As someone else mentioned, Terra Nil is exactly this, another good one is Eco. You do chop down trees and mine and stuff but the goal is to be environmentally sustainable. The goal is to stop a meteor from blowing up your planet but you need to sustainably get there otherwise you’ll end up polluting the planet and making stuff worse in the process. Underrated but really good

I want Spore, but modern and better.

I had an idea of a game where you played as a photojournalist documenting the brutality of a near-future totalitarian regime. There would be elements of stealth because you’d have to evade the police to take your photos and you have pretty much no combat ability. You’d use your earnings from selling the photos to gradually upgrade your equipment, maybe starting off with a shitty cell phone camera and working your way up to professional quality full frame SLRs. I’d want it to simulate the workings of a real camera… f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, etc., so you’re challenged with getting good, usable photos in difficult conditions.

Something with environmentalist and sustainability goals and principles rather than forms of destruction. I don’t want to kill things or chop down trees or blow stuff up. The world is difficult and I am tired.

Search and Rescue game. I’m not really a pacifist, I don’t have a problem with violence in games. But it would he nice to have an action game that didn’t involve slaughtering endless waves of mooks for a change.

There’s plenty of adrenaline, skill and gear porn to be had in the genre, so why don’t we see more of it?

I want Star Citizen… The Star Citizen that was promised in the Kickstarter… Still waiting.

Star Citizen, lmao

I would like a language learning video game which is set up as a MMO, and you “reverse” level. You start with massive equipment because you need it to be able to fight the learning monsters, but as you get more proficient you get hit less(fewer mistakes) and do more damage (faster language entry) so you can start dropping equipment. So the monk running around in a loin cloth is the goal. All sorts of multi-player interactions are possible around setting up conversations, handling larger readings, etc.

A lighthearted and colorful Soulslike RPG with actual multiplayer. I want to run around in a BotW/TotK style world and go adventuring with friends, while still feeling like the combat is challenging. I want to be able to head into a dangerous dungeon with friends and not be sure we’ll make it out, while having a more storybook fantasy vibe. Too many game opt for gritty apocalypse worlds. The recent Zeldas show that you don’t need to go grimdark to have a compelling fantasy world, while still retaining a save the world vibe.

• Sealed room murder mystery, with no quirky characters. And with puzzles that require you to wiki stuff.
• RPG that takes place outside of western European / American / Japanese setting. I wanna see games that take place in Korea, India, Africa
• RPG that takes place in a small city where you can interact with most people, a small open world like Kamurocho (maybe larger), but allows interaction with most people, instead of just handful of quest givers.
• Igavania but with modern sci-fi settings. Shadow Complex exists, but that’s more metroidvania (no leveling up or equipment drops from enemies)
• Flight simulator but for road trip. Truck simulator but with real world map data
• Flight simulator but for underwater exploration, with real world data.
• PS3 Africa, but expanded to more regions, more animals.
• God of War, but other mythologies, e.g. Egyptian, Chinese, South East Asians, Africans, Polynesians, etc.

Something like RDR2 but focused on the life sim part. Instead of narrative driven game where your main action in the world is violence, go all in on the simulation part with actually working economics, job choices etc.

I want to be a lumberjack hauling wood to the local mill via the river, not a bandit robbing every passer by. Also, I should be able to buy high heels from the big city store.

One limitation that games like Civ suffer from is that diplomacy is ultimately pretty shallow because there can only be one winner, so even when you’re building alliances or trading relationships it is generally to gain some temporary benefit until you are in a position to defeat your partner later on (whether militarily, scientifically, etc).

What I would love to see is a multiplayer game like Civ but where each player has independent win conditions (so that a game could have multiple winners, or no winners). The condition could even just be to attain a certain level of happiness or wealth. And if you achieve that then you win even if other nations are bigger or stronger, and conversely if you don’t achieve it you lose even if you are the last nation standing. So decisions to go to war, or focus on technological development, or build alliances or trading relationships, etc, are driven by the wants and needs of your own people and not just a need to dominate others.

I’d love for something like a watchmaker simulator to exist. You’d get broken watches, and you’d be tasked to take them apart, clean them and fix them up. Basically, something very similar to those almost ASMR videos on youtube where someone restores those completely broken things into a pristine state.

I just want a high quality horse game. Is that so much to ask? :( Apparently so.

And I mean, specifically focused on the horses, not an adventure game with unusually well done “horses as cars” like RDR2 or Zelda BOTW. A “girly” horse game, like one where you take care of and breed horses and participate in horse jumping or whatever, or one where you ride a horse around a forest and it has an actual personality and acts like an animal and not just a mode of transportation (Shadow of the Colossus is the one game I can remember feeling anywhere close to this, and even that was very minimal).

It’s maddening because the minute someone makes one it’ll sell like hotcakes - there are so many horse enthusiasts dismayed by the lack of quality horse games just waiting in the wings - aaaaand yet here we are. Sigh.

I want a historically accurate trading simulation set in the early modern period: I want a multitude of ever-changing regional hard, soft and bookkeeping currencies, also bills of exchange, individual units of measurement for each product, paying in kind, putting sth. on the cuff, installments, various per item or volume based taxations, tolls, tithes, tenure, social privileges, staple rights, scheduled trade fairs, regulated fixed prices, lot sales, return freight, regulated transportational services, craft and trading legislation, significance of saint days, city level legislation, guilds and other corporations, the very relevant concepts of honor, contemporary obligations of social responsibility, familial structures and needs for a network of professional connections, monasteries as large economical entities, etc. pp.

All tycoons I have played just reproduce a shallow version of our current concepts of money and trade and skin it with historical images without even trying to research the historical setting they’re in. They add complexity in many other ways that don’t focus on trade (i.e. combat).

No fighting. No leveling. No building. Just trade.