I agree. Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?
It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.
It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational.
Related tangent - I'd love to see more games (whether or not explicitly "educational") that are more collaborative and less focused on violence. I remember playing GTA and enjoying its then-new (to me, at least) open-world dynamics and imagining a more peaceful version or mode where you'd play the role of an EMT or field surgeon, running around helping people and saving lives or something.
You should check out Death Stranding! It has a unique asynchronous multiplayer model that rewards collaboration.
Players can place items and structures as they walk from place to place and you can see stuff placed by other players as you bring each in-game area "online". These items can be storage lockers, ladders and ropes to climb up difficult terrain, charging stations for your motorcycle, or even entire roads/highways stretching across a landscape. If you use an item from another player, you can give them likes. Note that you never see another player's character.
It's such a nice experience to come back to a river you bridged with a ladder and see hundreds of likes. There's not much combat in the game because it's generally easier to avoid confrontations, and the little combat that is present is heavily geared towards non-lethal weapons.
Tens of millions buys and plays truck simulators, so these games already exists. You have many other kinds, but the truck simulator one is the most popular. This type of game is much more popular in Europe than in USA though.
GTA 5 roleplaying servers are getting pretty popular now and do what you want. I haven't tried them yet but I've wanted what you describe and it might be fun to check them out.
It’s on PC, Xbox and PS at least, not sure about others. Really cool experience because it also includes pictures of artifacts and audio commentary from scholars. They did the same for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla aka Viking Simulator.
Anyone every play the educational mode in Assassins Creed Origins?
The sequels have this too.
(And, if you want to see what this stuff is like, there are YouTube videos that will show you; I remember seeing one by some historians reviewing the educational mode of the Greek game, Assassin's Creed:Odyssey).
It basically took that game's massive, amazing and detailed map of ancient Egypt, removed all the combat and replaced it with what was essentially a huge virtual museum. You could go run around Egypt, go inside the temples & pyramids, explore the farms, cities and the Nile delta and listen to audio clips and view slideshows about actual Egyptian history.
It was legitimately really amazing and educational. It essentially piggybacked off of the colossal amount of work that goes into creating a AAA open world game's map and repurposed it to create something educational.
Would love to see more of that type of thing.