Games you think will be "Hidden Gems™" once technology improves and stops them running like shit.

[Judge Dredd]

I might get shit for this but... many VR games.

The biggest hurdles of VR are the cost, the space required, and motion sickness. Headsets are getting better and cheaper, the general consensus seems to be that motion sickness only exists until you get used to it, and games are slowly figuring out general UI and design problems.

Everyone knows the big games. Palov, Half-Life Alyx, etc. But you don't have to look far to find a trove of interesting looking games that no one outside the dedicated VR community has heard of.

I didn't even notice Prey ran like shit, or maybe I got lucky and it didn't.

Highly recommended, and the Mooncrash DLC. Just copy your saves to a backup when playing Mooncrash, once you complete the game it makes it so you have to start a new save from scratch to play again.

Prey has such a great world, mechanics, and the way they intersect is brilliant. Highly recommended if you like System Shock 2 or even Bioshock.

I'd recommend playing on easy.

All it changes is damage dealt and received, and most of the tedium and backtracking of the game is picking through junk and bringing it to the recycler to make bullets and first aid kits. It also means you can experiment with fun mods instead of min-maxing.

 

[Drain Todger]

Stellaris. Even without mods, the late game runs like absolute shit. Something about how pop jobs are calculated. The devs current solution to this? Just don't allow players to have as many pops!

It didn't work.

The Clausewitz Engine is pure shit and was never meant for a game like Stellaris. All of the late game problems are because they overhauled the pop system in a patch, introducing districts, freeing pops from the building tiles, et cetera. There is so much math running in the background now, it's absurd. Every in-game month, the game takes all the pops and their consumption/production and tries to figure out the sum total of all their inputs and outputs. For every empire. Instead of adding and subtracting individually like that, they could have abstracted it into a set of simple functions. Like, this planet has x population, apply a wealth curve to the data to find out what the ratio of unemployed, lower, middle, and upper class pops is. Then, adjust production rate of the buildings accordingly (each building having an optimal economic class range). So, if a planet is "lower-income", menial things like mining, agriculture, and energy structures get a bonus, but if it's higher-income or middle-income, you get a bonus to research, factories, cultural output, administration, and so on. The income potential of a planet would be decided by its trade value (i.e. how many other planets border it and whether or not it constitutes an economic hub). So, basically, you'd get a bonus for developing your colonies such that fresh resources are gathered on the "wild colonial frontier" and transported further to the center of the empire to be utilized to make useful goods.

 

[Billy Beer]

OP, which Prey? OG Prey or new shitty Prey?

OT: Advent Rising.

 

[sasazuka]

It already is generally recognized as a top-tier Sega Dreamcast racing game but Metropolis Street Racer, the first game in the series that became Project Gotham Racing on the XBox, would be greatly improved if it had a simple "Pause -> Retry" option rather than having to end the race, go through something like six menu screens, and then have the Dreamcast reload the entire map all over again just to restart a single race or event.

 

[Tom Nook's Gloryhole]

It already is generally recognized as a top-tier Sega Dreamcast racing game but Metropolis Street Racer, the first game in the series that became Project Gotham Racing on the XBox, would be greatly improved if it had a simple "Pause -> Retry" option rather than having to end the race, go through something like six menu screens, and then have the Dreamcast reload the entire map all over again just to restart a single race or event.

Sounds to me like a mechanics issue where the map isn't fully loaded into memory so the menus disguise some of the hidden loading.

Which is a more irritating issue than most because it's a console limitation issue that wouldn't even be fixed by simply brute forcing it in an emulator.

 

[Crunchy Oats]

Everything here: http://gemtree.com/program.htm
Edit: Looks like their downloads are gone now

 

[BlueSpark]

Breath of the Wild. It will be nice to actually play the game at a decent framerate on official hardware.

 

[Calandrino]

I always thought the God of War games might be tolerable if not for the near-constant slowdown during QTEs, but they were too lazy to fix it even for the HD versions.

 

[Mike Stoklasa]

Cruelty Squad

 

[verymuchawful]

Stuff like AI Dungeon and NovelAI when(if) they no longer need extensive processing through cloud services. I'm not sure if the technology will ever really be there. I just know it'd be cool to open up a program on your own computer and generate AI stories without turning your Nvidia card into a space heater and having to wait 10+ seconds for generated text to come back.