My specific niche of expert knowledge is horses in video games

This could actually be a line in "Being a Peepeehead's Cool".

how is this OK

And a horse girl

Getting baited by "muh pronouns" edgelords in 2024

This game is about being a courier, not some random peasant. Couriers were important people and often had special privileges. Sending out someone with a message and the not giving them means to defend themselves is r-slurred, so it didn't happen.

BIPOC

>Because you're a fricking peasant not a merchant or warrior, you get robbed by unemployed mercenaries, you just fork it over and hope they don't stick a spear in your gut.

But that's boring, you don't have to fight to have combat, you can run away from them or stealth around or have good relations with the people to let you pass. If there's no conflict then you might as well just hook up WASD controls to google maps.

Gee, it's no wonder YOU STINK!

It could definitely work and not just as a walking sim.

They could make like some sort of weird medieval Crazy Taxi with timed deliveries and other challenges.

Your right that they ought to drop the realistic graphics and go more stylized though.

>frick that realism, make the game look stylized and with more/weird colors

>give it funky music

>add lots of weird events/encounters during travels

>odd story/deliveries/character backgrounds

>other background weirdness

add lots of weird events/encounters during travels

This is basically the whole point of Darklands.

3 months later

>SALON: "I Tried To Break Into The Gaming Industry With A Fresh New Take On Courier Delivery. Then, The Far-Right Incels Came For Me." (5-minute read)

Literally just make it but don't expect the market to suddenly want games without combat. Also don't get in fights on Twitter unless your marketing angle is "trolls want to bury my game!!1!"

There's a game called Lake which is just this in modern times that looks kinda interesting.

I am on record saying for decades that I want more games that aren't all about combat, this is the next frontier after Dan Bunten made games that weren't arcade shit in the early 1980s, and that foids are probably the right people to make them. And specifically I am interested in the 1400s. I mean ffs I spent like 20 hours in the last week writing about Darklands. And my other favorite thing in the world is a TV show about a girl who works in a kitchen in 1400s Korea.

The problem with this tho is that this r-slur chose the single thing you could do on the planet at the time that's most likely to get you into combat. Being a courier in Central Asia in the 1300s is not a great job if you don't like taking risks. I'm gonna venture a guess here that she has never actually had a conversation with a black guy about places where he doesn't go because he doesn't like getting robbed.

I mean, it's not interesting to me, but a lot of games aren't interesting to me. I think this isn't super fundamentally a bad idea

They came for !g*mers. G*mers!

His wife was taken hostage and came back pregnant within 9 months so nobody knew if Genghis r*ped her or her captors did.

!kino !historychads I loved this Genghis movie from 2007, but holy shit did the Russkies portray Genghis as a colossal cuck instead of a BAC BVLL like how he was irl, probably to cope with the fact that Ziggers carrying his DNA til this day.

The most peaceful time was probably in the 1950s, when the soviet union, Iran and Afghanistan all had decent governments

Until the 19th century settled empires were unable to project power into the steppe, it took the Qing and Russian empire a ton of organisation and genocide to pacify the region and even then when the xinhai and Russian revolutions erupted central asia was in chaos once more

Telling that the Mongols never took India

There was too much even for them

Dude, mongoloids lmao

It's fine if it has no combat but it has to have a fail-state. And adding enemies is the easiest way to achieve that.