The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.
I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.
I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.
For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.
And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"
https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code. Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/
There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/
Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html
yduJ's venerable duck tutorial: https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-duck...
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/
For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by.
Similar two-part writeup starts here :
This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.
Can’t wait for the next part…
In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.