I'm a firm believer in this: You cannot love something unless you can see its faults and be critical of it.

What is a favorite game of yours that you think is great? Now improve it. Share with how a great [to you] game could be made even better.

And no, no game exists (or could exist) that cannot be improved upon.

(For ease of conversation, stick to one game per reply? And yes, I'll give one of my own later. I didn't want to taint the start of a conversation just getting replies to mine.)

Age of Wonders 1&2 : Severely reign in hero stat gain when leveling, to prevent heroes from becoming one-man armies from the mid-game onward. This should keep the use of clever tactics and strategy a necessary component during the entire campaign. Bam! Game is now perfect!

Dungeon Keeper 1&2: A place-able roadblock for your imps, so that they don't constantly run off and get themselves killed.

Caesar 3, Pharaoh: Have some sort of constant migration/immigration dynamic, to lessen the devastating aging workforce effect in long games.

Half-life: Cut the Xen part in half. In particular, remove that blasted alien factory level.

Stronghold: 2 or 3 extra campaign levels where you can take your time to build a really big castle.

Btw, not so sure all games can be improved in any significant way. Abe's Oddysee for example: it's pretty much perfect. Obviously graphics could always be improved, but that's trivially true for almost anything.

Ghost of a Tale: Add voice acting. That's about it. With good voice acting I would consider it absolutely perfect.

Max Payne 2: Give Max his old face back. And do anything, just anything different with the final boss fight.

Heroes of Might and Magic (all the games in the series): remove turn limit from all campaign missions that have it. For me the fun of turn based games is not having to deal with any form of time pressure, and in HoMM particularly I like like to be able to explore the map, that's part of the fun for me. Having to worry about super-optimal use of my time kills all the joy.

Final Fantasy 5:
* Allow cutscenes to be skipped.
Also, some ability adjustments:
* White Mage should have something else instead of MP +10% (maybe a free party heal, since there isn't one currently in the game?)
* Monk should learn Kick instead of HP + 20%.
* Samurai's Zeninage is too powerful and should be toned down. Related, the price of shurikens should be decreased. (It's a bit ridiculous that buying shurikens and throwing them is so inefficient cost-wise, and you're better off just throwing the money you would have spent at the enemies instead. Also, note that Zeninage is a job command for a job that already has a decent physical attack.)
* Chemist should have Mix, not Drink, as the job command. (Drink is not enough to carry a class that isn't good physically. Mix, on the other hand, is.) Also, Mix should come after Drink, as it's clearly the better ability.
* There's no ability that allows one to do extra damage at the cost of health; add an ability that does that. (Perhaps even just add the Dark Knight job.)
* Allow Freelancer and Mime to choose which innate abilities to be active (as some, like Cover and Barrier, can interfere with reasonable strategies). Dual Wield should not be innate for Freelancer/Mime (it's too powerful), and Rapid Fire should not ignore defense.
* Make red mages not terrible in worlds 2 and 3. (As is, they're only good for learning the final ability, which requires more ABP than any other ability in the game.)

You don't say...

I thought the containers were a really good feature. Something you actually felt like rumaging through to find things, like a real container. These inventory screens with boring lists or tiled icons, all neatly stacked are so boring, oh look I have a stack of 7 short swords, yawn, shall I sell one or max?

Alpha Centauri - wouldn't change a thing about it save for making the AI more resilient.
I do not want an AI that is better at invading, i want an AI that is better at defending its own territory and not just sit there with stacks of units hiding in cities doing nothing while i take city after city. Also it would be good if the AI continued growing its empire beyond the mid game stall

Dungeonsiege 2 - make LAN multiplayer work again please!
Also, it might be nice to be able to complete equipment sets 'before' they become obsolete, just sayin.

I'd add some of the features Bethesda abandoned from Morrowind, to Oblivion and Skryim: namely, levitation and the ability to become so fast as to traverse the whole world flying in a few seconds.

In fact, as much as I liked the reinvention of the player systems in Skyrim, I severely missed stats in there (Strenght, Agility, Luck, etc).

In fact, in the interest of improving their games, I'd release the source code for all TES games (sans ESO) and reach a deal with the modders that created all those fixes for the games to incorporate them in official releases.

Sierra's The Hobbit adventure game.

It's a wonderful game, I love it. But the ending could really be improved. The last puzzle (when you have to rescue Beorn in bear form) is timed, so you have to rush, rush, rush, without enjoying anything. I want to watch the animations of the orcs, and the moving stairs, and the crane with the boulder. But I can't - I just have to rush through it.

Since Morrowind was mentioned:
- Make attributes also raise automatically, through the use of the related skills, with I guess just about everything adding a really tiny bit towards a raise in luck as well. That should also lead to removing levels entirely, and also allow attributes to grow to max even if the associated skills are already at max, since it'd be the usage itself contributing.
- On that topic, cap stats, so enchantments will still matter but the actual character stats will remain the main aspect as opposed to a great character being determined pretty much entirely by using very powerful enchantments.
- Greatly reduce respawns, maybe by creating two or even three types of areas, with respawns being daily in "dangerous" areas but take a long time otherwise, so if you really need a creature somewhere you may find it again after quite some time but won't regularly be pestered with the exact same fights in the exact same places, and some areas you may be expected to pass through often and which have very generic creatures may well allow to be fully cleared, with no respawns.
- Add at least one merchant with infinite money.

(I seem to recall a very similar topic though, wasn't there?)

Chrono Trigger
-Rebalance characters so some retain relevance (Marle for example)
-Buff up duel and triple techs (higher chance to crit, break damage cap, etc.) and increase enemy boss defenses and HP to compensate
-give some enemy level scaling (so enemies can still provide some challenge and decent exp even if you revist old areas)

Kingdom Hearts 3
-improve i-frames from guarding and block detection
-remove "falling" animation when in battle
-put back in "revenge" and proper "stun" in the game
-put i-frames in combo finishers
-include more Disney and Final Fantasy bosses, fewer heartless bosses
-rebalance melee and magic damage (make melee actually deal decent damage)
-add back bars for form changes/summons

Days Gone
-Make supplies purchasable in camps
-Add more boss fights
-Make early game fuel tanks slightly bigger
-rebalance camps so early camps have some value in endgame
-add a feeding camp mechanic aka make hunting and meat mean something

I'd also want spellmaking to return in Skyrim.

Also, regarding the stats you mentioned, I see there being two issues here:
* There are too many of them. For example, why do both Agility and Speed exist? Also, do we *really* need both Intelligence and Willpower? Is Personality *really* necessary? Also, what makes Luck different from other stats?
* The Morrowind/Oblivion leveling system has its issues (consider that, unless you play the game in a very counter-intuitive manner that isn't particularly fun, you will get worse stat growth), and most of them tend to be related to the way stat growth is handled; removing the stats is one way to fix this issue.


I wouldn't add enemy scaling, as that mechanic is not particularly popular. If it's introduced, it should be based off game progress, not character level.

One I'd add:
* Get rid of that one button mashing segment.
* (While we're at it, make it so that the future can be passed without having to simultaneously press multiple buttons.)

Duke Nukem 3D - diversify the enemy HP and generally increase it so that 90% of the game doesn't die to 1-2 shotgun shots.

Red Alert 2 - Balance. The. Prism. Tanks. Period. I don't know what the hell they were thinking with that one. Just swapping the reload time for charge up time would do the trick.

Heroes of Might & Magic III - make the useless half of the skills actually do something relevant. Heroes V did very well in this regard.

ARPGs in general - never use % life leech. All this leads to is more offense = more defense while the inverse is not true. Because the damage in those games is usually several number orders higher than player HP, % life leech just leads to HP bar "ping-ponging" where as long as you don't get one shot and have something to hit, you are unkillable even when going all out on offense. If Diablo 3 did one thing right, it was getting rid of % life leech and replacing it with static life per hit.

Subnautica

Well, pretty much flush out all the bugs which plague the game still. And for PC darnit, and not just for Steam users. And add in a whole raft of QOL improvements that modders have created like the Cyclops docking module, better rotation of the moonpool, permanent field sense hologram for the cyclops etc etc. Things which are organic to the game and should have been part of the final release.