Honestly, another fantasy game with the gameplay of Red Dead 2 and the beauty of a world like Skyim with multi-player enabled. I live for the story, so Dragon Age 1 was my jam and BG3 is right now, but I always wish I could be playing with my partner everytime im in a game like that and it isnt allowed. I was pissed when the Tales games dropped multi-player functionality!

The next elders scrolls but with an engine that isn’t 30 years of congealed tech debt. They also aren’t allowed to ship it early with tons of bugs expecting the community to fix it all…

Probably impossible, but a combination of:

• The Sims
• Simutrans (like OTTD but more complicated)
• SimCity (or more modern variants with street-level cameras)
• Command & Conquer / Age of Empires
• Sid Meyer’s Civilization
• Grand Theft Auto (drive around, do random stuff, but enter all buildings. But some storylines you could play as characters)

So basically a life simulator like The Sims, but you also build the city. And can transport goods and people. And build up military and fend off attacks or invade nearby countries.

It’ll be a century before we have enough CPU to power a game of that scale, and you’d have to be able to like “zoom in” and “zoom out” to the levels of details. Creating thousands of houses at a Sims level would be stupid, so a lot of automation would have to happen. But being able to play the game at various levels from individuals to companies to cities to counties or states to countries would be wild.

A AAA Brütal Legend remake with Gameplay Fixes for these weird RTS scenes.

Alternatively No One Lives Forever 3.

F2P Diablo style mmorpg with a twist. Each year starts a new season. $20 buys you a character for the year, pick your own class, skills, stats and starting gear. Punishingly difficult, permadeath, maximum playtime of 30 hrs a month, META adjustments on the fly by devs every month. Play like a risk averse little bitch? Serious XP penalty. Get overconfident and die? Thats it your season is done. Why would you play that? SERIOUS prize money on the line for the characters that make the end game.

Theres free characters and no playtime limit on those but you get a randomly generated character with slower progression and a greatly reduced prize pool for the characters that go the distance.

remake Mass effect.

Keep the story, voice cast, everyting, except delete the ending bossfight of ME2 and some “you died, OH SHIT, we need to make a sequel!” stuff.

Game ends with a minute long fade to black when you land on earth at the end while you fight your way through the invasion. The END.

Streamlining planeary exploration, but keep the vehicle.

AAA Kenshi

Tinder, but not for profit.

Guild wars 3 but following guild wars 1 combat system. They can add more animations and complex movement but skills, builds and gear need to be the power focus. It needs to be co op focused zones with outpost challenges.

For me it would be a dungeon crawler in the style of Monomyth but with AAA graphics. Also, it would start with a massive intro sequence, like in Kingdom Come: Deliverance, when you’ve been playing for ages and then realise the game hasn’t really even started yet. It would also have really emotionally engaging writing and cut scenes like in Eriksholm: The StolenDream.

The most important ingredient though, and I can’t stress this enough, because so many games get this wrong in my opinion, is a world that doesn’t appear to give a damn that I’m in it or need me to do anything. Monomyth nails this as does, I think, GTA5. Everyone’s just living their lives and you are one tiny part of it, nothing more. I really hate games that feel like the Truman Show. I want to be able to hide in the world, to be unnoticed. Thief by Eidos gets this right too.

Also I want my dungeons to hint at light above through maybe cracks way up high in the rocks, like the caves and temples of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Finally I want the player to be able to choose whatever play style they want, without shaming them for making it easy or glorifying them for making it as hard as possible. I don’t like games that tell me how to have fun and if a player finds a completely unexpected way to achieve something good. No sudden patch to nerf it. Just leave it.

Streets of Rage style beat em up,but it’s set in ancient Rome.

Fallout 5, please and thank you.

But, if it’s my vision, with no compromise:

• the map is the whole of the contiguous US, with parts of Canada and Mexico thrown in for good measure
• there is a main campaign with a more coherent story than those we’ve seen so far, but it’s almost irrelevant
• given the vast scale of the map there are hundreds of huge, complex, side quests involving different regions each of which is as full and complete and compelling as the main campaign
• the world is alive: it slowly changes even without your input if you’ve visited a place. Settlers slowly clean up rubbish, remove corpses, plant crops, rebuild walls and roofs, redecorate, begin trading, establishing lines of commerce and communication between settlements. You can speed the process up through your actions, but once you’ve visited a place, things will happen. The flip side is that sometimes bad things will happen: diseases that wipe out a village, fires, natural disasters, raiders, supermutants, whatever.
• NPcs age, change, die, have offspring, move locations
• over the course of many in-game years, you can actually make the world a better place, bring safety to the wastelands, wipe out nests of deathclaws, etc such that they don’t respawn
• reputation matters but travels organically, if you save a village (or commit brutal murder) your reputation changes but only at the pace of communication, if you go somewhere completely new, quickly enough, or far enough away, they won’t have heard of you
• NPCs will react to you appropriately, e.g. raiders with pool cues won’t attack a PC wearing power armor and carrying a minigun, townsfolk will be wary of a stranger who’s walked into town covered in blood
• dialogues choices will be complex, meaningful, and consequential
• game actions will also be meaningful, and consequential

I’m sure there’s more but that’s off the top of my head.

I have dreamed of this exact scenario happening for a long time, I have a vision of a turn-based tactical cypherpubk RPG story-based journey inspired by a really old flash game called Spybot. I wrote it most of the story beats ages who and still constantly see images of what it wants to be, in my head.

A game about a decapitation strike on Israel’s leadership. Then it would have a scene partway through just like in Band of Brothers when they liberated the concentration camps, frame for frame.