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GAMES with ENDLESS gameplay like for example in The Sims series.

Farewell into the night

Guest
Hey rpgcodex,

I was thinking about games and my question is..
Are there any very good games that have ENDLESS gameplay, like for example in The Sims series?

Sorry if this thread is bad, but I asked twice in the shoutbox and got nothing.

Online games, arena shooters & MMO's doesn't count.

I know you know your games.
Thanks in advance <3
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
Thanks, I'll check those. Already played Mount&Blade and a couple other titles, so that's a good track.
 

Mustawd

Guest
IIRC Darklands qualifies for
this, as I don’t think there are ending slides.

Also, I think Kenshi also does not have a set endgame.
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
Thanks! I've never played those. Heard good things about Darklands, now I'll check it for sure, and Kenshi looks interestng.
 

spectre

Arcane
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The Guild series is a less faggy twist on the Sims gameplay.

Invisible Inc. has an endless mode. Lots of roguelikes have something like that, e.g. in ADOM you have that one dungeon that literally goes on forever.

Builder games in general tend to take forever. Cities Skylines, Simcity, Anno, Tropico, Ceasar series (including the later ones, Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, there's one for pretty much any theme you can imagine, including the more obscure ones like Afterlife or Startopia).

Something like Dwarf Fortress, maybe? Or something with a more approachable UI, like RimJobWorld.
 

Haba

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IIRC Darklands qualifies for
this, as I don’t think there are ending slides.

p9pQCbA.jpg


If this qualifies, every game where you can grind before doing the final quest is technically "endless".
 
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My first tought was Civ 2 and suddenly rember that article from few years ago:

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/117862-The-Eternal-War-Ten-Years-of-a-Single-Civ-2-Game

"The Eternal War": Ten Years of a Single Civ 2 Game
ANDY CHALK | 12 JUNE 2012 1:00 PM

96666.jpg

A man who's been playing the same game of Civilization 2 for the past ten years is now looking for help.

What happens when you spend a decade of your life playing one single game of the masterful strategy title Civilization 2? Nothing good, as it turns out, at least not for the virtual citizens of your world. A reddit user by the name of Lycerius posted his ten-year tale of woe earlier today, describing his world in the year 3991 A.D. as "a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation."

At this point in history, only three super-nations remain - the Vikings, the Americans and the Celts, played by Lycerius. For the past 1700 years, they've been locked in warfare over the planet's few remaining resources that's gone nuclear numerous times, which has in turn caused the polar ice caps to melt more than 20 times, leaving all parts of the world that aren't mountains a useless morass of swamps. Most of the population has been killed off by war or starvation, as global warming has ruined arable land and caused sweeping famines; big cities no longer exist, and what resources remain are constantly poured into the military, just to maintain the stalemate.

There's more than that and none of it good, but despite the "air-tight stalemate," Lycerius said his goal over the next few years - real-time, presumably, and not game time - is to end the war and rebuild the world. The obvious problem is that after nearly two millennia of total war, he has no idea how, so he took his problem to reddit.

And reddit, to its credit, responded. Users have posted several long-term strategies that may prove effective and have even credit a subreddit, "The Eternal War," in which to ponder the problem. There is fanfic, of course, and a plan for Lycerius to upload his current savegame later today to allow the rest of the world to take a crack at bringing the hostilities to an end.

And what started his descent into this most awesome game of Civilization ever? "I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future," he explained. "I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on."

Even if you don't particularly care about Civilization, it's a fun, fascinating and well-told story - and if you are a fan, you might even be able to save the world. Either way, this is probably the most interesting thing you'll read all day.
 

Mustawd

Guest
If this qualifies, every game where you can grind before doing the final quest is technically "endless".

My understanding is that the game doesn’t end regardless. I guess retirong your characters at the INN counts?

I dunno. Doesn’t seem like a typical ending to me at all.
 

Serus

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p9pQCbA.jpg


If this qualifies, every game where you can grind before doing the final quest is technically "endless".
The game doesn't force you to finish it after this screen so those are technically speaking just the ending slides for the "main" quest not the whole game. The game continues if you choose so afaik. As to your comparison - in this case you can grind AFTER the final quest not only BEFORE.
 

Kitchen Utensil

Guest
Sim City 4 with Rush Hour is pretty great for an endless game. Create a custom region with as many large tiles as you want (don't even know whether there's a limit or not), make an interesting landscape and then let your autism flow.
 

nobre

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GTA: San Andreas gives you endless vigilante, taxi, ambulance, trucking, burglary, pimping, stone quarry, ?cardancing?, races, triathlons, and a bunch of lame minigames.

EDIT:

Forgot to add firetruck, getting high scores in schools and vehicle challenges.
 

Oracsbox

Guest
Borderlands 2 allows endless grinding and resetting one of the reasons it's still played by a hard-core fanbase.
Dying Light and Dead Island/Riptide are the same,the recent Far Cry 5 allows resetting as well.
Assassins Creed Origins allows new game+.
All of them with the same character so you can build up through difficulty levels with an ever improving arsenal.None are sim like in gameplay mechanics but they are endless and don't have to be played with others although co-op is an option.
 

Spectacle

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Mount & Blade lets you ride around on a horse and kill things for as long as you want.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Hey rpgcodex,

I was thinking about games and my question is..
Are there any very good games that have ENDLESS gameplay, like for example in The Sims series?

Sorry if this thread is bad, but I asked twice in the shoutbox and got nothing.

Online games, arena shooters & MMO's doesn't count.

I know you know your games.
Thanks in advance <3
There are two types of games you should look for:

1. Sandbox gameplay
In a sandbox, the game provides the player with a set of tools for construction and a given ruleset according to which things operate. However, there are no goals other than those set by the player and no end except when the player decides to start over. SimCity (1989) made sandbox gameplay famous and eventually led to The Sims as well creating the city-building genre (mostly, but not entirely, sandboxes) and many other games (e.g. Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft).

2. Procedural generation
Although many games make limited use of procedural generation as a substitute for tedious manual creation, there are some games that either procedurally generate the gameworld anew each time you start a new game or have created such a vast gameworld via procedural generation that gameplay is essentially endless. The former category includes Rogue (1980), Nethack, other Rogue-likes, and any other similar games (e.g. One-Way Heroics). The latter category includes Elite (1984), Daggerfall, and anything else with a sufficient quantity of procedurally-generated content that the time required to experience it all would be prohibitive.
 

Haba

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The game doesn't force you to finish it after this screen so those are technically speaking just the ending slides for the "main" quest not the whole game. The game continues if you choose so afaik. As to your comparison - in this case you can grind AFTER the final quest not only BEFORE.

Yeah, there is no practical difference between the two. If you freeze a game at certain stage, you can play it "endlessly". Especially in open world RPGs with random encounters/randomly generated quests. You will never experience any new content, but you can repeat the existing content ad infinitum. In that sense a game like Darklands that does not end at the end game screen and a game that has an ending are not different at all.

An autistic person that enjoys grinding the same content 1000+ hours will find equal "enjoyment" from both.
 

laclongquan

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Unreal World

The issue of URW is that one of these days your game is going to stopped by memory overflow, as in the cell's map has too many items that it overflow. There is a limit each cell, say 1000 (I dont remember correctly anymore but I did get stopped).

And URW has ways to make gamers into packrat of first order. you are going to have shitload of items, even if you store in different map. And when map change from winter map (with less vegetation) into spring map (with new greens), or a ready field into crop field (seed grow into plants) you are going to have that map overflow.

The second issue is that URW is not actually that large compare to a Large map of SMAC. There's a countable number of cell map and once you explore it all, the game save is going to be extreme large to play properly. I put it to two years of playing 2 hours daily.

Of course, to do that require you going at it at three times my autism and powergaming. But that's not hard.
 

Farewell into the night

Guest
Thank you for the responses!

By the way, I played Mount&Blade, Skyrim and Minecraft, San Andreas, Dwarf Fortress some years ago. Plus Minecraft gets me dizzy and makes my head hurt.

I'm thinking of game that lasts forever, like for example TETRIS <3.
 

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