Which themes or genres are getting ignored in games?

[ZinRicky]

There's humandkind which is mediocre from what i've heard
and this

View: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605220/Dune_Spice_Wars/

The trailer of the second game didn't catch me, unfortunately

 

[kantraa]

there is 2 genres that i think goes way too underlooked:

1: fast-paced arena shooters, like Xonotic or Quake Live. whenever i ask a normie about shooter games, they bring up shit like valorant or overwatch but no one thinks about the classics. for some reasons i just LOVE fast paced games, idk why. i havent really found any other decent ones other than maybe Unvanquished but i genuinely think that unvanquished only counts as a fast-paced game when you join the alien team, when you join the human team you're extremely fucking slow.

2: "retro style" horror games, like NO PLAYERS ONLINE. i don't have much to say about this, i just like it lol

 

[elia925-6]

* Games exploring non euclidean geometry, like Antichamber and manifold garden
* Soviet union - cold war esque games. I don't mind shooters but i would like to see more weird and unknown appearances of that era like Jazzpunk and Papers please i mean to get explored more.
* A good adventure time game. I love the show but honestly most of the games including the latest one are mediocre and doesn't add anything to lore and gives a shovelware-y vibe that doesn't reflect the audience. I mean made by indie game studio but it's impossible since the show ended.
* Afrofuturism-African fantasy games. I think african culture should be given more credit due to its influence on modern culture and it's sad that i don't see often games including those elements., like The journey down trilogy.
* Games with time mechanics(I don't count power-ups adding extra time to character), like you manipulate the time or doing specific tasks before time runs out and plot related to time like Majora's mask, Braid and Outer wilds. I hope botw2 includes that stuff

 

[ForgotMyPassword]

I just want a new TimeSplitters game, honestly

 

[Deleted member 3578]

Also, i loved Shadow Run (the original) and the new trilogy, it combines fantasy and cyberpunk, is fucking original as fuck man, i'm tired of medieval fantasy.
View attachment 24497

I have tried a few times to play the genesis Shadow Run but ooooooofff it be daunting. Old school interface and builds are rough.

I dunno if yr talking about that or the OG tabletop - but I like the vibe from a non-playing distance.

 

[Mintychip]

Arena shooters.

Have you tried Spligate?

my friends and i were hype for Halo Infinite since we enjoyed halo 2 so much back in the day and Infinite looked promising, but Splitgate scratches that itch pretty well for us.

elevator pitch is pretty much halo + portal with all your favorite goofy FPS game types. Big head snipers? Laser tag? Instagib? Yep its all there.


View: https://youtu.be/xIPJxZMNhVs


As far as whats missing for me, i would say really immersive games like Morrowind or E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy that dont really hold your hand but give you a lot of resources and worldbuilding to work with. I dont mind digging a little for story.
To me, nothing is more fun than taking a game that nearly filtered you and putting all the peices of jank together into eventually reaching OP status.

also parrot the other people that said survival horror genre needs some new blood thats not just trying to do resident evil.

 

[ZinRicky]

Spligate

It's a shame the game lost 90% of its playerbase within the first month. It's quite cool

 

[elia925-6]

Native south American. Aztec, Mayan and Inka type shit. Give me an ARPG where I yeet spears with my Atlatl, equip enchanted Jaguar hide, behead invaders with my maquahitl and conjure magic of the gods via blood sacrifices.
The pantheon, history and mythology is vast enough to fill a a game or two with.

I want an assassin's creed game that takes place during the discovery of america by spanish colonials.

 

[andreixyz]

* Soviet union - cold war esque games.

Tetris

 

[georgemoody]

Speaking of medical simulators, I feel like job simulators in general lack any good interesting games, and even if the gameplay is decent, there isn't any proper story. The one exception that I can think of is papers, please. I guess you could throw in the VR game job simulator but that's more of a parody imo.

 

[Sketch Relics]

Educational games of the kind that Jonathan Blow describes in this talk:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWFScmtiC44

Basically, games where you lead the player to develop a useful mental model through the mechanics of the game, and that model is inmediately transferable into something useful. Imagine a game whose mechanics are fun (you know, what edutainment games aren't) and indirectly teach you music theory (or the fundamentals of animation, or food science or whatever) through the gameplay. After playing it you'll have absorbed the "tacit" knowledge (hard or impossible to put into words, like writing a guide to riding a bicycle).
Basically edutainment done right, but it takes a pretty skilled game designer to produce something effective. Food for thought at least.

Hmm, I'm not sure it would work all that well in practice, in order to impart lasting and sustained knowledge, the game would have to be rather repetitive in nature and finding enough scenarios or complexity to keep any given topic interesting would be rather difficult.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPnaqY9pC_k


I can unironically say I learned a ton from this game as a kid. A basic understanding of the properties of magnets, spacial reasoning through gears, basic aerodynamics, and about kinetic vs potential energy. This is all stuff that wasn't relevant to me until I hit highschool and I still remembered it to that point. HOWEVER the game is highly repetitive and simple in nature the only reason I didn't get bored with it at the time was because I was 6~8 years old at the time. I only remembered what I did due to the shear repetition of what the game showed me and that doesn't bode well for this sort of thing.

The one subject I could see this actually working in is well, how to self learn and establish critical thinking skills by giving people scenarios where they have to solve problems without knowing all the rules or in spite of missing key context. I accidentally taught myself the basics of codebreaking while playing FEZ trying to understand what some of the people where saying halfway into the game and the important thing there was not the codebreaking in and of itself but that I had the thought to do so, worked out a plan to accomplish the task I wanted to finish, then succeeded without any outside help.

 

[Artichoke]

It's not really being 100% ignored but for my taste there's definitely not enough TPS movement shooters (think Gunz the duel) nowadays

 

[starbreaker]

Indian Mythology. Indian mythology is very diverse and not that well-known in the west and suprisingly Indian gaming industry is not as strong as Japanese, American and Polish for a country of 1 billion people. The only game i know is Raji with some success.

It's a Japanese game and you'll probably need to get bootleg copies and a PS2 emulator, but Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner borrows a bit from Hindu mythology.

 

[Voicedrew]

The "without rpg elements" genre

 

[elia925-6]

It's a Japanese game and you'll probably need to get bootleg copies and a PS2 emulator, but Digital Devil Saga: Avatar Tuner borrows a bit from Hindu mythology.

Persona and SMT also use gods from different mythologies.

 

[starbreaker]

Persona and SMT also use gods from different mythologies.

MegaTen is basically the OG Pokemon that uses gods, demons, and other monsters from most of the world's mythologies. (I haven't seen Elegba from traditional Yoruba belief yet, for example.)

 

[RisingThumb]

Basically, games where you lead the player to develop a useful mental model through the mechanics of the game, and that model is inmediately transferable into something useful. Imagine a game whose mechanics are fun (you know, what edutainment games aren't) and indirectly teach you music theory (or the fundamentals of animation, or food science or whatever) through the gameplay. After playing it you'll have absorbed the "tacit" knowledge (hard or impossible to put into words, like writing a guide to riding a bicycle).
Basically edutainment done right, but it takes a pretty skilled game designer to produce something effective. Food for thought at least.

Of this form, TTRPG are among the best. That's real life games though, and involves imagination, creativity, problem solving, and roleplaying social situaitons. I mean this from the perspectives of kids. In Kids, play is among the greatest ways of learning.
link about homeschooling and TTRPGs
Varg Vikernes made his own game, MyFarog. It's often seen as a joke game by hardcore TTRPG players, but it's a source for him to teach his children.

I think paradox games etc prove there is a huge appetite for games that would fill this niche

The issue with these, is that politics is part of an incredibly chaotic system. You can't make politics in a void, as it's policies that govern religion, education, economics, culture, justice... A good political simulation, is a good world simulation, so a complete version of this only works in a good simulation of the world. You can try to cut this down to you being a single actor in the world, but then that's a different scope, and arguably a harder scope, as the feedback mechanisms lag in politics(sometimes by decades, as found by China's 1 child policy). It's why most games that are tangential to politics, or political commentary, like Paper's Please, only cover how policies affect its subjects, not so much about creating policies.

Also exploration games: just wide open worlds that are detailed and have a nice vibe no matter where you stop. E.g. like Assassin's Creed's european cities or Genshin Impact's fantasy world but without quests or enemies or a story. I guess it's not very profitable to make a huge, detailed environment and have nothing in it except the player. Games like Minecraft gets away with this because the maps are randomly generated, and that reduces the exploration value a lot compared to what I have in mind.

I agree on exploration. King's field-like games where the exploration is more focused also works here. The only games that come to mind for this are Lunacid and Northern Journey. Maybe Long Dark too?

The Elder Scrolls have heavy asian mythologies influences (well, until skyrim, in which they went full nordic, but doesn't matter)

Are you a morrowind player? I've tried to get into Morrowind but I don't have the time to sit down and play it every day. Is there a good way of making it a game I can approach for a few hours each weekend? I find when I try to play it, I get into it, make little progress, come back to it the next weekend, confused by what I'm doing and have no idea what I should be doing. In other words, I feel it has a "knowledge burden" that I have to keep stuff in mind about it.

I use OpenMW to play currently, but I don't play much. It's a game I really want to get into. I know it's the getting into part that's hard.

I'd love to find a new RTS game (and I mean a new IP, not Age of Empires 25 or Civ LVI) that doesn't feel old or simplistic

Try Battle for middle earth. It's a starcraft/AoE adjacent game. It's also abandonware, since EA lost the LOTR license. It's about a decade and a half old mind.

* Indie action-adventure games. Personally I think it needs a variety in this genre by the indie scene but most of the games i know try to mimic zelda gameplay and even graphics like ripping off alttp and game boy entries like Oceanhorn or the myriads of walking simulators i see on itch.io . While i'm fine people who like those games, I rarely see effort and creativity on those games to stand out on their own. Examples: Sable, Creature of the well, Outer Wilds.

I'll mention Hyper Light Drifter. I played and replayed that game to death. Really good game.

1: fast-paced arena shooters, like Xonotic or Quake Live. whenever i ask a normie about shooter games, they bring up shit like valorant or overwatch but no one thinks about the classics. for some reasons i just LOVE fast paced games, idk why. i havent really found any other decent ones other than maybe Unvanquished but i genuinely think that unvanquished only counts as a fast-paced game when you join the alien team, when you join the human team you're extremely fucking slow.

These exist, but whenever they come up they die off pretty quickly. See splitgate as a recent example of a Halo-style arena shooter. The problem with these is usually this: If one opponent is 5% better than you, they will win by about 90% more than you, to the point of overkill. It's not hard to get 5% better than the general public, so as a result, it's a race to the top, and those who can't or don't want to get 5% better, than those who already are 5% better get filtered out and usually filter out of the game until you have hardcore folks left around.

The only antidote is a mixing pot of all different skill levels. And this is what happened with call of duty's multiplayer games... and most multiplayer games before ELO-based matchmaking became a thing. ELO-Based matchmaking improved this somewhat, but you need enough people with similar ELO ratings for a fair game, and when you introduce friends partying up, this is harder to match.

Mind you, although I'm naysaying here, I really wish arena shooters came back in style. I bloody loved Quake Live.



You guys know what I think is underrepresented? Sci-fi racers in the style of F-Zero and Wipeout. The only thing that meets this is BallisticNG. Nothing else has come close, or even been a return to form. In general, a lot of racing games are under-served areas. Not by quantity of games, but by quality of the racing elements, destruction, weight of the cars, physics of the cars(notice how physics are utterly broken in the vast majority of car games. Even Forza Horizon 5 can't handle cars not being magnetically connected to the floor, and any Ubisoft racer, is that "premium" Ubisoft quality). There's a lot of representation for arcade racers though, but I suspect a lot of that is down to hand-waving the car physics and damage in the name of arcade fun.

 

[スーパー Meidoメイド]

Are you a morrowind player? I've tried to get into Morrowind but I don't have the time to sit down and play it every day. Is there a good way of making it a game I can approach for a few hours each weekend? I find when I try to play it, I get into it, make little progress, come back to it the next weekend, confused by what I'm doing and have no idea what I should be doing. In other words, I feel it has a "knowledge burden" that I have to keep stuff in mind about it.

You can focus on the main quest, won't take you more than 20 hours total, is a shame tho because what makes morrowind so alive is the sidequests, and the DLC, besides that i have no idea how to make Morrowind a quicker experience, because the game is fucking inmense, you could try some speedrun tactics, but some require skill and luck to pull and will be complicated for a new player, so my tip is that, do the main quest, and if you manage to get the time, do sidequests because the game is fucking awesome. (Also there is no shame in looking for guides, veteran players would tell you that's a good thing, but if you ask me, morrowind is very outdated to modern standards and getting into it is quite hard specially following the quests, because the thing is that they give you directions to places you don't know yet and it tends to get messy, so as i said, if you get lost, use a guide in games like morrowind to play for the first time i necessary, or at least highly recommended)

I use OpenMW to play currently, but I don't play much. It's a game I really want to get into. I know it's the getting into part that's hard.

Oh i never tried openMW, i know is free, and that you can play morrowind multiplayer (which is basically like playing a session of DnD in morrowind seems very fun), but i already have the game on steam so to me in that case would be really redundant, but if you don't want to pay money, OpenMW is always the best option, specially because of compatibilty and optimization.

 

[RisingThumb]

Morrowind a quicker experience

For me it's not about making it a quicker experience, but a re-approachable one, where I can play a bit on a weekend, come back next weekend after forgetting a lot, and picking up where I left off. A lot of RPG games have a pretty good quest log, and quest markers(which I agree is bad), but the quest markers mean you don't have to remember the directions between sessions. In other words knowledge burden between sessions.

Oh i never tried openMW, i know is free, and that you can play morrowind multiplayer (which is basically like playing a session of DnD in morrowind seems very fun), but i already have the game on steam so to me in that case would be really redundant, but if you don't want to pay money, OpenMW is always the best option, specially because of compatibilty and optimization.

Have a look here at modlists for openMW. It's mainly modernisation mods. OpenMW, also has engine stability patches, which is something compared to default MW(though idk how much of a something it is). It's basically a source port.

 

[FacelessMan]

I think the reason why Hindu mythology is hardly ever used in those contexts is because it's a widely practiced religions and Hindus can be pretty... easily butthurt when it comes to their gods. Fallout games were banned in India due to those Brahmin cows with two heads.

By contrast, mythologies such as Norse, Japanese, Chinese, Greek and all are usually from dead religions. There's no risk of a practicioner going haywire over the fact you gave Aphrodite small boobs, for instance. Or Hou Yi has a cheap ass bow and cannot aim (he's not a god, but the first mythological Chinese figure that comes to mind).

Don't mean to be that person, but there are a small minority of people in greece that still worship greek gods