the dungeon.
Aside from being able to lose stuff on death, there are actual Thievery skills ranging from sneaking to pickpocketing and lockpicking (for stealing from player homes or when you unearth treasure chests). There is a “safe overworld” but many popular private servers have removed that. You might go about your daily business to grab some stuff from the bank teller and next thing you know, a grandmaster thief took your precious sword from your backpack (there are a lot of skill checks involved depending on how many possible witnesses there are (player and NPC), if the thief is invisible, how heavy the item is and such).
Very tricky to accomplish as long as people can interact with each other in the real world and bypass whatever rules and restrictions you have in the game rules, be it in terms of just communicating in situations where they shouldn’t be able to or running multiple accounts and characters at the same time to boost their power and influence.
You’d need to get extremely draconian with the anti-cheat, require real world ID for account creation, not allow new player once the game started and all that.
Plus there would always be griefers who just want to ruin other people’s game because the repercussions are at most a bit of money (if they get banned and have to buy a new copy of the game), rather than incarceration, bodily harm, or death in the real world.
Quake that people actually play. Like look at the virality of Battle bits Remastered, the Battlefield with block characters so you can have like 200 people in the match. Games need to feel snappy and run on a lot of low tech machines, and developers are mostly never catering to that budget demographic. FPS games have a huge demand for this. The hundreds of thousands of nerds who can infodump about how incredible the Source engine feels is my proof. So yeah I think there is still a market for competitive movement game 2.0 - a team fortress 3, a titanfall 3, a quake / unreal tournament that runs well and allows community mapping. Like unironically last gens engines followed the wrong upgrade paths and there is still more performance to squeeze out (titanfall 2 using highly customized source and it looking like a AAA game rather than a source game as my proof)
Animal Crossing with a super deep friendship system, where you play intricate minigames (like a full tennis sim) and go on adventures together.
a racing game that feels like mario kart but for pc
Something like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed? It’s been quite a while, but I remember having fun with it. It felt like a Mario Kart kinda game
In think you are looking for dash dash world on Steam.
So, Tux Kart?
Edit: or more old school, Wacky Wheels (I think I still have a copy somewhere)
There’s the sonic racing series which has a few ports on PC. I haven’t played them on PC, but I’ve played them on the switch and they’re pretty Mario kart-ish both in playstyle and mascot racer charm.
Also you can play as The Heavy.
I want a modern difficult farming Sim with an in depth relationship mechanic and no fucking combat. The old harvest moon games are good, but I’ve kinda played them to death and for some idiotic reason they removed stuff like rival marriages from the remakes. Rune factory has combat, and so does stardew valley (in addition to having a relationship mechanic that’s just, really shallow), and it seems like all the farming Sim games that don’t have combat are like baby’s first farm Sim and are all cutesy and aren’t very difficult
Like it feels like this would be an easy thing to do, right?
I don’t think Farm Simulator has any combat
No but I regularly drive the truck through town at about 90mph.
Does it have a relationship mechanic though? I always assumed it was just about equipment and using that.
Not a new concept or idea, but:
HL 3 and Portal 3 in Source 2The sequel is a lie. It’s so delicious and moist.
My new pet theory is that CS:2 came out so that Valve had all their IP sitting at 2. So then at some point, when their audience is too old to play games anymore, and the youth don’t even know that Valve ever made games, they’ll release a 3-box with HL3, Portal 3, LFD 3, CS:3, TF3, and DOTA 3.
Pacific Drive with the graphics from Sonst of the Forest
Any game where the AI cores of modern GPUs are used for actual AI and not graphics.
It’s not as simple as that. Those cores are specialised in handling graphics. Game devs have 0 control over it
The AI cores? I’m pretty sure they’re for AI right?
They are for providing special hardware for Neural Network inference (most likely convolutional). Meaning they provide a bunch of matrix multiplication capabilities and other operations that are required for executing a neural network.
Look at this page for more info : https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tensor-cores/
They can be leveraged for generative AI needs. And I bet that’s how Nvidia provides the feature of automatic upscaling - it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it. Leveraging AI of video games (like using the core to generate text like ChatGPT) is another matter - you want to have a game that works on all platforms even those that do not have such cores. Having code that says “if it has such cores execute that code on them. Otherwise execute it on CPU” is possible but imo that is more the domain of the computational libraries or the game engine - not the game developer (unless that developer develops its own engine)
But my point is that it’s not as simple as “just have each core implement an AI for my game”. These cores are just accelerators of matrix multiplication operations. Which are themselves used in generative AI. They need to be leveraged within the game dev software ecosystem before the game dev can use those features.
it’s not the game that does it, it’s literally the graphic cards that does it The game is just software. It will execute on the GPU and CPU. DLSS (proprietary) and XeSS (OSS) are both libraries to run the AI bits of the cards for upscaling, because they weren’t really being used for anything. Gamedevs have the skills to use them just like regular AI devs do.
By AI here I mean what is traditionally meant by “game AI”, pathfinding, decisionmaking, co-ordination, etc. There is a counterstrike bot which uses neural nets (CPU), and it’s been around for decades now. It is trained like normal bots are trained. You can train an AI in a game and then have the AI as NPCs, enemies, etc.
We should use the AI cores to do AI.
You could imagine training one AI for each game AI problem like pathfinding but what is see the benefit over just using classical algorithms?
Can DLSS and XeSS be used for something else than upscaling?
what is the benefit over just using classical algorithms
Utilisation. A CPU isn’t really built for deep AI code, so it can’t really do realistic AI given the frame budget of doing other things. This is famously why games have bad AI. Training AI via AI algorithms could make the NPCs more realistic or smarter, and you could do this within reasonable frame budgets.
I see. You want to offload AI-specific computations to the Nvidia AI cores. Not a bad idea, although it does mean that hardware that do not have them will have more CPU load so perhaps the AI will have to be tuned down based on the hardware they run on…
I think most of what I’d like has already been made. But they are old, few and far between.
I’d really like a modern Freespace game.
I enjoyed how it made your keyboard into a functional cockpit and how you could customize your own and your squads fighters and loadout. And sending tactical info in the thick of battle.
All that junk. It was great. But the old games are showing their age.
A modern version of black and white
A modern take on the (pre-NGE) Star Wars Galaxies style MMO, mainly the social aspects like player housing and player driven crafting system it had. We have still not seen such a deep crafting and resource system as SWG had in any game since.
While there are still private servers around in abundance, they are all too small to properly support the social aspects properly, and the dated engine really hold it back. A newer game engine and some modern QOL and UI changes is all you really need, and although the Star Wars IP would be great it would be fine with a lesser IP or fully unique setting.
There have been a few indie attempts at this but none have finished development, with the most recent one pivoting to AI and then going dark earlier this year, though to be fair indie MMO have a pretty bad track record for actually completing.
One of us! One of us! One of us!
My fear is we won’t ever see it because a game like that gives so much control to the players and the crafting/economy and skill system really stains back end databases.
It would be interesting to see what a modern dev could tack onto the concepts. SWG was weak on quests and end game content. You wouldn’t have to make it WoW in that regard, but it could use some of that. Or with the rise of “cozy” games, what extra decorations that could be added.
Hell, take the game system and pull Star Wars out of it. Space games do appeal to the community.
A modern dungeon keeper.
I was going to suggest War for the Overworld but at eight years old perhaps that doesn’t qualify.
Back in the day I playtested this game concept under an NDA, but since it expired I can talk about it.
An FPS game in an open map with buildings, has 12 players playing but when someone dies, they respawn right there but swap to the opposite team. The last person to get shot gets eliminated and then the teams split again. This goes on until 6 players are remaining, who are declared the winning team.
It was really fun to play, and I quite miss it.
What was that called?
That does sound like a lot of fun.
Doesn’t that mean that the last man standing is the first to lose?
So, if I die first in every round, I win?
Reminds me of zombie panic
So if your team is loosing you try to get shot deliberately to not be the last?
You could mitigate that by coms only being proximity and no indication of how many players each team has. Thst would also make offensive playstyles preferable.
