Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game (opens in new tab)

Since we're listing games with long-lasting consequences, I'll have to recommend folks who have been living under a rock to play the entire Mass Effect trilogy – to me, still the greatest game ever made (and I've played far too many games)

Deus Ex had choices with real consequences lasting throughout the game too, fwiw.

See dwarf fortress for a counter-example. I’m of the opinion that story-writing is a red-herring in video games; an attempt to apply “tricks” from other mediums, by disregarding the “interactivity” of video games. A story can be sufficiently created by means of the player’s operations, if the simulation is sufficiently complex and built to support it.

Another example is competitive fps games like CoD/Halo/Quake — the story (and singleplayer mode in general) is wholly unimportant; players will continue to have, and create, stories, despite the multiplayer modes offering little more than a setting. Interaction between each other becomes the story you tell.

No man’s sky (NMS) was simply a bad game, and poorly implemented procedural generation (procedurally generated games are appealing in that you’re exploring the system/simulation, and trying to get a handle on it. No man’s sky had a lot of “elements” to its generation, but its system was very basic; it didn’t take long to mostly understand it, and it was sufficiently complex to allow interesting new phenomena to emerge). NMS’s failure says very little about what procedural generation can offer, because it didn’t make a very good attempt at it. Spore is another example of a failed attempt. Borderlands is another, to a degree. None of these games understood that it’s the system thats interesting, not the combinatorial explosion. Thus their procedural generation is totally unsatisfying, and uninteresting.

The interesting thing in the article is that there is no story, yet it holds the writer's interest. Narrative is not a hard requirement. Same for, e.g. Minecraft, or Legos, or other common toys.

And also, Dwarf Fortress is essentially a story building simulator, it is designed to generate interesting stories.

anyway, just some thoughts, people get fun from different things.

This is similar to what I remember from playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. I wasn't very good at the actual game, but there was a post-credit sequence I would skip to where you could just walk, drive, and fly around quiet, rural, and sparsely islands. The simulation is pretty unremarkable by todays standards but being able to explore a huge open world at my own pace was incredible at the time.

One encounter that stands out in my memory was of driving along a remote road in the middle of the night and coming across a bad traffic collision where a truck had completely crushed a small car along with its driver. Something about the brutal and almost mundane nature of the encounter has stuck with me.

Half of the pleasure of Sir You Are Being Hunted is that it's a very good English countryside simulator, with occasional murderous robots.

Reminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead Redemption:

"What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse."

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-a...

See Euro Truck Simulator. These kinds of simulation games have a pretty decent niche community, though I'm not sure they actually constitute a decently sized market. They're really relaxing though, in the right vein.

But it's still a balance between reality and the interesting subset of it; having to manually brush your horse with a mouse would be awful, while requiring that you take your horse to a stable every night would be fine.

The main issue is that to design a decent simulator like that though, you have to avoid basically 90% of modern gaming trends. Fast travel, mechanically-intense play, grinding missions, small-but-numerous subquests, etc are exactly what a modern (A)RPG pushes for, and are exactly how you ruin a game like euro truck simulator. It's the mundanity, scheduling and (some) repetition that makes the game satisfying.

I loved the outdoor simulator aspect of RDR2. It might be my favorite part of the game. But I would get bored of it very quickly if it was the only thing I could do. Hunting and fishing and scouting were fun because they gave me a break from grinding missions, and it let me customize my character. But I wanted a customized character for when I was playing missions and working the story.

So the hunting and fishing and birding is fun because the rest of the game contextualizes it.

There's definitely survival games in this vein that have done quite well, The Long Dark is probably one of the better ones. Quite playable before they even had the story for this kind of thing.

There used to be.

Wilderness (1985)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/wilderness-a-survival-adventu...

From the sound of it, RDR2 would be a great starting point to build a modern implementation of Wilderness.

Well, the gameifized version of that particular trope is quite popular (survival games, that is camping with the added spice of death).

I don't know to what extent you can remove risk-reward loops without making it a product that can't pay for its own development.

That’s basically what Firewatch is (and it’s fantastic!!!)

Aren't there survival games like "Long Dark" and "Unreal World" that do this already.

Honestly, if VR improves its immmersion VR horseback rides could be quite therapeutic for the right individuals.

Absolutely. Just do a search on YouTube for bushcraft videos. There’s a market.

We did. People used to spend more time outside, more time walking. Older novels seem to mention animals and plants modern people wouldn't recognize.

And of course there just existed more nature. We are destroying our environment and are losing many species. It's getting harder and harder to just enjoy a carefree joke about it...

Back when I was a lad, we used to get up before we'd gone to bed to go down the mines!

There's really not much equivalence to anywhere, other than the different biomes resemble ones you'd see in the US (outside of a side mission to Guarma, a fictional island near Cuba). There's a swamp area similar to Louisiana with a delta city called Saint Denis (pronounced San Da Knee). To the West (yes, West) of that is the 'southern' town of Rhodes with plantations and antebellum houses. Nearby is a former Civil War battlefield. Further west is the typical wild west frontier, with the nothern areas being colder and mountainous down to the more southern areas being grass and desert plains.

In game there is talk about real places (like New York, Cuba, Tahiti) but there is little context to where those are in respect to where the player is.