I greatly enjoyed Waypoint’s stream of The Yawhg today. That game holds a special place in my heart and I find myself wishing there were more games like it. Other than The Yawhg, and recently Monster Prom, I don’t know of any other games with that particular style of multiplayer choose-your-own-adventure.
I hope that with rising popularity of single player CYOA games, like visual novels and dating sims, we’ll see more of the multiplayer variety like The Yawhg are just over the horizon.
What other games would you like to see become full fledged game genres?
Just want to add that Moonhunters is a multiplayer rogue-like with some CYOA elements. I’m very into the idea of these games as well, but haven’t had the chance to try Yawhg or Monster Prom, yet.
I’d really like to see more team-based racing games, like Criterion’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Thankfully there are a few coming out this year. Hopefully they’re able to get decent player bases.
Trailblazers Is like Wipeout mixed with Splatoon. It came out this week and absolutely no one is talking about it, so that’s kind of a bummer.
Team Racing League is in early access and looks promising. It’s top-down racing like Super Sprint, with short tracks that mean some players can score points by completing laps while their teammates can do blocking maneuvers.
Onrush is being made by dev’s with a pedigree so I am hopeful about this one. There’s a beta next week and I’m very excited to be able to get my hands on it.
After playing through Pyre, I really wanted to see more “imaginary sports” games with a fully-fledged single player campaign. Multiplayer stuff like Rocket League is great, but the drama and tension of competing in a league with other teams and the real stakes of winning or losing made for such a compelling experience. (Also I’m terrible at competing against humans)
I think someone mentioned this a while back in the “dream games” thread, but something like the Nemesis system between teams (or even players) going on over multiple seasons would be incredible.
The only other game I’ve played that sort of scratches this itch is, weirdly enough, the solo campaign for Unreal Tournament 2004. Instead of just assigning you AI teammates whenever you play a team-based match, the game makes you recruit and upkeep a squad of gladiators from a rotating pool of characters with different stats (IIRC you could even steal players from opposing teams if you paid them enough). It wasn’t a huge part of the campaign, but it went a long way towards making it feel like more than just an endless string of AI matches.
It’s frankly unconscionable to me that Thirty Flights Of Loving hasn’t spawned legions of imitators. Basically the only games I know that borrow its blend of first-person mechanics with film editing techniques are Paratopic and Virginia. Firewatch does it kind of (which makes sense, because Thirty Flights was made for the Idle Thumbs Kickstarter and Idle Thumbs and Campo Santo have significant overlap), but Firewatch’s attempts are ruined by loading screens.
This isn’t a genre, so much as a mechanic, but as a massive, completely unironic, fan of Alpha Protocol, I wish more RPG’s had the fluid conversation system that are now commonly associated with Telltale games.
“But wouldn’t that mean they’d have to make RPG’s shorter to maintain consistency?”
Pedantic incoming: No because prototype theory is frequently bad model of categorization IMO and frequently stifles creativity when applied to design :X sorry 2 buzzkill
I think I had my wish granted with walking sims, actually. When I was a kid I loved to spend time exploring somewhat mundane (and nonviolent) spaces, from the Croft Manor in the Tomb Raider games to just walking around in SimCopter, while making up little stories for myself. So playing Gone Home for the first time was like achieving the fourth stage in the galaxy brain meme for me!
I wish there were more truly freeform sandboxes like Garry’s Mod around. The source engine is getting older and fewer games are using it. A unity Garry’s Mod or a UE4 Garrys Mod would be really cool
In rocket slime you have to manually pick up different objects and carry them to the canons in order to load them and make them shoot,you have to manually pick up a water bucket and toss it on a fire etc. And youre inside this big ass robot thing.
Enviro bear is also similar- you have one hand,but in order to make the car go you have to pull the gas peddle, but then you have to let go so you can steer the car somewhere. (its free, you should play it)
And i would be so happy if this type of gameplay became a genre of its own,where you have to do all the tiny steps that happen instead of it just happening on its own when you press one button on your keyboard.
I always imagined a space ship sorta game based on the rocket slime type of gameplay and a mech/mech cockpit game based on the enviro-bear type gameplay.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts had such a compelling gameplay loop of identifying a challenge, prototyping a vehicle to surmount said challenge, and testing the vehicle, that I can’t believe we haven’t seen more games like it. I mean, we get a bajillion games with the Lego license, and so far none have tried to approach gameplay in this manner. Missed opportunity if you ask me.
If you haven’t tried it, Bad Piggies is a very good contraption building game that doesn’t get talked about much due to the Angry Birds branding and the fact it’s on mobile.
I really like the first Orwell game, and wish there were more games using its investigation mechanics. Trying to solve a mystery by looking up forum threads, social network accounts and blog comments. Even outside of the privacy and governmental surveillance discussion, it’s a very compelling way to present a story.
The two Lost Phone games are similar, but I can’t think of many others.
I really wish there were more JRPGs that used programming your party members as a mechanic like Final Fantasy XII did. The Gambits system allowed the game to move so much faster. I would have loved it with more strategic options like positioning units and magic that didn’t suck.
SE totally dumped the idea in FFXIII and nobody ever picked it up again as far as I know.
Not so much games like a specific game, but I’d like to see monster-focused games in the vein of Monster Hunter and Monster Hunter Stories. There are magical creatures inhabiting the world, here’s a game where you try to keep them from doing harm to human civilisation, here’s a game where you find a way of co-existing with them with less conflict, here’s a game where you play as the monsters trying to survive your own ecosystem and human predation. Give me more monsters whose physiology has weight and reasoning, while also being impossible nonsense. Give me a Pokemon Snap-esque game about capturing moments like the ones in the monster ecology videos Monster Hunter used to have.
I think about that a lot too. It should be in more JRPGs, but also just give me an infinite loot grind type game with that gameplay style and I will never complain about anything again.
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