groze: <snipity snip>

Matewis: Realistic combat flight sims perhaps? At least modern ones.

Breja: It's not like they were any more logical back when the genre seemingly ruled the world. If anything, it's the opposite.

jonwil: In terms of the decline of RTS games (or at least RTS games from major entities rather than RTS games from niche publishers that get little exposure), I suspect the abomination that is Command & Conquer 4 has something to do with it.

I got that game for free and I still haven't bothered to actually try and finish the single player campaign. Its like they basically took C&C and removed all the things that made it worth playing.

Ancient-Red-Dragon: The RTS genre is dead is because the Blizzard RTS games turned it into an extreme hardcore micromanagement chore and after a while people realized that such gameplay is not strategic (winning simply boils down to whoever has faster & more accurate fine motor skills in their fingers and therefore can hit more keys & mouseclicks per minute) and not fun.

_ChaosFox_: Same here.

Part of the problem lies in the absolutism of puzzles in P&C adventures. In real life, if there's a problem to be solved, there's usually more than one solution to it. If you want to get a ball down from a tree, you can throw stones at it, climb the tree, prod it down with a very long stick or whatever. If it was a LucasArts adventure, you would probably have to make a pendulum out of a stick, a stone and a piece of string, attach a balloon to it, let it float up the tree and knock the ball down.

I'll be honest - I don't like LucasArts adventures. I find them illogical and I detest the way that they hold singular solutions to be absolute. As you say, Daedalic has the same problem. WadJet Eye went in the other direction - the puzzles were absolutely logical, but at the same time, that made them incredibly easy, because only having one solution meant that you had to be nudged to that single solution.

Breja: Still, in terms of puzzles I really don't think there is a worse game than the first Discworld. The graphics and the voice acting is all top-notch, but the puzzles are not just illogical, they are cruel and demented. Even for someone who knows the books. Someone once said that to finish the Discworld without a walkthrough is to see the face of god - a cruel, insane god, and that's a spot on description.

F4LL0UT: I think action games where the protagonist is not a human or at least humanoid in general. Until the late 90's action games where you controlled a vehicle rather than a human being, whether it was realistic air planes or tanks or something sci-fi like some hover tank, space ship or mech, were pretty much the norm and often among the biggest releases. I guess this was gradually killed, first mainly by first person shooters and later more and more also by third person games. It only occurred to me rather recently how rare these kinds of games have become and virtually extinct among AAA titles. Sure, there's still vehicular combat these days but usually just as a feature of a game where you control a human being that CAN assume control of vehicles.

It's particularly crazy because these kinds of games should be a lot cheaper to produce, saving developers tons of animations and requiring lower graphical fidelity. I get it that, for example, a game that allows you to "be a high tech police vehicle" (like in G-Police or Future Cop) isn't as marketable as a game where you're an alcoholic cop on a path of revenge for the murder of his wife who can control sci-fi vehicles but come on, it's so much wasted potential design-wise. It really occurred to me when I played Dark Void not that long ago which, admittedly, is largely a mediocre cover based third person shooter but at least let me catch a glimpse of what would be possible if we had more games like Crimson Skies or Rogue Squadron these days. Most importantly it was huge fun to me because it played fundamentally differently than 99% of action games these days. Plus, games like Wing Commander showed us that you CAN have that highly marketable human element in a game that is about some sort of vehicular combat.

Sadly when we do get games focused on vehicular combat these days they usually seem to be twin stick shooters and such where the fact that you're controlling some badass vehicle doesn't really affect the gameplay that much. Well, and/or the game gets no genuine story or characters whatsoever (although I can do without that if the gameplay is really good).

Ricky_Bobby: The only one I know of is DCS World, although I can't vouch for it since I haven't played it. The core game is free though on Steam, so if you are curious you could try it out.
It seems to be focused on multiplayer gaming, but lists single-player as well in its Steam description.

The guys at GiantBomb did a few videos of the game:
, [url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huVi6rdPE4I]#2, #3

ScouseMouse180: Unless I'm just unaware of new games being released in these genres it's seems like a load of very good types of games have just totally died.

'Point and clicks' for example, Beneath a Steel Sky, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Simon the Sorcerer, tons of great titles, It's a really simple format that will always work if the story and everything is good.

dtgreene: [...]One other game type I haven't seen much of lately are puzzle games, specifically pure puzzle games. We could use more of those, as we have a game type that does not need violence or realism to be effective; they just need consistent rules. In particular, I could note that action puzzlers (the genre that includes games like Tetris) seem to be particularly scarce.

_ChaosFox_: Myst

just logical the puzzles really were, once you figure out what the Miller brothers mindset was. Everything you need to know is always within your reach, but the game owes a lot of that to the game world being so abstract and following its own internal logic.