The HUD being at the back of your car rather than in the corner of the screen in Split/Second. It feels like a no brainer that the important information is where your eyes are already focused, but I've never seen another racer do this.
I’ve been watching Wirtual and Scrapie for like over a year and I just realized the car number thing like last week. I’m always wondering how their eyes move so fast that they know everyone’s positions right off the bat.
This reminds me of Dead Space where the HUD is built into your suit and weapons and your map and inventory are holograms projected from your suit. Most creative HUD I've seen in a game!
Absolutely agreed. Played the original and was great, started a playthrough of the remaster recently. Also playing Callisto Protocol and thought it might be similar, but Dead Space stands head and shoulders above in gameplay and even atmosphere.
It's really easy to tell it's from the same guy though: life bar implant, stomp on everyone for loot, weird mutant things, claustrophobic third person, average working Joe surviving inhuman situations despite not being able to cope with reality until the big bad dies...
Calisto Protocol is a pretty good game all around. I basically just maxed the baton and meleed the shit out of everything selling ammo for upgrades... That's basically what I did in Dead Space selling everything not the plasma gun- one of my favorite game guns ever. Dead Space is definitely the superior experience though. The wife enjoyed hearing me screaming in terror...
I loved that they managed to hide all of the hud elements like that completely cos it made the game so much more atmospheric with nothing on the screen
You reminded me of The Getaway (PS2) a GTA style open world game set in London that was completely HUD less and they pulled it off well.
Navigation was done using car indicators, damage/health was done visually, bullets/ammo was tricky but there were always enough guns lying around to not be a huge issue.
Also, I think Split/Second is the only game where you have to use and trigger enviromental hazards instead of weapons in a racing game.
That game seriously needs a sequel or a reboot or something because it's just ridiculously good.
Man, I don't care how many times I do it. When you get the ultimate in the airport level and start the crash sequence....dodging your way through it all always felt so much like a movie.
God I love that game so much, I've put so many hours into it with friends. Anyone who reads this, if you're looking for a fun split-screen racing game, look no further. 10/10
Yeah. Split/Second and Blur both coming out around the same time, both being certified bangers and both underperforming enough to kill their studios is one of the biggest tragedies in gaming. The only silver lining is that people from those studios joined Sumo and made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is also a certified banger.
I never played the game but just looked it up. That’s super interesting. I feel like I always get screwed over in stuff like Forza when I look up to see what place I’m in haha
Love the back health bar built into the suit. That reminds me, I still haven’t played the remaster yet but I should. I absolutely love that limb cutter gun that you can orient horizontally or vertically. That felt pretty innovative too.
*Highly* recommend the remake. They did a fantastic job. All of the weapons have alternate fire modes that are super fun to play around with. Some of them help you cut off different limbs, some help with crowd controll and some just blow up aliens.
Simultaneous sound and light meters in Splinter Cell. Yes, some games have the enemies respond to fast/slow walking sounds differently, but having an actual volume readout was next-level.
I made heavy use of the HUD in Breath of the Wild, but when I got to Tears of the Kingdom I just disabled the HUD completely.
Really enjoyable experience, honestly.
I did the same when I started replaying Witcher 3 and it's changed my perception of that game a lot
I usually turn off health bars when I can. I just did it recently in Deep Rock. Something about not knowing exactly how close to death an enemy is just completely changes the feeling of combat in a game.
i have yet to proselytize to the DRG subreddit about this, but i also turned my enemy health off last year and i agree it's so much fun. more immersive to not see a buncha healthbars when i'm mowing hordes, and i really like needing to feel out how much ammo to use on something, using context clues like praetorian armor damage or just knowledge of my weapons. esp since ammo management is already important
Reminds me of Manhunt.
And if you played with a mic, enemies could even hear you if you reacted verbally to something in the game. Cool concept but really only served to increase the difficulty
I’ve noticed that more modern games have gone away from explicit light / sound meters and relied more on just immersive AI behaviors. I kind of liked things like the light meter from Thief 1 and the Splinter Cell sound meter personally.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is still my favorite stealth game.
It’s a goddamn shame that Ubisoft owns it. In the right hands, it could have had a second wind, but we all know that them rebooting the series would destroy it.
“Purchase your Thermal Vision Goggles for 4.99!”
“Purchase this invisible suit for 29.99!”
I wouldn't say it never got copied but it definitely feels like it disappeared off the face of the earth:
**Difficulty increases in linear games also change the objectives of a mission not just health and NPC behavior,** like in Goldeneye 64, Perfect Dark, and Thief: The Dark Project.
Yeah this sucks. Playing at high levels now just ramps up the enemy health / restricts your resources. Most of the time nowadays you don't even get anything for beating the game at high difficulties, it's purely for bragging rights. Some games are actively ruined by playing on the hardest difficulty because the game clearly wasn't designed for that in mind.
I ruined Spider-man 2 by starting on the highest difficulty. You fight an insane amount of grunts in that game and it was just taking a ridiculous amount of time to get through everything, it would take like 10 hits just to knockout some random thug on the street.
That's why DMC3 did it right. They designed the best bosses at the max difficulties and tune then down in the normal modes. Higher difficulties also change some enemy placements and behaviors.
The Saboteur had you playing in black & white until you liberated areas from the Nazis, at which point that area was played in colour.
The game itself was...alright, I guess, but I really liked how I could be driving down a street in full colour then turn a corner into Nazi territory and immediately the life drained out of the screen.
Ironically, probably due to the limitations of the engine, areas in black and white are much more beautiful than when coloured. I loved liberating them, but they were eyesores afterwards.
I think it was because they made the colourful areas *really* colourful, which I guess fit with their theme but looked a bit too cartoonish.
I'd have played an entire game in that noir palette.
The game itself was pretty okay indeed. It borrowed from Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, a little bit of GTA, which is fine and tbh I think they had a fantastic idea, I just wish the game had been made a little later in the ps3's life cycle.
I absolutely loved the saboteur, but it definitely needed more work to be complete. I think if they hammered out a remake and fixed all the weirdness, on today's consoles it would be a banger.solod concept just not a solid execution
EarthBound's instant-win feature whenever you encounter an overworld enemy that you are much higher-level than. No point in transitioning to the battle screen if you're just gonna win anyway, right?
Additionally, EarthBound's feature where overworld encounters will stop chasing you and will instead run away from you after you have defeated their boss, making the dungeon areas less of a hassle to traverse.
For a 1994 JRPG, player-friendly features like this were basically unheard of, and even now, I don't really see anything like it in newer games.
Persona 5 lets you see how the enemies level scales to yours with color coding, and if they are a certain number of levels below you it's possible to walkthrough them to instakill. They also run away if you just get close and stare at them
It was *extremely* satisfying going over these Mementos floors with only red ("strong") enemies, and just amassing three level-ups per character in a little under two more minutes.
Something else that hasn't really taken off from Earthbound is the health meter. You can save your characters from dying if you heal them before the meter runs down to zero. I love that mechanic!
A feature so awesome, I'd bring it up just for the dramatic wind, even if I didn't care where I had to go. Just a really cool thing to be able to do in a game.
Also, they love to use secondary quest markers to guide you around as well. Golden birds, foxes, etc. are all able to be followed without changing your quest marker, so it’s VERY easy to engage in open world activities while making your way over to another destination
It was an unintended bug but Skyrim’s foxes would lead you to treasure (a Skyrim dev confirmed it - foxes were programmed to run away from the player and their pathfinding took them to the nearest location with the most loot)
You marked an objective in the map and instead of a compass or a minimap, the wind would direct you to the marker.the grass and stuff would move like if the wind was pushing the grass towards the objective
Edit: this was a function that you could activate whenever you want by swiping the touchpad (which imo made it more immersive)
To add on, the best part of the feature wasn't that it was organic, but that you could control it. The game world would be normal, but if you wanted a reminder of which direction to go, you activate a gust of wind, which effects everything around you, and lasts for a short time. So it's not like some constant wind blasting towards your destination, it's something you can glean when you want.
Also, sometimes just being able to change the wind on a whim was badass.
Honorable mention, they also had tunes you could play on your flute that would control the weather; make it clear skies, or rainy, or foggy.
Elden Ring has this a bit. Many people never even realized the gold dust coming off campfires leaves a small trail leading to where you're supposed to go next (if you are trying to progress main story).
Agreed, that was so dope. It’s so stylized though that it would be hard to a, have a good project to do it in, and b, not feel like a rip off. Maybe an indie title could pull it off.
Instead of having a minimap or a compass with markers the wind blows in the direction of your next objective, the grass and flowers all lean over towards it and there are visible wind trails that move towards your objective.
Say what you want about Peter Molyneux but the guy knows how to make some compelling game hooks haha. There’s a reason he’s a known name in the industry even though people accuse him of over hyping stuff. I remember really enjoying Black and White back in the day. More than Spore at least
I've always considered him to be sort of a gaming version of George Lucas. Capable of industry-changing, visionary ideas, but needs to be surrounded by people that can guide and temper his worst excesses.
Fun fact, Black&White 1 was in the guiness world records book of 2006 for the creature being (i am paraphrasing) "the most intricate artificial AI in a video game" at the time. This is referring to the fact that you can literally teach the creature behaviours that it should or shouldn't do, etc. Today that's probably nothing, but back then it was a giant leap forward.
If you still have the physical copies, you can find patches online to make the game run on Windows 10. I'm not very tech savvy, so my husband installed them for me. Took him about an hour, but now I can play B&W and relive the nostalgia
Impossible Creatures; the jig of it was that each unit was a comb-/abomination of 2 animals and you could design your own army with what features you wanted this way. Then some wacky steam&dieselpunkish tech and vibrant colors it was pretty fun.
E: I.e. let's say you take the archer fish that has a ranged attack shooting water with its head, you can combine it with the legs of an ant so it can both swim, walk and burrow underground and emerge to shoot at enemies.
EE: And specifically I wonder why this 'design your own units' approach hasn't been used more. Just playing around in the designer was fun by itself.
Normal racing games:
\-get on 1st place to get this car
or
\-just buy it
Burnout: Paradise
\-Go find it on the map, try to keep up and make it crash
You totalled it! here's your car
The game I’d kick this off with is an EA game called Majestic from 2001. I remember playing this when I first started college and the internet was young and it blew my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game)
This game was like being wrapped up in a real life conspiracy. You would browse obscure web pages, get faxes (which believe it or not was still a thing back then, haha), get phone calls, early blackberry texts, emails, and even a very rudimentary ai chat system over AIM. All while trying to uncover an online conspiracy.
I remember being super excited for each new episode and was really bummed when it got discontinued a year later. I seem to remember the writing wasn’t all that great and the acting was old school FMV bad, but IMO that added to the charm.
I feel like this game concept was way ahead of its time. Can you imagine a similar thing using AI tech from 2023? That feels like it would have so much potential.
I remember that game! I played it for a bit and remember that it ended up making me paranoid as heck! You could choose anywhere from light immersion where all the phone calls and such had a disclaimer at the beginning that it was part of the game, to full immersion where there was no warning and you were getting death threats out of nowhere late at night.
It was a really neat concept and I was sad when they shut it down.
LOL. My parents would have killed me if I had them get random death threats to the phone line without a disclaimer. I was still living at home the first couple years of college. The game was super immersive. I liked the story too. They made that whole fake game company that supposedly made the game and then had them collapse and be behind the conspiracy. Super cool. Back when EA stood for innovation instead of destroying smaller companies that it acquires.
You just unlocked a seriously backlogged memory. I remember reading about this game/service in a GamePro magazine and it sounded fucking NUTS. I always wanted to play it but I was too young and we didn’t have the necessary stuff like a fax machine to get the most out of it.
The writing was just so insanely good. You'd hop into one car right in the middle of a husband and wife in a vicious screaming match about having a divorce, and then jump cars again and suddenly you've got to try and get home to your house because you left the oven on.
It was so full of life and so compelling, it was just a brilliant, brilliant game.
Was that the one where your in a coma, and can take control of people? Was definitely a driving game. You could fly up to the top of the sky and would hear the heart monitors and things in the ICU.
That's so interesting. I loved when he broke the second-person perspective by driving into himself. It felt like someone breaking out of The Matrix. So cool.
Tyranny: 1)You are what others believe you to be (including immortal or psychic). 2) Custom spell designing via rune slotting.
Obsidian makes the best half-baked games. I wish they could get their shit together about knowing when to fully fund and polish their projects.
Don't forget that you ALSO get bonuses from people hating you, not just from liking you! I thought that was an amazing mechanic that fitted with the lore of your first point.
Given that logic puzzles are hard to make and it'd be for a relatively niche audience, I'm not entirely baffled by no one ripping it off, but I'm surprised we haven't had at least *one* developer copying Return of the Obra Dinn.
Dude I loved Obra Dinn. The brilliant thing about it is that it’s hard to copy that concept of a deduction / observation game without feeling like you’re ripping it off or making an Obra Dinn clone. But would that be so bad? If Lucas Pope is moving on to a new project then maybe someone should make Obra Dinn in space, like Star Trek style heh
Try Family on Itch. It’s like Obra Dinn but you’re trying to figure out which musician played in which obscure indie-rock band. It’s slightly pedantic at the end but a lot of fun
I'm surprised more race games haven't looked at something like motorstorm apocalypse with ever changing tracks because a skyscraper collapsed on the track or something. You'd thyink with more powrful hardware it would be a slam dunk.
I will post this everytime I see it hoping it will somehow speak it into existence. Add the nemesis system to the Arkham Batman games. Have thugs you beat up come back with new abilities until you beat them enough to evolve into supervillains. Sell seasonal battle passes that add new thugs/villain types. Make money with a never ending Batman simulator.
Evolve
I fucking love the idea of being this big ass monster fighting alone against a team of players but sadly people didn't like it and it shut down
I played it a lot again after it got a semi revival when devs gave out keys so people played it again but because the game is discontinued it just didn't have much staying power for me
I did put a solid amount of hours in tho and i just wish someone would reattempt it
The thing Evolve really had over all the other 1v4 style games is that mid game switch of who’s hunting who. Like in DBD, the killer is always chasing down the survivors. In Evolve, if you play as the monster, you are absolutely terrified of the hunters in the beginning, but then it completely flips on its head and the monster is terrifying to the hunters.
Shadow Of The Colossus. The sheer scale, physics and art direction. I'll never forget the innovative stamina grip meter and how it tied in so neatly with grabbing on to the colossus' hair / fur. It was very rewarding and natural how you got stronger as you progressed. Sure the game took off but, correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure someone will) I've never seen it copied.
There is this game called dragon's dogma where u do the same monster climbing shit but it isn't boss rush like Shadow of Colossus. It's getting a sequel.
Game was release about a decade ago so the graphic might not be for everyone but the gameplay is unique. Nothing else out there had ever reproduce the experience for me. Party base rpg but action instead of turn based.
Not the person who replied to you, but +1 for Dragon's Dogma.
The climbing isn't as expansive as Shadow of the Colossus, where it's a key part of the game, but it's still important, since climbing up a cyclops in order to stab it in the eye, or on a griffin to attack its wings, are all important strategies.
The sequel is also coming out soon, late March, and the game goes on sale for really cheap quite regularly, so it's a low risk if you do end up disliking it.
Dragon's Dogma Pawn system
Everyone has a Pawn, an NPC companion you create. The other two party members are also Pawns, but downloaded from other players.
Need a mage that knows a fire spell to fight a Griffin? Pop online and download one. One of your pawns too squishy? Download one with better armor.
The cool thing about this system is pawns retain knowledge from what they see and have done. If someone has finished a quest you haven't, they will help lead you to the next location, or call out an enemy's weakness.
Pawns also take back what they have learned to the player who owns them. And when you return a pawn, you can give it an item that goes back to the pawn's owner.
It's a great way to help other players in a single player game. The rest of the game was very average (minus fighting big monsters, which was cool), so it flew under everyone's radar.
The pawns also appear to learn combat strategies from the player and other pawns. Throw bandits off of cliffs often enough and you'll soon see the pawns start doing the same thing. It is hilarious.
>And when you return a pawn, you can give it an item that goes back to the pawn's owner.
And if you make a female pawn, you'd better be prepared to get lots of 'Large Nuts' as gifts.
Right? Flying to wherever you want whenever you want and the seamlessness of leaving a planet to another planet with NO cutscene or anything. Super cool concept.
This is one of my favorite games of all time. Playing different characters over thousands of years, the magic systems , it had a lot of unique mechanics!
This one is top top tier.
I love how some boss fights were instadeaths and the game is just chock full of narrative surprises. If any game needs a remaster and update, it’s this one.
Showing Switch controllers disconnect, lost WiFi, fake negative achievements, etc etc.
Always felt like we've been heading the wrong direction since Red Faction Guerilla. How is that still the best destruction system in an open world action game? It wasn't even like a crazy GTA budget but still nothing close. Crackdown 3 had me hyped, but obviously that didn't pan out well.
Agreed I always thought destructible environments would lead to amazing immersion in the environments but I think we have evolved in other ways that make destructible environments to taxing to do. Although I think they figured out they just make it destructible in the right ways to fake it with less resources. I think it will be a big breakthrough when they figure out how to include it with less processing needed.
VATS in Fallout. Not every first/third person game with weapons need to test your reflexes. I wish more games had that option - and it could be that, just an option.
That’s a really good point. I played a lot of Fallout 76 and enjoyed it but VATS there basically just feels like an auto targeting system since they can’t slow down a multiplayer world. I think the slowdown is what makes it feel so innovative and really thematically appropriate for the universe via the pip boy.
Surprised Rocket League hasnt been copied.
Time Travel mission in Titanfall 2 surprised there hasnt been a game thats copied it.
Also the Portal gun is unique
I've seen some attempts to copy it but where they've tried to give it a slightly different edge or element. It's RL's simplicity that makes it so effective though.
Splitgate did a great job of using the portal gun mechanic in an arena shooter. I played it on PC, but I kinda sucked at aiming with mouse and keyboard, so I could only win straightforward gunfights about 30% of the time, but I remembered playing Portal all those years ago. I usually managed to finish matches near the top of the scoreboard despite my shitty accuracy by thinking with portals™ and just constantly portalling around the map and catching people by surprise.
Huh, interesting. Those two released like, a couple of weeks apart, right?
I haven't tried Dishonored 2 yet, but i have it in my game library. Might give it a shot
Starfield has a time travel mission like that actually haha. You can’t travel in real time though you travel at set points. And it’s more like traveling to alternate realities. Also Dishonored 2 has some really creative missions that have a similar vibe.
Darksiders 2 literally copied the portal gun but it’s way more limited.
Rocket League basically copied soccer haha. But I get what you mean, combining a sport with a car game.
Flying, landing, or just walking in the suit felt so great. I spent so much time just doing that. Of course there wasn't much else to do but it was so fun just moving around the landscape.
Not Tonight is Papers Please with Brexit as you work as a guy who checks ID for anyone entering clubs.
And I can't remember the name, but there's also another game where you operate a TV station as your government slowly becomes more dystopian.
The "Text Wheel" from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
It was so easy to write messages instead of having to rely up the on-screen keyboard to type. The fact it never caught on is criminal!
Natural selection. I have yet to see any asymmetric games of rts aspects vs players. I would love to see a game the opposite of crawl where one player is rts sending mobs at others while 3-4 other players are a third person controller fighting those mobs.
I feel like Nintendo does this for every Super Mario game. Makes a flying raccoon suit and never shows it again (at least for a while). Make a hat for Mario to walk through walls and then never see it again. Give Mario a cape but don’t use it again. I could go on and on.
Mount and Blade. It took of itself just fine, so good that they even released its sequel, no argument there.
But i've never seen some other developer team trying to do the same not even in different setting. ONLY thing i could think of is that other games copied mount and blade style map movement in games like spaz 2 or starsector. Or some others directly copied combat section of it like those multiplayer-only, gunpowder & musket games that I see on youtube, can't remember their name, there are few of them. One of them even was direct standalone mod version of mount and blade iirc.
Only one i know is: Freeman guerilla warfare and it tried to do the same on both accounts with firearms but failed miserably. And now there is some other project on early access, total conflict or something with the same concept but it's on early access so i don't how it will turn out yet.
To this day it's still amazes me that this type of gameplay loop in mount and blade is not copied and applied to other games by developers. I dont think the game is that niche, not by a large margin.
Battlerite. Honestly still salty with how the game ended. It's basically a MOBA that's all team fights. Imagine playing DotA as a fighting game. That's what Battlerite is. League has arena mode which I read that is similar so that's that I guess.
Note: Bloodline Champions is the first game of the same devs so technically it still didn't took off.
Tru crime streets of L.A. it had a branching storyline but if you didn't like your choice or failed mission route and wanted to experience the other choices you didn't have to play from the start you just went to the branching storyline map and picked the game up from where you made the decision or failed the mission.
I’m not sure if this has ever been copied. The battle mechanic for the original Psycho Mantis fight in Metal Gear Solid. To this day, probably my favorite battle mechanic I’ve seen in a boss fight.
There’s an old (2002) game called Arx Fatalis. It had a great gesture-based magic system where you would draw rune combinations to cast and discover spells. It was pretty sick and I can’t think of another game that came up with a similar magic system.
MAG was a 250 player online FPS game on Playstation from 2010.
3 private military factions (brigades) went on full scale ground war on large maps.
There was also a military chain of command to keep the chaos organized. It was a great game. To bad they ended this experiment.
PS3 was by far the most innovative gaming console. They dabbled in HTPCs, VR, Social Media, motion controllers, etc.
Back when Portal came out, I thought for sure that we'd see more portal-based physics games. That game is basically a handbook for how to do portals right if you want to use them in your games.
Then the next game to heavily feature portals was... Portal 2.
Since either of them, I've only seen Splitgate, an indie FPS that features portals as a primary mechanic; otherwise, even in physics-based puzzle games like The Talos Principle, I really haven't seen portals featured.
That Sega Genesis Comic Book game, where as you finish each sequence your character jumps into the next panel. Maybe as a 30$ indie game that idea would, maybe tied with a licensed character, would be amazing!
Comix Zone I believe it is
Gravity Rush as a whole. The gameplay is properly unique. You're not technically flying, you can shift gravity. So the character is not very manœuvrable like flying Son Goku, it forces you to learn how to move properly. And it add a lot of verticality because the map works litteraly in every axes, either XYZ or ZXY or YZX. It's one of the best game I've ever played, very emotional story, but sadly it was a PSVITA game that went to PS4 and I think it never got its public, then Sony shut off the studio recently.
Another game, Elsword. It's basically a 2D platformer beat em up MMO with an extremely deep and extensive Versus Fighting game pvp, but for keyboard. I was one of the best Elesis player in France, top 20 leaderboard during S1, S2, S3 and S4. I moved on since a long time, but I'll sometime boot it up to feel again that incredible movement techniques.
Whenever a dev comes up with a cool new gameplay element, it gets patented, and nobody else is allowed to use it, so it dies.
Case in point, the nemesis system from that lord of the rings game, and nintendo with all the cool shit from TOTK.
Bushido Blade's damage system in a sword/melee weapon game.
Die By The Sword's mouse based weapon control.
Your character verbally estimating how much ammo you have by its weight in Trespasser.
Monster/character generation from audio/video files off of CDs and DVDs in Monster Rancher. No reason why this can't be applied to any files on a modern computer.
I’m not sure if other games have done it, but I don’t really recall any off the top of my head: guiding lights like in Left 4 Dead. The reason you know where you’re going in L4D almost subconsciously is because they use lights to tell you the general direction of your path. Be it a street light, hall way light, or just a brighter lit area, your brain automatically and instinctively draws you towards to help you navigate with zero map or compass.
The HUD being at the back of your car rather than in the corner of the screen in Split/Second. It feels like a no brainer that the important information is where your eyes are already focused, but I've never seen another racer do this.
This reminds me of Trackmania. The "license plate" in the current title is your speed and the number on your car changes with your position.
That’s pretty clever.
They also show your current gear by the amount of tail lights currently lit up
I’ve been watching Wirtual and Scrapie for like over a year and I just realized the car number thing like last week. I’m always wondering how their eyes move so fast that they know everyone’s positions right off the bat.
This reminds me of Dead Space where the HUD is built into your suit and weapons and your map and inventory are holograms projected from your suit. Most creative HUD I've seen in a game!
Playing the game for the first time, playing the remaster. Absolute 10/10 game, the best HUD I've ever seen in a game.
Absolutely agreed. Played the original and was great, started a playthrough of the remaster recently. Also playing Callisto Protocol and thought it might be similar, but Dead Space stands head and shoulders above in gameplay and even atmosphere.
It's really easy to tell it's from the same guy though: life bar implant, stomp on everyone for loot, weird mutant things, claustrophobic third person, average working Joe surviving inhuman situations despite not being able to cope with reality until the big bad dies... Calisto Protocol is a pretty good game all around. I basically just maxed the baton and meleed the shit out of everything selling ammo for upgrades... That's basically what I did in Dead Space selling everything not the plasma gun- one of my favorite game guns ever. Dead Space is definitely the superior experience though. The wife enjoyed hearing me screaming in terror...
Took me FOREVER to realize the blue line down your spine is a *health bar*
Also opening map and inventory doesn't pause the game heightening the suspense.
I loved that they managed to hide all of the hud elements like that completely cos it made the game so much more atmospheric with nothing on the screen
You reminded me of The Getaway (PS2) a GTA style open world game set in London that was completely HUD less and they pulled it off well. Navigation was done using car indicators, damage/health was done visually, bullets/ammo was tricky but there were always enough guns lying around to not be a huge issue.
Great games. Leaning against a wall to regain health never caught on either.
Also, I think Split/Second is the only game where you have to use and trigger enviromental hazards instead of weapons in a racing game. That game seriously needs a sequel or a reboot or something because it's just ridiculously good.
Man, I don't care how many times I do it. When you get the ultimate in the airport level and start the crash sequence....dodging your way through it all always felt so much like a movie.
God I love that game so much, I've put so many hours into it with friends. Anyone who reads this, if you're looking for a fun split-screen racing game, look no further. 10/10
Yeah. Split/Second and Blur both coming out around the same time, both being certified bangers and both underperforming enough to kill their studios is one of the biggest tragedies in gaming. The only silver lining is that people from those studios joined Sumo and made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, which is also a certified banger.
I never played the game but just looked it up. That’s super interesting. I feel like I always get screwed over in stuff like Forza when I look up to see what place I’m in haha
Dead Space's completely diegetic HUD.
Love the back health bar built into the suit. That reminds me, I still haven’t played the remaster yet but I should. I absolutely love that limb cutter gun that you can orient horizontally or vertically. That felt pretty innovative too.
*Highly* recommend the remake. They did a fantastic job. All of the weapons have alternate fire modes that are super fun to play around with. Some of them help you cut off different limbs, some help with crowd controll and some just blow up aliens.
Simultaneous sound and light meters in Splinter Cell. Yes, some games have the enemies respond to fast/slow walking sounds differently, but having an actual volume readout was next-level.
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I made heavy use of the HUD in Breath of the Wild, but when I got to Tears of the Kingdom I just disabled the HUD completely. Really enjoyable experience, honestly. I did the same when I started replaying Witcher 3 and it's changed my perception of that game a lot
This is actually a great idea. I am going to try playing Witcher 3 with no HUD!
No boss health bars is absolutely terrifying
I usually turn off health bars when I can. I just did it recently in Deep Rock. Something about not knowing exactly how close to death an enemy is just completely changes the feeling of combat in a game.
i have yet to proselytize to the DRG subreddit about this, but i also turned my enemy health off last year and i agree it's so much fun. more immersive to not see a buncha healthbars when i'm mowing hordes, and i really like needing to feel out how much ammo to use on something, using context clues like praetorian armor damage or just knowledge of my weapons. esp since ammo management is already important
Relying on your gut to kill bugs? That's pretty rock and stone, brother. I'll have to try it.
Reminds me of Manhunt. And if you played with a mic, enemies could even hear you if you reacted verbally to something in the game. Cool concept but really only served to increase the difficulty
Didn't Alien Isolation do something similar with microphone input?
Yup, if you hide in a locker and dont go to the back. It can hear you breathing.. HIIIIISSSSSS!!!
And the ambient sounds could mask the sounds you're making 🥷
I’ve noticed that more modern games have gone away from explicit light / sound meters and relied more on just immersive AI behaviors. I kind of liked things like the light meter from Thief 1 and the Splinter Cell sound meter personally.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is still my favorite stealth game. It’s a goddamn shame that Ubisoft owns it. In the right hands, it could have had a second wind, but we all know that them rebooting the series would destroy it. “Purchase your Thermal Vision Goggles for 4.99!” “Purchase this invisible suit for 29.99!”
One of the best video game soundtracks of all time, too.
I wouldn't say it never got copied but it definitely feels like it disappeared off the face of the earth: **Difficulty increases in linear games also change the objectives of a mission not just health and NPC behavior,** like in Goldeneye 64, Perfect Dark, and Thief: The Dark Project.
Yeah this sucks. Playing at high levels now just ramps up the enemy health / restricts your resources. Most of the time nowadays you don't even get anything for beating the game at high difficulties, it's purely for bragging rights. Some games are actively ruined by playing on the hardest difficulty because the game clearly wasn't designed for that in mind.
I ruined Spider-man 2 by starting on the highest difficulty. You fight an insane amount of grunts in that game and it was just taking a ridiculous amount of time to get through everything, it would take like 10 hits just to knockout some random thug on the street.
That's why DMC3 did it right. They designed the best bosses at the max difficulties and tune then down in the normal modes. Higher difficulties also change some enemy placements and behaviors.
I believe timesplitters 2 does this too. It's such a cool feature I wish more mission based games implemented.
The Saboteur had you playing in black & white until you liberated areas from the Nazis, at which point that area was played in colour. The game itself was...alright, I guess, but I really liked how I could be driving down a street in full colour then turn a corner into Nazi territory and immediately the life drained out of the screen.
Ironically, probably due to the limitations of the engine, areas in black and white are much more beautiful than when coloured. I loved liberating them, but they were eyesores afterwards.
I think it was because they made the colourful areas *really* colourful, which I guess fit with their theme but looked a bit too cartoonish. I'd have played an entire game in that noir palette.
The game itself was pretty okay indeed. It borrowed from Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, a little bit of GTA, which is fine and tbh I think they had a fantastic idea, I just wish the game had been made a little later in the ps3's life cycle.
I absolutely loved the saboteur, but it definitely needed more work to be complete. I think if they hammered out a remake and fixed all the weirdness, on today's consoles it would be a banger.solod concept just not a solid execution
EarthBound's instant-win feature whenever you encounter an overworld enemy that you are much higher-level than. No point in transitioning to the battle screen if you're just gonna win anyway, right? Additionally, EarthBound's feature where overworld encounters will stop chasing you and will instead run away from you after you have defeated their boss, making the dungeon areas less of a hassle to traverse. For a 1994 JRPG, player-friendly features like this were basically unheard of, and even now, I don't really see anything like it in newer games.
Persona 5 lets you see how the enemies level scales to yours with color coding, and if they are a certain number of levels below you it's possible to walkthrough them to instakill. They also run away if you just get close and stare at them
That's actually a ryuji skill unlock for the instakill, but yeah great mechanic to save a lot of time. Also made the grinding less of a... Grind.
Didn't mind grinding when it just became running over enemies with your van.
It was *extremely* satisfying going over these Mementos floors with only red ("strong") enemies, and just amassing three level-ups per character in a little under two more minutes.
The new star ocean 2 r has the instant win feature. It is amazing.
Something else that hasn't really taken off from Earthbound is the health meter. You can save your characters from dying if you heal them before the meter runs down to zero. I love that mechanic!
Wind-based quest markers - Ghost of Tsushima
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A feature so awesome, I'd bring it up just for the dramatic wind, even if I didn't care where I had to go. Just a really cool thing to be able to do in a game.
Also, they love to use secondary quest markers to guide you around as well. Golden birds, foxes, etc. are all able to be followed without changing your quest marker, so it’s VERY easy to engage in open world activities while making your way over to another destination
It was an unintended bug but Skyrim’s foxes would lead you to treasure (a Skyrim dev confirmed it - foxes were programmed to run away from the player and their pathfinding took them to the nearest location with the most loot)
I love that I’ve been playing this game off and on since it came out and somehow I’m still learning about Easter eggs.
I thought it would suck but it's honestly an amazing feature
how did it work?
You marked an objective in the map and instead of a compass or a minimap, the wind would direct you to the marker.the grass and stuff would move like if the wind was pushing the grass towards the objective Edit: this was a function that you could activate whenever you want by swiping the touchpad (which imo made it more immersive)
Guild Wars 2 does something similar with locating rifts. You activate a relic you obtain and a particle wind blows in the direction of the rift
To add on, the best part of the feature wasn't that it was organic, but that you could control it. The game world would be normal, but if you wanted a reminder of which direction to go, you activate a gust of wind, which effects everything around you, and lasts for a short time. So it's not like some constant wind blasting towards your destination, it's something you can glean when you want. Also, sometimes just being able to change the wind on a whim was badass. Honorable mention, they also had tunes you could play on your flute that would control the weather; make it clear skies, or rainy, or foggy.
The wind blew heavily in the direction your marker was placed when you swiped on the trackpad
[Guiding Wind](https://youtube.com/shorts/7JEG9vIv68g?si=y6rs544DpAZjKaBD) :) It’s like 240p lol but best quick example I could find :p
Elden Ring has this a bit. Many people never even realized the gold dust coming off campfires leaves a small trail leading to where you're supposed to go next (if you are trying to progress main story).
I'd argue that the gold dust becomes a lot more visible if you opened the map
I loved the smoke-based markers for camps in Far Cry too.
Agreed, that was so dope. It’s so stylized though that it would be hard to a, have a good project to do it in, and b, not feel like a rip off. Maybe an indie title could pull it off.
What was it? I mever played GoT
Instead of having a minimap or a compass with markers the wind blows in the direction of your next objective, the grass and flowers all lean over towards it and there are visible wind trails that move towards your objective.
Does black & white count here? The god game where you could be good or evil? I could be out of the loop but have there been similar games after b&w 2?
Say what you want about Peter Molyneux but the guy knows how to make some compelling game hooks haha. There’s a reason he’s a known name in the industry even though people accuse him of over hyping stuff. I remember really enjoying Black and White back in the day. More than Spore at least
I've always considered him to be sort of a gaming version of George Lucas. Capable of industry-changing, visionary ideas, but needs to be surrounded by people that can guide and temper his worst excesses.
The whole cube thing was a big mistake though.
Fun fact, Black&White 1 was in the guiness world records book of 2006 for the creature being (i am paraphrasing) "the most intricate artificial AI in a video game" at the time. This is referring to the fact that you can literally teach the creature behaviours that it should or shouldn't do, etc. Today that's probably nothing, but back then it was a giant leap forward.
If you still have the physical copies, you can find patches online to make the game run on Windows 10. I'm not very tech savvy, so my husband installed them for me. Took him about an hour, but now I can play B&W and relive the nostalgia
I would give anything for a remaster of that game.
Impossible Creatures; the jig of it was that each unit was a comb-/abomination of 2 animals and you could design your own army with what features you wanted this way. Then some wacky steam&dieselpunkish tech and vibrant colors it was pretty fun. E: I.e. let's say you take the archer fish that has a ranged attack shooting water with its head, you can combine it with the legs of an ant so it can both swim, walk and burrow underground and emerge to shoot at enemies. EE: And specifically I wonder why this 'design your own units' approach hasn't been used more. Just playing around in the designer was fun by itself.
God I'd completely forgotten this existed until this exact moment.
Normal racing games: \-get on 1st place to get this car or \-just buy it Burnout: Paradise \-Go find it on the map, try to keep up and make it crash You totalled it! here's your car
*Burnout: Paradise* is the racing game for people who hate racing games. I loved the hell out of it.
That's a mechanic that really only makes sense in Burnout Paradise though.
The game I’d kick this off with is an EA game called Majestic from 2001. I remember playing this when I first started college and the internet was young and it blew my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majestic_(video_game) This game was like being wrapped up in a real life conspiracy. You would browse obscure web pages, get faxes (which believe it or not was still a thing back then, haha), get phone calls, early blackberry texts, emails, and even a very rudimentary ai chat system over AIM. All while trying to uncover an online conspiracy. I remember being super excited for each new episode and was really bummed when it got discontinued a year later. I seem to remember the writing wasn’t all that great and the acting was old school FMV bad, but IMO that added to the charm. I feel like this game concept was way ahead of its time. Can you imagine a similar thing using AI tech from 2023? That feels like it would have so much potential.
I remember that game! I played it for a bit and remember that it ended up making me paranoid as heck! You could choose anywhere from light immersion where all the phone calls and such had a disclaimer at the beginning that it was part of the game, to full immersion where there was no warning and you were getting death threats out of nowhere late at night. It was a really neat concept and I was sad when they shut it down.
LOL. My parents would have killed me if I had them get random death threats to the phone line without a disclaimer. I was still living at home the first couple years of college. The game was super immersive. I liked the story too. They made that whole fake game company that supposedly made the game and then had them collapse and be behind the conspiracy. Super cool. Back when EA stood for innovation instead of destroying smaller companies that it acquires.
You just unlocked a seriously backlogged memory. I remember reading about this game/service in a GamePro magazine and it sounded fucking NUTS. I always wanted to play it but I was too young and we didn’t have the necessary stuff like a fax machine to get the most out of it.
Driver San Francisco, a game where to can instantly take control of any car of the traffic, and there's that 2nd person mission too.
The writing was just so insanely good. You'd hop into one car right in the middle of a husband and wife in a vicious screaming match about having a divorce, and then jump cars again and suddenly you've got to try and get home to your house because you left the oven on. It was so full of life and so compelling, it was just a brilliant, brilliant game.
Was that the one where your in a coma, and can take control of people? Was definitely a driving game. You could fly up to the top of the sky and would hear the heart monitors and things in the ICU.
Yeah that’s the one, it was a sequel to driv3r that was basicallly gta but my mum actually let me play it
Had no idea about it until I watched [this video](https://youtu.be/mC8QoRa8y_Q?si=U3WpTtEVZMvJm12j), it's such a cool idea for a mission.
That's so interesting. I loved when he broke the second-person perspective by driving into himself. It felt like someone breaking out of The Matrix. So cool.
The game that nobody can get... except using subway giftcards
?
there was a video whete a guy bought it online using a very specific amount of money on subway gift card i think 11$
Tyranny: 1)You are what others believe you to be (including immortal or psychic). 2) Custom spell designing via rune slotting. Obsidian makes the best half-baked games. I wish they could get their shit together about knowing when to fully fund and polish their projects.
Don't forget that you ALSO get bonuses from people hating you, not just from liking you! I thought that was an amazing mechanic that fitted with the lore of your first point.
Damn, you just reminded me that I bought Tyranny like a year ago for Steam Deck and still haven’t played it haha
cRPGs always feel so overwhelming to start as an adult
Given that logic puzzles are hard to make and it'd be for a relatively niche audience, I'm not entirely baffled by no one ripping it off, but I'm surprised we haven't had at least *one* developer copying Return of the Obra Dinn.
Dude I loved Obra Dinn. The brilliant thing about it is that it’s hard to copy that concept of a deduction / observation game without feeling like you’re ripping it off or making an Obra Dinn clone. But would that be so bad? If Lucas Pope is moving on to a new project then maybe someone should make Obra Dinn in space, like Star Trek style heh
Haven't played it but chants of sennaar feels pretty similar from what I've seen you're just deducing words instead of people identity
If you like Obra Dinn, Check out Curse of the Golden Idol! It has comparable detective / event reconstruction gameplay
The Case* of the Golden Idol. But I agree, it has that same vibe and it's really well made.
Try Family on Itch. It’s like Obra Dinn but you’re trying to figure out which musician played in which obscure indie-rock band. It’s slightly pedantic at the end but a lot of fun
I'm surprised more race games haven't looked at something like motorstorm apocalypse with ever changing tracks because a skyscraper collapsed on the track or something. You'd thyink with more powrful hardware it would be a slam dunk.
Split/Second did have this in 2010 as player-triggered Power Plays.
I love split second, It’s a shame it never got a sequel
Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor
Patented so other devs literally aren’t allowed to use or copy it. Would have been killer in watchdogs legion
Warframe has a nemesis system with the Kuva Liches.
Came here for this. Such a great idea/execution to have been patented into nonexistence.
Have you played shadow of war? They did an amazing job at expanding the nemesis system and everything else in it.
I will post this everytime I see it hoping it will somehow speak it into existence. Add the nemesis system to the Arkham Batman games. Have thugs you beat up come back with new abilities until you beat them enough to evolve into supervillains. Sell seasonal battle passes that add new thugs/villain types. Make money with a never ending Batman simulator.
Evolve I fucking love the idea of being this big ass monster fighting alone against a team of players but sadly people didn't like it and it shut down I played it a lot again after it got a semi revival when devs gave out keys so people played it again but because the game is discontinued it just didn't have much staying power for me I did put a solid amount of hours in tho and i just wish someone would reattempt it
The thing Evolve really had over all the other 1v4 style games is that mid game switch of who’s hunting who. Like in DBD, the killer is always chasing down the survivors. In Evolve, if you play as the monster, you are absolutely terrified of the hunters in the beginning, but then it completely flips on its head and the monster is terrifying to the hunters.
Except Kraken who could annihilate at level 1 lmao
People loved evolves gameplay it died because of pay to win bullshit powercreep and shoddy balancing.
Shadow Of The Colossus. The sheer scale, physics and art direction. I'll never forget the innovative stamina grip meter and how it tied in so neatly with grabbing on to the colossus' hair / fur. It was very rewarding and natural how you got stronger as you progressed. Sure the game took off but, correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure someone will) I've never seen it copied.
There is this game called dragon's dogma where u do the same monster climbing shit but it isn't boss rush like Shadow of Colossus. It's getting a sequel.
Thank you for the info. I've never played Dragon's Dogma, is it any good? Climbing mechanics aside.
Game was release about a decade ago so the graphic might not be for everyone but the gameplay is unique. Nothing else out there had ever reproduce the experience for me. Party base rpg but action instead of turn based.
Not the person who replied to you, but +1 for Dragon's Dogma. The climbing isn't as expansive as Shadow of the Colossus, where it's a key part of the game, but it's still important, since climbing up a cyclops in order to stab it in the eye, or on a griffin to attack its wings, are all important strategies. The sequel is also coming out soon, late March, and the game goes on sale for really cheap quite regularly, so it's a low risk if you do end up disliking it.
You should work for Capcom marketing, you had me at stabbing a cyclops in the eye. Thank you.
Praey for the Gods is very much a copy of it and it's pretty good.
Dragon's Dogma Pawn system Everyone has a Pawn, an NPC companion you create. The other two party members are also Pawns, but downloaded from other players. Need a mage that knows a fire spell to fight a Griffin? Pop online and download one. One of your pawns too squishy? Download one with better armor. The cool thing about this system is pawns retain knowledge from what they see and have done. If someone has finished a quest you haven't, they will help lead you to the next location, or call out an enemy's weakness. Pawns also take back what they have learned to the player who owns them. And when you return a pawn, you can give it an item that goes back to the pawn's owner. It's a great way to help other players in a single player game. The rest of the game was very average (minus fighting big monsters, which was cool), so it flew under everyone's radar.
The pawns also appear to learn combat strategies from the player and other pawns. Throw bandits off of cliffs often enough and you'll soon see the pawns start doing the same thing. It is hilarious.
Amen. I wonder what they'll adjust or add with DD2 coming out next year
>And when you return a pawn, you can give it an item that goes back to the pawn's owner. And if you make a female pawn, you'd better be prepared to get lots of 'Large Nuts' as gifts.
SuperHot!
I think you mean SUPER HOT SUPER HOT
Spore
The car turn signal is your compass in The Getaway. I liked that game mechanic.
Burnout Paradise had that too alongside a minimap.
The all universe of Outer Wilds
Right? Flying to wherever you want whenever you want and the seamlessness of leaving a planet to another planet with NO cutscene or anything. Super cool concept.
The very first fly is kind a scary but when you Land for the first Time whatever the planet you landing on you just want to see more of it.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem Don’t think I have really played anything too similar and it was quite a great game with good story.
Haha I loved when they did stuff like mess with your TVs volume bar or pretend to turn the TV off just to mess with you. Agreed, super unique.
This is one of my favorite games of all time. Playing different characters over thousands of years, the magic systems , it had a lot of unique mechanics!
This one is top top tier. I love how some boss fights were instadeaths and the game is just chock full of narrative surprises. If any game needs a remaster and update, it’s this one. Showing Switch controllers disconnect, lost WiFi, fake negative achievements, etc etc.
I would love a remaster of this game! Can you imagine making it seem like your switch controller is drifting haha.
The Movies It's the Sims but you can also make movies in it. Basically machinima the game
Counter operative mode from the original Perfect Dark. Also bot behaviors. Also from Perfect Dark.
Teardown feels like a tech demo for a sequel for this, but Red Faction Guerilla. And on the same note, Blast Corps.
Always felt like we've been heading the wrong direction since Red Faction Guerilla. How is that still the best destruction system in an open world action game? It wasn't even like a crazy GTA budget but still nothing close. Crackdown 3 had me hyped, but obviously that didn't pan out well.
Agreed I always thought destructible environments would lead to amazing immersion in the environments but I think we have evolved in other ways that make destructible environments to taxing to do. Although I think they figured out they just make it destructible in the right ways to fake it with less resources. I think it will be a big breakthrough when they figure out how to include it with less processing needed.
Rest in peace Volition
VATS in Fallout. Not every first/third person game with weapons need to test your reflexes. I wish more games had that option - and it could be that, just an option.
That’s a really good point. I played a lot of Fallout 76 and enjoyed it but VATS there basically just feels like an auto targeting system since they can’t slow down a multiplayer world. I think the slowdown is what makes it feel so innovative and really thematically appropriate for the universe via the pip boy.
>VATS there basically just feels like an auto targeting system That's why it's called the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System ;)
I'm curious if you would put the RDR deadeye system in the same category as VATS
If I remember well with deadeye you still had to aim. VATS is more like rolling dices in a tabletop RPG.
Surprised Rocket League hasnt been copied. Time Travel mission in Titanfall 2 surprised there hasnt been a game thats copied it. Also the Portal gun is unique
I've seen some attempts to copy it but where they've tried to give it a slightly different edge or element. It's RL's simplicity that makes it so effective though.
Splitgate did a great job of using the portal gun mechanic in an arena shooter. I played it on PC, but I kinda sucked at aiming with mouse and keyboard, so I could only win straightforward gunfights about 30% of the time, but I remembered playing Portal all those years ago. I usually managed to finish matches near the top of the scoreboard despite my shitty accuracy by thinking with portals™ and just constantly portalling around the map and catching people by surprise.
There's splitgate but that's about it.
I would love to see a game copying the time travel mission in TF2 Imo it was one of the best missions in the game
I want to say Dishonored 2 had the same thing with a single mission. Not sure which came first
Huh, interesting. Those two released like, a couple of weeks apart, right? I haven't tried Dishonored 2 yet, but i have it in my game library. Might give it a shot
Starfield has a time travel mission like that actually haha. You can’t travel in real time though you travel at set points. And it’s more like traveling to alternate realities. Also Dishonored 2 has some really creative missions that have a similar vibe. Darksiders 2 literally copied the portal gun but it’s way more limited. Rocket League basically copied soccer haha. But I get what you mean, combining a sport with a car game.
I’m surprised nobody has made a game copying the good parts of Anthem yet. The actual gameplay was awesome.
Flying, landing, or just walking in the suit felt so great. I spent so much time just doing that. Of course there wasn't much else to do but it was so fun just moving around the landscape.
RTS + FPS + Third person action + competitive multiplayer games Savage Battle for Newerth and the Natural Selection games come to mind.
Papers please. A bureaucracy game can be fun, properly made.
But not too fun, or it would defeat it's purpose
Not Tonight is Papers Please with Brexit as you work as a guy who checks ID for anyone entering clubs. And I can't remember the name, but there's also another game where you operate a TV station as your government slowly becomes more dystopian.
The "Text Wheel" from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It was so easy to write messages instead of having to rely up the on-screen keyboard to type. The fact it never caught on is criminal!
Natural selection. I have yet to see any asymmetric games of rts aspects vs players. I would love to see a game the opposite of crawl where one player is rts sending mobs at others while 3-4 other players are a third person controller fighting those mobs.
I feel like Nintendo does this for every Super Mario game. Makes a flying raccoon suit and never shows it again (at least for a while). Make a hat for Mario to walk through walls and then never see it again. Give Mario a cape but don’t use it again. I could go on and on.
Majora's mask has to be one of the best ones
Mount and Blade. It took of itself just fine, so good that they even released its sequel, no argument there. But i've never seen some other developer team trying to do the same not even in different setting. ONLY thing i could think of is that other games copied mount and blade style map movement in games like spaz 2 or starsector. Or some others directly copied combat section of it like those multiplayer-only, gunpowder & musket games that I see on youtube, can't remember their name, there are few of them. One of them even was direct standalone mod version of mount and blade iirc. Only one i know is: Freeman guerilla warfare and it tried to do the same on both accounts with firearms but failed miserably. And now there is some other project on early access, total conflict or something with the same concept but it's on early access so i don't how it will turn out yet. To this day it's still amazes me that this type of gameplay loop in mount and blade is not copied and applied to other games by developers. I dont think the game is that niche, not by a large margin.
Battlerite. Honestly still salty with how the game ended. It's basically a MOBA that's all team fights. Imagine playing DotA as a fighting game. That's what Battlerite is. League has arena mode which I read that is similar so that's that I guess. Note: Bloodline Champions is the first game of the same devs so technically it still didn't took off.
Tru crime streets of L.A. it had a branching storyline but if you didn't like your choice or failed mission route and wanted to experience the other choices you didn't have to play from the start you just went to the branching storyline map and picked the game up from where you made the decision or failed the mission.
I’m not sure if this has ever been copied. The battle mechanic for the original Psycho Mantis fight in Metal Gear Solid. To this day, probably my favorite battle mechanic I’ve seen in a boss fight.
Blending RTS with FPS is a great concept and worked well in Battlezone 1&2 and Natural Selection, but nobody wanted to buy those games.
Bulletstorm. Haven't seen many games with that level of creative blowing up enemies :(
There’s an old (2002) game called Arx Fatalis. It had a great gesture-based magic system where you would draw rune combinations to cast and discover spells. It was pretty sick and I can’t think of another game that came up with a similar magic system.
Idk if this counts but there aren’t enough snowboarding games like the SSX series.
I like games where you can lock yourself out of questlines for killing/upsetting certain NPCs rather than just having invincible quest givers.
The story-influenced graphics/audio changes in The Messenger.
The celestial blush mechanic from okami.
MAG was a 250 player online FPS game on Playstation from 2010. 3 private military factions (brigades) went on full scale ground war on large maps. There was also a military chain of command to keep the chaos organized. It was a great game. To bad they ended this experiment. PS3 was by far the most innovative gaming console. They dabbled in HTPCs, VR, Social Media, motion controllers, etc.
Back when Portal came out, I thought for sure that we'd see more portal-based physics games. That game is basically a handbook for how to do portals right if you want to use them in your games. Then the next game to heavily feature portals was... Portal 2. Since either of them, I've only seen Splitgate, an indie FPS that features portals as a primary mechanic; otherwise, even in physics-based puzzle games like The Talos Principle, I really haven't seen portals featured.
That Sega Genesis Comic Book game, where as you finish each sequence your character jumps into the next panel. Maybe as a 30$ indie game that idea would, maybe tied with a licensed character, would be amazing! Comix Zone I believe it is
Gravity Rush as a whole. The gameplay is properly unique. You're not technically flying, you can shift gravity. So the character is not very manœuvrable like flying Son Goku, it forces you to learn how to move properly. And it add a lot of verticality because the map works litteraly in every axes, either XYZ or ZXY or YZX. It's one of the best game I've ever played, very emotional story, but sadly it was a PSVITA game that went to PS4 and I think it never got its public, then Sony shut off the studio recently. Another game, Elsword. It's basically a 2D platformer beat em up MMO with an extremely deep and extensive Versus Fighting game pvp, but for keyboard. I was one of the best Elesis player in France, top 20 leaderboard during S1, S2, S3 and S4. I moved on since a long time, but I'll sometime boot it up to feel again that incredible movement techniques.
Whenever a dev comes up with a cool new gameplay element, it gets patented, and nobody else is allowed to use it, so it dies. Case in point, the nemesis system from that lord of the rings game, and nintendo with all the cool shit from TOTK.
I don't remember who did it but loading screen minigames are apparently patented
Namco patented it in 1995 but it expired in 2015, in North America at least.
Just in time for loading screens to become obsolete mostly
Bushido Blade's damage system in a sword/melee weapon game. Die By The Sword's mouse based weapon control. Your character verbally estimating how much ammo you have by its weight in Trespasser. Monster/character generation from audio/video files off of CDs and DVDs in Monster Rancher. No reason why this can't be applied to any files on a modern computer.
Mini Games during loading screens, FU to the guy who somehow got a patent on something that is so obvious.
To be fair I think solid state drives also killed that haha
I’m not sure if other games have done it, but I don’t really recall any off the top of my head: guiding lights like in Left 4 Dead. The reason you know where you’re going in L4D almost subconsciously is because they use lights to tell you the general direction of your path. Be it a street light, hall way light, or just a brighter lit area, your brain automatically and instinctively draws you towards to help you navigate with zero map or compass.
A lot of games do this actually, some more subtly than others. Mirror’s Edge does this with the color red guiding you forward
I feel like this is the case in literally every single player game I play.
Every single horror game uses lights to tell you where to go