I want a model railroad simulator. I don’t want to drive the trains fpv, I just want to lay the track and buildings and terrain and stuff and control the trains third person. Not a transport tycoon type game, I don’t care about economies. Not a MS Train Simulator ripoff, I don’t want to worry about all the nuance of actually driving the thing.
I want a model train irl but don’t have space for it. A video game would fill this niche nicely for me. Something like Cities: Skylines I think but focused entirely on trains and without any of the city building requirements, and a sandbox.
Rolling Line is the closest game I’ve seen to being a true model railroading simulator. You can build layouts with few restrictions and control trains in third person. The low-poly art style can make it seem like it’s not very detailed, but it’s possible to make some great layouts on Rolling Line. You do have to build some things manually though, not quite like Cities: Skylines or Transport Fever where you can simply draw out a track in five seconds.
I just became aware of Rolling Line, which is what prompted me to post this! Rolling Line is exactly what I’m looking for but the low poly art isn’t my favorite (but I might be able to learn to live with it) and I don’t have a VR setup so not sure how well it will work on my steam deck.
Haven’t tried it on a Steam Deck, but it works just fine on PC. You certainly don’t have to get VR for it. The low poly art is a slight annoyance, but I think that the game makes up for it by giving you a lot of freedom in actually building the layout.
Awesome. If it works well on a flat screen I’ll probably pick it up then. Are there many prefab buildings? I watched a YouTuber build a layout but he was making all the buildings from scratch. I’ve seen that you can ride inside the engines, can you ride inside the passenger cars as well?
Additionally, Payday 2 oddly allows co-op between players on standard controllers and those in VR. That’s less interesting since they have the same abilities regardless of control method.
I’d love to see more games that explore asymmetry. Ever since Evolve ate up all my time for 2 years I’ve been looking for the next great asymmetric game and not enough devs have ventured in VR for that purpose.
There is a lot of potential in asymmetrical games in general with certain players having access to different information and strategies than others due to their perspectives… letalone adding VR to the mix. I am imagining that the VR players can pull out a clipboard or tablet containing secret info, in order to try to obtain separate objectives or even hamper the other controller based players with them having to ferret out the traitor or stop the VR faction from achieving their objectives!
Oh no for sure lmao. When I first started playing I would literally just exit the game if I heard a floorboard creak
But it gets sooooo good the more you play, especially on the higher difficulties where ghosts suppress some of their official “evidence” types and you have to rely on your knowledge of each ghost’s unique traits. Genuinely of the most rewarding detective style experiences I’ve ever played
We can’t play in person except twice a year, and games on a screen don’t do it.
Sitting in our respective homes and being able to “see” each other across a table while playing a couple hours a week would be great.
And my parents have friends they’d play with every day if they had this. Some of whom can’t even play in person because they’re confined to a single room in a care home, but they’d be able to wear a headset and move around in their bed. That’s enough.
If you’re anything like me and are impatient and don’t mind a bit of tinkering, you could look into trinusvr.com/psvr. I haven’t tried it myself, but it should let you play steamvr games on your PSVR.
A game with the time travel self interaction and self saving mechanics of Super Time Force Ultra. Doesn’t have to be a side scroller. Bonus points for getting multiplayer to work reasonably. I’ve been theorycrafting ways to do multiplayer like this for years (and ultimately most of it feels disjointed in theory so IDK). I’ve only seen one super low budget game using this mechanic (as a main game mechanic, not a side puzzle like the Ratchet and Clank time puzzles) and the reviews weren’t great.
I’ve been considering mixing it with 5D Chess with Time Travel mechanics and Advance Wars gameplay as a proof of concept and see how far that gets me… But I don’t have time or energy to work on it after work…
I really love, and really miss, healing in wow raids circa WOTLK through Cata, specifically using healnot and custom keybinds to keep people alive. I don’t have time or budget for an MMO in my late 30s, nor do I see that easing up anytime soon.
I think a game where you had to do raid mechanics/puzzles while keeping NPCs alive through healing could be really fun, even without a loot grind. Or a game that dropped you into a multiplayer raid encounter without the crap around it. Either could be great.
Some kind of stealth shooter where you and the bad guys have very realistic anatomy and no healthbar. You can’t be killed by being shot in the foot but you’re disabled. Shoot someone’s finger off and they might not be able to use a rifle, help in pain, leave a blood trail to follow. Chest shots generally kill you but it’s the lungs it’s not instant like the heart or central blood vessels. Bone shots are agonizing and totally debilitating.
Caliber and velocity are all calculated and what damage is done.
I know this is kinda grim, but lots of video games have done parts of this, especially Sniper Elite, but also RDR2, the Resident Evil REmakes, MGS:R, and more. I just want it even more detailed and collected in one game. I’ve been thinking about this since PS3-era and I think the tech is ready now.
Arma and Operation Flashpoint is much closer than the other games you mentioned. You might be interested in trying them. But it requires a lot of patience and map reading. Also it’s not finger-level accurate. But the rest is on par.
Yeah I’ve heard of them but those are mil-sim games. Not very fun imo. I’m think more like AAA experience of pickup and play, not remember 2000 key commands to zero your target, turn off the safety, chamber a round, breathe, force the thoughts of your husband and newborn back home, and no more to shoot. Oops, you missed! 😜
Seriously though. ARMA is cool but my game I’m thinking more like MGS4/5
I remember being tossed in the deep end when the mods were new to me. Having to diagnose and treat gunshot wounds, inject morphine, run fluids etc… even CPR, certain medics could do transfusions, match blood types etc.
Was kinda frightening for a PC game… And often all of this was under enemy fire.
The enemy would be injured, shot, concussed, knocked unconscious, lose blood etc. the potential existed for them to regain consciousness after a while and if you hadn’t removed their weapons they could fire in you. Surprised the shit out of people not used to these mods… Always had to check downed hostiles.
I have this concept for a VR team battle game where you have to learn to actually cast spells through complex real time action. Like a mix of moving your hands in patterns and adding elements via hot bar in sequence and saying words via headphone. 1 on 1 or team vs team strategy game where complexity makes stronger team spells and counters. You could have casters who specialize in defense, offense, healers, traps and counters and how you build your team makes for strengths and weaknesses.
Reminds me of Arx Fatalis. I think it’s the only game I’ve seen where casting spells requires you to trace a rune in the air instead of pressing the cast button.
That was my first thought, but I remember there was some rights snaggle that kept B&W from appearing on GOG. Looking it up, according to an interviewthe source code and IP are owned by Microsoft but EA still has the distribution rights.
I love capitalism “Hey instead of someone doing something with this lets all sit on it and give everyone the middle finger. If I can’t profit nobody can”
Drakan: Ancient Gates was my inspiration. Their magic casting blew my mind back in the day and I never understood why no one else has utilized that system. I will have to check out Arx Fatalis.
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite had spells you cast by tracing a shape on screen, representing wand movements (and it was graded on how closely you matched that spell’s shape as well as on speed.)
Not a complex system, but some of them took some effort to get a good cast.
Some sort of magical game that people with radically different skill levels can enjoy together. I tried to get my friend to play nioh2, but she just doesn’t have the practice to be any good at it yet. If we put in 100 hours she’d get competent, but that’s a big investment. I want someone to figure out a way that I can play like Nioh2, and my friend can play like Bejeweled, but we’re doing it together and it’s fun for both of us.
I almost also wrote that I wanted something like dark souls, but built for co-op from the ground up. The dark souls games typically have a fair amount of stuff each player has to do alone, and you’d have to do the game twice.
It’s still fun and I actually coop’d the franchise with a friend, but I don’t think I could get my “plays bejeweled” or even “plays Mario games” friends to do it happily.
(There is Remnant, but it didn’t really do it for me)
Word of warning: the game is jank personified, but once you get past the animations, visuals, and weird storytelling, it has a lot of charm. It does quite a lot differently to other RPGs and survival games, and because of that, it has a hell of a learning curve.
Playing it makes me remember how I felt when I played Morrowind, for some reason. Not because it is the same caliber of game though, that much is for certain.
Making a standard dark souls or Nioh like game, but with a co-op that incorporated Puzzle Quest like mechanics could be cool. In order to power up the main character the side kick could make certain matches in their match 3 game, or to pick locks, or cast spells, or even Estus flask use.
A lot of team games can have something like this. I’m throwing my pitch in for Deep Rock Galactic because it is one I know well. I’m a decently good player at this point and I still have a blast joining games with greenbeards. I get the challenge of carrying and teaching the younglings and they get to see the kind of magnificent bears they’ll have one day. There is decent variety in how you can approach the game with different classes and the roles people pick for different challenges. As for two different genre of game where you’re playing together, I’m not sure. I think that Age of Empires 2 could do something kinda like this. You can assign multiple people to the same faction and everyone has control of everything in that team. It is a bit clunky but you can do i teresring things like one person is tasked with infrastructure, another with combat.
Adding another potential thing here, I just learned of a game called Silica. It is a hybrid play where some people play as RTS commanders and some people play as on the ground FPS soldiers. Haven’t played it yet but could be interesting for mixed skill level based on which genre someone is good at
I just want to play fun games that have a great and comprehendible story.
They would also need to be natively made for PC (along with any other platform that the devs/pubs might want). I understand why console ports exist but one can wish.
Some AAA game examples/concerns off the top of my head:
MGS V ? Fun gameplay, couldn’t make head or tail of the story without viewing content from others, and still I feel it’s way too confusing.
AC ? Things were in a good direction from a story standpoint at one point in time years ago but they lost it, didn’t enjoy the new RPG-like direction as much either. Gameplay was a power fantasy thing I guess. Whether I like it or not is dependent on my mood during the session.
Skyrim ? Fun game, never got around to actually “finishing” the game because there would always be a break and I would entirely forget where and what I was doing earlier.
Souls-likes ? I don’t have a problem admitting that my skills are pretty sucky. Effort required to the rewards are pretty bad for me, and there is no particular story that I have seen other than community theories.
I’m working on my years long backlog, in case anyone wants to make recommendations it’ll probably take a long time for me to get to it if it isn’t in the current list…
Depends on what you define as comprehendible. Stalker and Yakuza as my “not AAA but does what I expect AAA games to do, since I play indies” came to my mind but they might not be comprehendible at times.
Same with fun, do visual novels count? Ghost Trick is the best story I played in recent years, but it’s a puzzle game.
I mean, there’s a ton of games I played with good story and gameplay over the years, but I don’t play AAA much.
A single-player fantasy game with no skill points/upgrades beyond equipment. I want the entirety of the progression to be the skills of the player. You end up losing fights to more than one goblin at a time, but then you learn to start dealing with groups. A long enough time pasts and you’re slaughtering hordes of enemy like clockwork. But if someone took control of your character they’d still lose to a goblin or two.
I want something where split second reaction times and skill determine how a fight goes. Both me and the enemy should be able to kill each other in 2-3 seconds given the right circumstances. I want extremely punishing mechanics for both enemies and the player. Something like a first-person Hotline Miami but with really good swordplay.
You literally just described dark souls and what has become the entire souls-like genre, though to be honest I’ve played dozens of souls-likes and most of them fail completely at it. Just play dark souls.
Skill points in dark souls are helpful but entirely unnecessary. See the wealth of Soul Level 1 runs on YouTube if you don’t believe me. I’ve personally completed the 2nd and 3rd games without adding a single skill point, and I’m definitely not that good. But yes, Sekiro fits the bill also.
I mean yeah, I guess they’re optional if you’re already an expert in the game’s mechanics. Level 1 DS runs are pretty niche, and someone who is clearly new to the genre entirely isn’t going to start playing like that. For most people, “builds” are what Dark Souls games are all about.
“Works fine” yeah ok. Give a newbie a copy of DS1 and tell them they’re not allowed to level up. See how long they play.
Like we get it, you’re good at the hard video game. This person wasn’t asking to be tortured, and I don’t think “play Dark Souls (for the first time) and just ignore the leveling system,” is a good suggestion for anybody, let alone someone who seems wholly unfamiliar with the genre.
Holy fuck dude LET IT GO. This has nothing to do with “newbies”. Did you even read the fucking OP? When I answered a simple question I didn’t expect to be harassed by a butthurt baby that just couldn’t git gud. I don’t think you should be on the Internet. It’s clear you can’t handle it.
Mine already was 95% developed before EA’s investors shit their pants over holiday season sales.
I can play a free-to-play shell of it now, but my closest friends are all gone now. What fun is a 4-to-8 player game when everybody you wanted to play it with is dead or gone?
Due to my still active non-disclosure agreement, I am prohibited from discussing what intellectual properties BioWare Austin are working on for release in 2011.
this is one of the strangest comments I have ever seen on hexbear. Like, I know people here do all kinds of things, it’s just weird to think you’re actually connected with big companies in that sense and have lost media to your name. my condolences on the second half.
Not really a game, but playing Minecraft has made me wish for real-world modeling software with a similar first person interface. Select from standard off-the-shelf components, use real-world tools, and craft stuff. Then test it out. I’ve got ideas in my head for all kinds of stuff, but going from there to an actual model is tedious with standard CAD and modeling software. Why can’t I (virtually) take an 8’ Douglas Fir 2x4, cut it with a saw, drill some holes in it - you get the idea. I could make something like a shed, then stress test it in a windstorm, pile 4 feet of snow on it, or drench it with rain. Or build a go-kart and see how it would perform. Tweak the design until it does what you want. Make the app user moldable and let the community go wild adding capabilities and virtual materials. Maybe it could eventually generate real parts lists, fabrication data for 3D printers and CNC machines, and assembly drawings.
You’ve kinda answered your own question there. That’s what CAD is for. To create what you’re after, you’d be using the same backend capabilities which are already computationally expensive, mapped out within a game engine. The result would likely be an expensive bit of training/simulation software that’s redundant to both engineers and machinists, and out of the price range of any home builder.
Accessibility is what you’re after, and I can sympathise. I think ANSYS Discovery was made with that in mind, and it’s available in the academic version.
I generate models with code and use a pythonic API to automatically simulate them in testbed conditions. It wouldn’t be far off to create extra scenarios, but each time you make one it would take a bit of knowledge to put together.
It’s one of their modules that’s meant for preliminary CFD with a simplified approach. I’ve only tried it a little tbh as it doesn’t have the control we required, but I can see how it’d feel accessible. Workbench is intimidating AF.
The pythonic API was for controlling Fluent which is maybe what you used in school, also involved some Spaceclaim. Getting started on coding that was a puzzle and a half. Feels good now it’s solved though :’D
There was a rudimentary gui of sorts, and we were taught using that and maybe very minimal command line stuff (I did learn some “programming” for Matlab in a different class, but all of that knowledge is long gone), but I remember it being very unresponsive and buggy.
Or maybe I just sucked at it, though I’m generally very good with computers and intuitively figuring out how software is supposed to work. ANSYS was not intuitive lol. I just remember trying to make meshes and wanting to smash the PC.
An open world game but the world is just a few city blocks, every single room in every building must be detailed & explorable, there would be a hospital, apartment, houses, businesses, shops, tunnels, parkland, garages etc etc.
The game would be a group of survivors, their needs for food, water, medication , clothes, fuel would be satisfied by exploring the environment and buildings, you need insulin? Search the hospital or medicine cabinets in the homes, you need food? Search the shops and kitchens? Water? Collect rainwater … Each game day would present a list of priorities for the survivors to manage.
Risk and jeopardy would come from the environment it’s self, other survivors who you could trade with or fight. Packs of wild dogs, maybe a few zombies but certainly not hoards, perhaps a Lion, escaped from the zoo. There are no long guns in this apocalypse but perhaps a pistol with limited ammo.
Importantly this must be a 1st/3rd person open world, the look and feel of the Last of Us 2.
I’ve toyed with the idea of playing, watched some YouTube walk throughs, it does hit the brief of my wish list game other than not being First/Third person game world…maybe I should give it a go
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