Yeah, one of the challenges (and eye-opening moments) in my early game design career was realizing how much work went into games. When I put game design on hiatus for a while to become a game reviewer, I think I was always a little tender toward games because I recognized the work that went into them, but also because I saw them in the sense of having interesting and novel features. That these features were often pretty bad for players didn't really matter, in a sort of mad scientist sense.
I always run afoul of word limits, but this one was pretty easy for me, because I told myself at the very start that I wasn't going to do any of the endless specific things that I don't really need, but like to see.
I'm fairly certain that a lot of the "technical limitations" that we currently see in video games are products of having the desire to create an experience that is very heavily focused on particular elements. Something like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld is closer to this vision than people would care to admit, and they simulate relatively large worlds with an incredible number of interconnections. Getting that complexity to the point where you can take on the role of a single person and explore the world in a convincing manner is the difficulty. A lot of roguelikes are cutting edge in this sense; games like Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or GearHead do things that no AAA or even A-list title has gone beyond merely dreaming of in how systems and narratives unfold. But, of course, they're freed of the burden of representing these by limiting themselves to a very selective, hard-core audience. GearHead is actually a counter-point to this, and I consider it to be my favorite roguelike and one of the more "accessible" true roguelikes.
We'll see how it goes. I'm not really sure that I'm in the running for the top prize because this isn't your typical "dream game" and there's a lot of stuff that could be fleshed out further. However, maybe that's a virtue in a tight competition.
Haven't even heard of those two games, I have heard about Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld though. And yes, these games have incredibly good AI for simulation. Most players don't really know what they want, just like most people (me included) don't know what they want most of the time and we just go with the flow.
In fact I think I've only heard one person ever say that he doesn't like open-ended worlds without objective or meaning. I do agree to a certain degree there, but I think it depends ultimately on what we like to do.
Well, my concept of "dream game" is somewhat similar to yours and while I agree that many things could be fleshed out, to me at least it's interesting to see the justification behind your choices. My post is the same in that regard, it's not about my "dream" game since I have tons, but it's mostly about the reasons why a game would be considered a dream game...
Will check out those two games.
I'm a wealth of wisdom on obscure games. A while back someone asked if anyone in my local group could "Remember Infantry Online?" and I was the only person in the room who had even heard of it (other than him) and played it (albeit not very much, because I discovered it well past its glory days and was more interested on a theoretical level).
Sadly, my knowledge of more modern games is less expansive than that of the games that were around when I was a kid.
But that's cool, a lot of modern games aren't really that good as some people make them to be. I have a draft ready to give some love to old Tabletop RPG games. I admit I thought they were really boring until I actually played them.
I mean, the thing about modern games is that they need to iterate successfully over old ones to be worth playing for people who have had good experiences for old games. Some of it's taste, but there's also a lot of questions about whether or not people are really delivering quality. I think there are a lot of good modern games, and that maybe even games on average are better than they used to be, but they struggle to really break even with old classics.