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?
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’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
Diablo, I want it to be an MMORPG. The story and setting of those games is awesome, but I’ve never been big on the play style.
Wish Blizzard would just layer Diablo story/art onto the WoW gameplay.
That’s what Diablo 4 essentially is
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.
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 an experienced X veteran can’t eclipse and steamroll the in-game 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.
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.
StarCraft, League of Legends, Warhammer 40K (shoutout to Darktide the goat), Rainbow 6 Siege, list continues…
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”)
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.
Dreamfall Chapters feels like it should be a crossover between Mass Effect and Dragon Age. But it actually plays like a Telltale game.
Mary Skelter should’ve had gameplay like Dragon Age, except you play as the support guy while your party members do most of the fighting, with you calling in when teammates should use their skills. Teammates in Mary Skelter have a habit of going insane, and the only way to calm them down is to have your support guy fix em.
Girls Frontline should’ve been an offline turn based strategy game. The gacha gatekeeps it from too many people.
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.
I either need more Armored Core in my MechWarrior series or I need Armored Core and MechWarrior to take tips from Chromehounds back on the shitbox360. God that game was soo good and I’ve been chasing that high for almost 20 years now.
And dont any of you suggest Crossout. You know its not as good by any metric.
I wish Skyrim was less RPG and more adventure. Get rid of builds and stats and nonsense like that. Add more legendary items and less common ones. Make combat more fun and not just clicking.
I was going to suggest giving a Dynasty Warriors game a try but your last line there kinda sinks the boat lmao
BioShock and any other narrative-heavy games with a shooter/action gameplay. I love lore and worldbuilding, but I really hate shooter gameplay, even more so in first person. If they were, say, turn-based RPGs, I would absolutely play them.
