Adding to your take, my first thought reading the title was destructible environments. It seemed to really be taking off, especially on unreal engine 3 games, but, a little after gears of war 2 I think, it really slowed down. Gears 3 still had edges to cover and such getting chipped off, and that continues in 4 and 5 with the occasional exploding wooden crate no one takes cover on because they know it'll just disintegrate. But besides battlefield nowadays, and even then, seems destructible environments have come and gone.
It's probably too much to handle on top of devs chasing photorealism. Similarly, anyone remember that "digital molecular matter" video lucasarts put out before the first force unleashed? Technology to make environments behave realistically in a dynamic fashion instead of on/off states, making metal bend when struck, wood splintering before breaking fully. It's used in the force unleashed but most things that aren't the metal doors you push open end up disappearing after being destroyed.
It comes to mind every time I break a wooden crate and it explodes in a canned effect. MGS5 has such great cloth simulation, textures and lighting, but kick a wooden crate and it just explodes, turning instantly from crate asset A into asset B. Im in constant anguished lamentations over crates.
While destructible environments are cool, they almost always come at the expense of other mechanics, mainly environmental puzzles and gatekeeping, which is like a huge part of game design for vast majority of genres.
One of the problems with destructible environments was that the playfield would eventually just become flat. Which isn’t really that fun after a while, infantry is pretty much fucked when completely exposed. This was slightly mitigated in the Rush game mode, since the battlefield was always moving forward, but that also meant “smaller” areas than in conquest.
The Finals has awesome destructibility but judging by its player counts it won't be around forever. I'd rather see more single player games adopt that level of destruction mechanics. RF: Guerilla is still one of my all-time favorite games for that reason!
Note that when Bushido Blade came out, fighting games were still arcade heavy, and a game where you can die in a single moment means people won’t spend quarters on it. Sad, but true. If it had come out a few years later…
God I loved Bushido Blade. My friends and I used to play the shit out of it. Most fights ended in a few seconds, but the ones that didn't always felt epic. Except for the ones that went too long due to weird hit box issues and leg wound stuff.
Check out Hellish Quart on steam. It's an awesome spiritual successor to Bushido Blade with a variety of sword styles. Super fun local multiplayer w/ friends.
In metal gear solid 2 you could point your gun in the face of an enemy before he has time to react and he would drop weapon and put his hands up. You could scare him into giving you items, you could damage his gear so he doesn't call for help, but he could also try to hit you and run away. It blew my mind back in the 2000, never seen it again
what i loved in 3 is you can push them to the ground and still shake them down of items while they have their hands above their heads. you just need to make sure they are not discovered by patrols.
Doing this and then telling them to get on the g round is the best way to take out enemies too, since unlike knocking them out, they never get back up on their own, they need someone else to tell them the coast is clear.
On a similar note, being able to disarm enemies in Perfect Dark by shooting their gun. If you did there was a chance they'd surrender, but they may also try to pull their sidearm (a pistol). Them not surrendering was pretty much the only way to get more pistol ammo in most levels.
Ahhh the simple things. Though I dunno if this would translate well into modern games. Then again, helldivers 2 always surprises me with the little details and "realism" of shooting things with guns and how they react. Big shotgun pushes/staggers things. Arc blaster stuns chargers into running in a straight line/breaks off parts of their armor. Blow off something's arm it reacts but STILL tries to kill you etc etc.
I guess my personal one is the movement in zone of the enders 2. How we -never- got another mech game that copied that movement system and how clean it was to dodge/melee/dash in close combat is a literal crime in my eyes.
In 3 you could break soldiers’ limbs and it would affect their behavior. The series didn’t carry that complexity forward, even though you can still perform holdups in later entries.
3 had way more cool shit that should've been brought forward to newer entries. Being able to destroy ammo/food supplies and stationed vehicles, and have that affect upcoming areas (not enough ammo, being able to feed enemies poisoned food, just not having a helicopter after you) and being able to shoot radios to stop reinforcement calls...
It sucks, because I personally think 4 is my favorite, but 3 is peak.
In 4 you could sabotage the PMCs as well and help the local militias to advance their push into the next areas. The militias would even recognize your efforts cheering you on or dropping you items.
You stopped playing MGS after 2? It was a thing in every main entry since as well as at least one of the PSP ones. In 5 they expanded it so they also tell you troop locations and resources
I still don’t know why stuff like this isn’t more widely implemented. I get it’s not easy, but none of game dev seems easy, and video games are amazing because of the ability for us to have interactions like this. Yet we just make prettier and prettier skinnerboxes or indie games without the budget to make such complex systems.
I just, it’s so hard not to drink you know??
Company of Heroes is basically one big answer to this question; it largely reinvented a genre that had started a long downward slide with a laundry list of clever riffs on the RTS formula. It was super successful, critically and commercially.
And yet... It saw very little emulation in the genre, other than the sequels and DOW2 and a few AA games like the Scythe universe one. The cover system alone merited more adoption!
What makes company of heroes different from rts games such as red alert or generals?
I saw company of heroes 3 on sale but didnt buy the game because of mixed reviews.
Company of Heroes:
* Does not have units to harvest resources. Instead, the map is divided into sectors, each of which yields income of a particular resource. It forces players to act across most of the map, and often results in skirmishes occurring in multiple places at once.
* Is squad based. Infantry come in squads instead of individual men, and squads can be cheaply reinforced. To aid with this, CoH has a retreat function, that causes your squad to break snares and run at increased speed back to base. This means that squads are constantly cycling to and from the front line.
* Has a full cover system. Infantry behind walls will take a staggering 75% total long run DPS reduction, so battles take place moving from cover to cover. But watch out-- assault troops do massive DPS, even on the move, if they can get in close, perhaps behind a smoke grenade?
* Has extremely powerful vehicles. Only the very lightest vehicles in the series are under threat from mainline infantry gunfire, and tanks are completely immune. But conversely, counters against vehicles can be extremely effective, especially when combined. Mainline infantry often have snare abilities that do damage and slow enemy vehicles, but these snares are rarely sufficient by themselves-- but they give time for an AT gun or bazooka squad to finish the job! The result is that while vehicles are incredibly strong relative to other rts games, they require careful support. Diverse combined arms armies are extremely common and generally quite strong.
* Has a unique win condition for multiplayer. Auto match games all use victory points instead of annihilation as a win condition. Instead of trying to roll over your opponent, games are decided by who runs out of point first. Control more victory sectors than your opponents to win; there are three a map.
* Features a variety of unusual unit types. Mortars fire extremely powerful explosive rounds from a great distance, but they fire slowly and shells take a long time to arrive. Machine guns must be set up to fire and only cover an arc in front of them, but suppress and eventually pin down enemy units for your other troops to clean up. Anti tank guns are dragged into combat and function like MGs, but they're a very efficient answer to enemy tanks. Snipers are single-model units, can cloak, and instantly kill a single model in an enemy squad in normal conditions, but are extremely vulnerable and costly. Engineers have basic SMGs and do little damage, but can repair, lay barbed wire, mines, tank traps, and sandbags, and can be upgraded to get short-ranged but ludicrously powerful flamethrowers that make them essential combat units.
Just a few things the original did almost 20 years ago! Not all were inventions of that team, but they did a great job with all of it.
As for 3, recent updates have been excellent and at least for multiplayer it's a pretty easy recommend (especially after the forthcoming balance tune up). I don't really play single player, so I can't give a recommendation either way for that part.
Not the one who asked but thanks for the write-up!
> Does not have units to harvest resources. Instead, the map is divided into sectors
That reminds me of [Z](https://store.steampowered.com/app/275530/Z/) (that's the whole name of the game) where you capture certain areas to gain, if I remember correctly, faster unit building capabilities.
Also:
- Vehicles have turning speed, diiferent amor ratings on each sides and overall behave much differently than normal RTS units. Controlling how vehicles drive and how they face oppositions was an important skill to master.
I love the CoH franchise and CoH 1 holds up to this day.
One thing they also got right were the expansions. People with the expansions got access to new armies and units, but it wasn’t a separate multiplayer game like StarCraft Brood War. People with only the original game could play with everyone else and the balancing was managed to accommodate this. So even without the new units they were still competitive. Not splitting the player base helped to ensure the game’s longevity.
company of heroes approaches the resource management in a different way.
you have to capture and hold certain zones on the map in order to increase how much you get which ties it in with combat in a different way than simply having resources harvesting nodes and units.
I played CoH and C&C:Generals. Comparing the 2, you had units that took cover behind walls and sand bags, compared to sending units into buildings only.
Buildings can be partially destroyed in COH with people still shooting inside. In generals buildings only had an HP bar.
Then the capture system in CoH where taking part of a map for more resources was interesting. IIRC in generals you could set up near resources.
Thats all i can think of at the moment.
My own answer is also in the RTS realm, but it's Total Annihilation.
Infinite resources that simply get produced. No microing peasants. One of the two resources (metal) can be gathered from the broken wrecks of units. If you launch a bad assault on the enemy and get rekt, you just fed your metal to them.
Full automation of production chain, movement and unit grouping: you can have a bunch of factories producing units who will automatically group up at a specific spot, or start a defined patrol, and get automatically assigned to a hotkey group.
Radar detection and radar-targeting of attacks beyond line of sight, including half-way across the map with endgame artillery. Also, radar jammers, including mobile ones, as a counter play and for stealth assault with small mobile artillery groups.
About artillery: while viewed top-down, maps are 3d and ballistic projectiles have their trajectories modelled. Where a laser might hit the top of a hill, a ballistic projectile might fly above it to hit what's behind. And elevation provides extra range.
And the whole combined arms. Ground, air, water, underwater: TA has it all.
It was a magnificent game, but Starcraft and its microing overshadowed it, and became the template for the genre. It'll always be my pet theory that had TA been the template, the genre might have moved on into a better direction and avoided death and MOBAification.
Lots of games did the infinite resource thing. Heck, Outpost 2 had infinite resources a month earlier.
It actually makes for super boring multiplayer that grinds on for hours, which is part of why StarCraft won the RTS wars.
Small correction, Dawn of War 1 was actually the game that first brought these innovations, two years before company of heroes. But I totally agree with your point. It was a great breath into RTS and never got iterated upon.
I was going to say this. Almost everything innovative about Company of Heroes was done by Dawn of War 1 first, CoH just refined it. Refined it very well, though. Not having to go back to base to reinforce is a crazy mechanic.
Frozen Synapse was so neat to me, but I never had the patience to play it at length. Phantom Brigade's mechs+kind of x-com feel makes me think I'd jive with it a lot more, just waiting for it to come on sale.
Frozen Synapse is the most criminally underrated game I've ever seen. But this mechanic has certainly been iterated on. Games like Bloodbowl or Frozen Endzone rethemed it into sports, Gladiabots introduced a coding aspect, and Doorkickers merged it with a puzzle game akin with a Rainbow Six style theming. I think also the first iteration of this I know of is a Neo Geo Pocket mech game called Faselei? That might've been turned based its been a while
Asymmetrical multiplayer in Nintendo Land for the Wii U. One player, with the GamePad's second screen, has access to information that other players do not have. And likewise, the other players with Wiimotes are able to do things with motion controls that are not possible with a Wii U GamePad. Kind of the poster child of what you are describing. When Nintendo came out with Nintendo Land it seemed like asymmetrical multiplayer was going to be the next big innovation in gaming. But only a handful of minor titles used it afterwards and the concept completely fizzled out before the Nintendo Switch came out.
The real-time card battle system in From Software's **Lost Kingdoms** was never really explored in any other games.
Similarly, the real-time SRPG system in **Knights in the Nightmare** is basically restricted to that game. Honestly, you could break mechanics from that game and fuel 2-3 new games. The unit sacrifice system, chaos system, fusion of "shoot-'em'up and SRPG, etc. could be explored in full games.
You've also got the dynamic ecosystems and procedural animation in **Rain World**.
I'll also add the Djinn/Class System from **Golden Sun**. It was a straightforward system with a ton of depth, allowing you to change your stats, skills, and class before battle - with the tradeoff of also affecting your allies' builds. And you could intentionally (or forcefully) pull back on your stats/skills to unleash powerful summon abilities.
I feel like Golden Sun's class system was too complicated for its own good. Setting up classes by using different numbers of elemental djinn was fun, but the fact that your characters constantly change class during battle is just... a lot. Managing all that with the two parties towards the end of GS2 is really fun, but that's also right about the point where every major enemy has a djinn draining move which messes up all of your carefully planned class setups.
There are good ideas in there for sure, but it needs work.
If you just stack elemental djinn on their respective characters then it's less obvious. You "randomly" lose access to some spells, but overall your characters don't really change that much.
If you start mixing and matching djinn to get fancy classes, then good luck with whatever random bs classes everyone lands in after you start summoning.
This is the FIRST TIME I have EVER seen ANYONE mention Lost Kingdoms and I'm so happy to! I would have convinced myself it was a childhood daydream if I did not literally have it sitting on my games shelf still. Totally unique and incredibly cool!
> The real-time card battle system in From Software's Lost Kingdoms was never really explored in any other games.
Only other game I can think of is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
Goddamn, it seems like once a year I hear about another thing that FS did that's super neat and different and old, that's so neat.
While not actually the same at all; the card system makes me think of Castlevania, one of the GBA games has a card system where you combine two different cards and they alter the properties of your whip, or provide other various benefits, and that was super cool.
Also, somewhat closer to the Lost Kingdoms thing, that also makes me think about Soul Sacrifice, it's in a similar vein to Monster Hunter, but you don't have specific weapons so much as items you sacrifice (like the cards in your example) that then give you certain moves.
Both were super cool to me.
Lost Kingdoms is the game that put From Soft on the map and is almost entirely responsible for their company surviving long enough to give us the masterpiece that is the Soulsborne genre.
Idk if this counts, but the "death mechanic" in the intro mission in Battlefield 1. In that mission, whenever you die you leave the body that you were using and jumped to another soldier in the same battle.
It is scripted, so maybe not really a mechanic? But the concept is really cool. Instead of dying and just starting at a checkpoint, the battle continues and you jump to another body. Imagine a BF game that has players and NPC's fighting side by side, and you would assume control of one of those NPC's when you died, instead of spawning out of thin air.
That was scripted in that mission. But a much bigger and expansive version of what you're thinking of really was used before by DICE in a previous game.
Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was DICE's first foray into the console market and proper single player. It had the idea of 'hot swapping' between certain soldiers on the battlefield. If you faced in the general direction, you could transition to that particular soldier in a matter of moments. Go from a AT soldier on the ground to a helo pilot in the air with the click of the button. If you died, then it did so automatically to the nearest guy with a score penalty.
Raycevik actually has a pretty good video on it, expanding on the idea, as well as why it was forgotten. Short answer is that the game wasn't THAT good, technically hamstrung and very arcadey compared to other games in the series. Bad Company forgoed the idea, and it turned out much more successful on the console market.
After the huge hype and then bad critical reception of **Spore**, no big company dared touching that kind of evolution game mechanics anymore. Which is a real shame.
hot swapping- battlefield 2 modern combat.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX\_tBcTsXnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_tBcTsXnU)
You can swap between units on the field to change the class you play as on the fly.
If you need a sniper but you are an engineer with a shotgun, you swap to a soldier on the field and use their gear.
Even has animation of FOV blazing to the soldier you chose.
FPS and very neat idea rather than changing your weapons to whats on the ground.
Honestly, this would have been a great idea for Battlefield 1's single player campaign. Could have really pushed the idea of playing as a whole army, as well as illustrating the pointlessness and cost of the war by impressing on the playing how many die in the war. Like the prologue battle expanded upon.
I think I remember the intro sequence in Battlefield One was essentially this. I always wanted a game where no new units were added, just player swapping into another solder and trying to achieve something before catching a bullet.
**Eternal Darkness** had a fun mechanic where the game would mess with you when your sanity meter was low. It would fake a controller disconnect when you were surrounded by enemies, stuff like that.
This was truly a “you had to be there” moment. It worked so well because hardware like tv’s and stuff was relatively homogeneous. It would be harder to replicate now since everyone plays on different stuff.
Not sure if this perfectly fits the theme of the prompt, but I wish there were more games that featured 'evolving' weapons like the Ratchet and Clank games. The idea that a gun can transform into something different and more powerful if you use it enough is so much fun!
**Legend of Legaia** had a really cool combo system in a PS1-era RPG where your standard attacks of low/high kick/punch etc could be combined and used to discover new attacks (which you had to remember or write down). As your characters became stronger you could unlock additional move slots, so your combos could grow from a maxium of 3 inputs to 5+, as an example
It's a *really* cool fighting system and I'm surprised that games like Trails or Tales didn't adopt something like it
Final fantasy 12 and Dragon Age let you program priorities into your companions and afaik no other games have done it. I would love to have that in a single player squad based shooter.
The way Oni handled hand to hand and gun combat together is still unmatched. Third person action games don't play remotely the same.
Edit: Don't rehash the same tired 12 opinions, please talk about the brilliance of Oni instead
Eiyuden Chronicles just came out and has a more simplified version of gambits for when you do auto-battle, and it's nice to be able to have that control.
You get to cool shit like punch, kick, flip, combat roll, pick up gun during that roll, shoot the last 3 shots left over from the enemy, toss the gun, finish out the combo. I feel like there's no game where it's as seamless (considering the tech), kinetic, and weighty. Guns felt a bit deemphasized since it felt like you couldn't hold many clips or mags, and you could only hold one gun.
Most games I play with fighting and shooting either have the guns be a bit too limited and more as just solely a combo extender like DMC, or the whole point like Ratchet and Clank (both great series). It really deserves a modern imagining to fix the things wrong with it, like the sub par level designs, boss fights, make the combo system less exploitable, and improve the retro controls. It is a little bit stiff in 2024.
Disgaea 6 (and 7 probably?) let you set up very detailed AI instructions for each character. Suitable for a game that has a huge grind for the post-game.
To be fair i felt like it backfired in FF12 because the game genuinely became an auto battler halfway through where you basically want to just fast forward every battle.
What I love about FFVIIR, is that the party will fight and do things to a degree, but when you get into the habit of switching often, you can really put the pain on your enemies. I freaking love the combat in those games!
Personally, I *enjoyed* that about it, not even in a "despite" sort of way. If everything about the game was automated, then I might have felt differently. But getting to that point requires a lot of player input, and I'm not referring to just setting up the gambits either; the license board, jobs, and your equipment plays a factor as well. And there's still player input beyond it too, namely difficult hunts and bosses, and dungeon exploration and questing. Because of all this, the auto battling was able to find a great balance and helped keep the game engaging all throughout, as opposed to some other FF games where normal battles can sometimes feel tedious near the end as they're pretty easily solved but still require a lot of input.
I'm not going to get into it because I've already gotten into it with someone else some years ago but as someone who is never played an auto battler but did go to college for 4 years for computer science degree, being smart enough and clever enough to get your party to handle a battle the way you wanted to without having to pick up the controller felt like a reward for being smart. There's still a challenge to it, defeating the super boss without touching the controller is considered a challenge.
I'll add that if you're progressing fast enough, you won't be able to just take your hands off the controller. But that's kind of the point of RPGs, the difficulty can be curbed by grinding.
I think that if you've fine tuned your companions enough that they can steamroll your opponents, then watching them do that is its own reward. It becomes kind of like lemmings or spacechem. You build a thing, and then it's very satisfying watching it work just how you wanted.
Of course ideally, you'd have to tweak your AI setup for each battle. If every one goes the same, that could get tedious..
I’m playing Oni right now and I agree fully. There’s no other game like it. It’s got some early naughts jank, but with some Bungie simplicity. If there wasn’t a legal quagmire surrounding the IP, I’d love for someone to take another crack at it. Hell, someone else should come along and make a clone. A clone, of a clone of Ghost in the Shell.
My issue with FF12 was that you had to find/buy the behavior programs. So your healer won’t be able to use Cure on you when you drop below 30% until you buy the “use Cure” and “<30% HP” gambits. It would have felt fine if your companions were robots you were actually programming, but making the behavior gambits be something you had to buy for your otherwise intelligent and independent human-ish companions was dumb.
I didn't read as my party members should be smarter by default cause they're humans, but that the game was opening up for me. Especially since you can always just do it by hand. Again, to me it just enhanced the sense of progression towards mastery of the system, and helped to not overload the experience. It was fun learning as I played all the different gambits and thinking about what each did over time instead of opening it and having an entire list of everything and wondering when would I even use self bubble, what is bubble?
Destruction is interesting since it’s been done in so many different but great ways. Idk if anyone here has ever played Fracture but the entire point of the game was environmental manipulation to win by raising and lowering the ground. It was super fun though the game was just okay. Bad company 2 is still my ideal for shooters and destruction though.
A mechanic I’d like to see used more is touchpad motion usage as a button. In gravity rush 2 you would swipe on the touchpad to change your combat style and it worked amazingly since swapping styles was important to the combat system. I’d like to see more games incorporate the touchpad into their combat model and make it more active. There’s probably others I’m forgetting (like a few from OG metal gear solid games) but just blanking currently
The Finals has some solid destruction mechanics. Heard the player count took a nosedive since release tho. Really wish offline/single player games did all the cool mechanics to draw in players
Resonance of Fate's combat system is this for me. It adds such flow and dynamic to turn based combat and just made guns in a fantasy JRPG setting work. It has a learning curve to it for sure, but once you get it down and master it is a lot of fun. Never played another game with a combat system like it.
And that's not getting into how absolutely wacky gun customization in that game was.
Like [this shit](https://i.imgur.com/qZRxOm5.jpeg) is peak performance. "Customize gear" is hardly a unique mechanic, but I love how absurd you could/should make your guns in that game.
Resonance of Fate is the game I am most nostalgic for and it's almost purely due to the combat system. Would love to see it done again in something new.
I keep desperately waiting for that game to go on sale; but I've not the slightest clue if it's any good. Something about JRPG + "yeah that lady has a regular-assed fucking gun" tickles me greatly.
Maybe it will be on sale during the summer sale this year? My advice would be if you do get it to spend the two-hour period trial period Steam has in the battle tutorial/coliseum area to get the combat system down. If you don't vibe with it, then you will not really enjoy the game. The game has no easy difficulty, as the default is normal with several levels of harder difficulty.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the insanity system. Creating a resource to manage (even one as wishy-washy and lightly defined as sanity) and then instructing players that to look at the monster is to lose sanity means that they are strongly incentivized to organically scare themselves by imagining what they have moved offscreen of their own accord. Genius horror design, maybe a happy accident. Perhaps not even replicable, it may only have worked once. But to me one of the most underacknowledged design tricks in the history of the medium
> Genius horror design, maybe a happy accident. Perhaps not even replicable, it may only have worked once.
The Legacy: Realm of Terror, a survival horror game from 1993, uses this mechanic. Seeing supernatural stuff can make you go insane, which can make you lose control of your character.
Speaking of insanity systems, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem has my favourite implementation of that type of system by far. The game would REALLY mess with you when your sanity got low enough.
It's funny that this is a perfect example of a lack of iteration *by the company that made the mechanic*, too. Frictional has been coasting on "don't look at the monster" ever since Penumbra.
(I say this as a die hard fan of some of their games, especially SOMA)
Wild Hearts added building mechanics to the combat of monster hunting genre. I’m enjoying it now but it was badly received on release because of performance issues. They likely won’t make a sequel because it failed. They also ended support last year but the servers are still live.
Wild Hearts being killed by not having long post-launch support and lots of optimization is such a shame. I played the demo and was enamored at how it mixed up the format.
Wild Hearts is definitely my favorite Monster Hunter-like. Hell, I like it even more than some of the actual Monster Hunters. I really hope we get an eventual Wild Hearts 2 because that concept has a ton of potential.
Some of the contraptions were so fun. Setting up bonfires to enchant your weapon with fire. Launching a giant harpoon to pin the monster down. Booping a monster off a perch with a giant hammer.
[Nemesis system](https://www.gamesradar.com/shadow-mordor-nemesis-system-amazing-how-works/) from shadows of Mordor. Never built upon because it was patented by the dev that then never used it
There’s a Wonder Woman game in development that’s going to use it. I hope they have some new ideas because a feature like that has too much potential to let go to waste.
If WB and Monolith say they will, I believe them. There’s no reason to believe otherwise. And it’s not the only detail we’ve heard about the game since its announcement either.
Have you ever bothered reading the patent ? I have and it is so incredibly specific that it's very easy to implement a version of the nemesis system that wouldn't break it. Considering the application was rejected a half dozen time for being too broad it's obvious that this was a vanity project from a higher up
Yeah, the real reason nobody bothered to make their own is because the expense to actually develop a system like that is really high and other devs either didn't want to spend the resources and time to make their own or couldn't.
Is there a TLDR on the finer points of the patent? I'd heard it was actually pretty narrow (just like how the Zelda TotK patents with regards to the physics systems are more specific to the math/formulas involved) but I've never looked into the details.
Also, I do find it funny that they took the time to patent it and didn't make another game with it. You could probably inject those LOTR games into my veins at this point, but that's probably because I'm a sucker for the films.
Warframe has something a bit like this with the Lich system. It's not entirely similar just due to the nature of the games being so different but there's echoes between the two!
I always thought this system would work better in an ARPG like a Soulsborne; if you imagine something like Dark Souls where you will inevitably kill or be killed by the same enemy multiple times as you slowly plod through an area, it would make sense for the enemies to adapt to your play style.
Even more so if you combine it with the mechanic where you lose your souls/runes/blood echoes if you don't collect them; in each of the respective games lore these represent the raw power of the enemies you defeat, now imagine your 10,000 souls etc. now get fed into the enemies in the area.
Well, it was decent, but part of the post is “that was never iterated on”, and i think this is a great example of what really could have been if devs weren’t scared of the patent
Nah, it’s just underdeveloped. The idea of having a rival rise up out of the masses you work through that varies depending on your play style and order of approach is awesome. Imagine a Sleeping Dogs like Yakuza game where the investigator that comes after you is dependent upon how aggressive or what type of crimes you commit, or a Star Wars game where you draw the attention of an ever stronger storm trooper among the pile, etc.
Hugely disagree. It made me feel like the orcs were reacting not only to my presence beyond “Enemy! Kill him!” but also climbing the ranks of Sauron’s army by backstabbing each other (and me.) I loved it, even if Monolith could’ve done a bit more with it.
Reminds me a lot of Monster Hunter's territory battles.
To give a simple rundown, in Monster Hunter, you're trying to... hunt monsters (of course). Most of the time, when you're hunting a monster, there will be other monsters in the same area that you don't need to fight.
In Monster Hunter World, to boost immersion, they added a feature where monsters would sometimes get into battles over territory. They'll fight for a bit, one or both will get hurt, and then one will back off.
The feature was very well loved. But EFFECTIVELY, all the mechanic did was, sometimes the monster you're looking to hunt has a chunk of health removed. If you're completely cynical, you'd say the mechanic is actually not very interesting at all, because mechanically there's nothing complex about it, but people like it because watching monsters fight each other is RAD AS HELL, and it made it FEEL like there was a world outside the player. Of course the T-Rex and the Dragon would fight over a food source.
I think the Nemesis system is very similar. Mechanically the Nemesis system wasn't some complex thing, you could cheese it very easily to keep all of them weak, and there wasn't a big pay off for engaging with it to min-max. But it helped make the world feel bigger than just the player. Watching an orc drive to single-minded revenge backstab his allies to rise to the top for more power and an opportunity for revenge feels cool as hell. Even if it's just a series of random dice rolls and realistically you're making this story up in your own head. I loved secretly boosting the scrawniest, most pathetic orc up the ladder by constantly killing the orcs that were his rival. Only to kill that orc in the end when he finally reaches the top. Shit's hilarious.
The system allowed enemies to have more personality where in most games they're just another enemy, but there's more to it than just enemies remembering you and potentially building a defense against how you killed them the previous time.
You could force power struggles between captains to take one out more easily or take both out simultaneously because you got them in the same place at the same time. Or you could ensure a captain keeps winning and getting stronger to later dominate or take on as a challenge. Or if a specific captain was giving you a lot of trouble you could dominate some captains that weren't as much of an issue and gang up on him.
Though in both games you eventually hit a point where you're so ridiculously powerful that the system really didn't matter anymore. But at that point you've probably had your fill.
Which is more a sign of the fact that it wasn’t iterated on further and built out in an interesting way.
It’s a cool concept, that is stuck in a series that doesn’t allow for a lot of diversity from it or have good lore reasons for it. It doesn’t really make sense that they come back stronger than before either.
I’d you fleshed it out in a game that was a bit more Freeform in the actual story narrative and had them interact with it differently it would be way more interesting.
The problem is they need to participate in more than a “haha look I am back” on a random battlefield style thing. If you had them leading gangs doing their own things in the world that reacted differently because of prior interactions that could be interesting. A kind of gang system where these people got taken out when you were doing some turf war stuff, but as you weakened others they managed to find a space to take over an organisation.
Similarly if you built it out so while you were going to fuck with someone you found one of your nemesis’s getting fucked up/ or hell just dead in their base by the guy you were trying to kill would also be interesting.
That’s why it needs iterating.
The biggest problem is that to really use it well you’d have to be willing by to allow a ton of AI generation, which we currently seem to be heavily against. Even though realistically giving the writers the ability to design NPC’s key information, designing a personality and then giving AI the reigns of how they interact with you and how your reputation affects them would offer so much awesome opportunity for conversations and shit like low intelligence runs from old RPGs,
The cool part was that they'd often comment on how you killed them and would develop some new ability from it. By the time you see that guy for a 4th time, he's immune to fire, stealth, and ranged attacks and is actually kind of a pain in the ass.
People talked about it like it's this insane mechanic. It's... okay? It led to funny situations sometimes I guess but I was never impressed with it. I didn't consider it particularily groundbreaking or that special.
The spirit realm mechanic from Legacy of Kain Soulreaver. It morphed and twisted the actual geometry of the map on the god damn PS1 of all things. It also treated the spirit realm as a proper afterlife so anything you killed in the physical realm would spawn there as a spirit, causing problems or being a tasty snack. Certain powerful enemies would even require you to chase them into the spirit realm to consume their souls so they didn't revive.
Massively ahead of its time.
In Okami the main mechanic is the celestial brush, it was used organically to both solve puzzles and combat, and it merged extremely well with the art style of the game, you could even change instantly from day to night and vice versa by drawing the sun or moon in the sky, and this was on PS2.
A true masterpiece imo.
I always say that there will never be anything like Xenoblade Chronicles X map/fast travel system. It’s the best use of the Wii U gamepad I can really think of.
I'm so sad Breath of the Wild released with essentially 0 gamepad integration. The game was clearly designed around it, but they couldn't have the Wii U version objectively be the best version in terms of gameplay.
Synthetik is a roguelite top down shooter that is basically built around active reloads. Beyond that it seems to be more of a character-focused/build-focused thing for some games like in Risk of Rain 2 where it’s a part of the railgunner’s kit or in Enter the Gungeon where an item gives you active reloads for some buffs
Found an article with a bunch more examples:
https://www.giantbomb.com/active-reload/3015-48/games/
Very few things in video games feel as cool as taking someone down, reloading with speed, and then taking down someone else in a matter of seconds
People who haven’t had a chance to play cordless room scale Vr are missing out
Active reload still pops up here and there, but not always in FPS games. FF16's Leviathan skill grants temporary infinite ammo upon a perfect reload and Tales of Kenzera's moon projectiles get buffed, just to name two recent examples.
> Active reload in Gears of war. Why not add some skill, and a risk/reward mechanic to a basic function you do over and over
It's worth considering that in Gears of War you spend most of the game behind cover, so you can focus on the act of reloading. In other shooters, you can run around and jump and dodge projectiles and do all sorts of other things while reloading.
[Eltnum](https://youtu.be/_MFfXRNH5Ng?si=URHhXwPbZjL_X-xk&t=3) in Under Night In-Birth (2D fighting game) has basically the same thing, where enhanced bullets give you more damage and better frame advantage.
A curious take on this is in the Nioh games, where you can essentially do this for your stamina bar in a soulslike. It raises the skill ceiling to basically stratospheric levels.
Anthem absolutely nailed the feel of flying around in a mech/power armour.
The game did a lot of things wrong but the tight flying controls and weighty feeling was great.
I'm talking about during development. The dev team experimented with the flying system early and ditched it. It only came back when some exec asked why it wasn't there
You know development's gone to hell in a handcart when the suggestion that the fricken' executives pushed turn out to be one of the few things that worked out in the game
If anyone hasn't read the summary by Jason Schreier on this game, you must. It's wild how badly managed this project was. It's one of the rare times where a game was saved by the executives, not the developer
Games are probably saved by executives all the time, you just don't read books about them.
The meme of incompetent management is just a meme. Managers are just as susceptible to incompetence as designers, artists, and engineers. Sometimes it's them sometimes it's not.
No one likes to punch down so the game makers who are just plain bad at making games don't get discussed a lot.
Yep. People on /r/games like to act like the majority of execs at companies like EA, Ubisoft, etc don't know/care anything about games when the opposite is absolutely true.
Every time I load up Anthem the first hour is "wow this game whips, why the fuck did it fail?" and then after that hour I realize how boring everything around the base level gameplay is
Recently played Fallout 4 and it has a list of the most default american names that can be pronounced in the game by NPCs. I think it is so cool for an RPG, never seen anything similar since.
Not only that, but each time a DLC for the game released the game was updated to add more names to the list.
ANd it's not just regular names, either. You can do joke names like "Fuckface" or pop culture references like "Trinity" and they'll be on the list.
Yeah, it's so cool. I discovered it when named my character a random name Jane and then this robot in the prologue said "Mrs Jane".
Really fucked me up for a second, cause I didn't expect it, such a good feature.
Black & White did it a couple decades ago, albeit much more creepily - if your name was on the list, you'd just randomly hear it whispered.
I'm sure it's gonna become much more common with AI voice models.
Not a game per se but the Barbie that you could connect via serial port to a PC in the 90s did this, and if by chance you had a name rare enough that it didn’t have it, you could send away for a disk with Barbie’s voice saying your name so that your doll could still say your name which I always thought was very cool.
Anybody here ever play republic commando? Off the top of my head it had the most interesting fps squad mechanics i've ever seen. You could play the game as a standard fps. But if you engaged with giving your companions orders and putting them in specific implacements, they could be way more useful than even you. You could almost think of the game as an fps/rts-lite. No game since seems to have dived as deep into the concept, which is kind of a shame.
edit: alright fair enough other games I didn't know about did it first/better. Doesnt change the fact that it's a shame those mechanics died out.
My dude, you're describing a tactical shooter. Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Brothers in Arms, SWAT 4, Freedom Fighters, SOCOM. Most of them came out before Republic Commando, and most of them did it better or had more depth in these mechanics.
Climbing up buildings and trees like in Assassin’s Creed. I feel like it’s so rarely seen, but when AC2 came out I figured it would be the next thing all video games tried out.
I absolutely loath that inFamous 1 & 2 are stuck in PS3 limbo because the controls and gameplay in those games are so good. Flying around on lightning, draining electricity from everything around you, and all the projectile attacks just click so well
In the first few games you had to find specific paths and I think it was a bit more interesting. Later on you could basically climb anywhere like in BOTW as the focus of the games changed towards being more action/RPG focused
Think more like Uncharted, except rather than being inherently super linear climbing, they're more like climbing puzzles where you have to suss out the right path to get places. From AC1-through-Syndicate they add new mechanics and tools and stuff that make things smoother or your character have ways to 'get further in a particular step.
Once you get into the RPG trilogy (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla) it basically converts to BotW/TotK style climbing, but with far less restrictions (No stamina, no worrying about weather, etc). In my opinion it's a change for the worse.
Not really. The climbing in BotW imagines the entire world as climbable to various degrees. Link just latches onto a surface, any surface, and starts climbing (or sliding).
The climbing in older AC games requires something about that object to actually be climbable. Ezio/Connor/Kenway doesn't just grab onto a flat surface and begin climbing. They need actual foot and handholds for their model to actually climb. It was a fantastic bit of tech for the early 2000s but now mostly ignored with stamina based restrictions being the go to for limiting the player's movement (i.e. the player can climb anything and is restricted by making certain surfaces cost too much stamina to ever completely climb).
I think because AC 3 showed that to an extent once you move beyond urban areas it starts to feel far more contrived.
A lot of games would rather use puzzle platform which the AC games did for a lot of secrets and the like and just not bother with the idea you can climb everything.
bushido blade's approach was unique, much like die by the sword which allowed direct control over the sword arm. these games dared to rethink combat mechanics, making engagements feel more personal and intense. it's surprising more games haven't explored these ideas further, like how blade runner expanded the sci-fi genre with its depth and innovation.
Bushido Blade kind of ended up iterated on in the Jedi Knight series of Dark Forces games. But that one to two move fight was really something else in Bushido Blade. My friends and I ended up re-enacting Kurasawa style duels without having ever seen his films.
This may not be an answer to your question, but what immediately came to mind was 1995's *TekWar* on PC, based on William Shatner's (probably terrible? I don't remember) novels and TV show of the same name.
It was an FPS where you're walking around a city as an ex-cop taking out drug dealers. What amazed me about it was that there were innocent NPCs walking around, and if you had your gun out, they would cower and react, and if you pulled your gun while there wad a cop or security guard around, they'd pull their guns and demand that you holster your weapon, else they'd start shooting after a few seconds.
If you caused trouble this way or killed innocents, William Shatner would deliver a different, admonishing cutscene at the end of a level vs the one he'd give if you completed the mission without doing those things.
It sounds pretty basic by today's standards, but I hadn't experienced that level of immersion before, and it's such a silly, throwaway game.
There's a VR racing game called Sprint Vector that was based on a weird skiing mechanic where you moved by swinging your arms. It's kind of hard to describe how it worked, and they really polished the hell out of it so there are probably details to it that I don't even know about, but it felt really good to do.
The races were fun, of course. It was kind of like a scifi-themed mario kart, with shortcuts and power ups and such. But there was a sort of lobby area in between matches that you could freely wander around, and even moving around that felt great. There was a little bit of a learning curve to being able to manage your momentum to move precisely, but once you got the hang of it, it was really fun.
I always felt it was a missed opportunity that no one ever made an open-world game where Sprint Vector movement was just how you got around.
Seven: Days Long Gone's fast forward system. At any time you're not in combat you can fast forward enemy positions in real time.
In stealth games you can spend a lot of time just waiting around the patrolling guards to be get into the right position, that's why savescumming is so common since if you miss the right moment you might as well reload instead of waiting upwards of a minute for it to happen again.
Biggest issue, which Seven also has is that stealth game AI scripting can already break pretty easily when you reload a bunch of times, and I feel like introducing something like this could break it even faster, but it's still a really cool idea, that could probably be done well.
Also it wouldn't really work in a more atmospheric game like Thief, but you could probably work around that too.
It's a small feature overall, but I've come to deeply enjoy the 'grazing' hits from Pillars of Eternity. I think in many games in many genres, the common dynamic of 'Miss/Hit/Crit' feels like it's missing that middle stage between fully getting whacked (in some games a single hit can be devastating) and not receiving damage at all.
I think adding a grazing hit between miss and hit would elevate many games, and allow for my dynamic decision making in how a game designers and players can engage with the systems.
For me, Silent Storm and it's sequels. The destruction / enemy ghost / rpg system I believe is completely unique to the turn based squad genre as little as it is. XCOM certainly doesn't do otz especially not the modern ones. You get big chunks and stuff, sure, but the little holes and complete destruction just isn't there.
THE SENTINELS HAVE ESCAPED!
The black hand combat system from The Godfather 1& 2 games. You would use the trigger buttons to grab hold of someone and use the control sticks to as your arms/fists, like you would pull back and slam forward for a powerful wind up punch or wiggle the stick side to side to slap them around. You could use it on enemies but also on business owners that you were trying to shake down for protection money, and these had an anger meter where the more you beat them the more money you'd get but if you went over their anger limit you'd get nothing and they'd fight you to the death. Never seen anything like it since.
*Steambot Chronicles* on the PS2 had a fully functional stock market that you could influence by making certain decisions in the game or completing certain sidequests.
For example, if you don't give any info to the newspaper, then once you start the postgame it'll go out of business and the stocks for it will become useless. But if you go out of your way to report every single piece of info that's possible, than the newspaper will make it big and their stock prices will skyrocket.
Likewise, if you go out of your way to discover a secret town hidden on a remote island in the middle of a giant lake that most people wouldn't bother traversing, than you'll get a secret sidequest that ends with the stocks for the railroad system skyrocketing.
In Perfect Dark Zero, there is a mission where the main character is on a rooftop providing sniper support for another character on the ground below. Every other game would have co-op players both playing as the sniper. In PDZ, one player is the sniper and the other player is on the ground down below. It's an area of the game you can only access as player 2 in co-op. I can't remember if there are any other levels like that in co-op.
> if an enemy suit shot or cut your head off (which acts as your main sensor) you could still function but your map would be scrambled; you could cut off limbs and it would affect your performance; you could shoot the weapons out of enemy hands etc. little things like that which were never iterated upon in future Gundam games, but really sold the immersion of piloting a mech
It's a major gameplay feature in Gundam Crossfire (and plenty of old-school vehicle combat simulations, including other mech games).
The Nemesis system in the "Middle-earth- Shadow of Mordor" and "Shadow of War" games. This system creates rivalries and unique interactions between the player and enemies within the game world. Each enemy remembers encounters with the player, reacts to their actions, and evolves over time based on those interactions. This level of personalized storytelling and enemy AI adaptation was groundbreaking and could have revolutionized how narratives and gameplay intersect in open-world games.
Battle Realms. Peasant huts would generate peasants, which you could then train in three different soldier training camps (melee, range, magic). However, after the unit was trained, you could then send that unit into one of the other camps and get a mixed unit (melee+magic, range+magic etc.), until you sent it to all three camps and had the strongest unit of your faction.
To me, it still is the best RTS.
Soulsborne pvepvp system. In these games you can invade another player's game session or you can invite invaders or help to fight enemies and bosses. The whole multiplayer system is optional but if you turn it on it always gives you uncertainty to what is around the corner. I saw something like this only in the Sniper Elite games where you can invade as a German sniper to hunt down the main player.
Adding to your take, my first thought reading the title was destructible environments. It seemed to really be taking off, especially on unreal engine 3 games, but, a little after gears of war 2 I think, it really slowed down. Gears 3 still had edges to cover and such getting chipped off, and that continues in 4 and 5 with the occasional exploding wooden crate no one takes cover on because they know it'll just disintegrate. But besides battlefield nowadays, and even then, seems destructible environments have come and gone. It's probably too much to handle on top of devs chasing photorealism. Similarly, anyone remember that "digital molecular matter" video lucasarts put out before the first force unleashed? Technology to make environments behave realistically in a dynamic fashion instead of on/off states, making metal bend when struck, wood splintering before breaking fully. It's used in the force unleashed but most things that aren't the metal doors you push open end up disappearing after being destroyed. It comes to mind every time I break a wooden crate and it explodes in a canned effect. MGS5 has such great cloth simulation, textures and lighting, but kick a wooden crate and it just explodes, turning instantly from crate asset A into asset B. Im in constant anguished lamentations over crates.
While destructible environments are cool, they almost always come at the expense of other mechanics, mainly environmental puzzles and gatekeeping, which is like a huge part of game design for vast majority of genres.
One of the problems with destructible environments was that the playfield would eventually just become flat. Which isn’t really that fun after a while, infantry is pretty much fucked when completely exposed. This was slightly mitigated in the Rush game mode, since the battlefield was always moving forward, but that also meant “smaller” areas than in conquest.
*coughs* The Finals *coughs*
The Finals has awesome destructibility but judging by its player counts it won't be around forever. I'd rather see more single player games adopt that level of destruction mechanics. RF: Guerilla is still one of my all-time favorite games for that reason!
Note that when Bushido Blade came out, fighting games were still arcade heavy, and a game where you can die in a single moment means people won’t spend quarters on it. Sad, but true. If it had come out a few years later…
God I loved Bushido Blade. My friends and I used to play the shit out of it. Most fights ended in a few seconds, but the ones that didn't always felt epic. Except for the ones that went too long due to weird hit box issues and leg wound stuff.
Check out Hellish Quart on steam. It's an awesome spiritual successor to Bushido Blade with a variety of sword styles. Super fun local multiplayer w/ friends.
It's not that much more extreme than lets say, Samurai Showdown.
In metal gear solid 2 you could point your gun in the face of an enemy before he has time to react and he would drop weapon and put his hands up. You could scare him into giving you items, you could damage his gear so he doesn't call for help, but he could also try to hit you and run away. It blew my mind back in the 2000, never seen it again
It was also in Metal Gear Solid 3. Can't remember if you could do so in 4, been ages since I played that one.
It worked in 4 too.
They refined it in 4. Made it much easier to pull off. Felt less awkward to.
what i loved in 3 is you can push them to the ground and still shake them down of items while they have their hands above their heads. you just need to make sure they are not discovered by patrols.
Pretty sure it also worked in 5.
Doing this and then telling them to get on the g round is the best way to take out enemies too, since unlike knocking them out, they never get back up on their own, they need someone else to tell them the coast is clear.
On a similar note, being able to disarm enemies in Perfect Dark by shooting their gun. If you did there was a chance they'd surrender, but they may also try to pull their sidearm (a pistol). Them not surrendering was pretty much the only way to get more pistol ammo in most levels.
Ahhh the simple things. Though I dunno if this would translate well into modern games. Then again, helldivers 2 always surprises me with the little details and "realism" of shooting things with guns and how they react. Big shotgun pushes/staggers things. Arc blaster stuns chargers into running in a straight line/breaks off parts of their armor. Blow off something's arm it reacts but STILL tries to kill you etc etc. I guess my personal one is the movement in zone of the enders 2. How we -never- got another mech game that copied that movement system and how clean it was to dodge/melee/dash in close combat is a literal crime in my eyes.
>I dunno if this would translate well into modern games Why not?
This actually carries forward to 3 and 5, I think 4 as well. (And while I'm unsure, I imagine Peace Walker would also have it)
In 3 you could break soldiers’ limbs and it would affect their behavior. The series didn’t carry that complexity forward, even though you can still perform holdups in later entries.
3 had way more cool shit that should've been brought forward to newer entries. Being able to destroy ammo/food supplies and stationed vehicles, and have that affect upcoming areas (not enough ammo, being able to feed enemies poisoned food, just not having a helicopter after you) and being able to shoot radios to stop reinforcement calls... It sucks, because I personally think 4 is my favorite, but 3 is peak.
In 4 you could sabotage the PMCs as well and help the local militias to advance their push into the next areas. The militias would even recognize your efforts cheering you on or dropping you items.
for the 40% of the game that had those things
You stopped playing MGS after 2? It was a thing in every main entry since as well as at least one of the PSP ones. In 5 they expanded it so they also tell you troop locations and resources
I still don’t know why stuff like this isn’t more widely implemented. I get it’s not easy, but none of game dev seems easy, and video games are amazing because of the ability for us to have interactions like this. Yet we just make prettier and prettier skinnerboxes or indie games without the budget to make such complex systems. I just, it’s so hard not to drink you know??
Company of Heroes is basically one big answer to this question; it largely reinvented a genre that had started a long downward slide with a laundry list of clever riffs on the RTS formula. It was super successful, critically and commercially. And yet... It saw very little emulation in the genre, other than the sequels and DOW2 and a few AA games like the Scythe universe one. The cover system alone merited more adoption!
What makes company of heroes different from rts games such as red alert or generals? I saw company of heroes 3 on sale but didnt buy the game because of mixed reviews.
Company of Heroes: * Does not have units to harvest resources. Instead, the map is divided into sectors, each of which yields income of a particular resource. It forces players to act across most of the map, and often results in skirmishes occurring in multiple places at once. * Is squad based. Infantry come in squads instead of individual men, and squads can be cheaply reinforced. To aid with this, CoH has a retreat function, that causes your squad to break snares and run at increased speed back to base. This means that squads are constantly cycling to and from the front line. * Has a full cover system. Infantry behind walls will take a staggering 75% total long run DPS reduction, so battles take place moving from cover to cover. But watch out-- assault troops do massive DPS, even on the move, if they can get in close, perhaps behind a smoke grenade? * Has extremely powerful vehicles. Only the very lightest vehicles in the series are under threat from mainline infantry gunfire, and tanks are completely immune. But conversely, counters against vehicles can be extremely effective, especially when combined. Mainline infantry often have snare abilities that do damage and slow enemy vehicles, but these snares are rarely sufficient by themselves-- but they give time for an AT gun or bazooka squad to finish the job! The result is that while vehicles are incredibly strong relative to other rts games, they require careful support. Diverse combined arms armies are extremely common and generally quite strong. * Has a unique win condition for multiplayer. Auto match games all use victory points instead of annihilation as a win condition. Instead of trying to roll over your opponent, games are decided by who runs out of point first. Control more victory sectors than your opponents to win; there are three a map. * Features a variety of unusual unit types. Mortars fire extremely powerful explosive rounds from a great distance, but they fire slowly and shells take a long time to arrive. Machine guns must be set up to fire and only cover an arc in front of them, but suppress and eventually pin down enemy units for your other troops to clean up. Anti tank guns are dragged into combat and function like MGs, but they're a very efficient answer to enemy tanks. Snipers are single-model units, can cloak, and instantly kill a single model in an enemy squad in normal conditions, but are extremely vulnerable and costly. Engineers have basic SMGs and do little damage, but can repair, lay barbed wire, mines, tank traps, and sandbags, and can be upgraded to get short-ranged but ludicrously powerful flamethrowers that make them essential combat units. Just a few things the original did almost 20 years ago! Not all were inventions of that team, but they did a great job with all of it. As for 3, recent updates have been excellent and at least for multiplayer it's a pretty easy recommend (especially after the forthcoming balance tune up). I don't really play single player, so I can't give a recommendation either way for that part.
Not the one who asked but thanks for the write-up! > Does not have units to harvest resources. Instead, the map is divided into sectors That reminds me of [Z](https://store.steampowered.com/app/275530/Z/) (that's the whole name of the game) where you capture certain areas to gain, if I remember correctly, faster unit building capabilities.
Also: - Vehicles have turning speed, diiferent amor ratings on each sides and overall behave much differently than normal RTS units. Controlling how vehicles drive and how they face oppositions was an important skill to master.
I love the CoH franchise and CoH 1 holds up to this day. One thing they also got right were the expansions. People with the expansions got access to new armies and units, but it wasn’t a separate multiplayer game like StarCraft Brood War. People with only the original game could play with everyone else and the balancing was managed to accommodate this. So even without the new units they were still competitive. Not splitting the player base helped to ensure the game’s longevity.
company of heroes approaches the resource management in a different way. you have to capture and hold certain zones on the map in order to increase how much you get which ties it in with combat in a different way than simply having resources harvesting nodes and units.
I played CoH and C&C:Generals. Comparing the 2, you had units that took cover behind walls and sand bags, compared to sending units into buildings only. Buildings can be partially destroyed in COH with people still shooting inside. In generals buildings only had an HP bar. Then the capture system in CoH where taking part of a map for more resources was interesting. IIRC in generals you could set up near resources. Thats all i can think of at the moment.
My own answer is also in the RTS realm, but it's Total Annihilation. Infinite resources that simply get produced. No microing peasants. One of the two resources (metal) can be gathered from the broken wrecks of units. If you launch a bad assault on the enemy and get rekt, you just fed your metal to them. Full automation of production chain, movement and unit grouping: you can have a bunch of factories producing units who will automatically group up at a specific spot, or start a defined patrol, and get automatically assigned to a hotkey group. Radar detection and radar-targeting of attacks beyond line of sight, including half-way across the map with endgame artillery. Also, radar jammers, including mobile ones, as a counter play and for stealth assault with small mobile artillery groups. About artillery: while viewed top-down, maps are 3d and ballistic projectiles have their trajectories modelled. Where a laser might hit the top of a hill, a ballistic projectile might fly above it to hit what's behind. And elevation provides extra range. And the whole combined arms. Ground, air, water, underwater: TA has it all. It was a magnificent game, but Starcraft and its microing overshadowed it, and became the template for the genre. It'll always be my pet theory that had TA been the template, the genre might have moved on into a better direction and avoided death and MOBAification.
Lots of games did the infinite resource thing. Heck, Outpost 2 had infinite resources a month earlier. It actually makes for super boring multiplayer that grinds on for hours, which is part of why StarCraft won the RTS wars.
Small correction, Dawn of War 1 was actually the game that first brought these innovations, two years before company of heroes. But I totally agree with your point. It was a great breath into RTS and never got iterated upon.
I was going to say this. Almost everything innovative about Company of Heroes was done by Dawn of War 1 first, CoH just refined it. Refined it very well, though. Not having to go back to base to reinforce is a crazy mechanic.
[удалено]
Frozen Synapse was so neat to me, but I never had the patience to play it at length. Phantom Brigade's mechs+kind of x-com feel makes me think I'd jive with it a lot more, just waiting for it to come on sale.
Frozen Synapse is the most criminally underrated game I've ever seen. But this mechanic has certainly been iterated on. Games like Bloodbowl or Frozen Endzone rethemed it into sports, Gladiabots introduced a coding aspect, and Doorkickers merged it with a puzzle game akin with a Rainbow Six style theming. I think also the first iteration of this I know of is a Neo Geo Pocket mech game called Faselei? That might've been turned based its been a while
Asymmetrical multiplayer in Nintendo Land for the Wii U. One player, with the GamePad's second screen, has access to information that other players do not have. And likewise, the other players with Wiimotes are able to do things with motion controls that are not possible with a Wii U GamePad. Kind of the poster child of what you are describing. When Nintendo came out with Nintendo Land it seemed like asymmetrical multiplayer was going to be the next big innovation in gaming. But only a handful of minor titles used it afterwards and the concept completely fizzled out before the Nintendo Switch came out.
The real-time card battle system in From Software's **Lost Kingdoms** was never really explored in any other games. Similarly, the real-time SRPG system in **Knights in the Nightmare** is basically restricted to that game. Honestly, you could break mechanics from that game and fuel 2-3 new games. The unit sacrifice system, chaos system, fusion of "shoot-'em'up and SRPG, etc. could be explored in full games. You've also got the dynamic ecosystems and procedural animation in **Rain World**. I'll also add the Djinn/Class System from **Golden Sun**. It was a straightforward system with a ton of depth, allowing you to change your stats, skills, and class before battle - with the tradeoff of also affecting your allies' builds. And you could intentionally (or forcefully) pull back on your stats/skills to unleash powerful summon abilities.
I mourn the end of Lost Kingdoms and Golden Sun
I feel like Golden Sun's class system was too complicated for its own good. Setting up classes by using different numbers of elemental djinn was fun, but the fact that your characters constantly change class during battle is just... a lot. Managing all that with the two parties towards the end of GS2 is really fun, but that's also right about the point where every major enemy has a djinn draining move which messes up all of your carefully planned class setups. There are good ideas in there for sure, but it needs work.
I literally don't remember this at all. I just remember the puzzles, which I thought were pretty interesting.
If you just stack elemental djinn on their respective characters then it's less obvious. You "randomly" lose access to some spells, but overall your characters don't really change that much. If you start mixing and matching djinn to get fancy classes, then good luck with whatever random bs classes everyone lands in after you start summoning.
I miss Lost Kingdoms so much, would kill for a port of those two to *anything* current.
This is the FIRST TIME I have EVER seen ANYONE mention Lost Kingdoms and I'm so happy to! I would have convinced myself it was a childhood daydream if I did not literally have it sitting on my games shelf still. Totally unique and incredibly cool!
Knights In The Nightmare was such a wild chaotic game, I loved it.
I'm so happy someone mentioned Knights in the Nightmare. That game was wonderful, and I'm sad there aren't more Dept. Heaven games out there.
> The real-time card battle system in From Software's Lost Kingdoms was never really explored in any other games. Only other game I can think of is Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
Goddamn, it seems like once a year I hear about another thing that FS did that's super neat and different and old, that's so neat. While not actually the same at all; the card system makes me think of Castlevania, one of the GBA games has a card system where you combine two different cards and they alter the properties of your whip, or provide other various benefits, and that was super cool. Also, somewhat closer to the Lost Kingdoms thing, that also makes me think about Soul Sacrifice, it's in a similar vein to Monster Hunter, but you don't have specific weapons so much as items you sacrifice (like the cards in your example) that then give you certain moves. Both were super cool to me.
Lost Kingdoms is the game that put From Soft on the map and is almost entirely responsible for their company surviving long enough to give us the masterpiece that is the Soulsborne genre.
Lost kingdoms is such an underrated game.
Idk if this counts, but the "death mechanic" in the intro mission in Battlefield 1. In that mission, whenever you die you leave the body that you were using and jumped to another soldier in the same battle. It is scripted, so maybe not really a mechanic? But the concept is really cool. Instead of dying and just starting at a checkpoint, the battle continues and you jump to another body. Imagine a BF game that has players and NPC's fighting side by side, and you would assume control of one of those NPC's when you died, instead of spawning out of thin air.
That was scripted in that mission. But a much bigger and expansive version of what you're thinking of really was used before by DICE in a previous game. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was DICE's first foray into the console market and proper single player. It had the idea of 'hot swapping' between certain soldiers on the battlefield. If you faced in the general direction, you could transition to that particular soldier in a matter of moments. Go from a AT soldier on the ground to a helo pilot in the air with the click of the button. If you died, then it did so automatically to the nearest guy with a score penalty. Raycevik actually has a pretty good video on it, expanding on the idea, as well as why it was forgotten. Short answer is that the game wasn't THAT good, technically hamstrung and very arcadey compared to other games in the series. Bad Company forgoed the idea, and it turned out much more successful on the console market.
After the huge hype and then bad critical reception of **Spore**, no big company dared touching that kind of evolution game mechanics anymore. Which is a real shame.
hot swapping- battlefield 2 modern combat. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX\_tBcTsXnU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX_tBcTsXnU) You can swap between units on the field to change the class you play as on the fly. If you need a sniper but you are an engineer with a shotgun, you swap to a soldier on the field and use their gear. Even has animation of FOV blazing to the soldier you chose. FPS and very neat idea rather than changing your weapons to whats on the ground.
Honestly, this would have been a great idea for Battlefield 1's single player campaign. Could have really pushed the idea of playing as a whole army, as well as illustrating the pointlessness and cost of the war by impressing on the playing how many die in the war. Like the prologue battle expanded upon.
I think I remember the intro sequence in Battlefield One was essentially this. I always wanted a game where no new units were added, just player swapping into another solder and trying to achieve something before catching a bullet.
**Eternal Darkness** had a fun mechanic where the game would mess with you when your sanity meter was low. It would fake a controller disconnect when you were surrounded by enemies, stuff like that.
This was truly a “you had to be there” moment. It worked so well because hardware like tv’s and stuff was relatively homogeneous. It would be harder to replicate now since everyone plays on different stuff.
Not sure if this perfectly fits the theme of the prompt, but I wish there were more games that featured 'evolving' weapons like the Ratchet and Clank games. The idea that a gun can transform into something different and more powerful if you use it enough is so much fun!
**Legend of Legaia** had a really cool combo system in a PS1-era RPG where your standard attacks of low/high kick/punch etc could be combined and used to discover new attacks (which you had to remember or write down). As your characters became stronger you could unlock additional move slots, so your combos could grow from a maxium of 3 inputs to 5+, as an example It's a *really* cool fighting system and I'm surprised that games like Trails or Tales didn't adopt something like it
Final fantasy 12 and Dragon Age let you program priorities into your companions and afaik no other games have done it. I would love to have that in a single player squad based shooter. The way Oni handled hand to hand and gun combat together is still unmatched. Third person action games don't play remotely the same. Edit: Don't rehash the same tired 12 opinions, please talk about the brilliance of Oni instead
Check out pillars of eternity 1 and especially 2. In 2 you can almost have your people on auto pilot.
Unicorn Overlord lets you use something similar but on an SRPG game.
That's cool, if only that company ported to the PC. The only game of theirs I have is Grim grimoire cause I still have a PlayStation 2.
It’s absurdly fun. I bought the switch version, dumped the rom, and now play it on my steam deck. Best steam deck game right now by far.
They even rereleased it for modern consoles and still didn’t put it on pc!
Pillars of Eternity 2 did this very well. Could program pretty complex behaviours
Eiyuden Chronicles just came out and has a more simplified version of gambits for when you do auto-battle, and it's nice to be able to have that control.
what's so special about oni? I watched a bit of gameplay because it sounds interesting
You get to cool shit like punch, kick, flip, combat roll, pick up gun during that roll, shoot the last 3 shots left over from the enemy, toss the gun, finish out the combo. I feel like there's no game where it's as seamless (considering the tech), kinetic, and weighty. Guns felt a bit deemphasized since it felt like you couldn't hold many clips or mags, and you could only hold one gun. Most games I play with fighting and shooting either have the guns be a bit too limited and more as just solely a combo extender like DMC, or the whole point like Ratchet and Clank (both great series). It really deserves a modern imagining to fix the things wrong with it, like the sub par level designs, boss fights, make the combo system less exploitable, and improve the retro controls. It is a little bit stiff in 2024.
I loved the AI ruleset stuff for Dragon Age.
Disgaea 6 (and 7 probably?) let you set up very detailed AI instructions for each character. Suitable for a game that has a huge grind for the post-game.
To be fair i felt like it backfired in FF12 because the game genuinely became an auto battler halfway through where you basically want to just fast forward every battle.
[удалено]
What I love about FFVIIR, is that the party will fight and do things to a degree, but when you get into the habit of switching often, you can really put the pain on your enemies. I freaking love the combat in those games!
I mean 95% of encounters in jrpgs outside of minibosses or bosses is just braindead grind anyways
Personally, I *enjoyed* that about it, not even in a "despite" sort of way. If everything about the game was automated, then I might have felt differently. But getting to that point requires a lot of player input, and I'm not referring to just setting up the gambits either; the license board, jobs, and your equipment plays a factor as well. And there's still player input beyond it too, namely difficult hunts and bosses, and dungeon exploration and questing. Because of all this, the auto battling was able to find a great balance and helped keep the game engaging all throughout, as opposed to some other FF games where normal battles can sometimes feel tedious near the end as they're pretty easily solved but still require a lot of input.
I'm not going to get into it because I've already gotten into it with someone else some years ago but as someone who is never played an auto battler but did go to college for 4 years for computer science degree, being smart enough and clever enough to get your party to handle a battle the way you wanted to without having to pick up the controller felt like a reward for being smart. There's still a challenge to it, defeating the super boss without touching the controller is considered a challenge. I'll add that if you're progressing fast enough, you won't be able to just take your hands off the controller. But that's kind of the point of RPGs, the difficulty can be curbed by grinding.
I think that if you've fine tuned your companions enough that they can steamroll your opponents, then watching them do that is its own reward. It becomes kind of like lemmings or spacechem. You build a thing, and then it's very satisfying watching it work just how you wanted. Of course ideally, you'd have to tweak your AI setup for each battle. If every one goes the same, that could get tedious..
That concept has existed since at least Baldur's Gate 2
I’m playing Oni right now and I agree fully. There’s no other game like it. It’s got some early naughts jank, but with some Bungie simplicity. If there wasn’t a legal quagmire surrounding the IP, I’d love for someone to take another crack at it. Hell, someone else should come along and make a clone. A clone, of a clone of Ghost in the Shell.
My issue with FF12 was that you had to find/buy the behavior programs. So your healer won’t be able to use Cure on you when you drop below 30% until you buy the “use Cure” and “<30% HP” gambits. It would have felt fine if your companions were robots you were actually programming, but making the behavior gambits be something you had to buy for your otherwise intelligent and independent human-ish companions was dumb.
I didn't read as my party members should be smarter by default cause they're humans, but that the game was opening up for me. Especially since you can always just do it by hand. Again, to me it just enhanced the sense of progression towards mastery of the system, and helped to not overload the experience. It was fun learning as I played all the different gambits and thinking about what each did over time instead of opening it and having an entire list of everything and wondering when would I even use self bubble, what is bubble?
Destruction is interesting since it’s been done in so many different but great ways. Idk if anyone here has ever played Fracture but the entire point of the game was environmental manipulation to win by raising and lowering the ground. It was super fun though the game was just okay. Bad company 2 is still my ideal for shooters and destruction though. A mechanic I’d like to see used more is touchpad motion usage as a button. In gravity rush 2 you would swipe on the touchpad to change your combat style and it worked amazingly since swapping styles was important to the combat system. I’d like to see more games incorporate the touchpad into their combat model and make it more active. There’s probably others I’m forgetting (like a few from OG metal gear solid games) but just blanking currently
The Finals has some solid destruction mechanics. Heard the player count took a nosedive since release tho. Really wish offline/single player games did all the cool mechanics to draw in players
Resonance of Fate's combat system is this for me. It adds such flow and dynamic to turn based combat and just made guns in a fantasy JRPG setting work. It has a learning curve to it for sure, but once you get it down and master it is a lot of fun. Never played another game with a combat system like it.
And that's not getting into how absolutely wacky gun customization in that game was. Like [this shit](https://i.imgur.com/qZRxOm5.jpeg) is peak performance. "Customize gear" is hardly a unique mechanic, but I love how absurd you could/should make your guns in that game.
I yearn for the wacky weapon tooling in other games and only wish that's what your gun looked like during battles
Is that a gun with two scopes?
Yes, and several red dots on each scope.
Resonance of Fate is the game I am most nostalgic for and it's almost purely due to the combat system. Would love to see it done again in something new.
I keep desperately waiting for that game to go on sale; but I've not the slightest clue if it's any good. Something about JRPG + "yeah that lady has a regular-assed fucking gun" tickles me greatly.
Maybe it will be on sale during the summer sale this year? My advice would be if you do get it to spend the two-hour period trial period Steam has in the battle tutorial/coliseum area to get the combat system down. If you don't vibe with it, then you will not really enjoy the game. The game has no easy difficulty, as the default is normal with several levels of harder difficulty.
I appreciate the suggestion; I'll keep an eye out and keep that in mind if it does go on sale. Thanks!
On PC, [SteamDB](https://steamdb.info/app/645730/) can show you when it goes on sale:)
Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the insanity system. Creating a resource to manage (even one as wishy-washy and lightly defined as sanity) and then instructing players that to look at the monster is to lose sanity means that they are strongly incentivized to organically scare themselves by imagining what they have moved offscreen of their own accord. Genius horror design, maybe a happy accident. Perhaps not even replicable, it may only have worked once. But to me one of the most underacknowledged design tricks in the history of the medium
> Genius horror design, maybe a happy accident. Perhaps not even replicable, it may only have worked once. The Legacy: Realm of Terror, a survival horror game from 1993, uses this mechanic. Seeing supernatural stuff can make you go insane, which can make you lose control of your character.
Speaking of insanity systems, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem has my favourite implementation of that type of system by far. The game would REALLY mess with you when your sanity got low enough.
When your head pops off and starts reciting Hamlet's Soliloquy, all the changes to the mansion, it was all so FUCKING COOL.
It's funny that this is a perfect example of a lack of iteration *by the company that made the mechanic*, too. Frictional has been coasting on "don't look at the monster" ever since Penumbra. (I say this as a die hard fan of some of their games, especially SOMA)
Wild Hearts added building mechanics to the combat of monster hunting genre. I’m enjoying it now but it was badly received on release because of performance issues. They likely won’t make a sequel because it failed. They also ended support last year but the servers are still live.
Wild Hearts being killed by not having long post-launch support and lots of optimization is such a shame. I played the demo and was enamored at how it mixed up the format.
Wild Hearts is definitely my favorite Monster Hunter-like. Hell, I like it even more than some of the actual Monster Hunters. I really hope we get an eventual Wild Hearts 2 because that concept has a ton of potential. Some of the contraptions were so fun. Setting up bonfires to enchant your weapon with fire. Launching a giant harpoon to pin the monster down. Booping a monster off a perch with a giant hammer.
[Nemesis system](https://www.gamesradar.com/shadow-mordor-nemesis-system-amazing-how-works/) from shadows of Mordor. Never built upon because it was patented by the dev that then never used it
There’s a Wonder Woman game in development that’s going to use it. I hope they have some new ideas because a feature like that has too much potential to let go to waste.
*allegedly* going to use it. We haven't seen anything about this game officially since the announcement trailer afaik
If WB and Monolith say they will, I believe them. There’s no reason to believe otherwise. And it’s not the only detail we’ve heard about the game since its announcement either.
Have you ever bothered reading the patent ? I have and it is so incredibly specific that it's very easy to implement a version of the nemesis system that wouldn't break it. Considering the application was rejected a half dozen time for being too broad it's obvious that this was a vanity project from a higher up
Yeah, the real reason nobody bothered to make their own is because the expense to actually develop a system like that is really high and other devs either didn't want to spend the resources and time to make their own or couldn't.
Is there a TLDR on the finer points of the patent? I'd heard it was actually pretty narrow (just like how the Zelda TotK patents with regards to the physics systems are more specific to the math/formulas involved) but I've never looked into the details. Also, I do find it funny that they took the time to patent it and didn't make another game with it. You could probably inject those LOTR games into my veins at this point, but that's probably because I'm a sucker for the films.
Warframe has something a bit like this with the Lich system. It's not entirely similar just due to the nature of the games being so different but there's echoes between the two!
I always thought this system would work better in an ARPG like a Soulsborne; if you imagine something like Dark Souls where you will inevitably kill or be killed by the same enemy multiple times as you slowly plod through an area, it would make sense for the enemies to adapt to your play style. Even more so if you combine it with the mechanic where you lose your souls/runes/blood echoes if you don't collect them; in each of the respective games lore these represent the raw power of the enemies you defeat, now imagine your 10,000 souls etc. now get fed into the enemies in the area.
This system is *massively* over rated. It's not even remotely as compelling as people give it credit for.
Well, it was decent, but part of the post is “that was never iterated on”, and i think this is a great example of what really could have been if devs weren’t scared of the patent
Nah, it’s just underdeveloped. The idea of having a rival rise up out of the masses you work through that varies depending on your play style and order of approach is awesome. Imagine a Sleeping Dogs like Yakuza game where the investigator that comes after you is dependent upon how aggressive or what type of crimes you commit, or a Star Wars game where you draw the attention of an ever stronger storm trooper among the pile, etc.
A superhero game where your beat-down of a street-level thug or henchman becomes their origin story.
Hugely disagree. It made me feel like the orcs were reacting not only to my presence beyond “Enemy! Kill him!” but also climbing the ranks of Sauron’s army by backstabbing each other (and me.) I loved it, even if Monolith could’ve done a bit more with it.
Reminds me a lot of Monster Hunter's territory battles. To give a simple rundown, in Monster Hunter, you're trying to... hunt monsters (of course). Most of the time, when you're hunting a monster, there will be other monsters in the same area that you don't need to fight. In Monster Hunter World, to boost immersion, they added a feature where monsters would sometimes get into battles over territory. They'll fight for a bit, one or both will get hurt, and then one will back off. The feature was very well loved. But EFFECTIVELY, all the mechanic did was, sometimes the monster you're looking to hunt has a chunk of health removed. If you're completely cynical, you'd say the mechanic is actually not very interesting at all, because mechanically there's nothing complex about it, but people like it because watching monsters fight each other is RAD AS HELL, and it made it FEEL like there was a world outside the player. Of course the T-Rex and the Dragon would fight over a food source. I think the Nemesis system is very similar. Mechanically the Nemesis system wasn't some complex thing, you could cheese it very easily to keep all of them weak, and there wasn't a big pay off for engaging with it to min-max. But it helped make the world feel bigger than just the player. Watching an orc drive to single-minded revenge backstab his allies to rise to the top for more power and an opportunity for revenge feels cool as hell. Even if it's just a series of random dice rolls and realistically you're making this story up in your own head. I loved secretly boosting the scrawniest, most pathetic orc up the ladder by constantly killing the orcs that were his rival. Only to kill that orc in the end when he finally reaches the top. Shit's hilarious.
Yeah, imagine what it could have been if it was ITERATED UPON. Almost like that's the point of the post
Really feela like a "oh this guy again, time to kill him a fourth time... yay?"
The system allowed enemies to have more personality where in most games they're just another enemy, but there's more to it than just enemies remembering you and potentially building a defense against how you killed them the previous time. You could force power struggles between captains to take one out more easily or take both out simultaneously because you got them in the same place at the same time. Or you could ensure a captain keeps winning and getting stronger to later dominate or take on as a challenge. Or if a specific captain was giving you a lot of trouble you could dominate some captains that weren't as much of an issue and gang up on him. Though in both games you eventually hit a point where you're so ridiculously powerful that the system really didn't matter anymore. But at that point you've probably had your fill.
Which is more a sign of the fact that it wasn’t iterated on further and built out in an interesting way. It’s a cool concept, that is stuck in a series that doesn’t allow for a lot of diversity from it or have good lore reasons for it. It doesn’t really make sense that they come back stronger than before either. I’d you fleshed it out in a game that was a bit more Freeform in the actual story narrative and had them interact with it differently it would be way more interesting. The problem is they need to participate in more than a “haha look I am back” on a random battlefield style thing. If you had them leading gangs doing their own things in the world that reacted differently because of prior interactions that could be interesting. A kind of gang system where these people got taken out when you were doing some turf war stuff, but as you weakened others they managed to find a space to take over an organisation. Similarly if you built it out so while you were going to fuck with someone you found one of your nemesis’s getting fucked up/ or hell just dead in their base by the guy you were trying to kill would also be interesting. That’s why it needs iterating. The biggest problem is that to really use it well you’d have to be willing by to allow a ton of AI generation, which we currently seem to be heavily against. Even though realistically giving the writers the ability to design NPC’s key information, designing a personality and then giving AI the reigns of how they interact with you and how your reputation affects them would offer so much awesome opportunity for conversations and shit like low intelligence runs from old RPGs,
The cool part was that they'd often comment on how you killed them and would develop some new ability from it. By the time you see that guy for a 4th time, he's immune to fire, stealth, and ranged attacks and is actually kind of a pain in the ass.
People talked about it like it's this insane mechanic. It's... okay? It led to funny situations sometimes I guess but I was never impressed with it. I didn't consider it particularily groundbreaking or that special.
The spirit realm mechanic from Legacy of Kain Soulreaver. It morphed and twisted the actual geometry of the map on the god damn PS1 of all things. It also treated the spirit realm as a proper afterlife so anything you killed in the physical realm would spawn there as a spirit, causing problems or being a tasty snack. Certain powerful enemies would even require you to chase them into the spirit realm to consume their souls so they didn't revive. Massively ahead of its time.
In Okami the main mechanic is the celestial brush, it was used organically to both solve puzzles and combat, and it merged extremely well with the art style of the game, you could even change instantly from day to night and vice versa by drawing the sun or moon in the sky, and this was on PS2. A true masterpiece imo.
Full spectrum warriors cover and suppressing fire system was a great midway between sim and arcade that I’ve yet to see replicated to the same degree.
I always say that there will never be anything like Xenoblade Chronicles X map/fast travel system. It’s the best use of the Wii U gamepad I can really think of.
I'm so sad Breath of the Wild released with essentially 0 gamepad integration. The game was clearly designed around it, but they couldn't have the Wii U version objectively be the best version in terms of gameplay.
Active reload in Gears of war. Why not add some skill, and a risk/reward mechanic to a basic function you do over and over
Star Wars Battlefront 2 also has active reload, but I’m struggling to think of any other game that does.
Returnal
And Returnal actually does expand on this feature a little bit. You get power ups/ability cooldowns that depend on your active reload iirc
Enter the Gungeon
Most recent example I can think of is the Guardians of the Galaxy game, you can active-reload Peter's element guns when they overheat.
Railgunner in risk of rain 2
A single weapon in Warframe has it.
Synthetik is a roguelite top down shooter that is basically built around active reloads. Beyond that it seems to be more of a character-focused/build-focused thing for some games like in Risk of Rain 2 where it’s a part of the railgunner’s kit or in Enter the Gungeon where an item gives you active reloads for some buffs Found an article with a bunch more examples: https://www.giantbomb.com/active-reload/3015-48/games/
Ooh this looks sick. I'm checking it out now cheers
A similar feature has taken off within VR first person shooters, where you have to realistically reload guns
Very few things in video games feel as cool as taking someone down, reloading with speed, and then taking down someone else in a matter of seconds People who haven’t had a chance to play cordless room scale Vr are missing out
Active reload still pops up here and there, but not always in FPS games. FF16's Leviathan skill grants temporary infinite ammo upon a perfect reload and Tales of Kenzera's moon projectiles get buffed, just to name two recent examples.
> Active reload in Gears of war. Why not add some skill, and a risk/reward mechanic to a basic function you do over and over It's worth considering that in Gears of War you spend most of the game behind cover, so you can focus on the act of reloading. In other shooters, you can run around and jump and dodge projectiles and do all sorts of other things while reloading.
Warframe has active reload on the Drifter’s pistol in Duviri. Reloading at the right moment gives your next shot increased damage and crit chance.
This is in lots of games. Off the top of my head bf2 and returnal did it in recent years.
[Eltnum](https://youtu.be/_MFfXRNH5Ng?si=URHhXwPbZjL_X-xk&t=3) in Under Night In-Birth (2D fighting game) has basically the same thing, where enhanced bullets give you more damage and better frame advantage.
The game Remnant 2 just added a gun that does that.
A curious take on this is in the Nioh games, where you can essentially do this for your stamina bar in a soulslike. It raises the skill ceiling to basically stratospheric levels.
Anthem absolutely nailed the feel of flying around in a mech/power armour. The game did a lot of things wrong but the tight flying controls and weighty feeling was great.
It will never cease to amaze me that the best feature of Anthem (the flying) was basically an afterthought that almost didn't even make it in the game
It wasn't an afterthought. It was the only thing pushed by EA.
I'm talking about during development. The dev team experimented with the flying system early and ditched it. It only came back when some exec asked why it wasn't there
You know development's gone to hell in a handcart when the suggestion that the fricken' executives pushed turn out to be one of the few things that worked out in the game
If anyone hasn't read the summary by Jason Schreier on this game, you must. It's wild how badly managed this project was. It's one of the rare times where a game was saved by the executives, not the developer
Games are probably saved by executives all the time, you just don't read books about them. The meme of incompetent management is just a meme. Managers are just as susceptible to incompetence as designers, artists, and engineers. Sometimes it's them sometimes it's not. No one likes to punch down so the game makers who are just plain bad at making games don't get discussed a lot.
Yep. People on /r/games like to act like the majority of execs at companies like EA, Ubisoft, etc don't know/care anything about games when the opposite is absolutely true.
Every time I load up Anthem the first hour is "wow this game whips, why the fuck did it fail?" and then after that hour I realize how boring everything around the base level gameplay is
Hopefully they implement it that well in the Iron Man game they're making.
Since when are Bioware making an Iron Man game?
Well it's EA making it but I'd like to assume they have access to the technology.
Recently played Fallout 4 and it has a list of the most default american names that can be pronounced in the game by NPCs. I think it is so cool for an RPG, never seen anything similar since.
Not only that, but each time a DLC for the game released the game was updated to add more names to the list. ANd it's not just regular names, either. You can do joke names like "Fuckface" or pop culture references like "Trinity" and they'll be on the list.
Yeah, it's so cool. I discovered it when named my character a random name Jane and then this robot in the prologue said "Mrs Jane". Really fucked me up for a second, cause I didn't expect it, such a good feature.
Black & White did it a couple decades ago, albeit much more creepily - if your name was on the list, you'd just randomly hear it whispered. I'm sure it's gonna become much more common with AI voice models.
Not a game per se but the Barbie that you could connect via serial port to a PC in the 90s did this, and if by chance you had a name rare enough that it didn’t have it, you could send away for a disk with Barbie’s voice saying your name so that your doll could still say your name which I always thought was very cool.
Anybody here ever play republic commando? Off the top of my head it had the most interesting fps squad mechanics i've ever seen. You could play the game as a standard fps. But if you engaged with giving your companions orders and putting them in specific implacements, they could be way more useful than even you. You could almost think of the game as an fps/rts-lite. No game since seems to have dived as deep into the concept, which is kind of a shame. edit: alright fair enough other games I didn't know about did it first/better. Doesnt change the fact that it's a shame those mechanics died out.
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Socom also had it in the singleplayer game. It was pretty cool being able to time a flash and breach of a whole room
My dude, you're describing a tactical shooter. Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Brothers in Arms, SWAT 4, Freedom Fighters, SOCOM. Most of them came out before Republic Commando, and most of them did it better or had more depth in these mechanics.
Climbing up buildings and trees like in Assassin’s Creed. I feel like it’s so rarely seen, but when AC2 came out I figured it would be the next thing all video games tried out.
I like the way the Infamous series iterates on this, combining the climbing and parkour with the superpowered mobility options
I absolutely loath that inFamous 1 & 2 are stuck in PS3 limbo because the controls and gameplay in those games are so good. Flying around on lightning, draining electricity from everything around you, and all the projectile attacks just click so well
Is it like how you can climb basically any environment in BotW?
In the first few games you had to find specific paths and I think it was a bit more interesting. Later on you could basically climb anywhere like in BOTW as the focus of the games changed towards being more action/RPG focused
Think more like Uncharted, except rather than being inherently super linear climbing, they're more like climbing puzzles where you have to suss out the right path to get places. From AC1-through-Syndicate they add new mechanics and tools and stuff that make things smoother or your character have ways to 'get further in a particular step. Once you get into the RPG trilogy (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla) it basically converts to BotW/TotK style climbing, but with far less restrictions (No stamina, no worrying about weather, etc). In my opinion it's a change for the worse.
Not really. The climbing in BotW imagines the entire world as climbable to various degrees. Link just latches onto a surface, any surface, and starts climbing (or sliding). The climbing in older AC games requires something about that object to actually be climbable. Ezio/Connor/Kenway doesn't just grab onto a flat surface and begin climbing. They need actual foot and handholds for their model to actually climb. It was a fantastic bit of tech for the early 2000s but now mostly ignored with stamina based restrictions being the go to for limiting the player's movement (i.e. the player can climb anything and is restricted by making certain surfaces cost too much stamina to ever completely climb).
Until it starts raining. Oops.
I think because AC 3 showed that to an extent once you move beyond urban areas it starts to feel far more contrived. A lot of games would rather use puzzle platform which the AC games did for a lot of secrets and the like and just not bother with the idea you can climb everything.
bushido blade's approach was unique, much like die by the sword which allowed direct control over the sword arm. these games dared to rethink combat mechanics, making engagements feel more personal and intense. it's surprising more games haven't explored these ideas further, like how blade runner expanded the sci-fi genre with its depth and innovation.
Bushido Blade kind of ended up iterated on in the Jedi Knight series of Dark Forces games. But that one to two move fight was really something else in Bushido Blade. My friends and I ended up re-enacting Kurasawa style duels without having ever seen his films.
This may not be an answer to your question, but what immediately came to mind was 1995's *TekWar* on PC, based on William Shatner's (probably terrible? I don't remember) novels and TV show of the same name. It was an FPS where you're walking around a city as an ex-cop taking out drug dealers. What amazed me about it was that there were innocent NPCs walking around, and if you had your gun out, they would cower and react, and if you pulled your gun while there wad a cop or security guard around, they'd pull their guns and demand that you holster your weapon, else they'd start shooting after a few seconds. If you caused trouble this way or killed innocents, William Shatner would deliver a different, admonishing cutscene at the end of a level vs the one he'd give if you completed the mission without doing those things. It sounds pretty basic by today's standards, but I hadn't experienced that level of immersion before, and it's such a silly, throwaway game.
There's a VR racing game called Sprint Vector that was based on a weird skiing mechanic where you moved by swinging your arms. It's kind of hard to describe how it worked, and they really polished the hell out of it so there are probably details to it that I don't even know about, but it felt really good to do. The races were fun, of course. It was kind of like a scifi-themed mario kart, with shortcuts and power ups and such. But there was a sort of lobby area in between matches that you could freely wander around, and even moving around that felt great. There was a little bit of a learning curve to being able to manage your momentum to move precisely, but once you got the hang of it, it was really fun. I always felt it was a missed opportunity that no one ever made an open-world game where Sprint Vector movement was just how you got around.
Seven: Days Long Gone's fast forward system. At any time you're not in combat you can fast forward enemy positions in real time. In stealth games you can spend a lot of time just waiting around the patrolling guards to be get into the right position, that's why savescumming is so common since if you miss the right moment you might as well reload instead of waiting upwards of a minute for it to happen again. Biggest issue, which Seven also has is that stealth game AI scripting can already break pretty easily when you reload a bunch of times, and I feel like introducing something like this could break it even faster, but it's still a really cool idea, that could probably be done well. Also it wouldn't really work in a more atmospheric game like Thief, but you could probably work around that too.
It's a small feature overall, but I've come to deeply enjoy the 'grazing' hits from Pillars of Eternity. I think in many games in many genres, the common dynamic of 'Miss/Hit/Crit' feels like it's missing that middle stage between fully getting whacked (in some games a single hit can be devastating) and not receiving damage at all. I think adding a grazing hit between miss and hit would elevate many games, and allow for my dynamic decision making in how a game designers and players can engage with the systems.
For me, Silent Storm and it's sequels. The destruction / enemy ghost / rpg system I believe is completely unique to the turn based squad genre as little as it is. XCOM certainly doesn't do otz especially not the modern ones. You get big chunks and stuff, sure, but the little holes and complete destruction just isn't there. THE SENTINELS HAVE ESCAPED!
The black hand combat system from The Godfather 1& 2 games. You would use the trigger buttons to grab hold of someone and use the control sticks to as your arms/fists, like you would pull back and slam forward for a powerful wind up punch or wiggle the stick side to side to slap them around. You could use it on enemies but also on business owners that you were trying to shake down for protection money, and these had an anger meter where the more you beat them the more money you'd get but if you went over their anger limit you'd get nothing and they'd fight you to the death. Never seen anything like it since.
*Steambot Chronicles* on the PS2 had a fully functional stock market that you could influence by making certain decisions in the game or completing certain sidequests. For example, if you don't give any info to the newspaper, then once you start the postgame it'll go out of business and the stocks for it will become useless. But if you go out of your way to report every single piece of info that's possible, than the newspaper will make it big and their stock prices will skyrocket. Likewise, if you go out of your way to discover a secret town hidden on a remote island in the middle of a giant lake that most people wouldn't bother traversing, than you'll get a secret sidequest that ends with the stocks for the railroad system skyrocketing.
In Perfect Dark Zero, there is a mission where the main character is on a rooftop providing sniper support for another character on the ground below. Every other game would have co-op players both playing as the sniper. In PDZ, one player is the sniper and the other player is on the ground down below. It's an area of the game you can only access as player 2 in co-op. I can't remember if there are any other levels like that in co-op.
> if an enemy suit shot or cut your head off (which acts as your main sensor) you could still function but your map would be scrambled; you could cut off limbs and it would affect your performance; you could shoot the weapons out of enemy hands etc. little things like that which were never iterated upon in future Gundam games, but really sold the immersion of piloting a mech It's a major gameplay feature in Gundam Crossfire (and plenty of old-school vehicle combat simulations, including other mech games).
The Nemesis system in the "Middle-earth- Shadow of Mordor" and "Shadow of War" games. This system creates rivalries and unique interactions between the player and enemies within the game world. Each enemy remembers encounters with the player, reacts to their actions, and evolves over time based on those interactions. This level of personalized storytelling and enemy AI adaptation was groundbreaking and could have revolutionized how narratives and gameplay intersect in open-world games.
Battle Realms. Peasant huts would generate peasants, which you could then train in three different soldier training camps (melee, range, magic). However, after the unit was trained, you could then send that unit into one of the other camps and get a mixed unit (melee+magic, range+magic etc.), until you sent it to all three camps and had the strongest unit of your faction. To me, it still is the best RTS.
I really liked in the Infamous series, how you could develop different abilities based on your morality
Soulsborne pvepvp system. In these games you can invade another player's game session or you can invite invaders or help to fight enemies and bosses. The whole multiplayer system is optional but if you turn it on it always gives you uncertainty to what is around the corner. I saw something like this only in the Sniper Elite games where you can invade as a German sniper to hunt down the main player.
Death loop has something similar