Ridiculously ambitious games that you really want to be great but are probably going to be meaningless and boring

inspired by the grand tradition of Spore and the likely outcome of No Man's Sky
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/03/08/everything-is-coming-to-ps4/

In Everything, every single thing is a playable character; if you can see it, you can be it. The game lets you see the entire universe from the point of view of the thousands of things in it. In other words, there is no distinction between you and the world, or between a level and a character. All these things experience and interact with the world differently. Everything lets you be anything you want. If you ever wanted to see what it’s like to be a horse, or a paperclip, or the sun, this is for you. Your main power in the game is Being (there are more but I won’t ruin the surprise).

I hope I'm wrong of course but oh the hubris

Scribblenauts ended up being pretty good

yeah, but when was the last time you played it

me? a long time. but my kids love it still.

maybe you have to be young to engage with these. i hope not.

I dunno, Everything sounds rad, if I had the $ I'd think about a PS4 to try it

What would be great is if this actually turned out to be a Diablo clone.

question, in Everything can i be myself, playing the game on PS4. until that's included via patch i'm steering clear

Hope you can be a goat.

finally, the chance to experience life as a paperclip

demis hassabis' republic: the revolution promised something vaguely similar back in the early 00s - i remember breathless previews promising you could zoom in across anywhere in this huge soviet city and it would have amazing ai. it was shit. still, hassabis went on to found deepmind and is now crazy rich after googel acquired it

david braben's the outsider promised endless interaction between ingame narrative elements and it ended up getting cancelled altogether

life as a paperclip:

http://cnet2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2015/03/17/eae09203-8694-4c8d-a1fb-9a209632c67a/resize/570xauto/e5d85581cd7a2a7fb9d714483e777b22/conquered-by-clippy.jpg

I want a game where I can see what it's like to blast zombies as a horse, a paper clip or the sun.

In all honesty this does sound interesting but I will probably never get to experience the disappointment the reality provides. I finally got to play Scribblenauts recently and it is a fun little game but its "everything you can think of" claim is wayyyyy overstated.

Goat Simulator

my kids also love goat simulator.

we bought I Am Bread but it isn't really hitting the spot

am0n, my comment about being a goat was a direct ref to goat simulator, just in case you thought I hadn't heard of it and genuinely wanted to experience life as a goat and were providing a handy tip.

Well, that was a massive run-on sentence. Sorry.

"Oregon Patriots Occupied My Butt"

http://www.amazon.com/Leonard-Delaney/e/B00E86C4B0

^ NSFW, sorry

paperclips don't have eyes dammit

I want to play a game based on "How It's Made"

No Man's Sky
everything Peter Molyneux makes

emil.y lol my bad, it also fits as an answer to the thread title

God I'd forgotten all about Molyneux's stuff. Black and WHite was arse. But I did love Dungeon Keeper.

In defence of Everything, it's by David OReilly and he's great, he did Mountain and the awesome A Glitch is a Glitch episode of Adventure Time and a bunch of other stuff, which means I'm guessing that description at the top of the thread must be at least 50% tongue in cheek.

Anyway yep, Milo and Kate! And the whole of VR in general might end up in this category tbh (though I really hope not).

I remember really looking forward to the fact that Black and White would know my location and the current weather in that location and would recreate that weather in the game in real time. NO IDEA why I thought that would be in any way valuable/interesting/fun?

I quite like that concept. I didn't find Black and White appealing, ever, but that seems like a halfway amusing idea.

In practice it just meant it was raining all the time.

molyneux is such a fascinating character - a genuinely visionary producer who created some amazing games (populous! syndicate! theme park! dungeon keeper!) and then slowly deteriorated into a misleading-quote-generator seemingly incapable of delivering on any of his promises.

does anyone understand wtf godus is supposed to be?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Etvideogamecover.jpg

ground zero that one.

Your main power is "being"? That's a great new-agey description of most inanimate objects. Who the hell has wondered what it's like to be the sun? a) hot b) boring

Hey guys I'm working on a game where you get to experience what it's like to be a rock. Any size from pebble to boulder, your choice. It's called "This Game Sucks".

link your kickstarter ffs what are you new to this

"Everything" the game, wow, i mean bravo dude, hope you enjoyed your first experience with weed.

Your main power in the game is Being

that's not a power, that is the default state of everything in the universe.

did anyone here play "Mountain"?

ah, checking the Steam reviews on it:

“Nothing You Do Matters in This Game, But You’ll Still Obsess Over It.”
WIRED

About This Game
~ you are mountain - you are god ~

Ambient procedural mountain game, as seen on The Internet.
FEATURES
- no controls- automatic save
- audio on/off switch
- time moves forward
- things grow and things die
- nature expresses itself

so it's a conceptual screensaver more or less? no controls at all.

i "played" mountain. conceptual screensaver is about right.

it's really difficult for me to take this seriously at all knowing there is 50+ years of conceptual/experimental film and video art much of which has mined this exact territory a million different ways.

i am more interested in replaying E.T. now that someone posted that. the game gets a lot of crap (mostly for the bad control getting out of pits i think) but is a hugely ambitious game especially considering how quickly it was made. you have an open world, you have inventory, you have a collect-a-thon, you have stealth mechanics, etc.

No Man's Sky looks incredible and the concept is genuinely impressive. plus it sounds like it has enough gamey elements in it to make it fun to actually play.

i replayed ET some time ago but even as a flash game it's mostly indefensible and unplayable

can't believe Mountain is any worse than yr average clicker game tbh

mountain isn't a game in any way, at least a clicker game is engaging (in the same way that heroin addiction is, yes, but even so)

average clicker game is not proclaiming to be a deep meaningful ambient experience of life and death and meaning

my gosh, and they're forcing people to buy it you say? that's just heinous

nah seriously tho, it's hardly the first callow "art statement" somebody's tried to make a few quid off of, and it's not like they're charging full price and pretending it's a "real" game like most of the worst stuff on this thread

i bought mountain, can still afford to eat, no regrets

yeah i think it's important that people still churn out experimental bullshit that ends up being hugely unsatisfying because it's part of a balanced gaming ecosysem

you must have loved the early 80s in gaming then

otoh Gog are asking for 40 of our British pounds to pre-order No Man's Sky and imo anybody who buys into that before we've had a chance to find out how little gameplay is in there...well, they've got a lot more disposable income than i have

xp

i spent the early 80s playing mainly on a ZX81 so hell yes

doh/sorry :-p my USA bias creeping in! i forget about neat computer systems like Sinclair and Spectrum i never got to play.

seeing the Atari crash first-hand, playing those trashy games, reading about the ET landfill, looking at stacks of $1 clearance titles at Big Lots, is the earliest memory i have of any video game culture. it wasn't a wasteland in many places.

i could see a VR headset + No Man's Sky being a really amazing investment, even if there isn't much gameplay

but yeah too rich for me. gotta get Dark Souls 3 first

E.T. had stealth?

i just remember it as a kid it made absolutely no sense. and then years later finding out about the creators ambition and how it flopped. kids heads weren't ready i guess

evading the FBI agents

oh yeah could you use the bushes for that, or was it just running away

pac man was a stealth game if you think about it

pac man not a stealth game, it was the first half of an interactive explanation of Borges' "Two Kings and Two Labyrinths"

unfortunately the intended sequel, "pac man starving to death in a desert," was cancelled halfway into alpha

that was E.T.'s ending
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/27/tech/gaming-gadgets/atari-et-video-game/

Funnily enough this April fools 'best game ever' preview, back from 1990, used Bullfrog and Molyneux as the development team:

https://archive.org/stream/theone-magazine-19/TheOne_19_Apr_1990#page/n7/mode/2up

that april fool seems a bit shitty in retrospect. was it really impossible for a game like that to have been made in the early 90s 16 bit era? it made a few wild claims like the fps rate but there doesn't to be any major fool flags - the fps rate thing maybe? dunno, it's not a fool on the level of spaghetti trees and i can imagine being gutted by finding out, rather than thinking 'doh, silly me'

I remember being impressed anyway. Upgraded Amigas and PC's weren't really at an affordable price for your average home gamer.

bought my first (only?) Amiga with money from a housing resettlement in about 91, don't think i'd have thought of buying one otherwise

there must be 4 or 5 Molyneux games i've desperately wanted to like only to get bored and give up trying after a few hours' gameplay

That Mountain game is like one dollar. Hardly a rip off. I could see it being like a neat ~ambient~ thing, put it on while cooking dinner or reading and look over every once in a while to see what's happening in your little world.

i bought mountain twice, and have mainly engaged with it that way. it's really quite a good thing.

it's not trying to be MEANINGFUL in ways that ppl seem to be eliding it w/? the tone is more tao lin than paolo coelho

i bought mountain twice, and have mainly engaged with it that way.

haha @ how i read this

tbf there's a lot of games i have mainly engaged with that way, largely out of forgetting to check my GOG account before looking at steam sales /:

having tried it over probably six or seven sittings, I think I'm going to have to go with Death Stranding here
for all the concerns you thought of when you realized the reason for this thread being resurrected was probably gonna be death stranding

I’ve beaten it and am still playing it. Everything is meaningless.

I bought the latest God of War because I was looking for something new to play and it was $20. It is silly and not very good so far. The father/son relationship is unintentionally pretty funny at least.

God of War gets better after you sacrifice your son to Leviathan in exchange for a bonus ability on your axe, and your son becomes the final boss

Karl ruthless about spoiling the Big Twist.

Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey

I want to believe but...

Grand Theft Dinosaur

i could see a VR headset + No Man's Sky being a really amazing investment

it's not

waiting for star citizen to come out and fulfill its promise as hot garbage... its wild that there's an army of chris roberts stans who show up in stories critical about the game.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/11/08/an-upcoming-star-citizen-mission-will-let-you-leap-from-ship-to-ship/#comments

check out the comments by 'crodemberg'.