I was thinking to myself while on the menu screen of TU, and then something came to me. All the gamemodes we have now and will have in the future are fairly diverse, but one genre there is nothing of is some form of Puzzle or true adventure. What I propose is a much longer Gamemode named “Diversion” (crap name). It would be similar to Portal in the aspect of it being a more sci-fi themed, with many elements of a puzzle to get your way through the levels. Would be designed to work in coop and in singleplayer. Each map would be around 6-10 levels (decent sized levels).
One map I had in mind was “Void”, this map would be very similar to portal 2’s feel of being in a giant open facility. I’m not saying to copy Portal at all, and really none of the Portal-related ideas need to be applied.
TL;DR - Just having a Puzzle/Adventure Gameworld where its a bit more open-world and challenging than avoiding some obstacles would be nice in my opinion.
Puzzle gameworlds are extremely difficult to produce; coming up with puzzles (at least for me personally) is a difficult task. Not only this, but once you know the solution to a puzzle, thats it, you know it, its done for and every time you are confronted by it in the future you instantly know how to solve it.
This is why an old GMod Tower gamemode, Puzzle Impossible, was scrapped; It had almost zero replayability. Here’s a little video for a taste.
If an adventure gameworld could be done well, Im down.
EvKem really put it best but a puzzle game could technically still be done. The hard part is making it random every time while also keeping it from becoming monotonous to solve (for example, Sudoku can have seemingly limitless puzzles and could easily be randomly generated, but once you know all the tricks it to devolve into going through routines; while fun for some, it might not hold long lasting appeal to everyone).
If I had to suggest some form of puzzle game, I’d go for a Lobby minigame where everyone competes to solve the same, random puzzle fastest. One possibility could be solving planar graphs (they even have their pseudo code posted). In short, a planar graph is one where there is some arrangement such that no lines between points cross each other. While the graph is technically already planar, these puzzles ask you to rearrange the points so that no lines cross. Once you have done this, the puzzle is solved. Say what you want about Math classes, but my Discrete Math teacher gave the link to our class and it’s actually a fairly interesting (and often infuriating) passtime.
Puzzle mechanics like Puzzle Impossible could be procedurally generated with occasional random events so it’s another level (almost) every time. If you include other Players trying to shove you into the lasers, it might just be replayable.