So I got a bug in my butt to install Mortal Kombat 11 last night and was doing the story mode which is basically like a movie with intermittent fights and it occurred to me that I love Mortal Kombat but just the characters, the worldbuilding, and the lore. I've never been big on fighting games and as I age, I am finding it harder and harder to pull off special combos quick enough to even do much other than slapping buttons and hoping for the best.
My favorite MK game was one of the ones on PS2 where the story mode was basically God of War gameplay turning it from a fighter into an action adventure game.
If Midway were to make a Mortal Kombat title that was like Dark Souls but set on Outworld or something, that would definitely be my jam.
Another would be Warhammer 40k. I am not at all interested in the PnP gameplay nor a lot of the video games. But I love the lore and the game Rogue Trader is fucking dope, playing more like a traditional CRPG in that setting and not an RTS or straight up shooter.
Do y'a have any games like that? Where you like everything about them except the actual gameplay?
I feel like a lot of third person action adventure games would be better off as turn based RPGs since the action gameplay usually sucks and smashing the action button 100,000 times is not fun after an hour or so.
Witcher 3 needs a turn based mode more than anything.
I love the setting of Control but would prefer if it were more of a tactical FPS with less spongy enemies. The way I play it now is basically on super easy because I just hate the mobs and bosses.
Some games that I like thematically, but don't enjoy the gameplay on:
Elden Ring. If it was more RPG-like, avoided respawning enemies and reliance on learning patterns, I think I'd like it more.
Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don't like the gameplay
simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.
Cyberpunk 2077. This isn't bad, but I wanted something like a Bethesda game, and I got something like a Grand Theft Auto game. I think that it'd be much better as a Bethesda-like game. Oh, though I never really liked Johnny Silverhand as a character much.
but on that particular game, I'd rather it wasn't an online game, were a single-player open-world RPG. It's more like that than when it launched, but...
To expand on that: a whole slew of games that are really intended to be played multiplayer, but where I only want to play against the computer. I don't like playing games multiplayer. I would buy an expansion for these that went back and put in some major single-player improvements and good game AI. Carrier Command 2can be played single-player, but it's kinda repetitive and not balanced well for single-player teams. Wargame: Red Dragon. I like the game and the setting, but the AI is very difficult to enjoy playing against; just too primitive. Steel Division 2, later in Eugen's series, really improved on the AI. Defense of the Ancients 2; the whole MOBA genre is really oriented towards playing with real humans.
Scanner Sombre. This is a mostly-psychological horror game, where the gimmick is that you can only see something that you've scanned with this LIDAR-type gizmo. You're walking through a cave complex, and the mechanic of things slowly emerging and having to manage your visibility really works in a horror environment. But...the game isn't really very replayable, and I like replayable games. I wish that someone would basically take the stumbling-around-in-a-cave-with-a-scanner thing and make a different sort of game out of it. (Note: If you play this, I played the Windows version in Proton. The Linux-native build was extremely unstable for me.)
And just for the hell of it, the opposite
some where I like the gameplay, but not the theme:
The Binding of Isaac. I love the action roguelike gameplay. I don't like the gore/fetus/abuse/scatological stuff all that much. I'll deal with it, but I'd have liked the game more if it had a different theme.
Probably all gacha games, like Genshin Impact or FGO. There's a lot about those games I like, but the fact that they're gacha actively gets in the way. If they were just regular games, most of the problems, which boil down to maximising play time like tedious grinding or filler in the main quests, would disappear.
Quite a few games as a service games look like they could have been turned into interesting single player story based games if, you know, someone bothered to write a story for it.
Brink for example had fantastic art assets and back story, but no actual story.
Hades and Hades 2. I am someone who is a huge fan of visual novels and the games already have a fantastic dynamic between characters and amazing writing.
i just hate that I have to play a game genre im not good at to get more of a story I'm extremely invested in. and characters I'm attached to.
I tend to only play a Pokemon game every decade or so because the formula has been basically the same since the original: you catch pokemans and then cock fight them. And I just only have so much bandwidth for that.
But over here in Pokopia I'm building habitats for them and we are all hanging out, and it's awesome. Yes, I will build you a little house, Bulbasaur.
Different genre? I dunno about that myself, but my favorite game of all time is the old DOS era game Descent, and Descent 2 of course. Descent 3 was alright as well, but something just seemed off about their weapon damage balance or something.
Their successor game Overload came along quite a while after their full development team split up for whatever reasons, but I'd absolutely love to play Overload on a system that isn't a 3 frames per second potato..
Someone remade Portal as a browser-based side scroller, and I fucking loved that game.
I played through Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, and with how hard every NPC was flirting with Aloy, I wondered "Why isn't this a post-apocalyptic dating sim?"
In Divinity: Original Sin II, there's a game-breaking mechanic where you can plant tea plants in pots, grow new tea plants, harvest them, and then use the buffs from drinking tea to get infinite moves during fights. I actually got into the whole management of the tea farm, and I don't want to totally throw out the RPG combat, but I might like it if farming and then using your crops to win fights was an entire game unto itself, rather than just a broken exploit.
I'd love it if Secret World (preferably the original release, not Legends) was a singleplayer RPG instead of the half-assed MMORPG that it was. You could lower the enemy density and respawns, maybe add some computer-controlled party members Guild Wars 1 style, and it would be the dopest thing ever. The lore, vibe, and worldbuilding in this game is immaculate, it's just a shame it's strapped to an MMO framework.
I wish souls games were more like action games similar to DMC. I hate the clunky and slow movement and attacks. I loved hyper light drifter. Despite it being a souls like in mechanics, I loved how fast paced it was.
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