This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants.
Looking at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_flight_simulation_games#Space_combat_games
…there really were far more games in the genre being released in the late 1990s and early 2000s than there have been recently.
A similar sort of phenomenon occurred for World War II first-person shooters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games
Back around the same time period, there was a glut of games in the genre, and they really have fallen off quite a bit.
Whether it’s a genre like these two, that hasn’t seen many new entrants recently, or a genre that just never grew as much as you’d like, what genre would you like to see more of?
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Single player card games. I just want a good card game where the PvP mode is optional. Curse you games as a service.
Inscryption?
Cultist simulator, even
Yeah I got it, exactly what I wanted.
If you haven’t looked recently, you might take another look.
I felt the same way when Slay the Spire came out in 2019 – not a lot of similar games at the time, and I couldn’t figure out why more developers hadn’t made similar games, as it seemed like a very good match for indie studios. But there have been a whole lot of games that came out since then.
Searching Steam for games tagged as single-player and deckbuilder, and sorting by user review
I get over 600 hits, almost all of which came out in the past three years. I’d say that single-player deckbuilders – and note that I’m assuming that you’re talking about deckbuilder games, not, say, solitaire implementations or similar, as I think that there are pretty good entrants there – are actually doing pretty well.
Slay the spire? It’s a deck builder rouge like. Excellent game. Dunno if it’s what your looking for but I highly recommend it.
More stealth games that aren’t horror and don’t allow you to punch or shoot your way out of the situation, should you get caught.
If you have any weapons, make them underpowered to the point of useless in combat (eg. Thief) or just having gadgets to use that won’t help you if you get caught (except maybe something that helps you get away like smoke bombs or some shit).
At the same time, though, I don’t want that “get caught, immediate game over” thing. You should still be able to run away and hide or whatever. Just make it exciting enough that you don’t feel like you need to load up a quicksave.
Similarly (if not directly related to stealth), more espionage/spy games. Not as many as there used to be.
I’d also like more actual detective games. Zero action and preferably ones that let you fuck up a case by accusing the wrong person or making the wrong conclusions and have it impact the narrative. Like, if you get it wrong, you get it wrong and you have to live with that. There are several currently, but I’d love more.
You think about a Mix of Thief and dishonored, i guess? Least Puzzle, more Sandbox stealth but Open for the Player to approach the Situation (and Not so much Tool/scenario Drive Like the Hitman Games). I would add Safe zones/Houses as in Nobody finds you there. So you can avoid running away from every enemy on the Map, which offen Happens If you have to flee. This could add some kind of inbetween restock or Adaptation options etc. Think espionage Thrillers and so in.
I think that if we’re doing real-history FPS games, I would like to see other conflicts. Give me a War of 1812 game or let me play as a Chinese soldier during Japan’s mid-1900s occupation or something.
People brought this up at the time, and the go-to problem with it is if you go too far back, like your 1812 example, you have to deal with reloading a gun being one of the most time-consuming actions you can perform. WWI was taboo for a while due to chemical and trench warfare, and for the most part, devs still shy away from it.
And yet Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo are some of the most fun multiplayer FPS games around.
If you’re going non-fantasy (in which case you can put in whatever), I think that one factor is also that in, say, the Napoleonic era, using soldiers in formation in warfare was an important multiplier, and that’s not super-friendly to FPSes. I mean, a lot of the game would be following orders to move into a formation or move in formation.
As for weapons, you could do archery, I suppose. There have been a number of games (Thief, Skyrim, etc), that have an archer running around on their lonesome, though that probably wasn’t historically all that accurate. Well, not that having a solo character going Rambo on a World War II-and-post battlefield was necessarily all that common. If it did, it was pretty unusual:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hooper_(Medal_of_Honor)
For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Staff Sergeant (then Sgt.) Hooper, U.S. Army, distinguished himself while serving as squad leader with Company D. Company D was assaulting a heavily defended enemy position along a river bank when it encountered a withering hail of fire from rockets, machine guns and automatic weapons. S/Sgt. Hooper rallied several men and stormed across the river, overrunning several bunkers on the opposite shore. Thus inspired, the rest of the company moved to the attack. With utter disregard for his own safety, he moved out under the intense fire again and pulled back the wounded, moving them to safety. During this act S/Sgt. Hooper was seriously wounded, but he refused medical aid and returned to his men. With the relentless enemy fire disrupting the attack, he single-handedly stormed 3 enemy bunkers, destroying them with hand grenade and rifle fire, and shot 2 enemy soldiers who had attacked and wounded the Chaplain. Leading his men forward in a sweep of the area, S/Sgt. Hooper destroyed 3 buildings housing enemy riflemen. At this point he was attacked by a North Vietnamese officer whom he fatally wounded with his bayonet. Finding his men under heavy fire from a house to the front, he proceeded alone to the building, killing its occupants with rifle fire and grenades. By now his initial body wound had been compounded by grenade fragments, yet despite the multiple wounds and loss of blood, he continued to lead his men against the intense enemy fire. As his squad reached the final line of enemy resistance, it received devastating fire from 4 bunkers in line on its left flank. S/Sgt. Hooper gathered several hand grenades and raced down a small trench which ran the length of the bunker line, tossing grenades into each bunker as he passed by, killing all but 2 of the occupants. With these positions destroyed, he concentrated on the last bunkers facing his men, destroying the first with an incendiary grenade and neutralizing 2 more by rifle fire. He then raced across an open field, still under enemy fire, to rescue a wounded man who was trapped in a trench. Upon reaching the man, he was faced by an armed enemy soldier whom he killed with a pistol. Moving his comrade to safety and returning to his men, he neutralized the final pocket of enemy resistance by fatally wounding 3 North Vietnamese officers with rifle fire. S/Sgt. Hooper then established a final line and reorganized his men, not accepting treatment until this was accomplished and not consenting to evacuation until the following morning. His supreme valor, inspiring leadership and heroic self-sacrifice were directly responsible for the company’s success and provided a lasting example in personal courage for every man on the field. S/Sgt. Hooper’s actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army.[4]
That’s a pretty unusual MoH citation out of Vietnam, and that’d probably be about par for the course for a single – maybe part of – a WW2 FPS level. I mean, if you want realistic World Wars fighting, the largest chunk of characters would probably just be killed by random artillery fire, not pulling off 100:1+ kill ratios in infantry combat, which…isn’t all that much fun as a first-person game.
But, as to archery:
https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-archers-shooting-twelve-arrows-a-minute
A skilled longbowman could shoot about 12 shots per minute. This rate of fire was far superior to competing weapons like the crossbow or early gunpowder weapons…
So, as to the hail of arrows, archers shooting heavy warbows confirm that releasing twelve arrows in one minute is possible, but that such a rate cannot be maintained subsequently. Practical experience argues for a shooting rate of about 5 to 6 arrows per minute being feasible over a period up to 10 minutes.
That’s definitely a lot slower-paced than a modern FPS, but it’s still a lot faster than nearly all 18th century firearms.
Skyrim kind of ignored fatigue and let you lug around a huge store of arrows and blast them without regard for your arms getting tired, so it’s not hard realism, but I think that people enjoyed the archery aspect.
Open-ended, sandbox sports games. SSX, Skate 3, Steep, are a few off the top of my head. I remember the Steep devs made a BMX game that was similar a few years ago. I tried it but I just didn’t find it nearly as fun as Steep was. They don’t have to be extreme sports either, I think more traditional sports would be fun too. I like it when they’re unrealistic and over-the-top too. I love playing Skate 3 and just listening to music and doing inhuman tricks. I’ve never played it but I’ve heard the NBA Jam series is like this.
edit: Wreckfest is also sort of in that realm. I’d love to play more racing games that aren’t constantly trying to be simulators. Trackmania is the only one I can think of that’s entirely divorced from being a simulator.
Checkout Distance on Steam. It’s definitely up there in terms of unique racing games.
Split/Second was also a really interesting take on racing, I wish they had released DLCs or something to add more maps, the way that game worked with the crazy visuals to open up new shortcuts and modify the track midrace was an awesome idea
I really wish Blur actually did well back when it was around. By far the coolest take on a Mario Kart-like game I’ve ever played.
Never heard of blur, looked it up, you might enjoy https://store.steampowered.com/app/396900/GRIP_Combat_Racing/
I didn’t even find the Steep game entertaining mate, maybe it is because I never played SSX to begin with, but hell the latter still calls my attention!
Check out Trail Out. It’s one of the few games trying to give us that kind of racing game these days.
I miss vehicle deathmatch games. Interstate 76, Twisted Metal, Vigitlante 8, probably a few more I don’t remember too.
They all kinda vanished.
I remember enjoying the original Carmageddon quite a bit.
I absolutely loved Carmageddon. My PC couldn’t really handle it so it would turn into a slide show eith every crash, but I just loved it and didn’t care.
These games would look so good with the current game engines, I’d even take remakes lol.
Holy shit, someone else who played Interstate 76! Too bad Interstate 82 never saw the light of day.
It absolutely did because I own it
Immersive sims.
Give me more games like Deus Ex, system Shock, prey 2017 and bioshock please
God, I so badly want more.
There’s maybe a chance that the Adam Jenson trilogy gets finished up, but the Embracer situation has made that less clear.
Goddamnit this is exact what I think EVERY TIME I see Embracer in the news…
“Oh no fuck…Deus Ex is now even further away…”
I’d like to see more first-person shooter campaigns in general. They’ve mostly disappeared. And what I don’t mean are the likes of Dusk or HROT that harken back to the Quake era. I’m looking for the era just beyond that, like Halo, BioShock, Half-Life, F.E.A.R., Crysis, 007 games and so on. A Cyberpunk expansion and, to a lesser extent, a remake of System Shock are all I have to scratch that itch this year. Someday the indie scene will cycle around to getting nostalgic for that type of game, and I’ll get more of it again. With Free Radical facing near-certain death on that TimeSplitters revival, so do my hopes for getting more of that type of FPS again. With LAN and split-screen co-op and deathmatch with friends while we’re at it too. Trying to make a game into a live service that inevitably dies is just telling me not to buy the few promising games that come around, like Friends vs. Friends.
Crytek is working on Crysis 4 🙂
As long as it’s closer to Crysis 1 and 3 and less like Crysis 2. And even though 3 was good, the story was already sent off the rails in 2.
Ditto, I love boomer shooters, but I don’t think I’ve played a game more like Halo or Half-Life released in the last decade.
Only a handful sneak through. Half-Life: Alyx, Cyberpunk, Titanfall 2, there’s one Wolfenstein game I haven’t played yet; but options dry up fast.
I’d like multiplayer shooters that put emphasis on clean visuals designed to transmit information as well as more emphasis on movement.
Even with all the hats, visibility in TF2 is a masterpiece compared to 90% of games. One team always bright red, one team is always bright blue. The maps aren’t full of noisy scenery and still look great.
Counter Strike 2 has recently been released. Valorant and Overwatch also seems to fit the description.
Valorant I can’t speak to, since I can’t play it on Linux.
CS I’ve played a lot of and it’s fantastic just a bit too slow paced/tactical for me. Your right though that it’s a fantastically designed game and a really good shout.
Overwatch I strongly disagree with. The maps have clean lines, but with the character design, abilities, and UI they clearly prioritise being flashy over anything else. It’s really visually loud for the sake of it and too much for me.
Yeah… Diabotical looked like a promising update to AFPS (which is what I’d say you’re describing), but it didn’t change enough of the formula (I blame the weapon design choices) and it launched on EGS instead of steam.
Yeah, I kind of intentionally avoided saying AFPS because unfortunately these days that tends to mean (like with diabotical) games which are desperate to be the most hypercompetitive aspects of quake. Duels or FFA aren’t really my thing, give me teams and objectives!
Perhaps unsurprisingly UT2k4 is one of my favorite of all time
Diabotical did do teams and objectives. I think what really needs to happen to bring the genre back to life though is for there to be a really good campaign tied to a really good multiplayer experience that brings in some new weapon design instead of the Quake meta weapons with minor tweaks.
UT4 was looking promising in terms of multiplayer before Epic killed the project.
You might like roboquest it’s a very recent game that’s not PvP but has a lot of AFPS characteristics.
IDK, kinda feels like we need idSoftware to do a new Quake with new story and new weapons even if they don’t call it Quake (or to release a DOOM multiplayer experience that is actually fun).
When I saw your title, space combat games are immediately what came to mind.
I adored the space operas that were FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 (VIP Volition). I would love for something along those lines. Add in a little bit more management, some rpg/progression elements, even pilot/FPS sections, and it’s dream game for me. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited (and let down by) Star Citizen.
What do you think about No Man’s Sky after its redemption arc and Everspace 1+2?
Not the guy you were replying to, but Everspace 1 and 2 are both great, arcade-y space shooters. I like 1 better than 2, but I’ve played both a bunch
It’s not dead as a genre, but I was in a conversation the other day on the Fediverse – don’t remember whether it was this community or not – trying to figure out what happened to the space combat genre. One guess was that it was just a really good match for the hardware limitations of the time. In space, there often isn’t a lot of stuff near you, so you can get away with making 3D games that don’t have to render all that many objects. And they were popular in the early days of 3D hardware, around the late 1990s and early 2000s. So maybe some of it was that developers would have done other genres, but that hardware limitations pushed more towards space combat.
I think that some of it has to do with a sort of societal interest in space. In the 1950s and successive decades, humanity entering space was very new, was a completely new frontier – maybe a frontier that no life form out there has ever crossed the barrier on. People liked theorizing about what society in space would look like, and so you had schools of architecture that alluded to it, comic books and novels about it, and then later movies about it, and later video games about it. But maybe space just isn’t as novel any more, is part of ordinary life. The video game genre tended not to be hard-realism, but adopted conventions from movies and TV series, like slowly-moving visible laser pulses that make a distinctive, synthesized sound, ship orientation changing ship direction of travel, objects like nebulas based on false-color NASA images, audible explosions, and such, so I think that those were maybe important in building interest. I don’t think that there have really been recent new entrants in movie and TV series that inspired the video games – Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, stuff like that had their heyday in the past too.
Lovecraftian horror games. There have been some games in recent years but I think there’s definitely a larger design space for this kind of thing. This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.
Searching Steam for games tagged as lovecraft and horror and sorting by user review gives me about 500 entries.
I think that Lovecraft’s setting is actually virtually the only fictional setting where you’re spoiled for choice, because Lovecraft permitted other people to use his setting. Like, you only get to do a Star Wars game if Lucasarts licenses it, because they leverage their copyright on the setting. Most people and companies who create a setting don’t allow other people to freely use it, and copyright law permits them to make that restriction. But Lovecraft was unusual in that he specifically encouraged other people to build on his world.
Maybe Robin Hood or a small handful of others from history, like Greek or Norse mythology, that developed before copyright law had really become the norm.
I dunno. Maybe there should be some kind of Creative Commons license that permits use of setting and maybe characters, while still keeping an individual work copyrighted, to encourage creation of collaboratively-developed settings like that.
This could mix with other genres as well like survival and potentially rogue-like stuff.
One of the top entries I see on Steam – though I’ve never played it – is an Overwhelmingly Positive-rated game, Disfigure, that appears to be a Lovecraftian action roguelike that just came out a couple of months ago.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2083160/Disfigure/
EDIT: Well, hmm. Someone tagged it as Lovecraftian, but the author doesn’t really describe it that way. Just creepy.
I really want to see more games like Might & Magic 6-8 or Wizardry 8, in that vein of open world dungeon crawler, but not locked to a grid like M&M 1-5 or Dungeon Master 1&2 (although I do like those games, they’re more well represented in the contemporary space with titles like M&M 10 or Legend of Grimrock.
How well does something like Skyrim approach what you’re aiming for?
Eh, not very well - there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that these games capture, revolving around skill allocation and character development that Skyrim doesn’t have. It’s exciting to become a water master in MM6 because it means being able to teleport freely between towns, or expert level spirit being able to bless the whole party at once.
A couple that I’d like to see:
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Realistic naval fleet combat sims. There’s not a lot out there. I assume that there’s probably limited demand – flying fighter planes seems to be a lot more popular when it comes to military sims. Rule the Waves does keep seeing releases, but it’s not a genre with many decent entrants.
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Kenshi-style games. I’m not sure that there is a name for the genre, but sandbox, open-world, squad-based combat with a base-building and economic side.
Would you consider Mount& Blade to be a Kenshi-style game? I view the two as quite similar
Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it’s also got a lot of differences.
The similar:
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You start out as one person.
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It’s not especially easy, particularly at the start.
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You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.
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You can form military groups – much larger than squads, normally – that are out and about.
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There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.
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There is an economic aspect.
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The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.
But there are also some pretty substantial differences:
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While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you’re still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you’re going to know and equip each character.
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You’re generally working with formations, not individual units.
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Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what’s there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There’s a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B – you’re mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.
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Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you’re aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.
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The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you’d do with your companions, if they aren’t in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.
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M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There’s the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you’re setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.
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M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.
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M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi’s modeling the whole shebang; what’s being produced matters a lot more.
Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It’s just that in Starfield – at least vanilla; we’ll have to see where mods take the thing – there isn’t a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don’t want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.
In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it’s a first-class part of the game.
Don’t get me wrong. I like M&B too. It’s just that in practice, I don’t think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you’ve picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don’t individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren’t killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don’t really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There’s a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn’t really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn’t much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world – that’s what the camera follows on the strategic map.
You sir, make a really String Advertisement for kenshi. Is it playable on the steamdeck?
I don’t have a Deck, but I would assume so. It works on desktop Linux, and it’s not an especially new game.
It doesn’t have gamepad support. I dunno how the Deck does keyboard and mouse.
googles
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kenshi/comments/u4h2p7/psa_its_great_kenshi_on_steam_deck/
Apparently so. Haven’t done it myself, though.
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Real-time Strategy. Specifically single-player campaign oriented RTS.
Genre peaked at, like, Red Alert 3 or Starcraft II, either-or. And the only notable title in the past (N) years has been like… Age of Empires 4. Which is good but also… It’s AoE. It’ll always be more of a multiplayer oriented game yanno? Give me my cheesy campaign stories with cool hero units and/or cheesy FMV uwu
There’s a few single player focused ones released in the past decade. Deserts of Kharak comes to mind.
The Homeworld Series (1+2 at least) comes Info mind in general.
OP ist right though. A masterpiecish RTS ist nowwhere to ne found. I think, it has something To Do for other genres innovating out of the RTS Framework (DotA, LoL, even Pikmin).
All can be played without the mechanical sweatfest traditional RTS turn Into, but instead focussing in Player knowledge and engagement.
However, there ist the new Company of Heroes Game, though…
Tbf, deserts of kharrak had a cool mp mode, too, and it’s a shame it died out immediately. It is a fairly novel and unique rts in a lot of ways, and very pretty to boot, so not sure what happened. I guess the maps are all very samey
Mech sim like the old Mechwarrior games. Not the new ones they are gatcha pay to win
Here’s a list: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mecha/comments/yb52yl/compilation_list_of_almost_all_mecha_games_for_pc/
Armored Core got a release in 2023 and seems to be good.
What about MechWarrior 5?
Medieval economy/politics/life sims like The Guild (aka Europa 1400).
It’s sad the closest recent other entry is like CK3 a totally different genre really
I miss the patrician series
Patricia more plays Like a refocussed ANNO entry. Its one of my All Time favorites and i wish for another entry…
I dont think its Line the guild though :)
You marry people based on how ugly they are and the size of their dowry. That’s solid the guild gameplay
