If you had the funding from a major company and total creative freedom, what video game would you get made?

Fat Bear Week: The Game. I’d set it in all the different National Parks, though, each one requiring a different strategy to become the fattest bear. No salmon? Too bad. Better find another food source.

Half Life 3

NPC Hospital, where you're a doctor and have to deal with the massive body counts from other games.

Or a foraging game, open world style, where you have to travel to the right places during the right time of day to pick certain foods. There are lookalikes and also tons of risks like landowners with guns, pesticides, snakes, and tough terrain. I imagine it would be very much like The Hunter COTW but with plants.

An Assassins Creed game as rich as Odyssey, but set in the Mali empire. Hanging with Mansa Musa? Visiting scholars at Timbuktu? Desert frontier towns, gigantic markets within cities, and everything in between? That period of history is so fascinating and it would be incredible to have the art budget to bring it to life.

Open world mystery-solving rpg that's set in early colonial New England.

All the different townships are religiously secular and xenophobic. So you have to travel from place to place earning people's trust, while simultaneously working on different parts of different crimes/mysteries.

It sounds... Complicated. But this is all hypothetical.

I wouldn't be interested in some stance on religion. Just the point of that's how it was in some places.

The game could have an occult/magic type vibe. Or not.

A proper magic-focused action RPG. Can't find anything that scratches the itch like Skyrim/Oblivion and Wizard of Legend did (in terms of battlemage gaming™). And when it comes to using magic as a tool, many games just pretend that's not a thing!

Forspoken's writers probably going to be a reason we won't get one any time soon though.

Portal 3, no question.

Larian Studios presents Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 3

Because 2 will still be in development hell by the time mine comes out

Black and White.

A Build Engine(Duke3D, Ion Furry) or Build Engine style(Cultic) game made around Petey Wheatstraw/Blaxploitation film genre. The "Holly Trinity" of Build Engine games were based on action films, each with their own specific flavor. Duke3D was 80's action, Shadow Warrior was badly dubbed HongKong Action and Blood was westerns and horror.

Blood and Cultic both have robbed cultist that light up real good with a molotov cocktail. I think it would be incredibly satisfying to light up KKK members the same way.

A Blaxploitation game would be rude, crude, and upset a lot of people. It could also be really fun and something that hasn't been done before. Most games that try to tackle racism do it was an attempt at nuanced or preachy writing. I just want to beat a neo-nazi with my pimp cane.

mmorpg based on the world of avatar the last airbender!

with a monthly subscription and no shop or similar, like wow back in the days. every progress and every item just achievable by playing.

I've always thought how well an open world Back to the Future game could be. Like you could get in the delorean, drive around Hill Valley and then time time travel to mess with the future or past. And in the case of messing with the past, then the future timelines would update based on actions you make.

Obviously it's get complicated really fast, and somehow you'd have to have some mechanic to make it so you can't interact with your past self. Maybe some sort of reset timeline mechanic would be needed if there were too many versions of yourself in a certain time?

VR Black & White

A WipeoutXL-esque hover racing game, maybe with open-world-racing-game vibes, with the deep technological complexity of a flight simulator like X-Plane.

I spent a bit of time in college tooling around with it, actually, even though it turns out that years later I'm really glad I didn't end up in the game development industry.

Way I figure it, it would require you to think about systems-level issues. It's a Formula-One styled thing so if you end up exceeding the altitude limit in competition, ten second penalty to your time. Do you want to use a lifting-body styled groundplane? Or lift-fans, knowing that that comes out of your power budget but will do a better job of keeping you away from the altitude limit, less susceptible to other people's wing vorticies, and avoid needing sturdy wheels? Etc.

As open world games have gotten more open world and popular these days, I suspect that the difference between then and now is that it might be funner with tune codes a la Forza Horizon so that you could play it without being quite as much of an expert. And maybe a lot of the more complicated mechanisms might actually be a little less intrusive when you can spend a bunch of time tooling around the landscape running into trees without the strain of competition before you actually get going.

There's a lot of flight simulator players and frankly part of the joy seems to be that, when it is really really complicated and accurate, you are learning skills that might be useless-ish but there's still that joy of learning and also of playing around with a large dangerous object that could kill a lot of people and not being worried about that when you flip an airliner upside down. And/or the "I could be an airliner/stunt pilot if the FAA wasn't so damn restrictive on the medical" vibes.

Something similar to the Sims, but with online federation and an AI component that simulates your characters actions when you’re offline, with a mobile app that allows you to check in occasionally to set goals or make decisions without having to fully engage.

I’d set it up so that if you host the game on your own instance, you could share those resources with others that don’t have their own instance. They would be literally renting a home from you, and they would literally be paying rental fees that you could get a cut of.

As an instance owner, you would still pay housing taxes to fund the game development. Ideally costs would be low, under $20/year.

Half Life 3 Portal 3 MDK 3 No One Lives Forever 3

A Shadowrun game that feels like the lovechild of Fallout and Deus Ex.

And I want BioWare to be the midwife.

A biblically accurate psychological horror where you're a night janitor in a large but rural and isolated church. It starts off with a floor cleaning simulator but weird shit keeps happening.

Black & White. A complete remaster and expansion of the original.

A Bureau 13 or SCP game. I like the sort of paranormal/horror aspects of both. I'd definitely want them to be story-rich though and real consequences for your choices (a la The Witcher or Baldurs Gate 3).

Polybuis

Sonic Adventure 3. Way more to the chao garden and if you don't think Imma have Crush 40 up in that shit you can fuck right off.

I'd probably do something like ARK: Survival Ascended; but rely less on 'realistic' dinosaurs, and do something closer to Horizon: Zero Dawn - where the creatures were still able to be somewhat freeform/modified from real species.

From there, I would toy around with a couple of ideas - such as semi-procedural maps (where say, The Island is the same up top, but each of the caves can be generated in different places, and the caves that generate are themselves procedural in nature). I want to be able to tell a story where necessary, but make 1:1 walkthroughs impossible - in order to force people who Google everything, to actually have to explore - while still getting some use out of the searched information.

I'd add a little bit of pal-world to the mix, requiring certain creatures to integrate/operate certain crafting tables, and also some RPG-ish elements where gear could be found that had special traits, such as run speed boots, etc.

Then I would rework boss battles and tames so that you didn't just zerg them with the "strongest" creature, but would have to mix stuff up - you would need a creature that helped reduce damage, a creature that could hold aggro, maybe some creatures could stack debuffs, and others could remove debuffs from your team, etc. Balance it so only 1 of these things couldn't defeat a boss, but some intelligent combination of them could do it pretty easy.

SimEarth remake.

Newer games in that genre are all too focused on terraforming or human impacts. I miss the geosphere/atmosphere/biosphere interactions.

A massive metroidvania rpg with a detailed character creator that takes place in a rural town that's gradually twisted and distorted, the population driven to madness by an unknown force. Something like that, anyway.

I'd make a new Breath of the Wild, but have Link be kidnapped and the game is a mix of stealth as Sheik and Roleplaying as the princess for hel0 from the different kingdoms.

A party-based, character interaction focused elderscrolls-like with yakuza style side stories out the ass.

A horror game with a "scare me to death" mode that uses those sub-audio notes that can freak people out to put the player way more on edge than they'd be normally.

A 3D port of cataclysm DDA with beautiful graphics and asynchronous co-op.

RDR3, Play as middle-aged Hosea, trying to raise Arthur in the way with Dutch's help.

A space game properly. With parts from darkorbit, eve online and all of the other shit. Maybe that already exists, but I haven’t found one yet.

I'd just take a new Fallout game by Obsidian with as many years as they'd need

Pong 2

Fallout 5 with a new engine and set in the Chicago wasteland.

An XCom style strategy/tactics game, but trying to find a balance of the original X-Com games' flexability and the modern XCom's streamlined polish.

Also, because I have a blank check, add VR support, and take advantage of the 3D positional controllers to to expand on the 3D enviroments. Rather than the simple 2-3 layer ones from the past, use more vertical levels, possibly more focus on units with grappling hooks or flight, or even using a similar format for air/space battles in 3D space.

I've got a few.

A reboot of quake... Quake 2016 if you wanna.

A NieR:Automata sequel. (or a remake of the PC port).

A looter-shooter type game, where instead of you building your weapons, you program them. Like, the unlocks in the game are sort of code blocks, which you combine together to upgrade the weapons and characters... Sorta like scratch: the game

It's a toss-up between remastering Deus Ex, or making Metroid: Breath of the Wild

I would remake Maplestory 2 to be what it SHOULD have been!! A 2.5D platformer. Without the couples NX Cash crap. Get that dating sim stuff outta here!!

Crusader Kings 2: Remastered

I would make a game like Anthem, but good. I loved many aspects of that game: the exosuits, the co-op focused gameplay, the open world, and yes, I like looter shooters.

Other things I would do: -Combat/traversal would be a bit more ground-based. There would be jet-assisted jumping and maybe limited flight, but not sustained flight -A modular weapon system. Take a base handgun/long gun/launcher/etc and modify it to be rapid-fire, scatter shot, sniper, target-chaining, or whatever else. -A post-apocalyptic world with a harsh environment that requires vehicles or exosuits to get around in outside of established towns/shelters.

Other game Ideas I had: -A single-player story-driven game where you play as a battlemage in your nation's military. The setting would be somewhat modern-day with magic. Due to the presence of magic, guns would be extremely limited or nonexistent, and I think would be an interesting idea to explore. -A gacha game without the gacha. I like games like Genshin Impact with the open world, exploration, characters to collect, team building, and regular content updates, but without the predatory monetization and focus on dull grinding and daily-logins to drive engagement. I'm not sure how feasible this would be without the amount of revenue a gacha game brings in, though. MMOs kinda do this, but I would want to build my own party, rather than play a single character.

What Anthem the Game could have been. There was SO much potential and they threw it all away!

Remake all the Star Wars space sims and bring them completely up to date.

I will die happy if someone does this.

Side scrolling fighter like X-Men or TMNT only Magnus: Robot Fighter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus,_Robot_Fighter

They had a great opportunity when they did Turok but somehow missed licensing Magnus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turok

Assuming I kept creative control throughout the entire project, I'd love to make Castlevania: 1999 - the epic story of how Julius Belmont killed Dracula once and for all. Man, I get hyped just thinking of how cool seeing Julius at his peak would be, considering he destroyed entire rooms of the dark castle as an old man.

Animal Crossing

I've had an idea for a while but I'm not exactly sure how to make it work the way I want it to. The basic idea is that I want a game where not only are there multiple playable characters but each character would have there own game genre. The idea started off as a combination of a personal joke about both Armored Core and Ace Combat sharing acronyms and the fact that I don't think I've every really seen a game where, if it has multiple playable characters, that the gameplay is really that different. Then it snowballed when I started thinking about how that would work and I thought about adding other games like Kingdom Hearts, Resident Evil 4, Besieged and Fallout/Elder Scrolls.

I know for sure that I'd want the game to be kind of complex for every character because I also like it when games give you the option to build the character you want to play as and allow character builds to be vastly different. As part of this, the game would also have magic, modern firearms and possibly futuristic technologies while keeping everything balanced so that more "primitive" weapons are still worth considering.

I think that in order for a game like this to work it would have to either be determined by the character as well or possibly just mission based like how the "AC" games are (or at least were, I've only ever played the PS1 and PSP games for both of them).

Do I have the power to force amicable licensing deals? If so a Marvel vs Capcom title worth the franchises name. If not, new Soul Calibur.

Evolution themed team combat game. Both teams start with a basic set of skills and abilities, claws, teeth, etc. And as you complete objectives (capture the flag, killing an opponent, etc) you get to evolve new traits. Think competitive Spore, with hints of TF2. There could be different maps based off of environments, deserts, oceans, rivers, mountains, with each having their own environmental hazards to contend with.

Original game concept:

• a single player playing two games at the same time using split screen. One with the left analogue stick and left shoulder buttons, another game with the right ones.

Improve on old games:

• A proper remake/remaster of Final Fantasy 7 while keeping the original turn-based combat, pacing, and story.

• A true sequel to Shadow of the Colossus.

• New Burnout game with proper tracks instead of open world.

Just thought of another one, a narrative game but where the leitmotifs are constructed like Arabic roots and templates, IE 3 note progressions and chords to assign affiliation and frames to put them within that shows their narrative role in that affiliation.

Morrowind with online multiplayer. Don't get me wrong, I like Skyrim and ESO is cool, just different. But I enjoyed my Morrowind experience and would love to see it modernized in some ways, mostly visual

I've had this idea for a Supernatural game. It's a side-scroller beat-em-up/Detective game, with town maps similar to Southpark stick of truth.

Deus Ex revival. Honestly that's probably cyberpunk but you can never have enough games in the genre IMO.

An open world, open ended, Way of the Samurai game...with all of the mechanics and branching stories and and and and and... basically any of the WotS games but on a massive scale and not 3 hours long.

An Assassins Creed game set in feudal Japan based around the samurai.

Sonic Mania 2.

A recent SimCity that is great.

I'd just pay The Fun Pimps to get their game out of alpha. Of maybe Savage 3.

Totally dynamic from every level and fully integrated between mobile and PC. I would build a real time strategy game that encompasses space civilizations that span planetary systems, overhead strategy, and a first person individual level. I would put in place elements where recruiting human participants in a collective dynamic is important but not required for marginal success.

Most of all, I would add game theory at all levels where fighting, killing, and waring is a disadvantage to more complicated social and political elements along with exploration and adventure. I would not restrict the explicit nature in any way. I would use all of it for a hard SciFi social critique, as all SciFi really is under the surface. And I would totally avoid the dystopian nonsense and fantasy magic bullshit like FTL travel, and aliens of any kind.

Banjo Threeie. Playing through those first two games with my younger brother are some great memories. I would convince him to take a week vacation so we could play through it uninterrupted.

World of darkness MMORPG, it has all the different WOD games in the same world, but they interact differently, so all the different vampires, wear wolves, wizards and demons.are vying for power in their own way, and the hunters are going full pvp, and changelings at just vibing.

Something like Avatar but with more humanity fuck yeah

I would call it "world" and it would just be a hyper detailed 1:1 recreation of earth. It would be more of a game engine than an actual game. So if you wanted a FPS you can do that. Want to build cities? you can do that. basically the use for it would be limitless.

A VR shooter of the Most Dangerous Game

An asteroid mining game in the style of shipbreaker, possibly same universe. The asteroid(s) should be more realistic in that they are far apart (maybe closer if you're mining in a ring, Saturn?) and surface is gravel-like. Cost-benifit of mining and returning certain materials, or using them as needed.

X4 Foundations with realistic solar systems and landable planets, and set in the full Star Wars Galaxy with all the Star Wars assets.

I have two and i would have to flip a coin.

1: Make a First Person Investigative Horror game with Xcom style mechanics. You travel all around the world investigating anomolies, recovering artifacts, and occasionally have action levels where you have to eliminate a cult or something like that. I'd like to use a Call of Cthulhu style stat system with some changes, where you never really increase your base stats, but your skills can increase. I'd want cybernetic enhancements to allow for actual increases to survivability and combat. Idk, I think it would be really awesome.

2: I want to make a space game like Elite Dangerous but with the ability to use RTS elements to make empires. Somethin like Mount and Blade with X4 and Eve Online, but with the actual scale of ED. Landing on a planet and taking a settlement to gain some control, buiding fleets and stations to solidify that control, negotiating with other empires and factions, and building armies for ground invasions on highly populated worlds. I just really want to start out with like a single ship or a tiny middle of nowhere station or settlement and grow a huge empire from it. And like early on, you would have stuff you think is powerful, but then you encounter actual military ships and they wipe the floor with you, so have to do more hit and run tactics before facing them head on. And maybe empires could have different tech levels, so a pirate gang has mostly civi ships with guns while a small size democracy has medium tech military units with some civi support ships and autocratic empires have huge capital ships, capable of glassing planets. And later on, you start getting attacked by things from the deep void like Reavers from Firefly and later Chaos demons from Warhammer. Maybe you know the Chaos demons exist and you need to build a powerful empire if you have any chance to survive.

And ship interiors, at least like X4.

Left for Dead 3

Sequel to freelancer.

Final Fantasy Tactics advanced 3 omg I need it so bad

Ultima 4 Quest of the Avatar.

I'd redo shadowrun so it was fps but with access points for hackers riggers etc. so combat may take place here, but support staff is x miles away. AI badies so it's not a cake run.

Berserk. Maybe a one piece game after it gets finished. Both should be open world games. I know Elden Ring and other dark souls games are inspired by Berserk but we actually need a berserk game. Also it would be interesting to see a proper one piece open world game since one piece world building is absolutely wonderful.

Final Fantasy VII. Don’t change the story. Don’t change the combat. Don’t change the open world. Don’t add a damn card game. Don’t add a damn VR training session. Don’t split it up into episodes.

Just update the graphics and fix bugs.

If people like it, then do VIII next.

Complete remaster of Xenogears, with a fully fleshed out disc 2.

Lost Planet IV

Team Fortress 2 Remake

(Because we all know Valve can't count to 3.)

"Remake" of industry giant 2. Not exactly though, more like similar because there are some painpoints to addess.

Theme Hospital, as an appimage.

I think I'd remake some old 2d game, upgrade it with modernized graphics and add in a few extra tricks, smarter enemies, better physics representation.

Things like Lode Runner, Wings of Fury (which has been remade to death, but they're not right), and the original Mario.

Specific game? I dunno. But I can think of features that I'd include. Like, in an FPS, I would incorporate things like drop, windage, the need to lead targets that are moving, bullet travel time over distance, actual bullet spread (e.g., you can still easily miss at 500y even if you have the drop, wind, etc. calculated perfectly because you're using a firearm that's only 5MOA) speed of sound for sound effects (e.g., observing something and hearing the sound from it dependent on how far away it is), realistic damage (getting shot is likely fatal, crippling if you aren't armored, and healing takes weeks with good medical attention, enemies not necessarily realizing they've been shot until they pass out from blood loss, and/or are still capable of shooting you if they've been shot in the leg), practical movement speeds and scaling (e.g., walking across D.C. should take about 24 hours, not just an hour or two if you don't run into super mutants), etc. In short, I'd make certain kinds of games much more realistic, and much, much harder.

As for the why, it's hard enough to win a match against someone that's a USPSA grand master; you either need to get the drop on them, or be really fast; you shouldn't have to mag dump into them. Gun fights are really deadly, but they're often treated like magic in games.

Socom 2.

I don't think I would want to be part of the creation process but another Zero Escape or Somnium Files game

I would have Puppeteer from the PS3 remade for PS5 with full 4k HDR graphics. What a damn shame that game came out exclusive to PS3 as the PS4 was launching. Why they didnt release it as a cross gen game is beyond me because it's fantastic!

I want a DIFFICULT competitive (non pvp) rpg with REAL money on the line.

Every 12 months you buy a character for $10, you can have a maximum of 30 hours of play time on that character for the month (with some form of real ID checking to prevent multiple accounts) and every character who dies (absolute permadeath no exceptions) kicks $5 into the kitty.

Do you go out hard early in the month to get the best loot and most xp or be patient and let other people discover this months mechanics, be more likely to survive but also more likely to fall behind the curve? Wait to learn the different types of enemies or go full Leroy? Tweak your character to suit the different meta every month or be focused and pray? The interesting part would be that once it gets down to the last 100 players, people start getting paid a % of the kitty with #100 getting free entry next season and it going up from there.

Custer's Revenge remastered

A game that contains all games. You want to play an RPG? Racing? Fighting? Survival? Horror? Rogue-like? Souls-like? Puzzle? RTS? FPS? My game has all that and more.

I'd have to take a poll to see which of my many ideas I would do. But it would most likely be something like Dwarf Fortress, but sci-fi, with space travel and such.

A Labyrinth game with well endowed Goblin King and a Bog of Eternal Stench and doors that give you riddles.

Dune: Universe.